KEVIN K. GAINES. American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era. (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 342. $34.95

Abstract

Kevin K. Gaines's book chronicles the sojourn of several notable African Americans (or as the title of his book presents it “American Africans”) in Kwame Nkrumah's newly independent Ghana during the years between formal independence from British colonial rule in 1957 and the military coup that toppled one of Africa's most famous postcolonial leaders in 1966. Some, such as Julian Mayfield, Maya Angelou, and W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, lived and worked in Ghana for a considerable time, while others, such as Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, made significant but brief visits to the country that influenced their own political development and consciousness. As Gaines explains, this was not just the period when a “wind of change” was blowing over Africa but a time when the Cold War was raging on that continent and throughout the rest of the world, as newly independent nations such as Nkrumah's Ghana and Patrice Lumumba's Congo were striving to develop economically and to chart an independent political course, build Pan-African unity across the continent, and maneuver between the imperialist ambitions of the superpowers and their allies. This was also the period when the struggle for civil rights in the United States was at its height. The “Afros,” as members of the expatriate African American community sometimes styled themselves, found that the political realities of this period, affected them just as much in exile as if they had remained in the United States.