Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism, ed. Reiland Rabaka

Abstract

‘… the independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up to the total liberation of Africa …’ President Kwame Nkrumah, 6 March 1957, Accra, Ghana President Nkrumah’s emotive statement was part of his inaugural speech as President of Ghana. Ghana had won its independence combating the debilitating effects of the Maafa (Disaster of Enslavement); ‘foreign rule and imperialism’; political disenfranchisement; and economic, cultural and social exploitation. And yet Nkrumah chose not to revel in unitary nationalism, but to offer a corrective—Ghana’s independence was ‘meaningless’. Nkrumah’s statement was political and originated from his commitment to Pan-Africanism. It was a commitment shared by his contemporaries, Patrice Lumumba of Zaire and Ahmed Sekou Toure of the Republic of Guinea. Nkrumah was part of a generation of African revolutionaries who viewed national independence and the nations it created as ‘trinkets.’ They struggled for another ‘prize’—a ‘United States of Africa’, where each nation state would be transformed into part of a supra-national federation, transcending ethnic, linguistic and national identities: in other words, Pan-Africanism. This ideology was central to African independence. And yet this historical significance does not mean that Pan-Africanism has been widely considered a subject worthy of scholarly discourse.