THE SECOND EMANCIPATION: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide, by Howard W. French
In 1951, when Kwame Nkrumah arrived on American shores for a whirlwind visit to the United States, only a few months had passed since he had won a landslide election from a Gold Coast prison cell; in subsequent years, he would secure the colony’s independence from British rule, becoming the first prime minister of Ghana, the country formed in its place, in 1957.
While he was in New York, Nkrumah sat down for a flurry of press interviews. In Washington, he was feted with a State Department luncheon. The mayor of Philadelphia presented him with the keys to the city — an especially stark sign of how much had changed for Nkrumah, who had previously spent a decade in the United States, earning four degrees (in sociology, theology, education and philosophy). In the early 1940s, as an impecunious graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, he was harassed by Philadelphia’s police officers for sleeping overnight in the train station.
“Nkrumah and his delegation were given prominent coverage in almost all of America’s Black newspapers, which hailed him effusively,” Howard W. French writes in “The Second Emancipation.” The outpouring, French suggests, was inversely proportionate to the demeaning treatment African Americans faced on a daily basis. His capacious book traces the connections between the American civil rights movement and global pan-Africanism, with Nkrumah at the center.
As the title suggests, decolonization was a second emancipation, ending the forced labor and subjugation imposed by the European powers on their colonies. The 1950s and 1960s saw momentous transformations taking place on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1960 alone, 17 countries in Africa obtained their independence. That year, James Baldwin reported on a sit-in in Florida by young African Americans. These students “were born at the very moment at which Europe’s domination of Africa was ending,” Baldwin wrote in an article for Mademoiselle. Decolonization expanded the sense of possibility. Baldwin still remembered Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935; the touchstone for the new generation was “the establishment of the Republic of Ghana.”
Nkrumah, for his part, comes across as a fascinating and enigmatic figure. He was ostensibly born in 1909, the only child of his mother, though details of his early life are fuzzy. Nkrumah’s own autobiography was the kind of “polished and streamlined” account that’s typical of a political memoir. It was published in 1957, the same year that the Gold Coast became Ghana, and was handed out at the independence ceremony, presenting his ascent as a matter of destiny.
That kind of messianic thinking would become ever more pronounced as the years wore on. French chronicles how, during his nine-year rule, Nkrumah grew increasingly authoritarian, jailing political opponents, proclaiming a one-party system and giving himself the title of “president for life.” At the same time, he was drawn to the world outside of Ghana, promoting pan-Africanism — a sense of unity and purpose on the continent and among the African diaspora — to the inspiration of some and the consternation of others.
“Critics and foes called his pursuit of pan-Africanism an exorbitant distraction,” French writes, showing how Nkrumah’s lofty transnationalism could seem disconnected from the internal divisions and material problems faced by his own nation. Ghana, a dominant cocoa-producing country, was vulnerable to fickle cocoa prices, and so Nkrumah became fixated on the prospect of rapid industrialization. He was determined to build a hydroelectric dam, refusing to believe skeptical economists who warned that such a project would allow foreign companies to profit at Ghana’s expense.
French, a professor of journalism at Columbia and a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, covers a lot of ground in a book that merges biography with panorama. His previous book, “Born in Blackness,” showed how the making of the modern world wasn’t just a story about Europe; it was also about Africa. “The Second Emancipation” is a sequel, bringing that approach into the postwar era. Nkrumah, like other leaders of Africa’s newly independent states, struggled to stay neutral amid the Cold War. “We face neither East nor West,” Nkrumah once said. “We face forward.”
Nkrumah may not have been interested in the Cold War, but the Cold War was most definitely interested in him. An avowed socialist, he was continually dogged by suspicions that he was a “closet communist” (he was not, French says). He kept investing in education, but he also became paranoid and withdrawn. “The regime had begun to commit autophagy, cannibalizing itself,” French writes. A vicious circle proceeded apace: Dictatorial rule fueled assassination attempts, which deepened dictatorial rule. While traveling to Vietnam in 1966, Nkrumah was deposed in a coup, with Washington providing, “at a minimum, quiet encouragement.”
“The Second Emancipation” ably treads the line on Nkrumah’s complicated legacy. French keeps reminding the reader of the larger context, pointing out how European colonies were laboratories not for good governance but for authoritarianism. He also emphasizes the central role of time. Nkrumah noted that European powers had centuries to work through their contradictions: “What other countries have taken 300 years or more to achieve, a once dependent territory must try to accomplish in a generation if it is to survive.”
It was this shared sense of urgency that made pan-Africanism such a potent force, even if French concludes that a “can-do vision” must never lose sight of the more humble, painstaking work necessary for truly sustainable development. He quotes Julius Nyerere, the founding leader of Tanzania, who recalled Nkrumah’s impatience as double-edged — a source of tremendous energy as well as inevitable frustration: “My differences with Kwame were that Kwame thought there was somehow a shortcut, and I was saying that there was no shortcut. This is what we have inherited, and we will have to proceed within the limitations that that inheritance has imposed on us.”
THE SECOND EMANCIPATION: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide | By Howard W. French | Liveright | 490 pp. | $39.99
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
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