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On Feb. 5, the Department of History presented its annual Black History Month lecture at New College. This year’s speaker was Howard W. French, professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and author of The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide.
In her prologue to the lecture, Professor Melanie J. Newton observed that this lecture — the fourth in the series — was notably the first to focus specifically on African history: “Stories of the history of the African continent, its people, its land, its remarkable diaspora, embody the powerful stories of survival, renewal and creativity that we need in dark times.”
Introducing French, Assistant Professor Safia Aidid explained how his new book, the second in a planned trilogy, depicts the life of Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) “as a throughline for a panoramic story of Black liberation struggles and the hopes and dreams that linked both continent and diaspora.”
French opened his lecture with an affirmation of Nkrumah’s place in world history. As prime minister of the Gold Coast, the dynamic leader presided over its transition to a country independent of Britain, and one with a new name: Ghana.
His influence both on his country and continent was extraordinary, said French: “Nkrumah was the catalyst for the wave of independences that swept sub-Saharan Africa beginning in 1957 and running through the 1960s.”
Nkrumah was also one of the most powerful exponents of Pan-Africanism, a global movement that seeks self-determination, freedom and a common destiny for all people of African descent. The Second Emancipation, said French, is not only a biography of Nkrumah but a “global history of Pan-Africanism as an idea.”
In vivid detail, French recounted the lives of Pan-Africanism’s earliest thinkers, starting in the 18th century and carrying on into the 20th: these included David Walker, Martin Delaney and James Horton.
French reaffirmed how the stories of these groundbreaking founders have been buried in conventional history: “You can grow up being a conventionally well-educated person and not even be able to imagine any of this. Here are Africans who have finally articulated a vast project aimed at stitching themselves together, politically and economically … with a mind to freeing themselves from external domination.”
He then drew attention to a historical figure whose work was especially foundational: Joseph Casely-Hayford, a Gold Coast journalist, lawyer and educator, responsible for drawing up a proposed constitution for the country in the early 1900s.
French said Casely-Hayford manifested the belief that “Africans do not need to copy the political institutions of other places, because Africans have always had their own political ways and institutions cut to their own measure.”
To set the scene for the story of Nkrumah’s rise, French revisited the main theme of his previous book, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War.
The book demonstrates how, for half a millennium, Africa was a central driver of the world economy — something not well understood today.
French explained that prior to Ghana’s independence, it was the second largest source of foreign exchange earnings of the entire British Empire. Gold and cocoa were valuable commodities, as well as jute, diamonds, coffee and minerals. “Every sort of tropical commodity that you can imagine was being extracted from Africa throughout the 20th century, leading up the Second World War.”
In its effort to recover from that war, French said that Britain became dependent on Africa, exploiting its resources for its own improvement. It also exploited the service of Africans, conscripting a million soldiers from its colonies to fight in World War II.
And yet, said French, “there’s no record of this in popular culture.”
“You don’t have to strain to find the ways in which Africa has always been near or at the centre of world events,” he added. “But somehow, it has always been pushed into dark corners in the telling of these events.”
Having described the context in which Kwame Nkrumah rose to power, French concluded his lecture by recounting the politician’s early life.
A precocious child, Nkrumah made the fortuitous acquaintance of an educator named J.E. Kwegyir Aggrey (1875–1927) during his early studies. Said French: “Kwegyir Aggrey had been suffused with the idea that Africa had a bigger vocation than just being a collection of colonies.”
Kwegyir Aggrey encouraged Nkrumah to pursue his education in the United States, where he acquired four degrees. There, he developed his political philosophy at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), including Lincoln University and Howard University, before returning to the Gold Coast after the war.
While engaging in activism on behalf of African soldiers who were being denied pay by the British, Nkrumah was jailed in the capital city of Accra.
“The British decided the way to appease the population would be to hold an election,” said French. “From jail, Nkrumah writes a platform and organizes a campaign, writing all of the documents on smuggled toilet paper. And he doesn’t just win — he wins by a landslide.”
Nkrumah remained a popular leader in the 1950s; by 1957, the Gold Coast peacefully achieved independence from Britain, henceforth becoming known as Ghana.
French concluded his lecture with an explanation of his book’s subtitle: Global Blackness at High Tide.
“Unbeknownst to most Americans, the peaceful acquisition of independence by Ghana became an extraordinary spark for the U.S. civil rights movement,” he said. “It’s really hard to exaggerate this.”
During one of its most difficult periods — when Martin Luther King was imprisoned, and a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama killed four Black girls — “the African American press was pointing to Ghana and saying: we should not be discouraged. We should not give in to defeat.”
Today, French emphasizes the need to strengthen ties between Africa and its diaspora, with the aim of fostering mutual learning and shared success.
“We live in a moment when Africans and African Americans largely live with their backs turned to each other,” he said. “But this moment can awaken in us the idea that these things are possible.
“I suggest to you that Africa, and peoples of African derivation, will never acquire the status that they deserve until they figure out a way to pull together in some new form.”