Read Time: 3 minutes
H Kwasi Prempeh
Favorites · September 27, 2014 · ·
I am concluding my “FOUNDERS” WEEK profiles today with the most famous and most celebrated of our “Founders”, Osagyefo Dr. KWAME NKRUMAH (1909-1972). More than enough has been written by and about him, so I shall not tread the over-beaten path. I will only share here this original copy of Time magazine in my personal collection. As you can see, Nkrumah’s face adorns the cover of that widely regarded international weekly.
This issue is titled “Gold Coast’s Kwame Nkrumah: In the Dark Continent, dawn’s early light?” The feature article devoted to Nkrumah runs some seven pages, complete with photos, and connects the changes taking place in the Gold Coast at the time with developments elsewhere in colonial Africa and beyond. This is the February 9, 1953 issue of Time magazine. Yes, Nkrumah was an international sensation even then, having become first (1951) Leader of Government Business, and then (1952) Prime Minister at the head of an all-African cabinet–a first in colonial Africa.
Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah
Independence was still four years away, but Nkrumah was now in government and thus carried the burden of both delivering on the people’s expectations and managing those expectations. He captured the challenge in these words: “I have the confidence of the masses. But about self-government, they must not make me go too fast–and I must not go too slow. If I tried to stop their urge to be free, they would turn on me. My job is to keep things level and steady.” But even as he tried to steady the waters in the Gold Coast and row along at the same time, Nkrumah was already making waves on the international scene.
This was momentous indeed. “Jim Crow” racial segregation was still the law of the land in the American South and beyond, and Brown v. Board of Education, that case which would finally pronounce racial segregation in America unconstitutional, was still making its way through the U.S. Supreme Court. Events in the Gold Coast were being watched closely in America and elsewhere, and the American-educated Nkrumah’s example had begun to inspire similar movements for emancipation not only in Africa but also in America. Racist governments were beginning to get nervous.
The Time magazine reported the then Prime Minister of South Africa, Daniel Malan, calling the Gold Coast ‘experiment’ “ridiculous” and “a disastrous step for Africa.” White settlers in colonial Kenya were beginning to “fear–with good cause–that the Black Continent–so long the slave of other continents, is rediscovering a long-lost pride in being black.” “South of the Sahara, the black man is everywhere coming awake,” the Time observed.
Nkrumah was the man of the moment. “It is in the jubilant, blossoming Gold Coast, and its hero Nkrumah, that some of Africa’s awakening millions see the early light of freedom dawning over the continent,” the magazine continued. It concluded by quoting the British Colonial Office: “The Gold Coast is talked about with surprise in Johannesburg slums, among tribes outside Nairobi longing for more land, and in Uganda where men nurse secret grievances and suspect every move we make. If it [the Gold Coast] fails, a great hope will die in Africa. If it succeeds, then we may begin the addition of a new continent to the political world that can be our friend.”
Nkrumah, then, came to symbolize that hope–not just of Gold Coasters, but of millions of Africans and peoples of African descent everywhere. He is thus our one “Founder” we are compelled to share with black and oppressed people everywhere. That alone is enough to put the Osagyefo in a class all by himself.