CONTINENTAL DREAMS

African independence was a time of high hopes. What happened?

- BY KELEFA SANNEH

In June, 1952, Ebony announced that a new era was dawning. “Africa is rather quickly awakening from its 1,000-year slumber,” the magazine proclaimed, and it named one figure as the personification of this revival: Kwame Nkrumah, of the Gold Coast, a British colony in West Africa, who had “one of the most illustrious titles held by any Negro anywhere in the world.” He was the colony’s first Prime Minister—and, people were realizing, its last. The Gold Coast was on its way to becoming an independent nation called Ghana, owing in large part to Nkrumah, whom Ebony hailed as the leader of a “bloodless revolution” transforming Africa. When Ghana declared independence, in 1957, dignitaries from around the world descended on the capital, Accra. Two especially high-profile visitors came from the United States: Richard Nixon, then the Vice-President, and Martin Luther King, Jr., fresh from his victory over bus segregation, who reportedly told Nixon, “We are seeking the same kind of freedom the Gold Coast is celebrating.”

In many ways, Ebony got it right. Nkrumah became not only a head of state but a global symbol of freedom, and the continent followed his lead. By the mid-nineteen-sixties, Africa had been transformed from a patchwork of colonies to one of mostly independent countries, each devoted, at least in theory, to self-determination. But, in Ghana, Nkrumah grew increasingly authoritarian—he styled himself “Osagyefo,” the Redeemer—and increasingly unpopular, and when the military overthrew him, in 1966, there was relatively little protest. Nine years is a short time in which to achieve redemption, but a fairly long time to serve as an elected head of state. Other African leaders would have terms either too short, broken by coups or assassinations, or too long, extended by a refusal to leave office; Nkrumah’s tenure somehow managed both. After the coup,