What Pan-Africanism Can Teach Us Now

French, a longtime journalist and author, most recently, of Born in Blackness, a crucial text that reaffirmed the important role sub-Saharan Africa played in the development of modern civilization, takes a similarly forward-looking approach. He challenges lazy theories that attribute Africa’s current economic precarity and political instability to incompetence and wonders what the continent might look like if today’s intellectuals and organizers readopted Nkrumah’s Pan-African ideals. What could Africa—and the broader Black diaspora—achieve if her people focused on building material connections across national and ethnic identities? These questions frame French’s biography of Nkrumah, which blends rigorous archival research, vivid on-the-ground reporting, and poignant personal anecdotes to construct an admiring portrait of Ghana’s first leader. While French never shies away from ­Nkrumah’s flaws, he remains a sympathetic biographer, acknowledging the pressures the Pan-Africanist faced and the antagonistic forces abetting his eventual downfall. Although The Second Emancipation aims to be a wide-ranging survey of a singular revolutionary moment, it is most persuasive and propulsive when French homes in on Nkrumah’s almost mythic journey from a village son to a nation’s hope. The Ghanaian leader’s story is an opportunity to reconsider Africa’s current destiny.

There are few details available about Nkrumah’s origins outside of his own writing, which French relies on in the early chapters of The Second Emancipation. ­Nkrumah was born in the Nzima village of Nkroful as Francis Nwia Kofi Nkrumah, to parents of modest means. His mother, Elizabeth Nyaniba, wanted her son to succeed, so when Nkrumah was young, she moved to a larger town and enrolled him in a Roman Catholic mission school. Although Nkrumah disliked the experience—he ran away on his first day—it opened doors that led the way toward his brilliant future. There’s an apocryphal sheen to parts of Nkrumah’s biography, which can be attributed to the political leader’s propensity for self-invention and the messianic role he would eventually play in Ghanaian history. After roughly eight years of school, Nkrumah entered the newly formed Achimota College, where he studied to become a teacher. There, he met one of his mentors, James Aggrey, the college’s first African faculty member and vice principal, who later convinced Nkrumah to study in the United States.

The young Ghanaian set off for this country in 1935. French describes the voyage as “an odyssey in three parts,” which included soliciting money from a relative, hiding among crew members on a ship, and making a stop in Liverpool, where he was briefly hosted by Paa Grant, the first president of the United Gold Coast Convention, or UGCC—a political party that would play a significant role in Nkrumah’s return to Ghana and early days as a political leader. Nkrumah was an ambitious but socially reserved figure: Though charming and beloved, he seemed fundamentally lonely. French ruminates on Nkrumah’s romantic life (or lack thereof, until his unexpected marriage to Fathia Halim Rizk in 1957) and wonders how this charismatic leader could be so awkward—occasionally bordering on juvenile—around women. These kinds of details, though clumsily deployed by French at times, effectively humanize ­Nkrumah, grounding a figure who is so often spoken of as more of a prophet than a man.