Kwame Nkrumah’s seminal book, Africa Must Unite, published in the United States in 1963 by Frederick A. Praeger, stands as a foundational text of Pan-African political and economic philosophy. Dedicated to George Padmore and to the African Nation that must eventually be realized, the book serves as a historical analysis of the colonial legacy, a blueprint for post-independence state-building and socialist development in Ghana, and a passionate, detailed case for the total political and economic unification of the African continent.
Introduction
Nkrumah begins by capturing the revolutionary fervor sweeping the continent, invoking nationalist slogans such as Freedom!, Hedsole!, Sawaba!, and Uhuru!. He characterizes this “wind of change” not as an ordinary wind, but as a raging hurricane driving down the bastions of European empire. Millions of Africans and Asians have grown impatient with their historic relegation to “hewers of wood and drawers of water”. Nkrumah highlights the hypocrisy of Western powers who broadcast the slogans of democracy, the Atlantic Charter, and the United Nations Charter during two world wars to enlist the aid of colonized peoples, only to declare that these principles had no application to the enslaved worlds of imperialism and racial arrogance. This Western propaganda boomeranged as colonized peoples eagerly absorbed these ideas of liberty and turned them against their oppressors.
Ghana’s independence on March 6, 1957, opened the floodgates of African freedom; within four years, eighteen other African countries achieved their independence. Yet, Nkrumah declares that those who have achieved independence cannot stand quiet until the last stronghold of colonialism has been laid to the ground. The purpose of his book is to trace the historical background of Africa, analyze the deep-seated political, economic, and social effects of centuries of colonialism, place the developments in Ghana within the broader context of the African revolution, and outline a political philosophy of continental freedom and unity.
Nkrumah emphasizes that his political philosophy is informed by his personal experience under the British pattern of colonial rule in Ghana, as well as the shared struggles of his continental brothers under other colonial masters. He argues that whatever the specific methods used by European colonial powers be it Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, or Spain the objective was uniformly the exploitation of subject territories to enrich the metropolitan countries, leaving behind nothing but resentment, destitution, and a fierce determination to be free.
On the morrow of Ghana’s independence, the incoming government was forced to confront the stark realities of a run-down estate left behind by centuries of colonial rule. The inheritance was daunting: squalor and slums in the towns, rampant superstitions in the villages, vast tracts of uncultivated land, rife nutritional diseases, a meagre network of roads, and short railways. Over eighty percent of the population was illiterate, and the existing school system fed pupils on “imperialist pap” completely divorced from their history and needs. Trade, commerce, banking, and shipping were controlled almost entirely by Europeans; Ghana had no domestic manufacturing, producing “not a pin, not a handkerchief, not a match”.
Nkrumah describes the symbolic experience of moving into Christiansborg Castle, the former official residence of the British governor, only to find it completely denuded. The departing colonial administrators had left not a rag, book, paper, or record behind, a petulant and covert attempt to sever the link between past and present. Nkrumah warns that freedom is a precious reward of struggle and sacrifice that must be guarded closely against the predatory, subtle, and new designs of neo-colonialism. Balkanized client states, fanned sectional interests, and puppet governments manipulated from afar present constant dangers to the continent. In particular, the massive military machine being built up by the Union of South Africa presents an ominous danger to the independent states, who must present a unified military, economic, and political front to survive.
Chapter 1: The African Background
Colonialism and its attitudes die hard, much like the hangover of slavery in the Western hemisphere. Nkrumah argues that prior to the New World slave trade, early European travelers described Africans with natural curiosity and respect rather than racial denigration. It was only when the slave trade developed into a highly lucrative base of capital accumulation for Western industrialism that the “myth of color inferiority” was invented to justify the subsequent rape, despoliation, and exploitation of the African continent.
A school of “imperialist anthropologists” emerged to promote the theory of African inferiority, systematically denying that Africa could exert any civilizing influence over other peoples and attributing any archaeological or cultural achievements of value to outside influences. Nkrumah counters this historical revisionism by citing modern objective scholars, such as L. S. B. Leakey, who assert that Africa was the birthplace of man himself and was in the forefront of world progress for centuries.
Ancient civilizations and organized states flourished on both sides of the continent long before European penetration. Written Arabic records from the ninth century onwards show that ancient Ghana was a highly centralized, powerful state by A.D. 800. Its traditions of government and empire reached even greater heights in its successor state, the fourteenth-century Mali Empire, which boasted great intellectual centers like Djenne and Timbuktu whose colleges exchanged scholars with Spain and the Muslim world. The great traveler Ibn Battuta, touring Mali in the middle of the fourteenth century, remarked on the complete security of the country, its people’s deep abhorrence of injustice, and the safety of both travelers and property. When Mali declined, it was replaced by the splendid Songhay Empire of Gao, while farther east lay the ancient state of Kanem, which persisted into the nineteenth century.
European seafaring adventurers, starting with the Portuguese voyages under Prince Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, and Bartholomew Diaz, originally encountered African coastal cities as fine and civilized as those of Portugal, thick with ocean shipping and a flourishing maritime trade in gold, iron, ivory, copper, and cloth. The Portuguese logbook of Vasco da Gama’s flagship, the Sao Gabriel, records encounters with haughty and wealthy local lords wearing embroidered caps of green silk, showing that these coastal societies were highly advanced and cosmopolitan.
These tolerant and easy-going civilizations were shattered by European invaders who were trained to ruthlessness, better armed, and driven by a greed for loot. Historical records of African achievements in gold, iron, and international trade were expunged from Western memory and left to gather dust. For over three hundred years, the slave trade dominated Africa’s history, drawing off an estimated twenty to fifty million people, depopulating entire villages, and exerting brutalizing, retarding effects on the continent’s socio-economic order. In Ghana, reminders of this tragic era survive in Danish and British slave-trading forts like Christiansborg Castle and Cape Coast Castle.
The late nineteenth century witnessed the notorious “scramble for Africa,” during which Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and Italy raced to divide the continent, formalizing their partition at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85. This partition completely disregarded ethnic realities, tribal territories, and villages, creating arbitrary boundaries that continue to cause border disputes today problems that Nkrumah argues can only be resolved through a continental union.
Chapter 2: The Colonial Imprint
Nkrumah examines the diverse and undemocratic systems of governance imposed by the colonial powers, noting that the pattern varied based on national traditions and the presence of European settler communities.
- France pursued a policy of “assimilation” designed to produce a small, highly cultured African elite class to prevent the rise of African nationalism, while leaving the vast majority of Africans as exploited “subjects” with no civil rights. In Morocco, the French never allowed national elections or democratic assemblies, kept wealth in French hands, denied decent education to Moroccan children, and drove patriotic organizations like Istiqlal underground. In Algeria, the French attempted to make the territory an integral department of France, a policy of self-deceit that failed bloodily because Algeria is geographically and culturally part of the African continent.
- Portugal similarly pursued an assimilation policy via the assimilado or civilizado system, based on the arrogant assumption of racial superiority and an attempt to turn Africans into Portuguese. Despite this facade, Portuguese colonies like Angola and Mozambique suffered under some of the worst conditions in Africa, characterized by censorious dictatorship, 99% illiteracy, and a brutal system of forced contract labor that functioned as a legal form of modern slavery.
- Belgium ruled the Congo, a territory seventy-seven times the size of Belgium, which was initially the exclusive personal property of King Leopold II. Leopold mercilessly exploited the Congo for rubber and ivory, utilizing terror, mutilation, and murder to enforce quotas, costing between five and eight million African lives. After 1908, the Belgian government took over, administering the colony in an authoritarian manner in alliance with big business combines and the Roman Catholic Church, completely denying the Congolese civil and voting rights.
- South Africa represents a highly dangerous settler oligarchy of three million people of European descent who enforce apartheid systematic racial, social, political, and economic segregation over twelve million unarmed African majority residents. Nkrumah rejects the reformist Progressive Party of British financiers as inadequate, arguing that only the principle of “one man one vote” can solve the South African crisis.
- Great Britain pursued a policy characterized by Ernest Bevin as “Give… and keep,” withdrawing politically at a suitable time to retain maximum economic and political goodwill. British colonial administration was highly authoritarian; governors were responsible to Whitehall and the Crown, not to the local population, ruling with advisory Executive Councils and Legislative Councils where Africans were long excluded. Governors possessed “reserved powers” to suspend constitutions and rule by decree, as done in British Guiana. British “indirect rule” utilized and propped up compliant, traditional chiefs to administer districts, which slowed down democratic social change, entrenched the status quo, and caused severe divided loyalties.
Nkrumah holds no brief for any colonial government, asserting that their methods differed but their fundamental purpose was identical: the systematic enrichment of themselves at the expense of their colonies.
Chapter 3: Colonial Pattern of Economics
Nkrumah strongly refutes the imperialist argument that European capital and investment served Africa. He quotes French Premier Jules Ferry (1885) and Colonial Secretary Albert Sarraut (1923), both of whom candidly admitted that colonization was motivated by selfish economic interests: the desperate need for raw materials, investment outlets for surplus capital, and closed markets for European manufactured goods to prevent metropolitan social bankruptcy and domestic stagnation.
This aligns with the Marxist-Leninist view of imperialism as the highest, monopoly stage of capitalism. Under this system, colonial raw materials were strictly controlled and shipped to metropolitan factories, while local processing and manufacturing in the colonies were systematically discouraged or disallowed.
Each colony was forced to raise its own budget to pay for the high salaries of its European administrators; the construction of railways, roads, and harbors was financed through local loans and laid out strictly to transport extracted minerals and timber to the ports for export. Vast profits were drained from Africa’s gold, diamonds, and copper mines to enrich alien investors, while less than half a percent of the UK Colonial Development and Welfare Aid (1946-1956) was spent on industrial development.
Concessions were secured in a sordid manner by deceiving illiterate chiefs into signing away mineral and timber rights for nominal sums, cases of whiskey, gin, and cloth. Chiefs who petitioned British governors for royalties on mining profits, such as Nana Sir Ofori Atta I, were flatly refused on the pretext that capital is “sensitive” and would be driven away. British mining companies paid no direct taxes to Ghana’s revenue until the CPP introduced taxation measures in 1952.
Furthermore, colonial powers fostered mono-crop agriculture, encouraging Ghanaian farmers to concentrate on cocoa to the complete neglect of local food crops and agricultural diversity. Cocoa prices were manipulated and forced down by European and American buyer associations. Nkrumah notes that under British rule, Ghana the largest cocoa producer in the world had not a single chocolate factory.
A British company operating lime plantations in Ghana expressed the juice from the fruit locally but shipped it in bulk to the UK, only to export it back to Ghana, bottled, to retail at high prices. Every single glass bottle used in the country was imported, and local efforts to establish a Ghanaian soap factory were actively stifled to protect foreign monopolies. British trading and shipping interests took an estimated £300,000,000 out of Ghana during the last thirty years of colonial rule. Agriculture was neglected to swell imports; dairy, beef, and poultry farming were ignored, and a highly successful wartime potato-growing campaign was deliberately shut down after the war to protect British shipping interests.
Chapter 4: Society Under Colonialism
The social effects of colonialism are highly insidious, leaving deep wounds of inferiority in the minds of colonized peoples. Under colonial rule, “No African Allowed” and “For Europeans Only” signs barred Africans from walking in certain parts of their own towns.
Popular housing programs were non-existent, leaving Africans to live in crowded hovels and shacks under the patronizing European assumption that “natives” neither wanted nor appreciated proper shelter. Water systems were neglected because public services yielded no immediate economic return. Public health and medical services were severely discriminatory; seven hospitals in Ghana catered to under 3,000 Europeans, while only thirty-six served four million Africans, and the Ridge hospital in Accra was strictly reserved for whites. Preventive medicine was totally ignored. Chronic diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, yaws, and kwashiorkor went unchecked, leading to appallingly high infant mortality rates and low labor productivity.
Africans were barred from attaining skills through an industrial color bar; in the Copper Belt, African miners received about one-tenth of the wages paid to Europeans for the same work. In South Africa and the Portuguese colonies, workers faced systemic state terror and forced labor. Under the Portuguese law of 1899, every African male over the age of ten was legally obligated to work; local administrators rounded up workers by threatening chiefs, enforcing collective contracts on behalf of private firms.
To cover up this system of slavery, the Portuguese paid nominal wages, but deferred three-quarters of the pay until the end of the contract, deducting high taxes that left workers virtually empty-handed. Captain Henrique Galvao, a senior inspector of Portuguese overseas territories, investigated these conditions in 1947 and submitted an honest, horrifying report detailing a 40% death rate among forced contract laborers; the Portuguese government promptly threw him into prison.
South Africa entered a formal treaty with Portugal to supply 100,000 Mozambique contract laborers annually for its mines, in exchange for routing 47.5% of its seaborne import traffic through the Portuguese harbor of Lourenco Marques. Vested international financial and mining combines, including De Beers, Union Miniere, and Tanganyika Concessions, controlled the Benguela railway and Angola Diamond Company, acting as a state within a state. Education was deliberately suppressed in Portuguese territories exemplified by 99% illiteracy in Mozambique to prevent native dissatisfaction.
Chapter 5: The Intellectual Vanguard
Nkrumah highlights that an awakened intelligentsia consistently becomes the vanguard of the struggle against alien rule, which explains why imperialist powers systematically neglected educational facilities in their colonies. Despite a burning enthusiasm for education among African children, colonial regimes left behind a critical dearth of trained technicians, agronomists, and administrators.
In Northern Rhodesia, only 43% of school-age children went to school, and only 1.1% received secondary education; in Kenya, there were only thirty-five high schools for five and a half million Africans. Kikuyu independent schools, established locally to bypass government neglect, were actively suppressed by the British after the 1952 Mau Mau outbreak.
Higher education was virtually non-existent; Makerere College, founded in 1922, was the sole university-rank institution in the immense distance between Khartoum and Johannesburg. Only Achimota in Ghana, Ibadan in Nigeria, Fourah Bay in Sierra Leone, Gordon College in Sudan, and Lovanium in the Congo existed. In South Africa, Prime Minister Malan banned Africans from attending the Universities of Cape Town and Witwatersrand under apartheid.
In the 1930s, Leonard Barnes calculated that at the colonial rate of progress, it would take 700 to 3,500 years for the natives of Ghana to read and write. Mission schools, though helpful, received government grants that were often spent on religious purposes, paid local teachers irregularly, and used their bookshops to monopolize textbook distribution.
Furthermore, colonial education possessed a heavily literary and clerical bias, breeding a contempt for manual labor and denying the country a skilled labor force of engineers, architects, agronomists, and accountants. Young men turned to law because the colonial administration was the sole employer of technical skills and systematically excluded Africans from top posts.
Upon taking office in 1951, the CPP confronted this situation by launching the Accelerated Development Plan for Education, which abolished primary school fees. Despite resistance from the Roman Catholic hierarchy over the discontinuation of public subsidies for denominational schools, primary enrolments expanded from 125,000 in 1951 to over half a million at independence in 1957. Twelve new teacher-training colleges were established, and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Technology was built in Kumasi. Nkrumah emphasizes the herculean task of reorienting textbooks and curricula away from British examination boards toward African history and culture to foster the “African personality”.
Chapter 6: Freedom First
Nkrumah asserts his deep conviction that the desire for freedom is rooted in the soul of every human being, but a people long subjected to arbitrary foreign rule often become lethargic, dulled by fear. The essential forged instrument of political revolution is a strong, well-organized, and disciplined political party. “Seek ye first the political kingdom” became the primary slogan of the CPP, based on the reality that without political independence, no plans for social, agricultural, or economic development can be put into effect.
Nkrumah rejects the imperialist argument that colonies must make themselves economically viable before attempting self-government, pointing out that colonial administrators plan economies to serve metropolitan interests, not those of the local population.
The 1940s and 1950s witnessed the emergence of mass national political organizations across Africa (NCNC in Nigeria, Nyasaland National Congress, KAU in Kenya, RDA in French West Africa, ANC, UNIP, UAS). Nkrumah advocates for the eventual creation of a common political party across the continent with a unified staff to coordinate the Pan-African struggle.
He highlights the vital role of the nationalist press, recalling how on the day he left the UGCC, he founded The Accra Evening News with the motto: “We prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquillity”. Anti-colonial newspapers like Action Tunisienne, Action du Peuple in Morocco, L’Eclaireur de la Cote d’Ivoire, and Nnamdi Azikiwe’s West African Pilot in Nigeria prepared the ground for the mass awakening of the population.
Chapter 7: Achieving Our Sovereignty
It is axiomatic that colonial powers do not willingly retire from political control; instead, they make superhuman efforts to create schisms, communal feuds, and rivalries before they depart (exemplified by the partition of India, the fragmentation of French West and Equatorial Africa, and the regional division of Nigeria).
During Ghana’s struggle, the British press and the opposition National Liberation Movement (NLM) campaigned aggressively to fragment the country by demanding a federal constitution. Nkrumah appointed Sir Frederick Bourne as Constitutional Adviser, who recommended a devolution of certain powers and the creation of Regional Houses of Chiefs.
Despite the NLM’s boycott of constitutional conferences, the 1956 general election confirmed the CPP’s overwhelming mandate for a unitary state.
However, the British insisted on writing “entrenched clauses” (Clause 32) into the independence constitution, requiring a two-thirds majority of all elected members of parliament to pass any constitutional amendments. This gave the minority opposition a virtual veto.
These clauses created Regional Assemblies with wide powers that threatened to block central government planning; for example, a regional assembly could veto a trunk road, a hospital, or housing projects planned by the center. In Ashanti, the constitution went so far as to designate the Asantehene a feudal knighted chief who had actively supported the NLM as the Head of the Ashanti Region, effectively excluding the territory from central democratic sovereignty.
The CPP government circumvented this obstructive mechanism by utilizing a legal loophole: the constitution omitted a starting date for the Regional Assemblies. The government delayed their establishment until the chiefs and people recognized the sincerity of the central development plans. Once the Regional Assemblies were finally set up, they met in an atmosphere of national unity and voted themselves out of existence, clearing the way for Ghana’s unitary sovereignty.
Chapter 8: Problems of Government
Nkrumah emphasizes that parliamentary democracy and independence are inseparable. Ghana’s constitution enshrined the separation of powers, a supreme legislature elected by universal adult suffrage, and the equality of all persons before the law.
He urges Western critics to remember that democratic evolution is historically turbulent; Britain underwent a revolution, executed a king, and installed Cromwell’s dictatorship, while the United States fought a bloody civil war to impose its union. Ghana’s socio-economic and educational standards at independence were comparable to those of Britain at similar early stages of political development.
Ghana’s transition was severely hampered by a destructive, violent, and highly regional opposition that had no alternative program and sought only to cause a breakdown in administration to grasp power. Rejected at the polls, the opposition turned to tribal separatism, demanding the virtual secession of Ashanti, the Northern Region, and British Togoland.
Nkrumah defends Ghana’s “People’s Parliamentary Democracy,” arguing that a government returned with a massive landslide mandate is democratically obligated to respect the popular will and cannot divide its mandate to satisfy a rejected opposition.
Chapter 9: Bringing Unity in Ghana
The opposition’s refusal to operate within the democratic framework led to armed violence, riots, and the murder of CPP workers in Ashanti and the North, alongside the rise of the Ga Shifimo Kpee, a strictly tribal organization in Accra. The world press eagerly twisted these events to discredit the Ghanaian government.
Nkrumah explains that a young state engaged in a war against poverty, disease, and tribalism cannot tolerate irresponsible license disguised as freedom of expression. The government introduced the Avoidance of Discrimination Bill, which prohibited political parties based on tribal or religious affiliations. This law forced the fragmented opposition groups to merge into the United Party.
Nkrumah quotes The Economist, which noted that the United Party had no constructive policy of its own and could only criticize in a woolly way. Nkrumah argues that abdicating the power bestowed by the majority to a subversive opposition would be a betrayal of the popular trust.
Chapter 10: Our Ghanaian Constitution
After three years of independence, Ghana revised its constitution to align with local political, cultural, and development realities. In 1960, a national referendum resulted in a heavy majority to convert Ghana from a monarchy to a republic.
Nkrumah explains that continuing to pay allegiance to the British Crown was an anachronism; Tamale residents found it highly incongruous that their Head of State lived in Buckingham Palace, London.
The new Republican Constitution combined the Premier and Presidency into an executive President (modeled partly on the US system), because the African population naturally associates primacy with executive power rather than titular figureheads. Chieftaincy was guaranteed but adapted to modern progress.
Civil service regulations were modified, transferring powers of appointment and dismissal to the President via a Civil Service Commission to reward merit over time-serving.
Crucially, the preamble and fundamental principles of the constitution made Ghana the first independent, sovereign state to voluntarily offer to surrender its sovereignty, in whole or in part, to a Union of African States.
Chapter 11: The Administrative Instrument
Nkrumah observes that the second stage of the revolutionary process raising the socio-economic standard of the people is harder than the first. The inherited civil service was British in substance, not African, and was designed to carry out colonial policy.
To prevent an administrative breakdown, Nkrumah chose “tactical action,” retaining cooperative British officials while rapidly accelerating the Africanization of senior posts. Expatriate officials were offered generous compensation programs for loss of career, leading to the departure of 223 officials.
Nkrumah demands that civil servants move away from the cautious, static, and status-conscious attitudes of British “Homburg-hatted, umbrella-carrying” complacency. Civil servants in a developing nation must be pioneers, working twenty-four hours a day with devotion.
Ghana established an Institute of Public Administration and offered to share its trained officials with newly-emerging African states to form a continental civil service pool.
Chapter 12: Reconstruction and Development
Emerging states face the task of transforming raw-material producing economies into productive units with a dearth of local capital and technical expertise. Ghana had to recruit expensive foreign technicians, spending heavily on housing and amenities.
Nkrumah points out that colonial banking firms acted as banks of exchange and refused credit to African entrepreneurs; furthermore, Ghana’s system of communal land tenure without individual freehold made it difficult to provide collateral for loans. Traditional Stool lands, controlled by chiefs, had been signed away for nominal sums, and family land litigation was a rampant source of waste.
The government placed Stool lands under local authority control and enacted laws to acquire land for public development.
Nkrumah notes that the traditional extended family system penalizes the active and enterprising relative in favor of the lazy and weak, acting as a brake on individual savings.
The government introduced compulsory savings, a national lottery, post office savings, and restricted the import of inessential goods. Government-led economic planning (socialism) is the only viable path to progress, as private local capital is too small to combat foreign monopolies.
Chapter 13: Towards Economic Independence
Nkrumah replaced the pre-independence slogan of “Self-Government Now” with “Serve Ghana Now,” stressing that economic independence requires hard labor and sacrifice. Ghana forged new economic and trade links with Russia, China, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, breaking the European monopoly over imports.
Agriculture was diversified by exporting bananas, coconuts, copra, palm kernels, rubber, coffee, and tobacco.
The government eliminated predatory middlemen, guaranteed cocoa prices, and established the Cocoa Marketing Board.
Nkrumah notes that fluctuations in primary product prices on the world market cost less-developed countries £574,000 million since WWII, highlighting the need for joint bargaining power among primary producers.
Ghana expanded its fishing industry in Tema and Elmina and established over sixty new factories by 1961 (including a distillery, brewery, oil refinery, steel works, and vehicle assembly plants).
The government built the Black Star shipping line and Ghana Airways despite active resistance from Western shipping and aviation monopolies.
The grand centerpiece of economic reconstruction is the Volta River Project at Akosombo, financed by Ghana, the US, the UK, and the International Bank. The project dams the Volta River to generate cheap hydro-electric power, feed a national electricity grid, Smelt domestic bauxite into aluminum via VALCO, and create the largest man-made lake in the world (3,275 square miles) for lake-fishing and irrigated rice cultivation.
The project was complemented by the construction of Ghana’s first planned city, the coastal port of Tema.
Chapter 14: Building Socialism in Ghana
Nkrumah defines Ghana’s socialist path to progress: full employment, good housing, and equal educational and cultural opportunities. Socialism is Ghana’s sole alternative because private enterprise would merely turn over national concerns to a greedy, small coterie of individuals.
The Ghanaian economy is divided into five sectors: state enterprises, foreign private, joint state-private, co-operatives, and small-scale Ghanaian private enterprise.
Surpluses must be pressed out of rising production from state enterprises to finance further development.
The government overhaul of the education system included free and compulsory primary and middle school education, making science study compulsory and establishing primary technical schools.
The Kwame Nkrumah Institute at Winneba was built to provide general ideological and political education to ministers, party officials, farmers, and workers.
The Trades Union Congress was integrated as a wing of the CPP, transforming trade unions from watchdogs against private employers into active development partners in state-owned enterprises.
Nkrumah advocates for the All-African Trade Union Federation (AATUF) as an independent continental force separate from the Cold War-aligned Western ICFTU and Eastern WFTU.
Chapter 15: Towards African Unity
Nkrumah refutes the argument that Africa cannot unite due to differences in race, culture, and language, arguing that the forces making for unity far outweigh those which divide. He traces the history of Pan-Africanism through Henry Sylvester-Williams, W.E.B. DuBois, and Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement.
He details the first four Pan-African Congresses (1919 in Paris, 1921 in London, 1923 in London, 1927 in New York) and the pivotal 1945 Manchester Fifth Pan-African Congress, which he and George Padmore organized as joint secretaries. The Manchester Congress marked a turn toward mass organization, trade union rights, and universal suffrage.
Upon Ghana’s independence, Nkrumah organized the first Conference of Independent African States in Accra (April 1958), attended by Egypt, Ghana, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Liberia, Morocco, and Ethiopia.
This was followed by the All-African People’s Conference in Accra (December 1958) representing sixty-two nationalist organizations, and the Positive Action and Security Conference (1960).
Nkrumah analyzes the 1960 Congo crisis, where Katanga’s secession, Belgian business interests, and Cold War rivalries led to the murder of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. He argues that a united Africa with a joint military high command and a common foreign policy could have solved the Congo crisis without non-African interference.
He notes that the All-African People’s Conference in Cairo (1961) warned independent states to beware of neo-colonialism operating through religious, philanthropic, or Western state-backed agencies.
Chapter 16: Some Attempts at Unification
Nkrumah chronicles concrete steps taken toward political union.
- In November 1958, Ghana and Guinea united to form the nucleus of a Union of African States.
- In July 1959, the presidents of Liberia, Guinea, and Ghana met at Sanniquellie to form the Community of Independent African States under the motto “Independence and Unity”.
- In April 1961, Mali joined the Ghana-Guinea-Mali Union (Union of African States, UAS), establishing a charter to coordinate joint defense, economic planning, and diplomatic policies.
Nkrumah analyzes the polarization of the continent into competing groups.
- The Casablanca Group (Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Libya, Egypt, Morocco, Algerian FLN) published the “African Charter of Casablanca” (January 1961), establishing a Consultative Assembly, permanent functional committees, and a Joint African High Command composed of Chiefs of Staff.
- The Monrovia Group (May 1961), consisting of twenty states, prioritized economic and technical cooperation over immediate political union, stressing principles of non-interference.
- The Lagos Conference (January 1962), attended by twenty states, set up complex machinery for inter-African cooperation, including a semi-permanent council of ministers and a permanent secretariat.
Nkrumah argues that the Casablanca powers are correct in insisting that political unity must come first, as economic integration requires a central political authority to be effective.
Chapter 17: Economic and Political Integration: Africa’s Need
Nkrumah refutes the myth of African poverty, presenting extensive statistics on Africa’s known mineral and agricultural resources.
In 1956, Africa produced 96% of the world’s gem diamonds, 69% of cobalt, 63% of gold, 37% of manganese, and 34% of chromite. Nigeria produced 85% of the world’s columbite, and Ghana was the second largest manganese producer.
Africa contains vast reserves of uranium ore (Congo, Ghana, Nigeria, Mozambique) and holds the greatest water power potential in the world, with the Congo alone possessing 21.6% of the world’s potential.
Vast coal reserves (4,500 million tons), iron ore, and rich oil deposits exist across the Sahara, Nigeria, Gabon, and Angola. Africa contains 27% of the total world forest area.
Nkrumah argues that the tsetse fly and malaria can only be eliminated on a continental scale. Transportation must be centrally planned internally; under colonialism, roads and railways pointed outward to ports strictly to ship raw materials.
An African Common Market and a common currency are urgent necessities. Nkrumah criticizes the German Zollverein as inadequate, noting that German capitalism only succeeded when the states surrendered their sovereignty to the German Empire.
He fiercely attacks the European Common Market (Associated Overseas Countries status) as a form of collective colonialism (“Eurafrica”) designed to keep Africa as a raw material supplier.
He analyzes the rapid, planned, continental-scale growth of the Soviet Union and China as proof of the superiority of planned continental integration over fragmented, laissez-faire systems. The vicious circle of poverty can only be broken by massive, continentally planned industrialization.
Chapter 18: Neo-colonialism in Africa
Nkrumah warns that balkanization the breaking up of Africa into small, weak, competing states is the major instrument of neo-colonialism. These weak states are driven into military, political, and economic alliances with rival powers outside Africa, dragging the continent into the Cold War.
He defines neo-colonialism as a system where a country is formally independent but in fact enmeshed in a net of financial and diplomatic dependence, citing Portugal’s historical relationship as a British protectorate.
France’s financial organizations (FIDES, CCOM, FAC, CCCE) siphon capital back to France; 80% of so-called French development investments returned to France in payments for materials, bank charges, and salaries, keeping former colonies dependent.
Semi-independent states are propped up by “silver platters” of fake independence, with their fiscal policies and military bases controlled by the metropolitan power.
Nkrumah exposes a NATO-linked article by Captain Goodspeed in the General Military Review (October 1957) that openly recommended coup d’etat strategies, including “judicious assassinations” and fabricating news to inflame public opinion against progressive governments.
He compares Africa’s choices to Simon Bolivar’s failed vision of a South American Union, which left South American countries in division, and Abraham Lincoln’s civil war, which preserved the US Union and paved the way for America’s industrial advance.
Chapter 19: Africa in World Affairs
Nkrumah argues that African affairs are inseparable from world affairs. Afro-Asian nations now form the most influential single group in the United Nations, with Africa holding over a quarter of the seats.
He asserts that instead of dozens of fragmented, weak voices, a politically united Africa should send a single representative to the UN to speak with the concerted weight of 300 million people.
Nkrumah details Ghana’s support for the UN in the Congo and its election to the Security Council in 1962.
He proposes reforming the UN structure by appointing three deputy secretary-generals (representing the East, West, and uncommitted nations) and an executive body to enforce decisions.
He highlights the Belgrade Conference of Non-Aligned Countries (September 1961), where twenty-five countries sought to constitute themselves into a moral force.
He condemns the massive waste of resources on armaments by the US and USSR, noting that one-tenth of military spending could raise the less-developed world to a self-sustaining economy.
Ghana hosted the “Accra Assembly” (June 1962) to promote a world without nuclear weapons.
Nkrumah defines the three pillars of Ghana’s foreign policy: African independence, African unity, and world peace through positive neutrality and non-alignment.
Chapter 20: Examples of Major Unions of States
Nkrumah provides a comparative constitutional study of major federal systems to extract lessons for Africa.
- He references James Bryce’s definition of a perfect federation where citizens owe a double allegiance to separate states and the federal government.
- He examines the United States Constitution (1787), listing the extensive federal powers delegated under Article One Section 8 (taxation, commerce regulation, coining money, raising armies, and making all necessary and proper laws).
- He analyzes the USSR Constitution, which unites sixteen sovereign republics with equal rights under the Supreme Soviet (consisting of the Council of the Union and the Council of Nationalities), the Presidium, and the Council of Ministers.
- He contrasts the Canadian Union (1867), which resolved Anglo-French racial and provincial deadlocks, with the Commonwealth of Australia (1901), highlighting their federal executive and legislative structures.
- He reviews the federal models of Venezuela and Switzerland.
Nkrumah argues that while these federal systems offer valuable templates, Africa’s post-colonial emergency requires strong, unitary state power rather than loose regional federations, which he characterizes as a dangerous form of “balkanization on a grand scale”.
Chapter 21: Continental Government for Africa
In the final chapter, Nkrumah presents his definitive, three-fold objective for a Union Government of African States:
- Over-all Economic Planning on a Continental Basis: This includes building an African Common Market, establishing a common currency, a unified monetary zone, and an African central bank of issue to place the continent’s fabulous agricultural, mineral, and water resources beyond the reach of foreign control.
- Unified Military and Defense Strategy: Individual states maintaining separate, tiny armies is described as ridiculous and suicidal. An over-all Land, Sea, and Air Defense Command for Africa would prevent a dangerous arms race, deter imperialist aggressors, and eliminate the need for dangerous foreign defense pacts.
- Unified Foreign Policy and Diplomacy: This would enable Africa to speak with one concerted, powerful voice on the international scene to safeguard the continent’s security and project the African personality.
Nkrumah proposes a flexible constitutional structure that could start with a willing nucleus of states, leaving the door open for others to join as they achieve freedom. He envisions a Continental Parliament consisting of a lower house (with representation based on population) and an upper house (ensuring the absolute legal equality of all associated states, regardless of size or population).
Nkrumah concludes with a passionate challenge to Africa’s leaders to grasp this golden opportunity to rise above separatist tendencies, abolish the relics of colonial boundaries, and lead the trusting millions of Africa into a glorious, secure, and prosperous Union of African States.