Kwame Nkrumah

Francis Nwia-Kofi Ngolomah was born in 1909 in the village of Nkroful, in the Nzima country of the southwestern Gold Coast, then a British colony and today the sovereign nation of Ghana. His father was a goldsmith of the Nzima people; his mother a trader who nurtured his early schooling at a Catholic mission at Half Assini. In keeping with Akan custom, he carried the day-name Kwame, marking a child born on a Saturday, and in time he set aside the name Francis to become known to the world as Kwame Nkrumah.

Educated at Achimota College and then across the Atlantic at Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania, he immersed himself in philosophy, in the study of liberation, and in the fellowship of African and diaspora thinkers. In London he helped organize the 1945 Pan-African Congress at Manchester, sharpening a conviction that would define his life: that Africa's peoples must be free, and free together.

Returning home, he led the Gold Coast's drive for self-rule, and on 6 March 1957 stood as the architect of the first Black African colony to win its independence. He served as Ghana's first prime minister and then its first president, championing industrialization, education, and a united continent. A founding force behind the Organisation of African Unity, he gave Pan-Africanism its most enduring modern voice before his government was overthrown in 1966.

He died on 27 April 1972 in Bucharest and was at last returned to rest in his native Nkroful. Kwame Nkrumah remains a father of African independence, whose call for a free and united continent still summons his people's highest hopes.