Ideas - He championed a radical dream — a 'United States of Africa'

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

Africa is a centre of world history, and that fact has been deliberately obscured, says journalist and author Howard W. French. In his talk and book, The Second Emancipation, he explores the surprisingly early seeds of 20th century Pan-African thought, and how Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana went from reluctant student to influential leader of a free Ghana.This podcast is a recording of Howard W. French's Black History Month lecture at University of Toronto's New College. French is also the author of Born in Blackness. He's a former New York Times bureau chief based in Shanghai, who teaches journalism at Columbia University.

Hi, I'm David Suzuki. I'm turning 90 this year, and you're invited to the party. Join me in Vancouver for a celebratory concert, featuring music and storytelling in support of the David Suzuki Foundation's work, protecting nature, and advancing climate solutions. This is a CBC podcast. That's the voice of Kwame Nakruma, Prime Minister of a newly independent Ghana. Ghana, your beloved country is free forever.

For more than 500 years, the coastal land had been exploited by European traders. It was the horror-filled center of the transatlantic slave trade. Then it was claimed as a colony of the British Empire, known as the Gold Coast. on this day, March 6, 1957, the day of Kwameh Khamen Akruma's speech, a new era dawned. From now on today, we must change our attitudes, our minds. We must realize that from now on we are no more a colonial by the free and independent people. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayat. African Freedom is the theme of a new book by journalists and

Professor Howard W. French. It's the second in his purposeful trilogy. I set out on this project with the mission of trying to re-insert Africa in the narrative of world history, at the center, close to the center, at a place of power and importance and influence in the main currents of world history. And that's what my previous book born in blackness was about. That first book looked at how, from the 16th century, trade achieved through. the enslavement of African people built Western prosperity.

But that book ends in 1945 until the Second War of War. And so having a notion of doing a trilogy that naturally set me up to begin wondering, what's the best place to pick up in 1945. The Second Emancipation tells African history with one politician and activist at its narrative heart. Kwame and Krumah was the catalyst for, for the wave of independences that swept sub-Saharan Africa beginning in 1957, which ran through the 1960s. This mid-20th century is Africans.

This was the height of pan-Africanism, a global movement aiming to reconnect Africans with the diaspora, in the name of both a unified Africa and black power. Kwame Nakruma was its leader and primary advocate. Howard French tells the story of Nekrumah's remarkable early life a bit later in his talk, recorded in February 2026 at the University of Toronto. But he begins with some lesser-known figures whose thinking laid the foundation for what the 20th century pan-African movement would become. This book is not really a straight-up biography of Kwame and Krumah in a conventional sense.

Enkrumah is a throughline to a much bigger history told in this book, and Incrumma never disappears, but there's always a lot of other stuff going on. One of them is it is a global history of Pan-Africanism as an idea. When I began to read about Pan-Africanism, I began to discover, for me, a truly unknown depth of history of this ideal. And I was surprised to learn that Pan-Africanism, in the first mention that I was able to uncover of it, begins really. in the 1700s. I'm talking about an articulation of something that is explicitly pan-Africanist. And it emanates from an abolitionist, a black abolitionist, born in Boston, David Walker, who emerges in the Episcopal Church in Boston, works in Philadelphia as well, and begins to develop an ideology which effectively says that until all Africans and people of African descent

are free and united, no Africans and no people of African descent will be free. There's no pure articulation of an Africanism that I've found since then. So one strain of this book is a development of this deep history. And the path will eventually lead us to Kwame and Krumah, but only by a number of other byways. And the byways include Martin Delaney, who is born in North Carolina, as a free black man, strangely born in North Carolina in the pre-Civil War era, who manages to make his way out of the south into the north, into a non-slave state, and takes on incredible personal risk to venture back into the South

to research the conditions of enslavement of his brethren and sister in the southern United States in the pre-civil war era. Martin Delaney then goes to Africa. I mean, I have to ask you to forgive the child in me. A story like this just struck me as so powerful that a black man in the middle of the 19th century could have conducted what amounted to a sociological study of slavery in the southern United States while slavery was a thing. And then having made his way across the Atlantic to West Africa to try to understand the cultures from which African Americans and other people are. the African diaspora in the Western Hemisphere had derived. Martin Delaney also articulates a very concise and coherent vision of Pan-Africanism.

Martin Delaney is followed up by a man named James Horton, who was from Sierra Leone. He was of Nigerian ancestry who had made his way to England, actually to Scotland for study, and had done tremendously well in school in Scotland and had returned to West West Africa with an idea that West Africans needed to unite across colonial frontiers, across colonial boundaries, across colonial languages, that only by uniting with West Africans, and then ultimately through that project, Africans much more broadly, begin to liberate themselves, to emancipate themselves from their condition of subjugation at the hands of European imperialism. There's another name, Edward Wilmutt Blighton.

Similar Eris Horton, similar ideas. Both of these men articulate notions about beginning with educational institutions, building a university system that can cover the entirety of West Africa, that can draw on students across linguistic lines that can overcome colonial frontiers, and that can begin this project of uniting Africans. This was extraordinary to me, because as with so much, much you're going to hear me talk about today, you can grow up as being conventionally speaking, a well-educated person and never hear any of this. You can grow up being a conventionally

well-educated person and never know, in fact, that Africans have history. You can grow up being a conventionally well-educated person and not even be able to imagine any of this. Here are Africans who have finally articulated a vast project aimed at stitching themselves together politically and economically through educational and legal institutions and frameworks with a mind to freeing themselves from external domination. So what does global history of Africa mean? First of all, it means picking up on the arguments that I made in Born and Blackness, that Africa had been at least since the 16th century at the center of the global economy. In numerous ways, we are taught or encouraged or led to believe that Africa sits at the margin of the global economy. They will throw statistics at you like GDP and things like that to demonstrate that Africa doesn't really contribute or weigh very much.

in the balance. But if you understand things in a more holistic way, beginning in the 16th century, beginning with the transatlantic slave trade, beginning with the transformational experience of plantation agriculture and of chattel slavery in the Western Hemisphere and in the Caribbean, especially, you quickly begin to understand that although Africans and Africa were not credited for having been big parts of the global economy. In fact, they were principal motors of the global economy throughout this entire period. So this book brings that up to date by talking about the emergence of African commodity trades in the 20th century. And the book develops an argument using historical documents and trade and financial data from the British Checker and various other resources.

to show that by the Second World War, the Gold Coast, as Ghana was known prior to independence, was the second largest source of foreign exchange earnings of the entire British Empire. That's just the Gold Coast, Britain-owned colonies throughout Africa. The Gold Coast, by itself, was the second largest source by mid-century, the middle of last century, source of foreign exchange, hard currency, specie for Britain. How could it be that we don't know that? Well, the short answer to that is this was this drew on a tradition of extraction of gold from the gold coast, hence the name Gold Coast, which dates back to the 17th century, discovery of gold at Elmina by the Portuguese, which is a main thread of my previous book. But there's a more modern

manifestation that becomes even more important than the discovery of gold and the exploitation of gold in commercial quantities, by the way, which continues even now. And that is the emergence in the early 19th hundreds of cocoa trade and alongside coco trade, timber and various other commodities. But let's just talk about cocoa. Coco becomes the second largest Forex earning source for Britain of all of its foreign colonies in the middle decades of the 20th century prior to the end of the Second World War. Something we've never heard about.

I didn't know that as much as I'd been reading about Africa for all of these years. I'd never seen that set anywhere prominently. I'd never seen anyone emphasize this or make a big deal of this. In fact, the principal narratives about Africa talk about Africa being a burden. That Africa is, it's a lost cause for Britain and for France and for the other colonial powers. They have to sink money into Africa to run Africa, but don't really get anything out of that. In fact, the reverse is dramatically true. The global history of Africa begins with the financial contribution of the Gold Coast and not just the Gold Coast alone,

but obviously South Africa and Zambia with diamonds and copper and other minerals and places like Malawi and Tanzania with jute and tea and Uganda. and every sort of tropical commodity that you can imagine are being drawn out of Africa, extracted from Africa throughout the 20th century, in an accelerating way leading up to the Second World War. In the Second World War and in the immediate aftermath, it's the Second World War, we begin to see that this has led to a dependence of Britain on Africa. Sounds stark, right? Britain dependent on Africa.

Britain was dependent on Africa in general and Gold Coast in specific for its recovery from the economic devastation of the Second World War to the extent that Britain imposed a kind of suppression of consumption in its African colonies in order to maximize its profits. Britain says we're not going to allow Africans to consume foodstuffs. and other consumables from Britain in our recovery efforts, doing our recovery efforts in Britain, so that we can focus consumption in Britain, which will be paid for by the trade in commodities for Africa. I'll come back to that when I speak to Kwame and Krumbe in a few minutes, and you'll understand what this means in a mechanical way.

A global history of Africa doesn't just mean economic wealth, though. A global history of Africa means the participation of Africans in human terms. When you see World War II movies, do you ever see Africans? Do you remember seeing Africans in those movies? I don't. And when I begin to read into the archives of the actual war experience for both of these wars, this is an astounding omission. In each of these wars, Grosomodo, a million Africans were conscripted for war duties of various kinds on behalf of European forces.

fighting forces. A million Africans. And yet, there's no record of this in the popular culture. There's no focus on this in our journalism. There's no focus on this in the way most of us read and teach history. It's become invisible. And I want to give you a way of understanding just how invisible it has become something that just hit me between the eyes. It was fortuitous in one sense and unfortunate in another, the Financial Times somehow discovered in some archives somewhere. A picture from the famous moment of the liberation of Paris when Charles de Gaulle is walking down the Champs-Eles, surrounded by the victorious and jubilant free French forces and, of course, the jubilant French population. And the picture that the Financial Times discovered reveals in a

traumatic way, the hidden truth. There, within a few feet of Charles de Gaulle is a black man who had fought on behalf of the French and who was being in effect beaten up and carried out of the photo frame because he was messing up the picture. The French were not exceptional in this regard. Britain had very few land victories in World War II, had a quite effective navy throughout much of the war. Britain resisted the German efforts to invade Britain and there were air battles over the English Channel and over the skies of London, et cetera, et cetera. But if you study the military history of World War II, Britain never did terribly well on land fighting the Germans. There's one exception, though. The exception was in Burma. And the battle in Burma was a struggle. This is also depicted in

film you have films like the bridge over the river quai one of the great hollywood i love this movie actually even though the erasure is so extraordinary i love it in cinematic terms right the storytelling um burmo was important to the allies and i'm using air quotes for allies listen i'm happy the allies one let me just put that out there but the allies it needs air quotes because the way it is used excludes some of the That's the point I'm making, right? So Burma was important to the allies because Burma was the only route by which the allies could continue to rearm Chinese nationalist forces fighting Japan in China. And continuing the struggle against Japan in China was essential to preventing a Japanese victory in the east, which would have made the life of the Allies that much more difficult. There were only two possible ways of getting supplies to nationalist forces in China.

One of them would have been over the Himalayas, tallest mountain range in the world. Well, that's not going to be very easy. The other one is through the forests of Burma. The British were getting this wonderful way to say this in French. They were getting their butts kicked in Burma until they, they called upon forces from Ghana, then the Gold Coast, who were used to the tropics because they came from Ghana, to fight on their behalf in Burma.

And these brigades from Ghana, I don't want to pretend the British didn't fight bravely too. I'm sure they did. But the forces from Ghana proved decisive in the Burma campaign. Look for it. You'll have to look hard because this is never emphasized. So there's a neighborhood in Accra, Burma Camp, right? Most Ghanaians don't know this history.

That's how totally this has been sort of glossed over somehow. Burma camp is where the veterans of the Burma campaign were brought back and put in cantaments, which is a word still used in Accra, when they were rehoused and resituated in a cry after the war. Okay, so this is all part of the global history of Africa. Without any kind of sentimentality or romance, you don't have to strain to find the ways in which Africa has always been at or near the center of world events, has always been an actor with great agency and importance in world events, but somehow is always sponged over or pushed into the dark corners in the telling of these world events. This is a consistent feature of our modern history.

And it is the project of this book, again begun in born and blackness and continuing in this book to try to overcome that and to try to restore Africa to its proper place in these stories. So now I come to Kwame and Krumah. And this book finally is a global history of Kualem Krumah. So who was Kwa Me Krumah? Kuma. Koumian Krumah was. born into a poor family, the son of a junior wife, quote unquote, meaning his father had several wives. He was not the first son in this household with several wives. And being the junior wife, his mother had no particular hierarchical power or status in the household. So Kwame and Krumah is born, I'm using the word gone. I'm not going to keep repeating Gold Coast. It was the gold

Co's when Kwameh and Krumer is born in the first decade of the 20th century in the very southwestern, remote southwestern corner of Ghana. And the circumstances end up being very important. The most pertinent circumstance being that Kwame and Krumas people, the Enzima ethnic group, by hazard of colonial boundary formation, the Enzimah are scattered on both sides of the border with ivory coast. So if you were in Zima to go see your aunt or sometimes your brother, you have to cross a colonial frontier. In fact, if you know that part of Ghana and Ivory Coast, you know that for most of eternity, there were no roads connecting these places.

You had to get into a pierrog, a little dugout and go across a canoe because the French didn't build roads to get to British colonies. and the British didn't build roads to get to French colonies. They were about their own affairs and in pursuit of their own interests, and one of their own interests was not Pan-Africanism. One of their interests was not figuring out how to draw Africans together in a common project. Right. So Kwame and Krumas born in that world. That's the specific place he was born, culturally, ethnically, historically.

historically. And I believe this was decisive in lighting the first spark of a notion, it's not Pan-Africanism yet, but of a notion of things that leads him eventually or provides a kind of glue that ties together eventually, the ideas that become Kwame and Krumas' pan-Africanism. So Kwame and Krumah, born into a colony, which is the largest source, which by mid-century, at the time of his birth, but mid-century is the second largest source of foreign exchange of Britain among its colonies. Kwame and Krum was born into a place where the British did not create schools in effect. The British said our British Methodists can build schools, our British Catholics can build schools, but we, the colonizers, we're not going to put any money in the schools.

We're here to take money out. We're not here to put money in. you would be led to believe. You could believe easily in the course of things that if you just read common accounts of the way the world works, that there was a noblese obelage about colonialism, that the colonizers were actually doing good things. They were civilizing people, supposedly.

They were bringing them along into the modern world. They were helping them to develop. In fact, that's not what was happening. Kwame and Krumah is born into this room, remote hinterland, as I've said, and there are almost no schools. Kwame and Krumah, the first extraordinary coincidence of his life, coincidence, maybe not the exact right word, but stroke in his life, is that his mother had a tremendous force of will, and his mother somehow persuaded his father that of all of the children he had, and I don't know the exact number, but it was a number of

children, that whatever the meager extra resources he had that could be devoted for education should be invested in the son named Kwame and Krumah, whose name was actually not Kwame yet, but Francis Nuyakufi. So this extraordinary woman, neither parent had any formal education. There were no schools in that part of the Gold Coast, sends Kuma and Kuma to a one-room Catholic schoolhouse in some nearby town. I think it was Hafassini. He didn't actually want to go at first. He rebelled. This is another kind of interesting feature. Kwameh Krumah was rebelling right from the beginning. Howard French, talking about the boy who would become the first leader of independent Ghana.

The story is told in his book, The Second Emancipation, Nekrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide. This lecture was presented by the History Department in the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto. It took place in February 26. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. This Mother's Day give Mom something she wants. Space, space to breathe, space to relax. At XYZ Storage.ca, our MakeSpace for Mom's Sale is on now. Five months of savings at up to 80% off.

Clear out the basement, tidy the garage, and finally move the. those boxes she's been tripping over. With no rent increases for one full year, helping mom has never been easier. Prime Minister Mark Carney has finally secured a majority for this liberal government. What are his plans and how does it all affect you? The Power and Politics podcast answers these questions and more six days a week. We have you covered from all angles. Our reporter roundtable joins us every Friday, and you can get caught up with the weekly wrap every Saturday. Follow and listen to Power and Politics wherever you get your podcasts.

In 1958, Kwame and Krumah spoke the future aloud at the All-African People's Conference in Akra. This mid-twent century is Africa's. African independence. Forward then to independence, to independence now. the United States of Africa. It was a fiery demand for self-rule and African power. But Incrumas' leadership did not last.

Ghanaians grew disenchanted with his repressive brand of socialism. Western nations saw him as a radical threat. His government was overthrown in 1966, and Kwame and Cruma died in exile in 1972. But for one historic moment, moment, he was the voice of a new free Africa heard around the world. It was a long and unlikely journey from his very humble beginnings in Ghana. Howard French continues his talk at the University of Toronto by describing the luck and talent that put in Krumah on the path to becoming a national

and Pan-African leader. In the history of British colonial overlordship of the Gold Coast, where most of the colonial governors had been quite conservative, so conservative, in fact, that they were busying themselves trying to prevent black gold coasters from entering schools overseas because that would mean that they could enter professions later on, and that by entering professions later on, they would be competing with the colonial people who had settled in the Gold Coast. The second stroke is, for the first time in this run of governors, there's a relatively liberal governor in the Gold Coast. And so this relatively liberal governor has his deputy make a tour of the hinterlands.

And in this tour of the hinterlands, he stops by the one-room schoolhouse, Catholic school. And the priest pulls him aside and says, listen, there's this kid here. You really need to do something about it. He's extraordinary. we have to find something for him. Third stroke, the governor himself, not the deputy, is in the midst of arguing with the colonial office in London that the colonial office should do something,

I'm sure he didn't use this word, but I'm going to use it, revolutionary. And the revolutionary thing was creating, for the first time in this extraordinary lucrative colony called the Gold Coast. an academy. Think of that. That was revolutionary

because they were not about educating Ghanaians. The governor convinces the colonial office to provide enough funds to get this thing started. And just at the moment that this tour of the hinterlands

took place, the academy was about to open. And so Kwame and Krumah enters in the first class of the academy. The academy is named Achimota College. It's called college, but it was not a college. There were no colleges in Ghana.

It was really a boarding school. So Kwame and Perma leaves the hinterlands. He goes to Accra. And a whole suite of other extraordinary coincidences begin to happen. It turns out that this place becomes over time and still is a motor, of just extraordinary talent in Ghana. If you look at the history of Ghana,

several Ghanaian presidents, Imkrumah was the first, but went to Achimota, huge numbers of Ghanaian parliamentarians, of Ghanaian academics, of Ghanaian business people, of Ghanaian on and on and on, went to Achimota.

So Enkrumah had the big stroke of being in that first class, and while Enkrumah was at Achimota, another stroke, the colonial administration of the Gold Coast, names a black man to be an assistant dean of Ache Motta College. I'm sure they didn't think this was revolutionary, but it was revolutionary. The man's name was Quagier Agree.

Quagier Agree had done something, an extraordinary man on his own terms, had done something extraordinary. He had been overseas, to study, to go to university and to get higher degrees, something more extraordinary than that, he had been to the United States for his education. I don't say this as a chauvinist, but this is a really operative thing. The very few people who went to Britain to study were being trained to be little British people to assimilate British values and to revere

Britishness and to bow before the throne and to do all of the things that any proper British person would do and to aspire to fit in in the British way of thinking about fitting in. So the fact of not going to Britain, it could have been another country, it happens to have been the United States, becomes a really important thing, something more important. Quagier Agree had been an amateur of Marcus Garvey, that Africa is a grander thing than that, and that Africa encompasses not just everything contained within the boundaries of the continent, but of extracontinental dimensions, meaning the diaspora.

So this is a candle now, not just a spark. It's a candle of Pan-Africanism that's burning in Kwame and Krumah, that Quigir Agree begins to ignite. Another big stroke. At the very time, Kwame and Krumah is at Achimota studying a newspaper owner in the Gold Coast hired a crusading editor who happened to have come from Nigeria named Namdi Azikiwe to edit his newspaper. So think of how extraordinary this coincidence is. Kwame and Krumas at Achimota College, Kweger-Agra is edited.

an Ghanaian-owned newspaper in Accra, both of them will become precedents of West African countries. Quagir Agri begins to crusade to fulminate against the hypocrisy of colonial rule. When I say the hypocrisy of colonial rule, it goes well beyond what you might immediately imagine. It's not simply about the pretended right of one people to rule over another people.

The British maintained, and well-educated British people don't know this today, the British maintained a kind of apartheid in their colonies. Partite was not just in South Africa. All of Central Accra, and the same was true whether you were in Lagos or you were in Nairobi or wherever you may have been, all of Central Accra was given over to exclusiveness for British people. British social clubs, British polo, backgrounds, British schools, British on and on and on. Formally meant only for white people in the midst of a almost purely African population.

So Nameda Zikiwe begins to write editorials about this. He finally gets kicked out of the colony, but not before his writings captivate Kwame and Krumah. and Kwame and Krumah approaches him and makes his acquaintance. And Namdiazi Kuiwe, like Kwegiragri, becomes a kind of mentor to Kwaim Krumah and tells Khami and Krumah. He recognizes in Kwame and Krumah a kind of spark and energy, a native intelligence, a talent, an ambition. And he says to Kwami and Krumah, you need to get out of here. and go study not just anywhere, don't let them send you to Britain, go to the United States.

And here I must emphasize the United States because Namdi Azikiwe had studied himself in the United States. Quigieragre had studied at Columbia University where I teach. Namdiazzi Kiwi had studied at Lincoln University, which was the oldest historically black university in the United States to issue graduate degrees, formal graduate programs. Azikiwe had studied there, had done so well there that they took him on as a lecturer after he finished before he returned to West Africa and got into newspaper editing.

So Krumah, being poor, penniless, but very smart, very ambitious, full of energy and willing to try anything. He's like, what can I do? How can this, how could I possibly make this? And Azakiwa says, well, at least I can write a letter of introduction to you. So Azakiwa writes a letter of introduction to Lincoln. And then Krumah begs and borrows money from relatives and various friends, and he makes his way via Britain to the United States.

You had to go back in those days to leave West Africa. You couldn't get a visa in West Africa if you're African to go to the United States. You had to go to Britain first. So he sails to Britain. He gets a visa in Britain. he gets on a transatlantic liner and sails across the Atlantic, the ship takes him from London to New York. Kwame and Krumah lands in New York. It's 1935. Okay, so this is not the high watermark of the Harlem Renaissance, but there are still some of, there's still a lot of effervescence in Harlem. Lots of political activism in Harlem. Pretty much every street corner had something going on it. People standing on a soapbox, preaching about this, lecturing about that, agitating about this, socialism, Pan-Africanism, Islam, evangelical Christianity, what have you, right?

Kwame and Krumah gets to Harlem. He made friends with a Dutch guy on board the ship. And the Dutch guy, when they get to New York, says, let's go to Harlem. Kwame and Krummer had no notion of going to Harlem. Kwame and Krumah was not a Pan-Africanist in that sense yet. I want to tell you something. The notion that Kwame and Krum is going to land in Harlem and say, hey, I'm in a black place called Harlem.

It's kind of tickling, right? Because if you come from a place where everybody's black, being black is not a special feature. It's the baseline, right? The Dutch guy says, there's this really, really special place in New York called Harlem. We've got to go there. We have to see all these things.

And let's go to church. And so I tell this story in the book. Kwame and Krumma was like, Krumma had had a religious education. He had actually thought at one point he might want to become a Jesuit. And Krumma says, okay, let's go, whatever. And the Dutch guy took him to the Abyssinian Baptist Church, one of the most famous and oldest black churches in New York City in Harlem. And Krumma was horrified. I don't know how you guys, what you guys know about

Baptist churches in New York City or in the United States, but they're not like the Jesuits, right? There's a lot of stuff going on. The spirit is there, right? Kwame and Krumma is embarrassed because he thinks it's a little bit, there's a little bit, too much spirit. Anyway, Incrumah got over there, and this is another stroke.

Incrumah meets a Nigerian guy, Ed Dumu Johnson, in Harlem, who is all into Pan-Africanism and who is all into blackness as a thing, and who begins to serve as a kind of cultural guide after the encounter with the Dutch guy, for Harlem giving the entree to Enkrumah of

into the Harlem social world. He's just there for a week or two. And Krumma then leaves Highlump to go to Lincoln. He's late. The semester's already on. Get this. He arrives with the letter of introduction from Azekewe, and he doesn't have the fees.

Will they let you start studying if you haven't paid your fees? I don't think so. And Krumah talks his way in and says, listen, trust me, I'll figure it out, I'll find a way to pay. I'll do whatever I need to do. And he did. So Krumas got this first inkling of a blackness that is not just the baseline Ghanaian blackness or African blackness. He's seen all this effervescence in Harlem. He's made his way to Lincoln. Lincoln is a black university. Lincoln's not just any black university. Lincoln is a black university that had made a special thing about recruiting. African students. And so Lincoln not only has African Americans, pretty much at that time,

a kind of bourgeois aspiring to be dentists and lawyers, kind of black middle class student body, African American middle class student body, plus a bunch of Africans, right? And Incrumas arrives. Encruma is just sharp. And Incrumah loves to read. Encrumah stays up all night reading, and this is not Higheography. Encruma stays up all night reading. So to put it. To put him, pay for his college, and Karuma starts tutoring other students. Actually, he does something that you probably shouldn't, isn't quite above board. He actually starts writing papers for other students. It's not quite enough to get by. Anyway, he goes back and forth to Harlem every summer because he can't board at Lincoln during the summer. He gets deeper and deeper into American social stuff and to American

ideology and to internationalism and to all of the various movements, including Garveyas, in Harlem. He's a fishmonger in the summer, by the way. He works on a paint factory in the summer, by the way, just to be able to survive, right? And he goes back to Lincoln during the school year, and because he has the power of the verb, and he knows theology, he begins to preach as a part-time substitute stand-in preacher in the Middle Atlantic States. So Maryland, New Jersey, Delaware, that part of the United States. And he's really good at it. And by doing this, imagine the guy who had experienced horror at the Abyssinian Baptist Church.

Now he's in full flow. Like he goes to Baptist churches and Methodist churches and he's standing at the pulpit and he's giving these Sunday sermons. And he's really good at it. He's learning a lot. It's not just a one-way thing. He's learning a lot about meeting your crowd and about call and response and about picking up signals and about modulating your message and all these things, right? And then something

else really important begins to happen as he becomes sure and sure of himself. And I don't think he has seen any great destiny yet for himself yet, except he was just, he was becoming a very self-confident and driven person. And Krumah accumulates four degrees in five years. That's how driven he was. And in the midst of this, he goes, actually I should say, he starts visiting Washington. And by virtue of visiting Washington, he is drawn to Howard University, and this is the next big stroke. Howard University in the 1930s is this citadel of black intellectual talent, Eric Williams, CLR James, George Padmore, Ralph Bunch, on and on and on, who are at Howard University and incrementers into conversation with these people. And the idea

first of an eventual decolonization of Africa is in the air and of the Caribbean is in the air. And these people from various places in the diaspora are exchanging their thoughts and their strategies about all of this. This is the first inkling that Krumah has that he will have any political destiny. And Krumah spends 10 years in the United States. He is imbued with all of these ideas, mostly at Howard University. He gets introduced by George Padmore, many of you won't know that name, but a truly remarkable figure in terms of networking and the transmission of liberation ideology in the greater African world in the early mid-20th century. CLR James gives Enkrumah a letter of introduction to George Padmore, who's living in London by this time in 1945, Enkrumah leaves the United States for England. he thinks, and Krumah thinks he's going to go to law school.

Padmore meets Krumah at the dock of his ship. They go straight away to a student, African student association meeting where there are all of these radical speeches taking place. And Krumas actually, again, like at Abyssinni, he's kind of shot. He's like thinking if anybody spoke like this in the United States, they'd be arrested. Like the students are basically voicing almost revolutionary slogans in a student. student meeting in London. And Padmore is like, calm down. This is the thing. This is what's happening now. Things proceed at such a rapid clip from here. This is 1945. Well, right away, Incrumah starts

working with Padmore, networking with embryonic African liberationist movements, small groupings of people all over the continent, sending correspondence, writing articles, things like that. And because Incrumah was so full of energy, Padmore hires Encruma or names Encruma as the Secretary General of the Fifth Pan Africa and its Congress in Manchester that year. And Cruma goes, he meets W.B. Du Bois. And right around this time, there's a nascent political party. They're not yet calling themselves a political party in the Gold Coast, consisting of basically the super small but very well educated in British school. native legal elite of the Gold Coast. They're thinking about forming a political party because they are well-to-do and well-educated people. They're kind of fancy and they don't really know how to talk to

the common people. And so they write to the student association and they say, can you guys suggest somebody who can work with us who can talk the commoners talk? And right away, they wrote back to the lawyers and said, Kwame and Krumah. Within weeks, Kwame and Krumah was on a ship for the the Gold Coast. Within weeks after arriving in the Gold Coast is writing platforms for these people who are too timid yet to call their grouping a party saying we need to push for independence now. They're frightened by that. So Krumah, who was timid before now is pushing the envelope. But a couple of really important things happen. Right around that time, 1945, the soldiers who had fought for Britain in Burma are returning from that campaign full of prompt.

and expectations that the British are going to pay them benefits, they're going to give them pensions and health insurance and housing and things like that, and the British are reneging. And the British are reneging for the reasons I told you, the British are suppressing consumption in the colonies so as to help revive the British economy on the back of the colonies. And the veterans marched on the governor's office peacefully. By the way, the governor's office was in a Dutch-built fort from the 16th century, 17th century, that had been a slave fort, right? Imagine the irony that the colonial headquarters is in a slave fort. And the veterans marched there anyway. And the colonial police opened fire. And a gigantic riot ensues,

and it engulfs Accra. And there's looting on a very large scale. And Krumah had nothing to do with this. But because in Kruma, He was out of town. He rushed back to town. Because Encruma was associated with this independence now language, the British arrested him. He was put in jail. First, he sent to the northwest eastern corner of Ghana in almost where the border of Burkina Faso is and held incommunicado there. And then finally taken to various other places. And back to James Fort in Accra, which was the main political jail on Accra. And the British decide the way to kind of peace, the population would be to hold an election, not for independence, but a little bit greater African representation. And Krumah from jail forms a political party, writes a platform, organizes a campaign writing all of the documents on toilet paper smuggled out of the prison, and he wins the election. He doesn't just win the election. He wins the election by landslide. So Enkrumah is released, and to compress this entire decade, that's 1947, the first election.

And this gives way to a series of elections over the next decade, which Enkrumah each time wins by landslide, peacefully. Culminating in 1957 with the British concession of independence to the Gold Coast, which becomes Ghana. Okay. Why did I call this book Global Blackness at High Tide? unbeknownst to most Americans, I'm sure, unbeknownst to most Canadians, unbeknownst to most Africans, unbeknownst to most British people, the peaceful acquisition of independence by Ghana under the auspices of Kwame and Krumas's political party and in his person itself, becomes an extraordinary spark for the U.S. rights movement. It is really hard to exaggerate this. This was at a time when in the United States, there was a thick and thriving tissue of African American newspapers in the country where every major

city had a big and vibrant African American newspaper and where a few African American newspapers had national audiences like the Pittsburgh Courier for one. So in the run-up to Encrumos' final victory, African-Americans, in a way that's been utterly forgotten, were injecting all of their hope or in the inspiration that they could take from Enkrumah and his party and the example of Ghana. And this gave an extraordinary impetus to the civil rights movement in the United States in one of its darkest periods, the Birmingham church bombings and all of that. the African-American press was pointing to Ghana and the example of Incrumah and his party and saying we should not be discouraged. We should not give in to defeat. We should not flag in our efforts.

Look what Kwame and Krumah has just done in Ghana. He has defeated what was still then the world's largest empire. And he did it without killing anybody, without firing a shot. He started doing it from jail. Well, guess what? We know of a very famous letter written from jail, letter from Birmingham jail by Martin Luther King. Quamun Krumah did that before Martin Luther King. So in 1957, March, when Ghana becomes independence, the entire who's who of African American civil rights activism, the entire who's who of African American civil rights activism flocked to Ghana in recognition and in celebration of what Ghana had achieved and celebrated Kwame and Krumah and the victory of Ghana.

And you go back and you read the archives of the press coverage in the African-American press of this in the moment, and it is impossible not just to be completely bowled over by the depth of spirit that this unleashed in African-American society at the time. And I warrant more broadly in the African diaspora. none of this sounds familiar today.

We live in a moment when Africans and African Americans, in my opinion, largely live with their backs turn to each other. There's no very extensive tissue connecting them, meaning by tissue association of movements or of activism or of organization, right? and this moment can awaken in us the idea that these things are possible. They've been done before and that there's no reason why Africans and African Americans and other people in the African diaspora should see themselves as being so utterly balkanized psychologically, culturally, socially in the way that I think is presently true.

I don't come to this from a position of naive pan-Africanism, which would maintain that you could wave a magic wand and all of Africa could become one country. I don't actually think, Enkrumah believe that either, that there was some magical way that this could happen. He was very sophisticated in the way he thought about this in the opening conference of the Organization of African Unity in 1963. and Krumah had a really sophisticated argument about African unity. He was bitter that he didn't prevail, but he had no illusions about how simple this was. And he goes to Addis Ababa in this moment. And he says, you know what we should be studying?

You know what we need to take inspiration from? The way that the 13 original colonies that formed the United States decided to surrender some of their small, prerogatives as little places run by localized elites in behalf of grander interests that they hold in common and that the grander interests have much more potential and power than the petty benefits of sustaining ourselves in these little parceled out policies right this remains true today it doesn't mean that africa needs to be one country Doesn't mean you have to start with the grand gesture. It doesn't mean that a bridge is going to be drawn across the Atlantic and all of a sudden everybody is in some naive or romantic way identifying in perfect harmony. What it does mean, I believe, and this is really the spirit behind the central idea of my book,

is that a careful reading of the world today suggests to me, and I suggest to you, that Africa and peoples of African derivation, much like Martin Delaney had observed in the 1850s, will never acquire the status that they deserve or should have the standing, the prosperity, the security that they deserve until they pull together in some new form. and this doesn't have to mean instantly it shouldn't be considered a product of magic it doesn't need to be in one big step

but that this is an essential step to emerging from the disdain and the ill treatment and in the case of Africa the exploitation that the continent continues to suffer from and if this should happen perhaps at some point they'll be another book, which will have a title called The Third Emancipation. Thank you very much. Howard French, author of the Second Emancipation, Nekrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide. This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas. Senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.