Kwame Nkrumah

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 10

Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah

 1909 - 1972

Kwame Nkrumah is one of the very greatest of the African Revolutionary writers; also independence leader and first democratic president of his country, Ghana, and famous advocate of African unity.

Of the two Nkrumah downloads linked below, the first covers major parts of his “Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism”. At the end of this revolutionary book Nkrumah wrote:

“I have set out the argument for African unity and have explained how this unity would destroy neo-colonialism in Africa. In later chapters I have explained how strong is the world position of those who profit from neo-colonialism. Nevertheless, African unity is something which is within the grasp of the African people. The foreign firms who exploit our resources long ago saw the strength to be gained from acting on a Pan-African scale. By means of interlocking directorships, cross-shareholdings and other devices, groups of apparently different companies have formed, in fact, one enormous capitalist monopoly. The only effective way to challenge this economic empire and to recover possession of our heritage, is for us also to act on a Pan­-African basis, through a Union Government.”

In the year following the publication of the book, and while he was on a visit to China and Vietnam, Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown as President of Ghana in a military coup d’état organised by the US Central Intelligence Agency.

In 1967 Nkrumah spoke at a seminar in Cairo, Egypt, in strong opposition to the “Negritude” philosophy of Leopold Senghor, and also the phony false-flag product called “African Socialism”* (somewhat like the situation today in South Africa with the idea of a "Workers' Party" that is not a communist party). The second downloadable item is the transcript of this decisive speech.

Kwame Nkrumah remains the greatest of the advocates of revolutionary Pan-African unity against Imperialism.

 This is the last part of our course on African Revolutionary Writers. There will be one more item. We have brought out a lot of powerful, original, African Revolutionary Writing; but there is other writing that we were not able to find in suitable electronic form (i.e. as text files or HTML pages). The following is a list of the texts that were sought but not found, and some which were requested but not found. These will all continue to be sought until the next publication of the African Revolutionary Writers series, on a parallel forum to this one, in 2011.

Name	Dates	Sought-after Text	Date
Paul Robeson	1898 – 1976	Here I Stand	1958
WEB Du Bois	1868 – 1963	Africa in Battle Against Colonialism, (and/or The World and Africa , 1946)	1960
Oginga Odinga	1911 – 1994	Not Yet Uhuru	1967
Malcolm X	1925 – 1965	By Any Means Necessary	1970
Eduardo Mondlane	1920 – 1969	The Struggle for Mozambique	1969
Agostinho Neto	1922 – 1979	Sacred Hope	1974
Samora Machel	1933 – 1986	Sowing the Seeds of Revolution	1974
Ousmane Sembene	1923 – 2007	God’s Bits of Wood	1960
Ayi Kwei Armah	1939 -	The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born	1968
Alex La Guma	1925 – 1985	In the Fog of the Season’s End	1972
Ngugi wa Thiong’o	1938 -	Homecoming, Petals of Blood &c	1972
Bantu Stephen Biko	1946 – 1977	I Write What I Like	1978
Cheikh Anta Diop	1923 – 1986	Civilisation or Barbarism*	1981
Albert Memmi	1920 -	Coloniser and colonised	1991
Henry Winston	1911 – 1986	Strategy for a Black Agenda	1973
Ruth First	1925 – 1982	Mozambican Miner: Proletarian and Peasant	1983
Sékou Touré	1922 – 1984	Strategy and tactics of the revolution	1978
Julius Nyerere	1922 – 1999	Freedom and Development	1974
Thomas Sankara	1949 – 1987	Thomas Sankara Speaks	1987
A Mohamed Babu	1924 – 1996
Anton Lembede	1914 – 1947
Mehdi Ben Barka	1920 – 1965
Gamal Abdel Nasser	1918 – 1970
Lúcio Lara	?

If you have electronic copies of any of these texts, please send them to dominic.tweedie@gmail.com.

Please download and read the text via this link:

Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-colonialism, 1965, Compilation (10643 words)

Nkrumah, African Socialism Revisited, 1967 (2587 words)

Further reading:

Walter Rodney, Colonialism, System for Underdeveloping Africa, 1973, 1973 (34211 words)

  

*From the time of Eduard Bernstein with his 1899 book “Evolutionary Socialism”, and of Rosa Luxemburg’s classic 1900 response to Bernstein, “Reform or Revolution?”, the same question has been repeated. In the history of the struggle for liberation from colonialism in Africa, the question “Reform or Revolution?” was again put. To sound better and to deceive the people more easily, a false kind of “Socialism”, not very different from Bernstein’s kind, was dressed up as “African Socialism” and was then widely deployed as a smokescreen for neo-colonialism from soon after the dawn of African Independence in the 1950s and 1960s, onwards.