3 November 2010

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
1898 – 1976
Here I Stand
1958
1868 – 1963
Africa in Battle Against Colonialism, (and/or The World and Africa , 1946)
1960
1911 – 1994
Not Yet Uhuru
1967
1925 – 1965
By Any Means Necessary
1970
1920 – 1969
The Struggle for Mozambique
1969
1922 – 1979
Sacred Hope
1974
1933 – 1986
Sowing the Seeds of Revolution
1974
1923 – 2007
God’s Bits of Wood
1960
1939 -
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
1968
1925 – 1985
In the Fog of the Season’s End
1972
1938 -
Homecoming, Petals of Blood &c
1972
1946 – 1977
I Write What I Like
1978
1923 – 1986
Civilisation or Barbarism*
1981
1920 -
Coloniser and colonised
1991
1911 – 1986
Strategy for a Black Agenda
1973
1925 – 1982
Mozambican Miner: Proletarian and Peasant
1983
1922 – 1984
Strategy and tactics of the revolution
1978
1922 – 1999
Freedom and Development
1974
1949 – 1987
Thomas Sankara Speaks
1987
1924 – 1996


1914 – 1947


1920 – 1965


1918 – 1970


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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:

Further reading:
  
*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.

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