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- [00:00]
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Peter Frankenpern
Hello, and welcome to a new episode of Legacy. I'm Peter Frankenpern.
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Afua Haysh
I'm Afua Haysh.
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Peter Frankenpern
And this is Legacy, the show that explores the lives, events, and ideas that have shaped our world and asks whether they have the reputations that they truly deserve. So this is episode two, Apua on Kwame and Kruber. How do you think we did first time round? Are we on track?
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Afua Haysh
I think so. I mean, it's a giant legacy. It's a complex story, you know, for our listeners. I guess we want to make sure that we paint the picture of the environment that he is living in so that his thoughts and actions make sense. But at the same time, we really want to get to the legacy of this man. So, you know, we're doing our best to balance it. I've got a lot in my head. I'm trying to stay focused. Peter, you're really helping me keep on track.
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Peter Frankenpern
Well, I know this is one that really matters to you. When we got to the end of the first episode, we had Nkrumah heading off to the United States. He was thinking very deeply about Africanism in general. He was thinking about the legacies of religion and of his own journey. And he's, I think, heading off to the US to try to learn more about a changing world in the 19, early 1930s. Tell us about. He spent 10 years or so in the U.S. tell us about that. That process. What. What's he trying to achieve? What does he do?
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Afua Haysh
Well, he's going to get a degree like many aspirational young Africans who travel abroad. And, you know, the way I like to think of it is that he goes into America, this young colonial African, looking to gain intellectually and become a professional person who can achieve utility and effectiveness back home. But he comes out of this decade in America really a different person, a leader, an organizer, and most importantly, a thinker with a commitment to a very specific idea. Peter. And that idea is unifying black people from oppression, not just in the Gold coast, not just in America, but everywhere.
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Peter Frankenpern
Just start me off about Africa and about the difference of Sub Saharan and North Africa. When we're talking about Africa and all Africans and Pan Africanism, is Nkrumah thinking at the moment about black people? Is he thinking about West Africa? Is he thinking about different parts of the continent? How's he conceptualizing Africa? At the time in the early 1930s.
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Afua Haysh
Well, one of the achievements of British colonialism and European colonialism was to really divide Africans. So even within West Africa, which is one region of the African continent, you know, you've got divisions between British rule Europe, you've got Nigeria, which is not yet to become Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone then, and the Gambia. But you've got the. The majority of the land is owned by France. You've got big francophone West African colonies, you've got a couple of Lusophone colonies, Sao Tome and Cape Verde, you've got Spanish speaking colonies, Equatorial Guinea. So you just got this huge division so that even neighboring countries don't speak the same language, that have the same immigration infrastructure. And then you've got this idea that divides north and South Africa. And even the language of sub Saharan Africa is very contested because it's actually language that replaced colonial language of tropical Africa, equatorial Africa. And what you find is that this is basically coded for black. And in colonial times there was this idea that North Africa was more civilized than sub Saharan Africa because it was part of the Roman Empire, as you know so well from your work. You know, it was closer to Europe, it had European adjacent civilizations. If you look at the ruins in Carthage, for example, or the connection between the Moors in Morocco and southern Spain. So there was this idea that, you know, even though it was still Africa, it was kind of closer to civilization. Whereas the language of sub Saharan Africa was reserved for the people that Europeans have the least regard for. Black people whose cultures were different, whose religions and spiritual systems were different. And this division is still operates today. If you hear the way that the development community, for example, describes these different parts of the African continent. And we'll get to it later, but one of the things that made Nkrumah different was that he wanted to unite the whole African continent. He wanted to get rid of that division between north and sub Saharan Africa. He wanted to include east and southern Africa with their very different systems of settler colonialism. And he also wanted to unite black people in the Caribbean, in Europe and countries like Britain and France. So it's incredibly expansionist view of blackness. And it wasn't the idea that black people are superior. It wasn't reversing white supremacy with an idea of black supremacy. It was instead this idea that no one is free until Africans are free. And that actually the liberation of all people of African descent who had suffered the most racial oppression, that if you achieve equity and justice for those people, then the whole world benefits, everyone is included in that progress. So it's actually a very unifying, uplifting ideology. And of course, that made it very threatening in the 20th century, which, as we'll see, race and the battle for control of Africa and its resources were becoming more and more polarized during the Cold War.
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Peter Frankenpern
I'm just going to put a little footnote, Afra, when you said Lusophone, I'm sure all of our listeners know that. No, they wouldn't know that means Portuguese speaking from the Roman province of Lusitania. So, I mean, it's, you know, these legacies, they really have a resonance. I mean, it's kind of amazing anyway, that idea that this might be a moment of opportunity, liberation, national identities has a very obvious setback in the middle of the 1930s. Mussolini, who's been on the rise in Italy since the early 1920s, takes the opportunity, through a set of circumstances that gives him an opportunity to claim to be an imperial power, to knock out at a starter, provoked deliberate war against Ethiopia, which is the one real part of the Africa continent that has managed to resist European colonialism. Liberia and West Africa is a slightly unusual story, but this great Solomonic culture that we mentioned last time, Mussolini sets his imperial ambitions to show that Italy, like other European states, is an empire that's on the rise rather than on decline. There's to avenge a defeat that the Italians have suffered in 1896. You know, there's a whole bunch of circumstances that Mussolini looks like he wants to be a great imperialist and a great leader. And when Nkrumah hears that Elvis has a huge impact on his views and makes that fight for freedom even more urgent than ever before.
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Afua Haysh
At this point, Nkrumah is in London on his way to the US Collecting his visa, and he's connecting with some of the other young Africans in London. And this is a profound and very distressing shock to them. And, you know, I'm not sure people listening will know how big a deal Ethiopia was to colonize Africans. It was the only part, as you said, Peter, of the African continent that wasn't colonized. You know, even though Liberia is a republic, it was colonized by black Americans, essentially, who were sent there by America trying to get rid of its own unwanted, formerly enslaved people. But Ethiopia has never been under the control of a European power at this point, and that there's a practical dimension to that. You know, it's a good example of how Africa's colonization isn't inevitable, but there's a spiritual dimension. Africans look to Ethiopia as this beacon. As we talked about in the last episode. It's been Christian far longer than Europe has been Christian. It's regarded as one of the old, ancient centers of civilization. It's often used by Africans as this kind of check against the. The idea that Europeans have a monopoly over civilized ideas. And it has this history of Solomonic rule. There's the belief that the Holy Grail resides in Axum, guarded by monks, and that this has given divine protection for Ethiopia. So the existence of this free, ancient, spiritual heartland on the African continent is an incredible source of strength and inspiration to colonized Africans yearning for their own freedom. To see that a fascist dictator has just reversed that history invaded. It's more than just military assault. It's like an assault on the identity of all Africans and the beacon of hope that they harbored. And Nkrumah says when he heard about Mussolini invading Ethiopia, it felt almost as if the whole of London had suddenly declared war on me personally. And then he said, for the next few minutes, I could do nothing but glare at each impassive face, wondering if those people could possibly realize the wickedness of colonialism and praying that the day might come when I could play my part in bringing about the downfall of such a system. You know, just thinking about the childhood and early adult years we talked about in the last episode, this is a sea change. This is a immediate radicalization. And. And that is the effect has on many young Africans, it radicalizes them. It starts to make them see imperialism in evil terms as a system that must be overthrown. And it gives them a sense of urgency, because there's this sense that while they sit back and intellectualize and debate, more of their freedom is being taken away.
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Peter Frankenpern
I mean, what's interesting about so many of the great figures in history, the men and women, is that although, you know, like, all of us feel like we're too small to make any kind of meaningful difference, you know, so Nkrumah saying that he wants to bring about the downfall of the colonial system, you have to try and do something. So Kruger, when he goes to the US he gets a master's degree in philosophy, the University of Pennsylvania. But his time there is spent in incredible penury. I mean, he has to sleep rough sometimes. He works in selling fish in New York. He works as a waiter on board a ship. But he's constantly thinking about the ways in which he can make a difference. And rather than accepting how it is or complaining about it, he's constantly trying to work out what are the next steps that might be able to shake this incredibly Strong tree of colonialism. So he's conscientious, he's busy being rewarded with scholarships. He's still a brilliantly talented young man. But everywhere he goes, he sees racism and the effect of the Jim Crow lives on fellow African Americans. And in a way, I wouldn't say that gives him strength, but it keeps on inspiring him because every single hour, every single minute, he can see the realities of what it means to be a second class citizen in a globalized world.
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Afua Haysh
I'm slightly laughing, Peter, because I said, you know, now young Pan Africans realize was the time for action, not intellectualizing. And then we're like. And then he goes and gets a master's in philosophy, which, you know, probably doesn't strike people as the most immediate action oriented course. But you're right, you know, being in America, now that you've had this radical awakening of how nefarious colonialism is to be bang smack in the middle of Jim Crow America is just only furthering that sense of extreme injustice in the world. And knowing Croomer's never experienced this formal color bar before, but now he's told he can't drink from the same water spittoon as white passengers. He's told that he can't eat in same restaurants that white people are eating in. This is another shock to his system and a shock to his dignity. And one of the things that he does is he starts to, to volunteer for black church. You know, he's had this complicated relationship with Christianity. He was stepping away from his Catholic face. But in America, he's discovering this proud tradition of liberationist Christianity that enslaved Africans took Christianity as their own doctrine. They interpreted the parts of the Bible that are about the Israelites freeing themselves from the Pharaoh's enslavement. You know, this idea of your promised land, of fleeing from Babylon. And in the black consciousness, this becomes a completely different ideology. And that's very appealing to Nkrumah in ways that the kind of staid Catholicism of his upbringing aren't anymore. And one of the jobs he has for a black church is to conduct a survey of African American life. And this requires him to visit 600 African American households. So he's going to these homes and he's interviewing the inhabitants about their lives, about their daily struggles, about their daily experiences of racism. And that has a profound impact on him, to really see up close in an intimate way. Because of course, African Americans are talking to him as a fellow black person, even though he's from a very different place. They're sharing things that they wouldn't share with a white person interviewing them. And he's really understanding just how insidious racism is, you know, both in its formal structures but also its psychological effects. And he will never forget the lessons that he learns in this era.
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Peter Frankenpern
I mean, what's interesting, I remember, I remember interviewing Michael holding, the legendary West Indian fast bowler. You know, incredibly thoughtful, eloquent, brilliant man. And he said, you know, when he went to New York for the first time, also one of the things that shocked him most was seeing poor white people. So, you know, when Krumer comes to the United States, he's obviously shocked to see the conditions that black people live in, but also seeing that not everybody who's white is rich, which is the experience he's grown up with. They're the ones who make all the decisions. They're the ones who tell you what to do. They're the ones who set the rules, especially in Ghana.
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Afua Haysh
Because the only white people in a country like Ghana really are the colonial officials and the people running the mines. You know, just. Sorry to interrupt, but I have had this experience because I. I'm so used to being in West Africa where still today white people are expats, they're corporate relocations. You know, they, they're on corporate jobs. They are working for embassies or the Peace Corps or USAID or dfid. When I went to South Africa, I went to Durban, for example, and I saw homeless white people in Durban begging. I was genuinely shocked because I have never seen poor white people in Africa before. And it gave me insight into how someone like Kwame Nkrumah must have felt seeing poor white people for the first time in America. Because I know that there are poor white people in the world. I've just never seen it in Africa. But for them, they were told that white people are civilization itself. So that is really, it's a really shocking thing. And you know, my grandparents have similar stories. I think many of the first generation of Africans to live in Europe, you know, our grandparents and great grandparents also had that experience coming to Britain and realizing there were factory workers who were white. No one ever told them that in Africa.
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Peter Frankenpern
Tell me Afraid. And Karima starts to get involved with intellectual circles like the Harlem National Memorial Bookstore and the Schomburg Collection, trying to find like minded individuals to talk about what is happening, how to understand it and what might be done. But the one that's most important is the association of African Students in the US and Canada. Tell us about the aas, about what kind of organization it is how Nkrumah gets involved.
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Afua Haysh
Yeah, I mean, anyone who's been to university in Europe or America is probably familiar with the idea of kind of an Afro Caribbean society or a black society. This is something a bit different because there are still not many Africans in America at this time. Most of the black people on a campus are going to be African American. And so these African students start to self organize. And I would say there's really two main points to this association. One is a kind of social support network. You know, if you've ever joined a university society, you know, it's a way of forming community and having people you can kind of share your fears and stresses with, socialize, maybe meet romantic partners. But the other side for the African students in America is that they want to communicate their existence to African Americans. They want to educate African Americans on the fact that they as Africans exist and are educated and have an ideology. Because no African Americans, like many people in the west, have also been educated with this idea that Africa is this kind of giant village of mud huts. You know, they've also been told it's a primitive place. People, people who are enslaved in America have been taught that they were lucky to be brought to America as traffic slaves because it got them out of barbarian Africa. You know, this is the kind of conditioning people have received. So the African students want to show America who they are, what they're about, and hopefully convert African Americans to their thoughts about unifying the global black community. So in this association is the beginning of ideas of West African unity because you've got students from the Gold coast, but also Sierra Leone and other English speaking Africans coming together with a wider cause than their own nation. You've also got these bigger ideas about the diaspora, the role that black people who've never stepped foot on the African continent, what role they could play in this struggle for African freedom and for anti racism everywhere. So it's a very formative association and Nkrumah really rises through the ranks to become a really central part of it.
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Peter Frankenpern
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- [17:37]
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- [18:45]
Peter Frankenpern
How does it work, Afwa? Because, you know, Africa has so many diversities. I mean, there's more genetic diversity in Africa than all the other continents. And so when you talk about, when one talks about Pan Africanism or West Africa or Akan or Ghanaian, whatever the label you want one's layering over all of that. So it's. Is that a response to the fact that the fate and a lot of people in Africa is so poor you have to build alliances that puts everybody in the same basket? Or are there discussions also that Nkrumah is involved in about working out who exactly is who? And should countries be set up on the lines that are being chosen by European states and by incorporations, people being pushed together? How does it work around diversity rather than just Pan Africanism?
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Afua Haysh
Well, it's a really interesting question because I don't think people realize that, know, Africanness is in some ways a white construct. You know, Africans weren't African until Europeans came along. They were a can. They were Yoruba. They were living their own experience with their own interests, their own culture, their own ambitions for their society. And there were colonizers within the African continent. I mean, the Akan were great colonizers of large parts of West Africa. So it only in the context of having the same kinds of experience of colonialism, the same experience of having their people trafficked as slaves, the same experience of having these violent wars started, then having their land taken, and then being formally colonized. That's beginning to unite them. Just like blackness wouldn't be an identity without the invention of whiteness. So in a way, it's a response to the ways in which colonialism and racism have played out. But, you know, I think the Pan Africanists would say there's a deeper truth to it. You know, to be African is something beyond belonging to a certain ethnic group or nation state. There's a kind of consistency in some of the deeper spiritual or cultural ideas around being African. But till today, that's contentious and we'll get to it. But one of the big, big problems Pan Africanism is going to have as the 20th century progresses is the two competing ideas. Nkrumah's idea, which is Unite Africa. Africa can only succeed in unity, needs to be basically a United States of Africa, a bit like the American federal system where each state is part of the United States versus other African leaders who want independence from colonialism, but they want to rule their own country. They want to keep Senegal or Guinea or Cote d' Ivoire or Togo as its own country. They don't want it to be pulled into this wider federation. And you know, those differences have still not been resolved and we'll see that. But at this point, one of the reasons that Nkrumah is able to dream is because he's a student. The stakes are still fairly low. While there are all these very pressing problems, they don't actually have any power yet. They're on a university campus organizing, dreaming, arguing. And you know, as anyone who's ever studied a social movement knows that's so important because you in a way need to be cushioned from the harsh reality to have those ideas. If you were thinking about all the practical problems you would face implementing it, you would probably never even have the energy to form a plan. So this is a period of idealism and the practical challenges to that are going to come later on.
- [22:04]
Peter Frankenpern
And what Nkrumah does as he finishes his undergrad studies at Lincoln, he then does his master's at University of Pennsylvania. As we mentioned, by 1943, he's playing a key role organizing the General Conference of Africans in America. And, and the same year he's already giving open air lectures talking about the suffering of African people and talking about getting rid of colonialism altogether of out of imperialism and independence. And he's also becoming increasingly interested in Marxism that starts to become more prominent in his theoretical framework. So he talks about democracy as a liberation movement. He starts to think about the ways in which it's capitalism and elitism that is keeping the masses in place and getting closely involved with people who are members of the Communist Party of the United States. So that flirtation of looking for lots of ideas, there are lots of other resonances that Nkrumah is playing with. Again, that puts him in that kind of global context that he's been thinking about since he was even a young man. But he then goes on to do a doctorate. Is the title of thesis the history and philosophy Imperialism with special Reference to Africa. But I mean, his ideas don't look that radical. Is that right enough? Is that fair to say?
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Afua Haysh
I think, you know, now they look a little different from they did at the time, because even though he wanted this United States of West Africa, and that was a radical idea, he conceived the role of former colonizers in a very different way. For example, he thought that the United States and the governments of Europe would support this United States, West Africa, that they would be kind of benevolent patrons of this new system. And that really speaks to a naivety. I think he thought that colonialism was an outdated system that was getting in the way of African self determination and justice. But he wasn't fully thinking through how existential it was to Europe's economies. You know, they weren't going to let these colonies go and then like, wish them the best of luck with a bit of aid on the side, similarly, that the United States would become hostile. I mean, in fairness to him, this is the middle of the Second World War. You know, the Cold War is not in full swing yet. It was hard at that point to anticipate how bitterly control of Africa would be fought for by the superpowers in the later 20th century. And the Second World War is making these young Africans very jaded. Many, many of Nkrumah's countrymen from the Gold coast are fighting for Britain. They're being told that this is a war for freedom and justice, to fight, you know, the evil Axis forces of race, anti Semitism, oppression. But if you're an African, Britain doesn't look that different. You know, Britain is not running the Gold coast as a democracy. It's running it as basically a autocracy with a colonial regime that's unelected in charge. It's not giving Africans equal rights, self determination. So all the things that you're being told you're fighting for are for Britain, not for yourself. And I think that's exposing the hypocrisy of European powers. So it's a very dynamic period. You've got this war ongoing. His own ideas are evolving and he's still protected enough to kind of dream these dreams without having the shock treatment he'll get later about what it actually looks like to try and implement them in real life. And Agray dies also during this period. And that affects Nkrumah really profoundly. And actually it has big implications for his relationship with his theological PhD that he's doing at a seminary college. Because when Agri dies, Nkrumah wants to perform a ceremony, but that honours him in Agra's culture, which was Fanti, which is also part of the Akan, but it's a neighbouring state to the Enzima, one that Nkrumah's from. So he wants to do this traditional ceremony. He wants to pour libation to the ancient gods and ancient prayers in their own language. He charges the spirit of Agre to leave the foreign soil in which he had been resting for years and go back home to Africa to sleep with the spirits of his ancestors and have eternal rest. He's almost expelled for doing this because he's at a Christian seminary college. And the dean writes in condemnation that this was an animistic service without Christian significance and indeed contradictory to Christian teaching. To pray to heathen gods and to pour libations to them is directly forbidden in the Holy Scripture. So this is a real reality check from Krumer, that Christianity and his self pride as someone steeped in this ancient African culture are conceived as completely incompatible by the authorities under whose control he currently is.
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Peter Frankenpern
I think it's also the reaction about being told what to do, you know, by anybody, but particularly by white religious figures who are telling them that they should control what he says, thinks and does. And I think Nkrumah has moved far beyond this already, but with the conceptualization of the fact that it's time for a new chapter. I mean, as a fellow historian, it gives me great pleasure to shout out to Nkrumah's emphasis that he puts on studying history. So he's been influenced, as we mentioned, Marcus Garvey last episode, whose Universal Negro Improvement association plays such an important role in Pan Africanism. But Nkrumah says that a thorough knowledge of Negro history is indispensable in the training of future leadership. He said a country or a race without the knowledge of its past is tantamount to a ship without a pilot. So it's really important to understand who African people are before Europeans, what Europeans have done for bad and I suppose, for good, but to also understand what the framing of where the future lies for Africa. That's something that Nkrumah is thinking about incredibly carefully. People without knowledge of the history is like a tree without roots. So he's thinking about what a world will look like where people are able to make their own decisions and not being told what to do all the time. And his experiences, both in the Gold coast but also in the United States, I think have convinced him that there's going to be no way that this is going to get solved by slow process of democracy. There needs to be more dramatic action that gets taken too.
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Afua Haysh
And, you know, even just talking about history, it's a very contested idea what that means, what the role of educating black people about history is at that time. And you know, as we mentioned in the last episode, in America in this period, you've got these two competing theories. One is to W.E.B. du Bois idea that black people need to be learning Latin and Greek. They need to understand the ancient world as conceived in European education. You know, they need basically the same knowledge as their white peers to be able to function in the great spaces of the state versus someone like Booker T. Washington who thinks that education for black people needs to have practical application. They need to be able to build farms and industries. They need agricultural skills. They need skills to know how to harvest the land and trade. You know, they need more the kind of. I think now we'd recognize it as like vocational skills than this great intellectual education that gets you into places like Harvard. And so while African Americans are fiercely debating the merits of both of these ideas, and it is very fiercely debated, and in fact it still plays out actually today. What Nkrumah does is kind of amalgamate the two in his theory. So he thinks that any education needs to be able to allow Africans to compete on the world stage. They need to be able to stand toe to toe with their peers from Europe and America. But their education system has to ask a question that's never been asked of it before. And I have to say we're recording this in 2025 to this. It's still incomplete today. This project was never fully carried out. And that question is what education will furnish the needs of Africans in their own political, economical, technical, social needs, the spiritual needs of the African people to be able to thrive in their own societies? What does that look like? And how can we equip Africans to really know who they are, have that self worth and meet their own values? Because African values are not the same as European values. These are very communal societies. They have a different relationship with, with capitalism and trade. They have a different relationship with marriage and relationships. They have a different spiritual blueprint to the way that they live. And I think in Crema here is also speaking from his experience of having an education that forced him into a very Eurocentric model. And now he's thinking like Booker T. Washington. Who are we as black people? What do we need? What will help us succeed and overcome all these centuries of. Of oppression? But he's doing a PhD. He's an intellectual guy. He doesn't want to be deprived access to knowledge and literature and world history. And so he's kind of combining the two. It becomes a big part of his legacy. But because of the events we'll get to later. It never really materializes in any African country, let alone in modern day Ghana.
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Peter Frankenpern
I've got so many questions, Safwan, but we're going to go off the point, off the plot. If I ask why hasn't happened. And that's still the case. We talked a tiny bit about it before, about the African people relative to African peoples. I mean, is Nkrumah thinking about Africans as all being similar and the same? Is he thinking about the ways in which East Africa is different to the West African experiences? When you say African values are different to European values, is he thinking in those terms as well? Or are we projecting backwards now to put words into his mouth?
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Afua Haysh
Well, this is a fascinating time that he's living through in the 30s and 40s, because you've got these scholars like Aimee Cesaire, like Frantz Fanon, CLR James, who he's about to meet, great Trinidadian scholar Leopold Senghor, who will go on to become the first president of Senegal. This generation of Pan Africanists are poets and intellectuals as much as they are leaders. And what they're developing is this theory of the African personality. That idea will become a big part of what happens later in the story. And it's this thesis that there is such a thing as the African personality and that it's mental, made of kind of different ingredients to other peoples. It's got this spiritual core. It's rooted in the way that Africans connect to their gods, to the earth, to the seasons, to this afterlife. Because, you know, many African countries, the idea is that there are three levels to reality. There are those who are alive now, there are those who have lived before, and there are those who are yet to be born. And that you can't really separate these realms, that they're all present in every moment, they're all working on our experience, and that, you know, the boundaries between life and death are much more fluid than I think we would understand in European traditions and especially European interpretations of Christianity. So these scholars are suggesting exactly that, Peter, that there is such a thing as an African personality and that it does have its own distinct contours and that this is something that unites people, whether they're from Gabon or Ethiopia or Egypt to those in Ghana or Gambia. So it's quite a novel idea in the way it's being conceived at this point. And that's one of the reasons that I love looking into Nkrumah's story, because he's right at the centre of all of this philosophy and theory. But what's different about this story is that unlike other philosophers and theorizers, these people end up running countries. They end up getting their hands on nation states that change the whole pattern of geopolitical events in the 20th century. And so it's not just a nice idea, but something that becomes a real life experiment.
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Peter Frankenpern
And Nkrumah, one of the first things we said about him when he was a young man is that he's a very good listener and watcher. So he's putting this in a wider context, not just of Africa. He's looking at education in other parts of the British Empire, in the East Indies, the West Indies, in Malaya, in Singapore, in Burma. He's seeing a pattern that he can identify with. So he can see that this is a matrix which deserves to be changed, if not broken. On top of that, he's acquired those skills that I think are really important of not just being a thinker and a scholar and trying to write and finish his dissertation, but also of organizing things. So his role in the aas, you know, you get used to convening meetings, you get used to listening to people, you get used to stopping the person who's talking for too long. You get used to looking for talent and those kinds of logistical, you know, the mechanics of how you run an organization can be very easy to forget about how important those are when it comes to not, not just running a country, but organizing any form of political movement, which is going to be so important. But we all.
- [34:36]
Afua Haysh
I was just going to say, we all know that person, don't we? You know, like if you've been to university, the person that kind of runs for the student union or, you know, in the workplace, the person who wants to be the rep or representing the employees on the board, you know, if you have kids at a school, the parent that always wants to be on the teacher Parent association, there's a kind of person that often steps up to those organizing roles and actually hard work. Well, I really admire it because I'm not that person. And you know, we all need that person. And it is work. And there are those who kind of do it reluctantly because it's a massive chore, me. And there are those who enthusiastically embrace it and find something of their calling and doing it. And a crema is definitely in that category. What about you, Peter? Are you, are you the first person to volunteer to be a rep or a leader?
- [35:22]
Peter Frankenpern
I love the logistics, but you need to be very organized and you need to be very driven because it's unrewarding. But if you've got A vision. And I think if you've got the fires burning and it's something you really believe in, then it's something that is. You approach it in a different way. So most people, if they're having to be on the parent association at school, it's kind of not enormously exciting, but someone has to do it, and it's your turn. I think Nkrumah has got a real drive to him because he can see there's a destination he wants to get to. He surrounded himself with some of these incredible thinkers like Marcus Garvey, like C.L.R. james, the Trinidadian scholar and activist, you know, so he's been collecting people around him who fortify his energy, who fortify his determination that there's something that he can really achieve and make a difference. But just take us through before we go, about how you sum up his time in the United States and what we have to look forward to in the next episode.
- [36:12]
Afua Haysh
As he's preparing to leave The United States, 1945, the Second World War is really winding down. He has, just as you said, Peter, emerged as quite a leader. And that's the external change, I guess he's gained these skills and his practical experience of organizing, but the internal change is probably even more stark. He has become totally synonymous in his own identity with Pan Africanism, with anti colonialism, anti. And, you know, he's not undogmatic. He debates, he likes to discuss. He. He assimilates other people's ideas, but he has really deepened his intellectual understanding of these ideas and he's starting to convert those into political ambitions. So by the time he's finishing his doctoral dissertation, he feels that Lincoln University in the United States is not where he needs to be. The place he needs to be is the uk and not just the uk, but London, because that is where young colonials with big ideas and big skills are beginning to gather at the end of the Second World War, planning what they think the future should look like.
- [37:18]
Peter Frankenpern
And that's next time on Legacy, when we're going to see Nkrumah's most dramatic transformation of all started to take shape.
- [37:24]
Afua Haysh
This is the second episode in our series about Kwame Nkrumah.
- [37:28]
Peter Frankenpern
Legacy is hosted by me, Peter Frankenpeace.
- [37:31]
Afua Haysh
Ammi Afwahesh.
- [37:51]
Acast Host
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Julie Koehler
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