The founding leader of Ghana and the foremost champion of Pan-Africanism, who led the first Black African colony south of the Sahara to independence in 1957 and tried to convert that breakthrough into a continent-wide project of African unity. A principal founder of the Organization of African Unity and the theorist who named neo-colonialism, he built a one-party state under his own personality cult, was overthrown by the army and police in 1966, and died in exile in 1972, leaving a divided legacy as both patron saint of African liberation and cautionary tale of concentrated power.
Just after midnight on 6 March 1957, as 5 March became Ghana's independence night, Kwame Nkrumah stood before a crowd in Accra and declared that Ghana was free forever. He had spent years in colonial prison, run a mass movement from a jail cell, and watched a colony of millions decide it no longer needed Britain to govern it. He was the first leader of the first Black African colony south of the Sahara to win independence from European rule, and across the continent people understood at once what that meant: the colonial order was not permanent, and it could be made to fall. Nine years later, while he was abroad on a Vietnam peace mission, the army and police seized his government. He never ruled Ghana again.