Nkrumah, African Awakening and Neo-Colonialism: How Black America Awakened Nkrumah and Nkrumah Awakened Black America (Kwame Nkrumah) (Critical Essay)

Pan-Africanism has its beginnings in the liberation struggle of African-Americans, expressing the aspirations of Africans and peoples of African descent. From the first Pan-African Conference, held in London in 1900, until the fifth and last Pan-African Conference held in Manchester in 1945, African-Americans provided the main driving power of the movement. Pan-Africanism then moved to Africa, its true home, with the holding of the First Conference of Independent African States in Aecra in April 1958, and the All-African Peoples' Conference in December the same year. The work of the early pioneers of Pan-Africanism such as H. Sylvester Williams, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and George Padmore, none of whom were born in Africa, has become a treasured part of Africa's history. It is significant that two of them, Dr. Du Bois and George Padmore, came to live in Ghana at my invitation. Dr. Du Bois died, as he wished, on African soil, while working on the Encyclopaedia Africana. George Padmore became my Adviser on African Affairs, and spent the last years of his life in Ghana, helping in the revolutionary struggle for African unity and socialism.--Kwame Nkrumah, Introduction to pamphlet, "The Spectre of Black Power," 1968