“AFRICA MUST UNITE.
We have before us not only an opportunity but a historic duty.
Kwame Nkrumah
In 1935 Kwame Nkrumah left the Gold Coast (GHANA) for the USA to complete his education, having been inspired by the writings of Marcus Garvey and W.E.B DuBois and his ambitions for the future of his country. Later, as a student and a teacher at Lincoln University, PA, USA he thought deeply of the needs of his continents and its people. In London, he began to put his thoughts into political action: ideas for the unity of a great continent and people became particularized in practice in terms of, first, a united continent, Africa, and finally and effectively, of a united and independent country, Ghana.
In the struggle years before independence and later, in the years following his great triumph, Ghana’s own problems and needs occupied him completely. However, he never lost sight of his idea of African unity and, later on, he turned more and more to practical means of achieving that objective.
Since his student days and by the time Nkrumah died in 1972, Africa has vastly changed. The best-known changes are political, though the old boundaries as determined at the Berlin Congress in 1884/85 largely remain. Nkrumah knew that to cross those boundaries and penetrate the strong and proud new nationalisms within, Africa would need modern infrastructures in the form of telecommunications, trunk roads, railways, airlines, interterritorial committees on health and education, better language teaching, exchanges between artists, writers and craftsmen, shared research projects in sciences and medicine, trade treaties and some form of political co-operation or at least understanding processes.
Those who might have considered in 1963, when Africa Must Unite first published, that Kwame Nkrumah was pursuing a ‘policy of the impossible’,can now no longer doubt his statesmanship. Increasing turmoil through the succession of reactionary military coups and outbreaks of needless civil wars in Africa prove conclusively that only unification can provide a realistic solution for Africa’s political and economic problems.
In the words of the author, “To suggest that the time is not yet ripe for considering a political union of Africa is to evade facts and ignore realities in Africa today. Here is a challenge which destiny has thrown to the leaders of Africa.
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