Ghana's Independence
Ghana became independent on 6 March 1957, the first sub-Saharan African colony to do so, and everyone else took the date as a starting gun. The Gold Coast was the wealthiest and best-educated British colony in Africa, producing over half the world's cocoa, with a small but real professional class and a tradition of coastal chiefs negotiating with the British rather than being conquered outright. Kwame Nkrumah returned in 1947 after ten years in the United States and Britain, where he had helped organise the fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, and was invited to be secretary of the moderate United Gold Coast Convention. He left it two years later to found the Convention People's Party on the demand for self-government now, and organised the first mass party in Africa around trade unionists, market women, veterans and young men without prospects. Positive action — strikes and boycotts on the Gandhian model — brought him a prison sentence in 1950 and an election victory in 1951 that he learned about in his cell. The British let him out to form a government, which is the crucial decision: the transfer of power was negotiated over six years rather than fought over. He took the name Ghana from a medieval West African empire that had been somewhere else entirely, which was the point. Nkrumah pushed pan-Africanism hard, built the Volta dam, and had himself made president for life before being overthrown by the army in 1966. Some thirty African states became independent within a decade. His line at the independence ceremony was that the independence of Ghana was meaningless unless it was linked to the total liberation of Africa. He spent the money on that proposition and on prestige projects, and the cocoa price fell.
- Year: 1957 CE
- Category: Independence
