Ghana in Focus Special: Celebrating an Afrikan icon Dr Kwame Nkrumah

Wednesday the 21st September is the Earth Day of the man BBC Afrika listeners voted the Afrikan of the Millennium in the year 2000, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president.

In this special edition of Ghana in Focus we replay the podcasts aired last year relating to the life and legacy of the great man.

Born in 1909 in the little town of Nkroful in Western Ghana, Nkrumah originally wanted to be a Roman Catholic priest and was training to do so.  However, in a chance meeting with Pan Afrikanist Nnamdi Azikwe, who himself later became the first president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria,  Azikwe introduced the young Nkrumah to the tenets of Pan Affrikanism that changed Nkrumah's life for ever!!

Enthused by what he heard Kwame Nkrumah was eager to know more about Pan Afrikanism.  It's just so that Nkrumah won a scholarship to go to the United States to continue his education.  According to historian John Henrik Clarke in his article on Nkrumah's American sojourn, "the influence of the ten years that he spent in the United States would have a lingering effect on the rest of his life'.  

It is in the US where Nkrumah becomes familiar with the works of pantheons of Pan Afrikanism including Clarke himself, JA Rodgers, W E B DuBois, George Padmore and more notably Marcus Garvey.

On the latter, Kwame Nkrumah said 'of all the books that I have read no other book gingered me up more than the Philosophies and Opinions of Marcus Garvey'.

After his sojourn in the United States, Kwame Nkrumah goes onto London, UK in May 1945 and enrolled at the London School of Economics as a PhD candidate in anthropology.

Nkrumah spent his time on political organizing. He and Padmore were among the principal organizers, and co-treasurers, of the Fifth Pan afrikanism Congress in Manchester (15–19 October 1945).

The Congress elaborated a strategy for supplanting colonialism with African socialism They agreed to pursue a federal United States of Africa, with interlocking regional organizations, governing through separate states of limited sovereignty.

Among those who attended the congress was the venerable W E B Du Bois along with some who later took leading roles in leading their nations to independence, including Kamazu Banda of Nyasaland (which became Malawi) Jomo Kenyata of Kenya and Obafemi Awolowo of Nigeria.

It was while this conference was taking place in London that the first political party in Ghana, The UGCC, The United Gold Coast Convention was on the move to gain political independence for the Gold Coast.

The UGCC was a party formed by middle class lawyers who sought to champion the cause of independence.  However, the UGCC lacked punch and struggled to reach the masses of the Gold Coast.  The founding members heard of Nkrumah's mobilising and organizational skills and invited him back to G