Howard W. French

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832 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 20 Dec

Howard W. French’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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New Books in Intellectual History · Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism’s High Tide: A Conversation with Howard W. French · 20 Dec 2025 podcast

So this is just to say that at the elite level, at the state level, Pan-Africanism is not altogether dead.

What's most interesting to me

is that I believe on the African continent, rank and file, ordinary, everyday Africans, listen, I've been to almost every African country.

I've spent a great deal of time in an enormous, unusually large number of African countries.

I've spent my entire life, since 1975,

traveling and dwelling in the African environment.

You and I have traveled in Africa today, so you know that this isn't just a bio point, right?

You were born into this.

Ordinary Africans find resonance in this to a degree today that I think is much deeper and more resonant than their elites and their leaders do.

Okay, so final point in this long argument is

Where is the second dimension of this Pan-Africanism, which beyond Africans coming together meant restoring and strengthening links with the diaspora?

I don't have a prediction or an assessment, a clear assessment of sort of state of where things are at this moment.

But I also think that there are substantial numbers of

people in the black diaspora at the ordinary level who are who remain very very intrigued by and attracted to africa and want to find ways to relate to africa and to reclaim africa as their place of origin and as their relations right sometimes it's romantic sometimes it's naive often it's superficial but i don't want to dismiss that because i think this has lasting ongoing value and it awaits

And African leadership that will know how to galvanize this and how to channel this and how to restore some of the vibrancy and some of the idealism and some of the pragmatism also of the Pan-Africanist push by Nkrumah and others of his generation.

So he is indeed the background, the backbone of this book.

His story is the backbone, narratively speaking, of this book.

It's not really a straight-up biography of Nkrumah, as many readers and reviewers have observed, and as I readily admit.

But he is the spine of the book.

His story is the spine of this book.

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