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

You know, there's proof of this in Ghana's own example.

So Nkrumah wins his first election, stuns the British in 1951 from jail, landslide election.

The British had thought that this tiny coterie of

British-trained lawyers would win power and that they would be happy to have a very slow transition to independence, right?

And that they would agree, much like de Gaulle had wanted from the French colonies, they would agree basically to be ruled under terms favorable to the British.

Nkrumah wins election to them, the British, by grand surprise.

The British did not hand over the keys to the Gold Coast to Nkrumah.

They made him win two more elections.

They knew that they couldn't, because it had been a landslide, they knew that they couldn't outright deny that he had won.

They knew that because the election had been carried out under their auspices, they couldn't say that he had rigged the election.

And so what they did is move the goalposts and said, okay, very good.

We recognize you won, but you're not independent now.

You're not really going to be in charge now.

In fact, we're going to invent a new title to kind of make you, to patronize you.

We'll call you leader of government business instead of prime minister.

And then they made him win two more elections over the course of the 1950s until finally in 1957, Ghana gets independence from Britain.

What's the lesson of this?

This is the lesson of Fanon, that until you can force power to concede, it's not going to concede, right?

And some people say that this whole argument that I have from certain audiences and certain reviewers about, after all, wasn't Nkrumah a failure?

Look at his period of rule and how could he have not amounted to more in the time granted to him?

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