Howard W. French
speaker
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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.
Appearances
So in 1963, Africans come together for this founding conference of the OAU.
And between 1960, when there was this headlong rush toward independence in 1963, the leaders of these newly founded states had enough time to understand what exactly are the prerogatives and privileges of ruling your own little thing.
Right.
A.K.A.
power suite.
Power suite, as they say, as they might say in Lagos today.
Right.
And Nkrumah didn't have in that moment, no, you know, operative answer for that.
Like he had principled answers for that.
He gives a very long speech at this founding conference to the OU about the logic behind this.
And I find the logic still compelling.
But I'm not going to recite it in its entirety here.
But, you know, one of the pieces of this...
impressively for me, was a recounting of the founding of the United States.
That if you think this is just an African problem, dear fellow leaders, think about where else in the world we have seen this.
Look at Latin America, which did not come together, and look at the way they remain dominated by the outside world.
He said this in 1963.
Look at the United States, which in the last quarter of the 18th century,
consisted of British colonies whose leaders or whose elites understood and eventually agreed on the notion that if each of them surrendered a little bit of their own power and position, they could form a whole that was greater than its parts and the general well-being and good would benefit from this.
This to me is an extraordinarily, is a brilliant answer, not just at the level of rhetoric, but in real terms, right?
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