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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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.

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

Nkrumah was... The other remarkable thing to me about his story is, in a lot of interviews I've done about this book, interviewers are eager to dwell on Nkrumah's failures, Nkrumah's failings.

So, after all, didn't he become an autocrat?

After all...

As I've said already, didn't Pan-Africanism fail?

You know, there's lots of these kinds of questions.

What's most remarkable to me, actually, is without needing to deny that Nkrumah does indeed turn toward authoritarianism in the latter part of his rule,

The scope and ambition and the range of solutions that Nkrumah tried and experimented with as a way of helping develop Ghana and make it economically powerful, not for Ghana's own purposes, but indeed on behalf of this idealistic vision of Pan-Africanism, which he never abandoned.

right?

So he wants to build a hydroelectric plant, which the West strings him along with or strings him along over for years, right?

Crucial years of his rule.

There's one way to think about this as what an unrealistic thing, what a maniacal idea.

I don't believe either of those things.

And Cromer's vision was we have to industrialize quickly or else we will never escape from domination.

So that is part one.

Part two is we have natural advantages

in our landscape for hydroelectric power.

And if we can build an enormous dam, which they eventually do, we can sell cheap power, subsidize power for our neighbors.

And by this act of sacrifice on our part, not trying to profit from our electricity, but being brotherly toward our neighboring states, we can show them by example what Pan-Africanism means.

That if we surrender something,

on behalf of a greater good, just like I said with the American colonies, we can then emerge on the other side of an equation where we are all in a much better place, right?

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