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

Ghana, under Nkrumah, sends some of the first peacekeepers ever to wear blue uniforms under the UN system to the Congo to try to bolster the brand new government of Lumumba and to bolster its legitimacy.

And the West, in effect, as I described – this doesn't happen overnight, but it plays out over a year or so –

The West basically decided, we've got to punish this Nkrumah guy because we don't want Lumumba to be in charge of this storehouse of mineral wealth called the Congo, where, most importantly, most of the world's easily exploitable uranium reserves come from.

So this was a revelation for me.

So I have mixed feelings about this call by Fanon.

I think that Fanon had a valuable insight in that he understood that

that freedom is almost never granted, that freedom is almost arises, it is almost always one, and one in a very active way.

And I think I would like to imagine that if I could have a conversation with Fanon, which is of course not possible, that we could agree to a formulation of this thought that doesn't result in a exclusive focus on violence as a solution.

that there are other ways to actively win freedom that don't necessarily involve violence.

They may be rare.

They may be unusual.

I actually think Ghana is an example of this, right?

A criminal wins power from a jail cell, right?

I think that the word violence can serve to distract readers of Fanon from a deeper wisdom in his comment or in his thought, which is precisely that power doesn't concede easily.

and maybe not at all.

If you're going to have meaningful freedom, you're going to have to fight for it, right?

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?

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