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

And I grew up with all of this in my life.

And so all of this is kind of in a formative background of mine that

I deserve no credit for.

I was born into this story, right?

My father moved the family to Africa.

I get no credit for that.

That just happened to us, right?

I was not a child, but I started visiting right away.

And as I told you, this had a tremendous effect on me.

To your education question, yes, of course.

One of the things that is...

remarkable to me about the story of Kwame Nkrumah, and it is also a story of accidents.

I guess a big lesson for me in the work that I did on this book is how much people, perhaps most of us, maybe even all of us, are the product of accidents, right?

So Kwame Nkrumah, instead of getting the

British-formed post-colonial education, or in his case, because he was born in 1909, the colonial-era education, which gives idealized, flattering versions of history, flattering toward the British versions of history, right?

Nkrumah encountered formative influences in the persons of Quaggir Agre, who was like a deputy headmaster at the academy he went to in Ghana.

Nnamdi Azikiwe, who was at the time of Nkrumah's young adulthood, a crusading anti-colonial newspaper editor in the Gold Coast.

He's from Nigeria.

Eventually, he will become president of Nigeria.

I mean, that by itself is just an extraordinary coincidence, right?

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