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
This is a fascinating question, and I get asked this a lot.
Sometimes I get asked it, I don't feel this from you, but sometimes I get asked this with a strong degree of skepticism, sometimes even hostility, like, okay, so how important could Nkrumah have been if Pan-Africanism is now like a big vacuum?
Like, it doesn't mean anything.
It's lost all resonance.
I don't believe that, right?
What I believe is the following.
I believe that Nkrumah lost...
in his day, the crucial battle of Pan-Africanism, which was the 1963 founding conference of the Organization of African Unity.
And I describe this in, I hope, a dramatic way in the book.
Nkrumah goes there and he lays all his cards on the table, which is with an argument which basically says,
that the only way that this continent, which represents a very substantial and today even far more substantial portion of humanity, that the only way that this continent can fend for itself in the world is by coming together and erasing the divisions that were left behind by imperial domination.
And this is the simplest definition of Pan-Africanism.
There are...
wider definitions which bring in the diaspora.
But this is the essence.
This is the beginning of a definition of Pan-Africanism.
And this happens in 1963.
And Nkrumah is, I believe, in many ways, in that moment, a victim of his own success.
He has illuminated, beginning with the experience of the Gold Coast turning into Ghana in 1957,
This triumph peacefully against the world's greatest imperial power, he has illuminated a pathway which others rushed to follow him on toward independence in Africa.
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