Kwame Nkrumah’s warning that as long as capitalism and imperialism go unchecked there will always be exploitation, a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, and wars bred by neocolonialism comes from Challenge of the Congo. In that book he examined how Western powers and the United Nations helped crush the Congo’s independence and the government of Patrice Lumumba. Born in the Gold Coast in 1909, Nkrumah studied in the United States and Britain, where he immersed himself in Marxism and Pan-Africanism. In 1945 he helped organize the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester alongside George Padmore and W.E.B. Du Bois.

Returning home, Nkrumah founded the Convention People’s Party and led a mass campaign of strikes and “positive action” against British rule, for which he was imprisoned. In 1957 he led Ghana to independence as the first sub-Saharan African colony to break free from British rule. He declared that Ghana’s independence was meaningless unless it was linked to the total liberation of Africa. He hosted the All-African People’s Conference and supported liberation movements across the continent, and he helped found the Organization of African Unity while calling for a united socialist Africa. In Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, he showed how former colonial powers kept control of nominally independent states through debt, aid, and foreign capital.

In February 1966, while Nkrumah was abroad, he was overthrown in a military coup welcomed by Washington and London, and later accounts link the CIA to the plotters. He spent his final years in exile in Guinea, where he continued to write. He died in 1972. His warning about Challenge of the Congo still stands: Africa’s freedom cannot be won while imperialism and capitalism remain unchecked, and only a united, liberated Africa can end the wars and exploitation they produce.

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