Kwame Nkrumah was the leader of Ghana's independence struggle, the first president of independent Ghana, and one of the foremost architects of Pan-Africanism and African socialism. Born in 1909 in the Gold Coast, he spent a decade studying in the United States at Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania, immersing himself in the writings of Marcus Garvey, Marx, and Lenin. In London he worked with George Padmore and helped organize the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945, which brought together the future leaders of African independence and called for an end to colonial rule.

Returning home in 1947, Nkrumah broke with the cautious nationalists of his day and founded the Convention People's Party under the slogan "Self-Government Now." In 1950 he launched a campaign of "Positive Action," with strikes, boycotts, and mass demonstrations, and the British jailed him. His party won elections while he was still behind bars, forcing the colonial government to release him, and on March 6, 1957, he led Ghana to independence as the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to break free from British rule. His government built schools, hospitals, roads, and the great Volta River hydroelectric project, expanded free education, and offered Ghana as a base and refuge for liberation movements across the continent.

Nkrumah believed that Ghana's independence was meaningless unless it was linked to the total liberation and unification of Africa. He hosted the All-African People's Conference, helped found the Organization of African Unity in 1963, and wrote Africa Must Unite and Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. In those books he warned that the former colonial powers would maintain control through debt, aid, and foreign capital. In 1966 he was overthrown in a military coup welcomed by Washington and London. He spent his final years in exile in Guinea, where Ahmed Sékou Touré made him co-president, and he continued to write until his death in 1972. Nkrumah's legacy endures in the unfinished dream of a free, united, and socialist Africa.