What do you remember when you hear the name Dr Kwame Nkrumah?
Who was this man, well spoken of in the western land with a crown in the West, Africa.
A fearless man who stood to defy the odds and break the herdge of belief that Africa can never feed itself without the help of its colonial masters.
How I wish he lived to rule abit longer, a mother Ghana.
How I wish he… but only if wishes were horses….
He said “Colonialism and its attitudes die hard, like the attitudes of slavery, whose hangover still dominates behaviour in certain parts of the Western hemisphere.
Before slavery was practised in the New World, there was no special denigration of Africans. Travellers to this continent described the inhabitants in their records with natural curiosity and examination to be expected of individuals coming from different environments.
It was when slave trade and slavery began to develop ghastly proportions that made them the base of that capital accumulation which assisted the rise of Western industrialism, that a new attitude towards Africans emerged. ‘Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the man of colour. A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon.
Slavery was not born of racism, rather racism was the consequence of slavery.’ With this racial twist was invented the myth of colour inferiority. This myth supported the subsequent rape of our continent with its despoliation and continuing exploitation under the advanced forms of colonialism and imperialism.”
He was not just a man for Ghana ( The Gold Cost) but Africa was his home. He fought to build a nation and unite the states of Africa.
“I am not African because I was born in Africa but because Africa was born in me.”
“The forces that unite us are intrinsic and greater than the superimposed influences that keep us apart.”
He did not just believe he could do it, but he believed that we as Ghanaians, as Africans could be owners of our lands. to rule our people as Kings and Queens and live and Princes and Princesses. He was a doer..
“Action without thought is empty. Thought without action is blind.”
“Never before in history has such a sweeping fervour for freedom expressed itself in great mass movements which are driving down the bastions of empire. This wind of change blowing through Africa, as I have said before, is no ordinary wind. It is a raging hurricane against which the old order cannot stand. The great millions of Africa, and of Asia, have grown impatient of being hewers of wood and drawers of water, and are rebelling against the false belief that providence created some to be menials of others. Hence the twentieth century has become the century of colonial emancipation, the century of continuing revolution which must finally witness the total liberation of Africa from colonial rule and imperialist exploitation.”
Africa was indeed his home. Ghana was indeed his motherland and today we remember you for your foundership as a country of Ghana.
Happy Founder’s Day
