Four Men Who Dreamed of One Africa
Nkrumah, Touré, Lumumba, Nasser: four contributions to African liberation and solidarity, and one shared conviction that the flags were only the beginning.
A dream older than the flags
In October 1945, delegates gathered in Manchester, England, for the Fifth Pan-African Congress. Its declaration urged colonized peoples to unite, assert their rights, and elect their own governments, because political power was the key to complete social, economic and political emancipation (AU OAU60).
Pan-Africanism was never meant to stop at independence. The pioneers who won Africa's freedom saw the flag as a beginning, though they disagreed, sometimes sharply, about what should follow it. Four of them tower over the story.
Kwame Nkrumah: the architect
When the Gold Coast became independent Ghana on 6 March 1957, Nkrumah, the new nation's first prime minister, told the crowd at midnight: "Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent" (Britannica). He immediately turned outward. He convened the 1958 All-African Peoples' Conference in Accra, which called on Africans everywhere to unite in the fight for liberation, and in 1961 he anchored the Casablanca group, including Ghana, Guinea and Mali, which demanded continental political union and integration (AU OAU60).
His 1963 book Africa Must Unite laid out the full blueprint: unity at the political, economic and defence levels as the only path to true freedom and prosperity (The Point). At the OAU's founding conference he told the assembled leaders: "Unite we must" (African Union, 1963 summit speeches).
Nkrumah was also the thinker who gave the movement its sharpest analytical tool. He is credited with being the first to apply the term "neo-colonialism" to Africa's twentieth-century experience (LSE), and developed it fully in his 1965 book Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (Springer).
Sékou Touré: the man who said no
In September 1958, Charles de Gaulle offered France's African territories a "Community": continued association with Paris, in a junior role. Sékou Touré campaigned for "No." His answer to de Gaulle in Conakry, on 25 August 1958, became one of the great sentences of the century: "We prefer poverty in liberty to opulence in slavery" (Wikipedia, in translation).
On 28 September 1958, Guinea voted "No" overwhelmingly, the only French African territory to choose immediate independence, and on 2 October 1958 it became the first French territory in sub-Saharan Africa to gain full independence (Franceinfo). France moved within days to end all aid and withdraw its personnel, including the armed forces (Franceinfo), but Guinea had shown that total independence was possible.
Touré spent the rest of his life in the pan-Africanist trench. Guinea stood in the Casablanca group alongside Nkrumah's Ghana and Modibo Keïta's Mali (AU OAU60), and when Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966, Touré gave him asylum in Guinea and named him honorary co-president (Wikipedia).
Patrice Lumumba: the conscience
On 30 June 1960, at the ceremony marking Congo's independence from Belgium, Patrice Lumumba, whose Mouvement National Congolais had just won the May 1960 elections (CCC Pressbooks), delivered a speech that has entered history:
We are proud of this struggle amid tears, fire, and blood, down to our very heart of hearts, for it was a noble and just struggle, an indispensable struggle if we were to put an end to the humiliating slavery that had been forced upon us.
We are going to show the world what the black man can do when he works in freedom, and we are going to make the Congo the focal point for the development of all of Africa.
The speech ended with the cry that tied Congo's freedom to the continent's: "Long live independence and African unity!" (Columbia University). Lumumba was overthrown within months and executed on 17 January 1961, aged 35 (Britannica). His memory became a permanent reminder of how much unfinished business the independence settlements left behind.
Gamal Abdel Nasser: the bridge
Egypt's State Information Service, an official source that presents the Egyptian government's view, describes Nasser as treating the African continent as the second circle of Egypt's foreign policy, and as a backer of liberation movements "spanning from Algeria to the Congo" (Egypt SIS (Nasser)). The same source says Egypt played an important role in founding the Organization of African Unity (Egypt SIS (Africa)). Alongside Nkrumah, Nasser rose to international prominence as a leader attempting to shape a common destiny for Africa (UNT Digital Library).
His place in the story matters for another reason: it reminds us that African unity was never only a sub-Saharan idea. From Cairo to Accra, the map was one continent.
The thread that binds them, and the questions it raises
A Ghanaian, a Guinean, a Congolese, an Egyptian. Their contributions took different forms, and they did not share one blueprint. But Nkrumah stated the conviction that gave the era its direction, at Addis Ababa in 1963: "the struggle against colonialism does not end with the attainment of national independence. Independence is only the prelude to a new and more involved struggle" (African Union, 1963 summit speeches).
A fair account also holds a harder fact. Nkrumah, Touré and Nasser all governed without free political competition, and their governments imprisoned opponents. Lumumba had only a few months in office. Admiring what these men wanted for Africa does not require ignoring how some of them ruled at home, and the case for unity has to be made with that history in view.
What independence made possible, and where the unity question led, is the story of the next two chapters.