“For centuries, Europeans dominated the African continent. The white man arrogated to himself the right to rule and to be obeyed by the non-white; his mission, he claimed, was to "civilize" Africa. Under this cloak, the Europeans robbed the continent of vast riches and inflicted unimaginable suffering on the African people.”
--- I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology (1961)
(Spring 2008) -- The incessant stream of bad news — make that “flood” — from “the dark continent” gives the impression that Africa somehow missed out on the wonders of capitalist development which the West luckily reaped through some quirk of fate. No longer is it acceptable to attribute this discrepancy to skin colour, though that underlying prejudice still survives, seemingly corroborated by World Bank — even holier-than-thou United Nations — statistics.
So the words and works of Kwame Nkrumah, which inspired a generation, are well worth a second glance. In fact, the greatest African of the millennium, according to the 2000 BBC World Service listeners’ poll, is not Nelson Mandela or even Patrice Lumumba, but Kwame Nkrumah, the man who inspired the movement for African independence, but who has dropped out of Western discourse, for very good reasons.