Kwame Nkrumah and Consciencism

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) led the Gold Coast to independence as Ghana in March 1957, becoming the country's first prime minister and, from 1960, its first president, before being overthrown in a military coup in February 1966 while on a state visit to Beijing and Hanoi; he remains one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century African political thought both for his practical leadership of decolonization and for his explicit attempt to systematize a philosophy to guide it. Educated at Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania in the United States during the 1930s and early 1940s, where he encountered Marxist theory, the Pan-Africanism of Marcus Garvey and George Padmore, and African American intellectual life, and later in London, Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast in 1947 to become general secretary of the United Gold Coast Convention before founding his own more radical Convention People's Party (CPP) in 1949, whose campaign of "Positive Action" — organized strikes, boycotts, and non-violent civil disobedience modeled partly on Gandhian methods — accelerated the British colonial timetable for self-government.