The Wave of African Independence

The Gold Coast's independence on 6 March 1957, when it was renamed Ghana, marked the first instance of a sub-Saharan African colony winning full sovereignty from a European power, and it carried outsized symbolic weight across the continent. Kwame Nkrumah, the country's first prime minister and later president, had led the Convention People's Party through a campaign of strikes and civil disobedience under the slogan "self-government now," and on the eve of independence he told a crowd in Accra that Ghana's freedom was "meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent." Nkrumah went on to host the first Conference of Independent African States in Accra in April 1958 and became one of the most forceful advocates of Pan-Africanism, a movement whose intellectual roots reached back to figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey earlier in the century. Ghana's transition, achieved largely through negotiation rather than armed struggle, offered British colonial administrators a template of phased self-government that they would apply, with varying speed, to Nigeria (1960), Sierra Leone (1961), and Tanganyika (1961).