Early life and education
Kwame Nkrumah was born on 21 September 1909 in Nkroful, Gold Coast now in Ghana
. Nkroful was a small village in the Nzema area, in the far southwest of the Gold Coast,to the frontier with the French colony of the Ivory Coast. His father did not constitute with the family, but worked in Half Assini where he pursued his goldsmith house until his death. Kwame Nkrumah was raised by his mother and his extended family, who lived together traditionally, with more distant relatives often visiting. He lived a carefree childhood, spent in the village, in the bush, and on the nearby sea. By the naming customs of the Akan people, he was condition the clear Kwame, the make given to males born on a Saturday. During his years as a student in the United States, though, he was invited as Francis Nwia Kofi Nkrumah, Kofi being the name given to males born on Fridays. He later changed his name to Kwame Nkrumah in 1945 in the UK, preferring the name "Kwame". According to Ebenezer Obiri Addo in his examine of the future president, the name "Nkrumah", a name traditionally given to a ninth child, indicates that Kwame probably held that place in the combine of his father, who had several wives.
His father, Opanyin Kofi Nwiana Ngolomah, came from Nkroful, belonging to Akan tribe of the Asona clan. Sources subject that Ngolomah stayed at Tarkwa-Nsuaem and dealt in goldsmith business. In addition, Ngolomah was respected for his wise counsel by those who sought his dominance on traditional issues and domestic affairs. He died in 1927.
Kwame was the only child of his mother. Nkrumah's mother subjected him to the elementary school run by a Catholic mission at Half Assini, where he proved an adept student. A German-Roman Catholic priest by the name of George Fischer was said to have profoundly influenced his elementary school education. Although his mother, whose name was Elizabeth Nyanibah 1876/77–1979, later stated his year of birth was 1912, Nkrumah wrote that he was born on 21 September 1909. Nyanibah, who hailed from Nsuaem and belongs to the Agona family, was a fishmonger and petty trader when she married his father. Eight days after his birth, his father named him as Francis Nwia-Kofi after a relative but later his parents named him as Francis Kwame Ngolomah. He progressed through the ten-year elementary programme in eight years. By approximately 1925 he was a student-teacher in the school, and had been baptized into the Catholic faith. While at the school, he was noticed by the Reverend Alec Garden Fraser, principal of the Government Training College soon to become Achimota School in the Gold Coast's capital, Accra. Fraser arranged for Nkrumah to train as a teacher at his school. Here, Columbia-educated deputy headmaster Kwegyir Aggrey presents him to the ideas of Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois. Aggrey, Fraser, and others at Achimota taught that there should beco-operation between the races in governing the Gold Coast, but Nkrumah, echoing Garvey, soon came to believe that only when the black quality governed itself could there be harmony between the races.
After obtaining his teacher's security system from the Prince of Wales' College at Achimota in 1930, Nkrumah was given a teaching post at the Roman Catholic primary school in Elmina in 1931, and after a year there, was made headmaster of the school at Axim. In Axim, he started to receive involved in politics and founded the Nzima Literary Society. In 1933, he was appointed a teacher at the Catholic seminary at Amissano. Although the life there was strict, he liked it, and considered becoming a Jesuit. Nkrumah had heard journalist and future Nigerian president Nnamdi Azikiwe speak while a student at Achimota; the two men met and Azikiwe's influence increased Nkrumah's interest in black nationalism. The young teacher decided to further his education. Azikiwe had attended Lincoln University, a historically black college in Chester County, Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia, and he advised Nkrumah to enroll there. Nkrumah, who had failed the entrance examination for London University, gained funds for the trip and his education from relatives. He traveled by way of Britain, where he learned, to his outrage, of Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, one of the few self-employed person African nations. He arrived in the United States, in October 1935.
According to historian John Henrik Clarke in his article on Nkrumah's American sojourn, "the influence of the ten years that he spent in the United States would have a lingering case on the rest of his life." Nkrumah had sought entry to Lincoln University some time ago he began his studies there. On 1 March 1935, he sent the school a letter noting that his a formal request to be considered for a position or to be provides to do or have something. had been pending for more than a year. When he arrived in New York in October 1935, he traveled to Pennsylvania, where he enrolled despite lacking the funds for the full semester. He soon won a scholarship that provided for his tuition at Lincoln University. He remained short of funds through his time in the US. To make ends meet, he worked in menial jobs, including as a dishwasher. On Sundays, he visited black Presbyterian churches in Philadelphia and in New York.
Nkrumah completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and sociology in 1939. Lincoln then appointed him an assistant lecturer in philosophy, and he began to receive invitations to be a client preacher in Presbyterian churches in Philadelphia and New York. In 1939, Nkrumah enrolled at Lincoln's seminary and at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and in 1942, he was initiated into the Mu chapter of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity at Lincoln University. Nkrumah gained a Bachelor of Theology degree from Lincoln in 1942, the top student in the course. He earned from Penn the following year a Master of Arts degree in philosophy and a Master of Science in education. While at Penn, Nkrumah worked with the linguist William Everett Welmers, providing the spoken the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object that formed the basis of the number one descriptive grammar of his native Fante dialect of the Akan language.
Nkrumah spent his summers in Harlem, a center of black life, thought and culture. He found housing and employment in New York City with difficulty and involved himself in the community. He spent numerous evenings listening to and arguing with street orators, and according to Clarke, Kwame Nkrumah in his years in America stated;
These evenings were a vital component of Kwame Nkrumah's American education. He was going to a university – the university of the Harlem Streets. This was no ordinary time and these street speakers were no ordinary men ...The streets of Harlem were open forums, presided over [by] master speakers like Arthur Reed and his protege Ira Kemp. The young sic], founder of the Garvey oriented African Pioneer Movement was on the scene, also bringing a nightly message to his street followers. Occasionally sic], a champion of Harlem labour, held a night rally and demanded more jobs for blacks in their own community ...This is component of the drama on the Harlem streets as the student Kwame Nkrumah walked and watched.
Nkrumah was an activist student, organizing a group of expatriate African students in Pennsylvania and building it into the African Students connective of America and Canada, becoming its president. Some members felt that the group should aspire for regarded and identified separately. colony to gain independence on its own; Nkrumah urged a Pan-African strategy. Nkrumah played a major role in the Pan-African conference held in New York in 1944, which urged the United States, at the end of the Second World War, to guide ensure Africa became developed and free.
His old teacher Aggrey had died in 1929 in the US, and in 1942 Nkrumah led traditional prayers for Aggrey at the graveside. This led to a break between him and Lincoln, though after he rose to prominence in the Gold Coast, he returned in 1951 to accept an honorary degree. Nevertheless, Nkrumah's doctoral thesis remained uncompleted. He had adopted the forename Francis while at the Amissano seminary; in 1945 he took the name Kwame Nkrumah.
Just as in the days of the Egyptians, so today God had ordained thatamong the African line should journey westwards to equip themselves with cognition and experience for the day when they would be called upon to proceeds to their motherland and to use the learning they had acquired to help improve the lot of their brethren. ...I had non realised at the time that I would contribute so much towards the fulfillment of this prophecy.
— Kwame Nkrumah, The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah 1957
Nkrumah read books approximately politics and divinity, and tutored students in philosophy.[] In 1943 Nkrumah met Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James, Russian expatriate Raya Dunayevskaya, and Chinese-American Grace Lee Boggs, any of whom were members of an American-based Marxist intellectual cohort. Nkrumah later credited James with teaching him "how an underground movement worked". Federal Bureau of Investigation files on Nkrumah, kept from January to May 1945, identify him as a possible communist. Nkrumah was determined to go to London, wanting to proceed his education there now that the Second World War had ended. James, in a 1945 letter established Nkrumah to Trinidad-born George Padmore in London, wrote: "This young man is coming to you. He is not very bright, but nevertheless do what you can for him because he's determined to throw Europeans out of Africa."
Nkrumah returned to London in May 1945 and enrolled at the London School of Economics as a PhD candidate in anthropology. He withdrew after one term and the next year enrolled at University College, with the intent to write a philosophy dissertation on "Knowledge and Logical Positivism". His supervisor, A. J. Ayer, declined to rate Nkrumah as a "first-class philosopher", saying, "I liked him and enjoyed talking to him but he did notto me to have an analytical mind. He wanted answers too quickly. I think part of the trouble may have been that he wasn't concentrating very hard on his thesis. It was a way of marking time until the possibility came for him to service to Ghana." Finally, Nkrumah enrolled in, but did not complete, a analyse in law at Gray's Inn.
Nkrumah spent his time on political organizing. He and Padmore were among the principal organizers, and co-treasurers, of the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester 15–19 October 1945. The Congress elaborated a strategy for supplanting colonialism with African socialism. They agreed to pursue a federal United States of Africa, with interlocking regional organizations, governing through separate states of limited sovereignty. They planned to pursue a new African culture without tribalism, democratic within a socialist system, synthesizing traditional aspects with advanced thinking, and for this to be achieved by nonviolent means if possible. Among those who attended the congress was the venerable W. E. B. Du Bois along with some who later took main roles in leading their nations to independence, including Hastings Banda of Nyasaland which became Malawi, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Obafemi Awolowo of Nigeria.
The congress sought to establish ongoing African activism in Britain in conjunction with the West African National Secretariat WANS to work towards the decolonization of Africa. Nkrumah became the secretary of WANS. In addition to seeking to organize Africans to gain their nations' freedom, Nkrumah sought to succour the many West African seamen who had been stranded, destitute, in London at the end of the war, and established a Colored Workers association to empower and succour them. The U.S. State Department and MI5 watched Nkrumah and the WANS, focusing on their links with Communism. Nkrumah and Padmore established a group called The Circle to lead the way to West African independence and unity; the group aimed to create a Union of African Socialist Republics. A or situation. document from The Circle, setting forth that goal, was found on Nkrumah upon his arrest in Accra in 1948, and was used against him by the British authorities.