Africa’s Many Divides and Africa’s Future: Pursuing Nkrumah’s Vision of Pan-Africanism in an Era of Globalization ed. by, Charles Quist-Adade, and Vincent Dodoo (review)

The edited volume Africa’s Many Divides and Africa’s Future: Pursuing Nkrumah’s Vision of Pan-Africanism in an Era of Globalization emerged as a publication from the second biennial Kwame Nkrumah International Conference, which took place at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada. The conference “attracted worldwide interest and brought a global focus to the economic, cultural, social, and political issues that African countries and Africans face in the twenty-first century” (p. ix). The coeditors are Charles Quist-Adade, a faculty member and former chair of the sociology department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, and history professor Vincent Dodoo of the department of history and political science on the social-science faculty of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana.

The book is divided into fifteen chapters and four sections: acknowledgments; a preface; the opening address by William Otoo Ellis, vice-chancellor of KNUST (pp. 1–4); and a nine-page keynote address, “Literature as a Tool for National Liberation and Post-Colonial Reconstruction: Anti-Palanquinity and the Pan-Africanist Imperative,” delivered by Atukwei Okai of the Department of Applied Linguistics in the University of Education at Winneba, Ghana, and secretary general of the Pan-African Writers’ Association. Ellis’s address emphasizes Nkrumah’s search for continental unity, which led to the founding, in Ethiopia in 1963, of the Organization of African Unity, now called the African Union. Ellis says, “The problems of Africa and especially its status in the world, Kwame Nkrumah insisted, can never be resolved if Africans remain divided” (p. 1). Philosophically, Okai reiterates: “Our platform is that, if the books had been used to colonize our minds, then we must use the [same] books to decolonize our minds” (p. 5). Most certainly, the address contains food for thought. Two shorter messages, part of the welcoming sentiments from officialdom that make up the opening section, come from Sam Afrane, provost of the College of Art and Social Sciences of KNUST, and Diane Purvey, dean of arts at KPU; the latter traces the history of the conference: “Two years ago, Kwantlen Polytechnic University was pleased to hold the inaugural Biennial Kwame Nkrumah International Conference in Metro Vancouver, in the shared traditional territories of the Kwantlen, Kwatzie, Semiahmoo[,] and Tsawawssen First Nations” (p. 3).

Among the chapters are essays about Nkrumah, whose centenary was marked by the conference and its publication, as well as intercontinental African topical essays. Three accomplished historians discuss three topics close to Nkrumah’s heart and aspirations. Nkrumah was often dubbed the Osagyefo—a warrior title, which his critics often misunderstood and misinterpreted. KNUST history professor Wilhelmina J. Donkoh’s essay is titled “Nkrumah and His ‘Chicks’: An Examination of Women and Organizational Strategies of the CPP” (chapter six); London-based Ama Biney, whose teaching experiences have included a part-time University of Oxford stint, writes on “The Intellectual and Political Legacies of Kwame Nkrumah” (chapter eight); and E. Ofori Bekoe of the College of New Rochelle’s Rosa Parks campus in New York, bases his essay—“The United States Peace Corps as a Facet of United States-Ghana Relations” (chapter thirteen)—on the Peace Corps, though as he underscores, “President Kwame Nkrumah was initially skeptical of the United States foreign policy” (p. 254). Yet, with Nkrumah’s fellow Pennsylvania-based Lincoln University alumnus (future Ghana-based US Ambassador Franklin H. Williams) appointed by the Kennedy administration in 1961 to serve as the first assistant director of the Peace Corps (established in 1961 under Executive Order #10924), it was not surprising that, as Bekoe notes: “Ghana was the first country to be a beneficiary of the [Peace Corps] program” (p. 254).

Donkoh, in her chapter, argues, “Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s...