Kwame Nkrumah and the Quest for Independence

Depending on whether you looked from the North Atlantic or the Black Atlantic, the year 1957 appeared to signal two different political futures. On March 6, Ghana finally secured its independence from Great Britain after a decade-long nationalist struggle. At the independence celebrations, Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of the Covention People's Party and the new prime minister, declared that Ghanaian independence marked the birth of a new African "ready to fight his own battles and show that after all, the black man is capable of managing his own affairs." Less than three weeks later, on March 25, Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands signed the Treaty of Rome, creating the European Economic Community (EEC). For West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the treaty was one more step in "the great work of fostering durable international reconciliation and a community of nations for the good of Europe." While Ghanaian independence marked the emergence of a world of nation-states from the ashes of European imperialism, the birth of the EEC in empire's metropoles looked forward to the transcendence of the nation-state itself.