Ezra's Bookshelf

The Second Emancipation

by Howard W. French · 518 pages · ~9.5 hrs

HistoryPolitics & GovernmentRace & Identity

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Howard W. French, a longtime New York Times foreign correspondent in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean and now a professor at Columbia Journalism School, places Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah at the center of a global twentieth-century history of decolonization and Black liberation. The book is the second in a trilogy that began with Born in Blackness, French's argument that the modern world cannot be understood without taking African history seriously as a primary actor rather than a backdrop. The 'second emancipation' of his title is the wave of decolonization that began with Ghanaian independence in 1957, when Nkrumah declared that his country's freedom was meaningless unless tied to the liberation of the entire continent. French follows Nkrumah from his student years in Lincoln University and London, where he met C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and other Pan-African intellectuals; through his return to the Gold Coast and the political struggle against the British; through his presidency, in which he attempted to build a continental political union and a non-aligned bloc; to his overthrow in a CIA-supported coup in 1966 and his exile in Guinea. Along the way French interweaves the American civil rights movement, the New York Black radical world, anticolonial movements across Africa and the Caribbean, and the Cold War politics that conspired to crush them.

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