Kwame Nkrumah

Born Francis Nwia-Kofi Ngonloma in 1909 in the Nzema village of Nkroful, Nkrumah trained as a teacher at Achimota before studying economics, sociology and philosophy in the United States and Britain — organising West African students all the while. Recalled home in 1947 as secretary of the UGCC, he quickly outgrew its gradualism.

In 1949 he founded the Convention People’s Party with the demand of “Self-Government Now”, won the 1951 election from a colonial prison cell, and at midnight on 6 March 1957 declared Ghana free forever — the first sub-Saharan African nation to break colonial rule. As president he drove mass education, the Volta River Project and Tema Harbour, and hosted the 1958 All-African Peoples’ Conference before co-founding the Organisation of African Unity in 1963.

Overthrown in the 24 February 1966 coup while on a peace mission to Vietnam, he lived his final years in exile in Guinea and Romania, dying in Bucharest in 1972. His remains rest in the Accra mausoleum on the old Polo Grounds. Voted Africa’s Man of the Millennium by BBC listeners in 2000, he remains both Ghana’s founding father and its most fiercely debated leader.