Kwame Nkrumah quotes

Kwame Nkrumah was a Ghanaian politician and revolutionary, celebrated as the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana. His leadership was instrumental in achieving Ghana's independence from British colonial rule and inspiring pan-African movements. He championed unity and progress across Africa, leaving a lasting legacy in the struggle against colonialism. Here are 38 of his quotes:

Just as in the days of the Egyptians, so today God had ordained that certain among the African race should journey westwards to equip themselves with knowledge and experience for the day when they would be called upon to return to their motherland and to use the learning they had acquired to help improve the lot of their brethren. ...I had not realized at the time that I would contribute so much towards the fulfillment of this prophecy.

Kwame Nkrumah

We face neither East nor West: we face forward.

Kwame Nkrumah

Freedom is not something that one people can bestow on another as a gift. Thy claim it as their own and none can keep it from them.

Kwame Nkrumah

Revolutions are brought about by men, by men who think as men of action and act as men of thought.

Kwame Nkrumah

The best way of learning to be an independent sovereign state is to be an independent sovereign state.

Kwame Nkrumah

We prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquility.

Kwame Nkrumah

The principle of mutual inter-imperialist assistance whereby American, British, French and West German monopoly capital extends joint control over the wealth of the non-liberated zones of Africa, Latin America and Asia, finds concrete expression in the formation of interlocked international financial institutions and bodies of credit.

Kwame Nkrumah

The guerrilla is the masses in arms.

Kwame Nkrumah

Always be the servant of the people.

Kwame Nkrumah

A colonial student does not by origin belong to the intellectual history in which the university philosophers are such impressive landmarks. The colonial student can be so seduced by these attempts to give a philosophical account of the universe, that surrenders his whole personality to them. When he does this, he loses sight of the fundamental social fact that he is a colonial subject. In this way, he omits to draw from his education and from the concern displayed by the great philosophers for human problems, anything which he might relate to the very real problem of colonial domination, which, as it happens, conditions the immediate life of every colonized African.

Kwame Nkrumah

This defective approach to scholarship was suffered by different categories of colonial student. Many of them had been handpicked and, so to say, carried certificates of worthiness with them. These were considered fit to become enlightened servants of the colonial administration. The process by which this category of student became fit usually started at an early age, for not infrequently they had lost contact early in life with their traditional background. By reason of their lack of contact with their own roots, they became prone to accept some theory of universalism, provided it was expressed in vague, mellifluous terms. Armed with their universalism, they carried away from their university courses an attitude entirely at variance with the concrete reality of their people and their struggle.

Kwame Nkrumah

Seek ye first the political kingdom and all things shall be added unto you.

Kwame Nkrumah

There were the vast numbers of ordinary Africans, who, animated by a lively national consciousness, sought knowledge as an instrument of national emancipation and integrity. This is not to say that these Africans overlooked the purely cultural value of their studies. But in order that their cultural acquisition should be valuable, they needed to be capable of appreciating it as free men.

Kwame Nkrumah

The evaluation of one's own social circumstance is part of the analysis of facts and events, and this kind of evaluation is, I feel, as good a starting point of the inquiry into the relations between philosophy and society as any other. Philosophy, in understanding human society, call for an analysis of facts and events, and an attempt to see how they fit into human life, and so how they make up human experience. In this way, philosophy, like history, can come to enrich, indeed to define, the experience of man.

Kwame Nkrumah

We cannot tell our peoples that material benefits in growth and modern progress are not for them. If we do, they will throw us out and seek other leaders who promise more ... We have to modernize. Either we shall do so with the interest and support of the West or we shall be compelled to turn elsewhere. This is not a warning or a threat, but a straight statement of political reality.

Kwame Nkrumah

As long as we are ruled by others we shall lay our mistakes at their door, and our sense of responsibility will remain dulled. Freedom brings responsibilities, and our experience can be enriched only by the acceptance of these responsibilities.

Kwame Nkrumah

We know that the traditional African society was founded on principles of egalitarianism. In its actual workings, however, it had various shortcomings. Its humanist impulse, nevertheless, is something that continues to urge us towards our all-African socialist reconstruction. We postulate each man to be an end in himself, not merely a means; and we accept the necessity of guaranteeing each man equal opportunities for his development. The implications of this for socio-political practice have to be worked out scientifically, and the necessary social and economic policies pursued with resolution. Any meaningful humanism must begin from egalitarianism and must lead to objectively chosen policies for safeguarding and sustaining egalitarianism. Hence, socialism. Hence, also, scientific socialism.

Kwame Nkrumah

It is not only the study of philosophy which can become perverted. The study of history too can become warped. The colonized African student, whose roots in his own society are systematically starved of sustenance, is introduced to Greek and Roman history, the cradle history of modern Europe, and he is encouraged to treat this portion of the story of man together with the subsequent history of Europe as the only worthwhile portion. This history is anointed with a universalist flavouring which titillates the palate of certain African intellectuals so agreeably that they become alienated from their own immediate society.

Kwame Nkrumah

Capitalism is too complicated a system for a newly independent nation. Hence the need for a socialistic society.

Kwame Nkrumah

The critical study of the philosophies of the past should lead to the study of modern theories. For these latter, born of the fire of contemporary struggles, are militant and alive.

Kwame Nkrumah

The difference between myself and Castro is that I am not aligned and he is; I am a socialist and he is a communist.

Kwame Nkrumah

To the true African journalist, his newspaper is a collective organizer, a collective instrument of mobilization and a collective educator-a weapon, first and foremost, to overthrow colonialism and imperialism and to assist total African independence and unity.

Kwame Nkrumah