Nkrumah Quotes

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You can no longer see or identify yourself solely as a member of a tribe, but as a citizen of a nation of one people working toward a common purpose.
Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for all Africans: How Every African Can Live the Life of Their Dreams)
I am not African because I was born in Africa but because Africa was born in me.
Kwame Nkrumah
Most people write me off when they see me. They do not know my story. They say I am just an African. They judge me before they get to know me. What they do not know is The pride I have in the blood that runs through my veins; The pride I have in my rich culture and the history of my people; The pride I have in my strong family ties and the deep connection to my community; The pride I have in the African music, African art, and African dance; The pride I have in my name and the meaning behind it. Just as my name has meaning, I too will live my life with meaning. So you think I am nothing? Don’t worry about what I am now, For what I will be, I am gradually becoming. I will raise my head high wherever I go Because of my African pride, And nobody will take that away from me.
Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for all Africans: How Every African Can Live the Life of Their Dreams)
We face neither East nor West; We face forward
Kwame Nkrumah
The forces that unite us are intrinsic and greater than the superimposed influences that keep us apart.
Kwame Nkrumah
Action without thought is empty. Thought without action is blind.
Kwame Nkrumah
When I look at Africa many questions come to mind, many times I have asked myself what would happen if Dr Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba were to rise up and see what is happening, many times I have asked myself what would happen if Nelson Madiba Mandela were to rise up and see what is happening, because what they will be confronted with is an Africa where the Democratic Republic of Congo is unsettled, there is a war going on there, but it's not on the front pages of our newspapers because we don't even control our newspapers and the media.
Patrick L.O. Lumumba
Thought without practice is empty; and action without thought is blind." (The other 'quote' has it backwards.)
Kwame Nkrumah
All the fair brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended.
Kwame Nkrumah
Never before in history has such a sweeping fervor for freedom expressed itself in great mass movements which are driving down the bastions of empire. This wind of change blowing through Africa, as I have said before, is no ordinary wind. It is a raging hurricane against which the old order cannot stand [...] The great millions of Africa, and of Asia, have grown impatient of being hewers of wood and drawers of water, and are rebelling against the false belief that providence created some to be menials of others. Hence the twentieth century has become the century of colonial emancipation, the century of continuing revolution which must finally witness the total liberation of Africa from colonial rule and imperialist exploitation.
Kwame Nkrumah (Africa Must Unite (New World Paperbacks))
It is far better to be free to govern or misgovern yourself than to be governed by anybody else. — Kwame Nkrumah
Iyanla Vanzant (Acts of Faith: Meditations For People of Color)
We are the children of Nelson Mandela; we are the children of Kwame Nkrumah; we are the children of Haile Selassie; we are the children of Samora Machel; we are the children of Robert Mugabe; we are the children of Patrice Lumumba; we are the children of Julius Kambarage Nyerere. We know who we are.
Enock Maregesi
When Kwame Nkrumah, the pro-Chinese ruler of Ghana, was on a state visit to Beijing, Mossad orchestrated the uprising that led to both Nkrumah’s overthrow and the destruction of the CSIS infrastructure in the country.
Gordon Thomas (Gideon's Spies: The Inside Story of Israel’s Legendary Secret Service)
Are we going to do the right thing, or we going to let fear take over?
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
If by their fruits we shall know them, they must first grow the fruits.
Kwame Nkrumah (Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism)
Colonialism and its attitudes die hard, like the attitudes of slavery, whose hangover still dominates behaviour in certain parts of the Western hemisphere. Before slavery was practised in the New World, there was no special denigration of Africans. Travellers to this continent described the inhabitants in their records with natural curiosity and examination to be expected of individuals coming from different environments. It was when slave trade and slavery began to develop ghastly proportions that made them the base of that capital accumulation which assisted the rise of Western industrialism, that a new attitude towards Africans emerged. 'Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the man of colour. A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism, rather racism was the consequence of slavery.' With this racial twist was invented the myth of colour inferiority. This myth supported the the subsequent rape of our continent with its despoliation and continuing exploitation under the advanced forms of colonialism and imperialism.
Kwame Nkrumah (Africa Must Unite (New World Paperbacks))
Practice without thought is blind. Thought without practice is empty. (note: Two versions of this do not cite the book and are not exact. Action is not part of the equation.)
Kwame Nkrumah (Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Development)
If we are to achieve revolutionary Socialism, then we must avoid any suggestion that will imply that there is any separation between the Socialist world and a 'Third World'.
Kwame Nkrumah (Revolutionary Path)
The history of a nation is, unfortunately, too easily written as the history of its dominant class. —KWAME NKRUMAH
James W. Loewen (Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong)
Instead of teaching African children about Napoleon or Shakespeare, teach them about Biko, Nkrumah, Sallasie, Annan, etc.
Henry Johnson Jr
Never before in history has such a sweeping fervor for freedom expressed itself in great mass movements which are driving down the bastions of empire. This wind of change blowing through Africa, as I have said before, is no ordinary wind. It is a raging hurricane against which the old order cannot stand.
Kwame Nkrumah
Nkrumah declared that we faced neither East nor West but we faced forward. But, see, we can face forward and just look at the horizon. Sometimes, as I think of Ghana, I am tempted to believe that we kept looking East and West and never made up our minds, so we just stood still.
Nana Awere Damoah
For this end Africa needs a new type of citizen, a dedicated, modest, honest and informed man. A man submerges self in service to the nation and mankind. A man who abhors greed and detests vanity. A new type of man whose humility is his strength and whose integrity is his greatness
Kwame Nkrumah (Africa Must Unite (New World Paperbacks))
King established a Pan-African frame for what was to follow. He harkened back to a night in West Africa in 1957 when he stood with Ralph Bunche and the black congressmen Adam Clayton Powell and Charles Diggs and witnessed Kwame Nkrumah’s installation as the first president of the new nation of Ghana. Being there had called up the most primal associations, linking him, present-day Africans, and his own slave forebears in an intimate embrace. He had strolled the streets of Accra and wept with joy as he heard both young and old Ghanaians calling out “free-doom!
Jonathan Rieder (Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation)
What’s white people? I’m blind. Never seen the color white in my life. Or the color black, blue, or gray for that matter. To a blind man, color means nothing. My ma used to tell me that the world is like a glorious set of watercolor paints laid out in a hand crafted palette. Sure wish I could see what that is. She made is sound special. The only things I can see are bad people, good people, and those in between. The bad ones you can easily avoid, but those in between people are the worst because you never know when they’ll help you up and when they’ll kick you in the teeth. So ask me instead if I hate people, and I will tell you that some are deserving of hate and others not.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
The real question is why were they racist?
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
You said we shouldn't judge people by their color and that there are only good people and bad people and those in between.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
If one sat back and made someone else do all the work for free, who was the lazy one?
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
Your secret behavior will be inherited by your children! If Nelson Mandela was a symbol of reconciliation; then reconciliation is our character. If Kwame Nkrumah was a symbol of unity; then unity is our character. If Patrice Lumumba was a symbol of patriotism; then patriotism is our character. If Robert Mugabe is a symbol of dictatorship; then dictatorship is our character. If Haile Selassie was a symbol of heroism; then heroism is our character. If Samora Machel was a symbol of socialism; then socialism is our character. If Julius Kambarage Nyerere was a symbol of justice; then justice is our character. We are the children of the African patriarchs! They are the fathers of the African nations! We have inherited their secret behaviors.
Enock Maregesi
The traditional face of Africa includes an attitude towards man which can only be described, in its social manifestation, as being socialist. This arises from the fact that man is regarded in Africa as primarily a spiritual being, a being endowed originally with a certain inward dignity, integrity, and value. It stands refreshingly opposed to the Christian idea of the original sin and degradation of man.
Kwame Nkrumah (Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Development)
Then, one day, it seemed that all the problems of the Civil Rights times came walking right up to our front doors, jolting us awake, and forcing us to remember. While time had marched on, some people were still the same.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
God made us all beautiful, but it was the slave owners who messed it all up by having all those coffee, cookie crumble, caramel, milky, yellow, and tan babies and then treating those lighter ones better than the deep dark ones.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
Socialism in Africa today tends to lose its objective content in favor of a distracting terminology and in favor of a general confusion. Discussion centers more on the various conceivable types of socialism than upon the need for socialist development.
Kwame Nkrumah (Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Development)
I now knew why God had made us in such ordinary colors like black, brown, and white, unlike the greens of the grass, the blues of the oceans and sky, and the rainbow colors of birds and insects. He wanted us to look outside, at his paintings, not at ourselves. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone thought like that? If the only color we saw was the array of colors outside in the world and not on our skins.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
The following year Carmichael began a campaign to promote armed warfare in American cities and was briefly made "prime minister" of the Black Panther Party for his efforts. Ever the racist, Carmichael tried to persuade the Panthers to break off their alliances with whites, but failed. This led to his expulsion from the party and a ritual beating administered by his former comrades. Shortly thereafter, Carmichael left the United States for Africa. In Africa, he changed his name to Kwame Ture, thereby honoring two dictators (Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure) who caused untold misery to their own peoples. He took up residence as the personal guest of the sadistic Toure, Guinea's paranoid dictator, whose reputation was built on the torture-murders of thousands of his African subjects. Some 250,000 Guineans were driven into exile during Carmichael's stay there, without a protest from this New Left leader.
David Horowitz (Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes)
The passage from the ancestral line of slavery via feudalism and capitalism to socialism can only lie through revolution: it cannot lie through reform. For in reform, fundamental principles are held constant, and the details of their expression are modified. In the words of Marx, it leaves the pillars of the building intact. Indeed sometimes, reform itself may be initiated by the necessities of preserving identical fundamental principles. Reform is a tactic of self-preservation.
Kwame Nkrumah (Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Development)
Even the cinema stories of fabulous Hollywood are loaded. One has only to listen to the cheers of an African audience as Hollywood’s heroes slaughter red Indians or Asiatics to understand the effectiveness of this weapon. For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California. And along with murder and the Wild West goes an incessant barrage of anti-socialist propaganda, in which the trade union man, the revolutionary, or the man of dark skin is generally cast as the villain, while the policeman, the gum-shoe, the Federal agent — in a word, the CIA — type spy is ever the hero. Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments. While Hollywood takes care of fiction, the enormous monopoly press, together with the outflow of slick, clever, expensive magazines, attends to what it chooses to call ‘news. Within separate countries, one or two news agencies control the news handouts, so that a deadly uniformity is achieved, regardless of the number of separate newspapers or magazines; while internationally, the financial preponderance of the United States is felt more and more through its foreign correspondents and offices abroad, as well as through its influence over inter-national capitalist journalism. Under this guise, a flood of anti-liberation propaganda emanates from the capital cities of the West, directed against China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana and all countries which hack out their own independent path to freedom. Prejudice is rife. For example, wherever there is armed struggle against the forces of reaction, the nationalists are referred to as rebels, terrorists, or frequently ‘communist terrorists'!
Kwame Nkrumah
Carmichael’s volkish black nationalism and creation of new values required, as the Black Muslims insisted, shedding a false enslaving identity for a true (i.e., authentic) one rooted in black Africa. This included shedding that most obvious sign of identity, one’s name. So just as Malcolm Little dropped his “slave name” for a simple X, representing his lack of identity in a white racist society, the boxer Cassius Clay reemerged as Muhammad Ali, the basketball star Lew Alcindor as Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and the beat poet LeRoi Jones as Imamu Amiri Baraka (ignoring for the moment that Islamic names reflected an identity imposed by an earlier slave-owning elite, the Arabs). Carmichael himself became Kwame Touré, after two African dictators of the sixties, Sekou Touré of Guinea and Du Bois’s failed Pan-African savior, Kwame Nkrumah.
Arthur Herman (The Idea of Decline in Western History)
It is essential that socialism should include overriding regard tot the experience and the consciousness of a people, for if it does not do so, it will be serving an idea and not a people. It will generate a contradiction. It will become dogmatic. It will shed its materialist and realist basis. It will become fanaticism, an obscurantism, an alienator of human happiness.
Kwame Nkrumah (Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Development)
When we talk of socialism in Africa, therefore, we really do intent to include as part of socialism an overriding regard to our actual material conditions, an overriding regard to our experience and our consciousness.
Kwame Nkrumah (Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Development)
French speakers went to France, while English speakers went mostly to African American institutions in North America. In the 1930s and 40s, more than 100 west Africans went to US universities, among them Azikiwe (‘Zik’) of Nigeria and Nkrumah of the Gold Coast, both graduates of Lincoln University. From among these overseas graduates came most of the leaders of the nationalist and independence movements that followed in the decades after the Second World War.
Kevin Shillington (History of Africa)
The US colonization of the Philippines was brutal, but it did not end with formal independence. The Philippines has existed in a state of what Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's independence leader, referred to as 'neocolonialism': a condition in which a state is, 'in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty,' but 'in reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from the outside.' This was a familiar situation for many newly independent nations. ... For decades, the development of the Philippines was hampered by collusion between the US, international institutions, domestic capitalists, and a corrupt political class, which together deprived Filipinos of basic human rights to ensure the country would remain a haven for international capital. Bello himself was referred to the situation faced by the Philippines after independence as neocolonial.
Grace Blakeley (Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom)
Tabia yako ya siri mwanao atakuwa nayo! Kama Nelson Mandela alikuwa alama ya msamaha, msamaha ni tabia yetu. Kama Kwame Nkrumah alikuwa alama ya umoja, umoja ni tabia yetu. Kama Patrice Lumumba alikuwa alama ya uzalendo, uzalendo ni tabia yetu. Kama Robert Mugabe ni alama ya udikteta, udikteta ni tabia yetu. Kama Haile Selassie alikuwa alama ya ushujaa, ushujaa ni tabia yetu. Kama Samora Machel alikuwa alama ya ujamaa, ujamaa ni tabia yetu. Kama Julius Kambarage Nyerere alikuwa alama ya haki, haki ni tabia yetu. Sisi ni watoto wa wazalendo wa Afrika! Wao ni baba wa mataifa ya Afrika! Tumerithi tabia zao za siri.
Enock Maregesi
Sisi ni watoto wa Nelson Mandela; sisi ni watoto wa Kwame Nkrumah; sisi ni watoto wa Haile Selassie; sisi ni watoto wa Samora Machel; sisi ni watoto wa Robert Mugabe; sisi ni watoto wa Patrice Lumumba; sisi ni watoto wa Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere. Tunajua sisi ni nani.
Enock Maregesi
Extraits: Seuls les pores de l’infini-temps Quand seront-ils libres ? Leur suffit-il d’être Depuis Nkrumah, Lumumba, Lucie Dinkinesh ? En Afrique, depuis Saba d’ébène, On invente, écrit, calcule ; Depuis l’amharique de nos anneaux non noués, Depuis Askia qui fit chuter l’or, Depuis l’apartheid de la Rhodésie, Pour façonner mers et continents D’un pacte d’amour les fils de la nature.
Abdou Karim GUEYE Poésie Comme un amas de pyramides inversées
In Africa, there are still more men, if you’re looking for courage. There, a few years back, the colonial powers were the ones who owned the government, who owned the guns—the ones who were responsible for whether you ate, had a job, whether your children got an education, or whether you lived or died. But that colonial system was challenged by, in addition to Nelson Mandela, men like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, and men in others places. They knew that the authorities would try to eliminate them.
Sidney Poitier (Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter)
4. “If you look at it, #Integrity in public governance is not a complex subject, "it is simply doing exactly what the rules say". You may be a smoker, abuse alcohol and patronize prostitutes, but if you are fully committed to complying with the laid down rules, you are Mr Integrity. However, if you live like Ghandi, talk about civil liberty like Martin Luther King Jr and preach altruism like Malcolm X and Kwame Nkrumah, but you publicly and consistently violate laid down rules, you'll still be seen in the shameful cast of Adolf Hitler
Onakpoberuo Onoriode Victor
Philosophically and ideologically, he does not appear very deep. He is no Kwame Nkrumah
Kwamena Ahwoi
How come white people have all this?” I pondered. Nate had said, “It was just plain and simple, the early bird gets the worm. Those who came before had weapons and swept out everybody else and got all the best stuff. That’s it. Plain and simple. They had swept it all up and folded their arms and had everyone else do the work.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
I was the sin that she couldn't wash out.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
Sometimes not showing fear scares away a bully.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
I wondered if the words I loved so much could ever be enough to make me feel safe.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
The sky was crying, big fat dollops of wet that clung to my braids, my nose, and everywhere else they could.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
The words stung. Hurt as though a thousand bees had descended on me.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
How plain the world would be if it were only painted in brown, black, and white.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
while in exile Nkrumah drew deep pleasure from growing his beloved roses and other flowers, and from animals and all forms of wildlife. On one occasion, two members of his entourage returned from a fishing expedition with a large turtle, which they presented to Nkrumah, assuming it would be made into soup. But he instructed them to place it in a small pool on the veranda, to live there until his hopeful return to Ghana—when the turtle would be returned to the sea.14
Susan Williams (White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa)
People may not recognized what you are doing today but the future generation will see and ask who did this?.... People who will be the at that time will boldly say"Shamala did this".Ask kwame nkrumah will tell you..
David Shamala
People may not recognized what you are doing today but the future generation will see and ask who did this?.... People who will be there at that time will boldly say"Shamala did this".Ask kwame nkrumah will tell you..
David Shamala
You need to love yourself first, Ella. DOn't go searching for love in other people's eyes until you love yourself first. You come from somewhere beautiful.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
Didn't I tell you? They all turn. He done beat the very devil into here.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
I looked past the bloodied face I saw in the mirror, taking in my midnight-black skin that was shades darker than any person's I knew in Ricksville, my generous mouth, and my wide nose, so different from the rest of my family. How odd it felt to be looking at myself with someone else's eyes. It was then I understood what Ma felt towards me. And it was there, in that bathroom, staring into my face, that I realized the only person I had ever really hated was me.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
I could never imagine them weeping and hollering and fainting, because I knew only black folk did that. Surely we were the only ones to feel the pain deep down in our marrow so that it had to come forth, spewing up in moans and groans and chants, till we felt better. I wondered how they kept their pain all twisted and knotted up inside, like a corked bottle.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
The danger to world peace springs not from the action of those who seek to end neo-colonialism but from the inaction of those who allow it to continue. To argue that a third world war is not inevitable is one thing, to suppose that it can be avoided by shutting our eyes to the development of a situation likely to produce it is quite another matter.
Kwame Nkrumah (Neo Colonialism the Last Stage of Imperi)
Ella, let me give you a piece of advice. You feel too much, and everything you feel is right there on that face of yours. It's in your voice. You've got to close that face of yours or people will keep hurting you. Put on a skin of toughness and hide yourself. You know, like a crab.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
One night, not long after signing over his inheritance, Nate said something to a customer that I overheard and would never forget. He said that he'd finally realized that he had never been the puppeteer, controlling his own destiny. Instead, he now realized that black people were just puppets on strings. The strings were so long that they reached far above them - so far out of their vision that they never saw or knew who the puppet masters were. He only knew that when they yanked at the strings and said to dance, he had no choice but to dance.
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
I'm afraid for Ray. These young ones aren't afraid of anything. They know about what happened during the height of the movement, but they can't feel it. Knowing it and living it are two different things. It's history to them. They don't know what we've seen. Can you imagine what would happen if that lady got it in her head to call the police on some pretext or other? Why, they would sweep through this place, arresting all our boys and men over the age of thirteen. Remember the killing of those three boys turning out to vote? Remember Emmett Till?
Nyani Nkrumah (Wade in the Water)
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