Kwame Nkrumah

He was born Kofi Nkrumah on 21 September 1909 in the small fishing village of Nkroful, in Nzima land in the far southwest of the British Gold Coast colony. His father was a goldsmith; his mother, Elizabeth Nyanibah, was a market trader who lived to be over a hundred. A bright, restless boy raised Roman Catholic, he trained as a teacher, then in 1935 sailed for the United States, where he spent a decade studying economics, sociology and philosophy at Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania, scrubbing dishes and preaching on Sundays to pay his way while absorbing the ideas of Marcus Garvey and the Pan-African movement.

Back home in 1947, he turned mass frustration into a movement. He founded the Convention People's Party in 1949 and called for 'Positive Action' — strikes, boycotts and non-violent protest — which landed him in colonial prison and then, when his party swept the polls, carried him from a jail cell to the office of Prime Minister in 1952. On independence day in 1957 he and five comrades wore the handwoven northern fugu smock, making it forever a symbol of a self-governing Africa. He gave the new nation the ancient name Ghana and a flag bearing a Black Star borrowed from Garvey's shipping line — a beacon for Africans everywhere.

As leader he thought big. His government built the colossal Akosombo Dam on the Volta River (1961–1965), creating Lake Volta — the largest man-made lake on Earth by surface area — to power factories and homes, and it poured resources into free education. In 1963 he helped found the Organisation of African Unity and pressed, almost alone, for a single united Africa: 'We must unite now or perish.'

But the dream darkened. The Preventive Detention Act let his government imprison opponents without trial, and in 1964 Ghana became a one-party state with Nkrumah declared president for life — moves critics fairly call authoritarian. With the economy faltering, the army overthrew him on 24 February 1966 while he was abroad in China. He lived his final years in exile in Guinea, still writing of African unity, and died of cancer in Bucharest in 1972. Decades later, in a 2000 BBC poll, listeners across the continent voted him Africa's Man of the Millennium.