Over the years, Africa day has been a sustained celebratory day that African people use to mainstream how attached to the African land. Celebrated on 25 May ( The day the OAU was founded), Africa day has turned into highlighting what makes us African, the joys of being African, and the struggles as well. While all of these are valid and one should always have a personal attachment to a collective celebratory day, Africa Day has a long history rooted in Panafricanism and Liberation.
In this essay, we are going back to the politics of Kwame Nkrumah and the creation of the Organization of African Unity.
Who was Kwame Nkrumah?
Kwame Nkrumah, born on 21 September 1909 in Nkroful, was a Ghanaian revolutionary and pan-African who believed in the urgency to unite African peoples everywhere. Nkrumah had a particular unique journey. He experienced white supremacy through colonization in Ghana during his primary education at a Catholic boarding school and racialized segregation in the states where he went to school. That is why his overall plan was to connect struggles. Decolonization, for him, had to be global. Nkrumah started his activism when he was a student, organizing a group of African students in Pennsylvania. He built the African students association where members organized and educated on a pan-African strategy, demanding each African colony to aspire and gain independence. In 1944, Kwame organized the first Pan-African conference in New York. [1]
