Kwame Nkrumah: Socialism for Liberation

Kwame Nkrumah is much more fondly remembered for his fight for African freedom, than for his intellectualism. Yet his power, both of mind and practical planning are due essentially to his efforts and attempts at combining intellectualism and political practice or practical politics. Searching for a theory to give him the needed rhetoric as a backing for his fight for Africa’s political, cultural, and economic disentanglement from the webs of Western colonialism and imperialism, he choose marxism. because it seemed to him the only philosophy that proves to be an instrument of practical social change. In this lay Nkrumah’s philosophical troubles. Whether acceptable or not, the materialist tones in Nkrumah‘s thought make his works a source for a continued discussion of marxism and the theory of praxis. In this paper I have limited myself to pointing out the philosophical importance of Nkrumah’s work not only to African philosophy in particular, but also to marxist theory in general.