In the month of September Pan-Africanists all over the world generally commemorate the born month of Osageyfo Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah was the first president of Ghana, which was the first country in Africa to achieve the first stages of political independence from Europe. Nkrumah was the founder/co-founder of the first African Union between countries in 1960. He was the convenor for the All African People’s Conference in 1958 which set a more militant tone for independence struggles. He was the co-founder of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) which today is known as the African Union or the organization of all governments in Africa. He was the co-founder of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party which continues work today to carry out his revolutionary Pan-African vision.
One critical area which rarely comes up today in discussions about Nkrumah’s legacy is his emphasis on class consciousness and struggle. Throughout the 1960s, Nkrumah’s literary works like “Neo-Colonialism (1965)”, The Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare (1968)”, and “Class Struggle in Africa (1970)” each had a strong focus on class struggle, but his writings, much like those of his political comrades/contemporaries like Sekou Ture “Strategy and Tactics of the African Revolution” (1958/1978), and Amilcar Cabral “Unity and Struggle”(1979), are most often ignored by many so-called Pan-Africanists today.
One reason for this is many Africans claiming the Pan-African mantle today lack any semblance of class analysis. For this element of people, the racial analysis reigns supreme. In fact, many so-called Pan-Africanists reject class as a determining factor in evaluating our struggle for liberation on any level. Our history is rapt with so-called Pan-Africanists from Aime Senghor and Felix Humphrey Boygny in Senegal in the 1950s to Umar Johnson in the U.S. today who claim to be Pan-Africanists, or least support African unity, while clinging to capitalism as the economic approach that they believe will provide for our people.
Nkrumah never accepted or advanced a non-class based analysis of our struggle for liberation. He understood that our struggle as African people is rooted in the exploitation of Africa’s human and material resources. Consequently, he recognized that our primary struggle is the liberation of our land base – Africa – and so when he, and we, call ourselves African nationalists, we are doing so with a focus on our connection to the land (Africa), not our skin color. Nkrumah also understood clearly that the capitalist system has been developed into the dominant economic system on earth through its exploitation of Africa and other lands/peoples. As a result, he was under no illusion that capitalism could play any role in the self determination of our people or any people on earth.
Nkrumah also realized that a primary strategy of the ruling capitalist classes is to divide workers/people and that doing so along racial lines has proven to be the most effective and sustainable way to ensure mass unity is difficult to achieve. And, this division of course cannot just be limited to European (white) control over African minds and bodies. With the advancement of the African independent movements and civil rights and Black power movements around the world, the ruling classes recognized the need to proliferate classes of petti-bourgeoisie and even bourgeoisie Africans who would protect the capitalist system.
To understand the last statement its necessary to look at the contradictions that those movements forced. Here are some examples to illustrate this point. In 1960 when the Congo became independent, in a country of 25 million people, there were exactly 15 Congolese people who had technical and civil service training and experience. The newly elected government of Patrice Lumumba never had a chance to realistically build an independent government under those conditions which forced the Congo to continue to be manipulated by Belgium and the U.S. in efforts to manage the country. Another example is the response of the U.S. government to over 300 urban rebellions throughout U.S. cities in the late 1960s. In response, the government formed a committee made up of the president of the U.S. – Richard Nixon, McGeorge Bundy, the CEO of Ford Foundation, David Rockerfeller who was the patriarch for all the Rockerfeller ruling class interests that include controlling stock in Chevron, all NBC television affiliates, and Chase Bank, and others. The task of this committee was to study the results of the 1968 Kerner Commission report which argued that the U.S. was two societies, one Black, one White, and unless the disparities created by centuries of institutional racism were addressed the country would continue to rupture. Of course this committee never had any honest intentions of addressing any of the social contradictions articulated in the Kerner report. Instead, its approach was to broaden the existence of the African petti-bourgeoisie class by promoting the institution of Affirmative Action programs that would open doors that were previously closed to qualified African people to have access to assistance to help them achieve college education, minority business contracts, etc. The results of this were and are an expanded African petti-bourgeoisie class within the U.S., or a large class of African people who see their primary interest as that of protecting the capitalist system in order to serve their own political and economic interests as the gatekeepers for this system.
These examples are the things Nkrumah warned us about in “Class Struggle.” Now today, in 2025, there are multiple African billionaires throughout Africa like Akite Bangote from Nigeria, and numerous other African billionaires around the world including several within the U.S. As Nkrumah told us, the role of these people is to pose as leaders of the African masses while using their visibility to steer our people towards loyalty to the capitalist system. The concerted effort has been to replace revolutionary ideology and action with entrepreneurship and business focuses among our people. To promote the belief that hard work and vision will permit us to gain access to the benefits of the capitalist system. Pyramid scam economic approaches like bitcoin have engulfed the imagination of so many of our people today when the reality is all of the business and entrepreneurship in the world has not and cannot liberate our people. It cannot because the number one principle within the capitalist system is in order to have a ruling class, there must be an underclass. For this emerging African petti bourgeoisie, they have made clear choices. They will place all of their eggs into that capitalist basket with the hopes of advancing their ability to rise within the capitalist system. And, since capitalism is again the product of exploiting Africa, a central component of sustaining capitalism is to keep the masses of Africans divided and disorganized. A core element of this strategy is dehumanizing and demoralizing the African masses. Making us believe that the struggles we face are only the result of our own failings and have nothing to do with this system that continues to exploit us.
There are plenty of these African petti bourgeoise who are content to play the role of keeping our people down by any means necessary to uplift their individual stock within the capitalist system. All one has to do is scroll social media and you will find no small number of African people who are proudly parroting long ago discredited racist tropes against our people. Its naïve to believe that their desire to do this is fueled entirely by ignorance. The neo-colonial leaders throughout the 54 countries in Africa and the 16 in the Caribbean along with people like Barack Obama are not all confused. They are the people Nkrumah warned us about. They look like us, but they ain’t like us.
Nkrumah was also very clear about articulating the importance of a class perspective to guide our understanding of how race is utilized as a tool of oppression within the capitalist system. When Kwame Ture, formally Stokely Carmichael, died in 1998, he was an avowed revolutionary Pan-Africanist and scientific socialist with a clear class consciousness, but that was not always the case. In 1968, when Stokely Carmichael first started visiting Nkrumah in Guinea-Conakry (before moving there in 1969 to become Nkrumah’s political secretary), he possessed a dominant race first analysis. This was illustrated by his 1968 speech at Huey P. Newton’s birthday party commemoration in Oakland, California, U.S. (as a result of Newton – the co-founder of the Black Panther Party – being imprisoned for the death of a European police officer). In that speech, during a contentious time where Carmichael was engaged in ideological struggle with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, he indirectly criticized the Panthers in general, and Cleaver in particular, by attacking communism as being “ill-relevant to Black people!” The young Stokely Carmichael’s ideological growth into Kwame Ture has to be largely credited to Kwame Nkrumah who had endless discussions with the young Stokely at Vila Syly in Conakry about the danger of a race dominant analysis that is devoid of class analysis in properly evaluating our problems as African people.
If he were with us in his physical form today, Kwame Nkrumah would most likely see the boot licking of so many Africans in Africa towards neo-colonialism and disgraceful respect so many Africans are showing towards an anti-African fascist who was shot and killed in the U.S. as clear manifestations of class struggle within the African communities. Long before it because fashionable to say so, Nkrumah understood clearly that “all skin folks ain’t kin folks.” Regardless, we are still a long way from developing the type of collective class consciousness that will overshadow race consciousness among African people. We are still in the realm of “I’m rooting for everyone Black!” Nkrumah’s experiences with the betrayal of Lumumba by Mobutu and other Africans in the Congo and the betrayal of Africans within his government in Ghana reinforced for him that the struggle for revolutionary Pan-Africanism is a class struggle. A struggle that will certainly require African unity, but will also see the African struggle in solidarity with non-Africans who are engaging in anti-imperialist struggles while we fight relentlessly against many people who look like us who will not hesitate to work on behalf of the enemies of the masses of Africans and all of humanity.
One critical area which rarely comes up today in discussions about Nkrumah’s legacy is his emphasis on class consciousness and struggle. Throughout the 1960s, Nkrumah’s literary works like “Neo-Colonialism (1965)”, The Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare (1968)”, and “Class Struggle in Africa (1970)” each had a strong focus on class struggle, but his writings, much like those of his political comrades/contemporaries like Sekou Ture “Strategy and Tactics of the African Revolution” (1958/1978), and Amilcar Cabral “Unity and Struggle”(1979), are most often ignored by many so-called Pan-Africanists today.
One reason for this is many Africans claiming the Pan-African mantle today lack any semblance of class analysis. For this element of people, the racial analysis reigns supreme. In fact, many so-called Pan-Africanists reject class as a determining factor in evaluating our struggle for liberation on any level. Our history is rapt with so-called Pan-Africanists from Aime Senghor and Felix Humphrey Boygny in Senegal in the 1950s to Umar Johnson in the U.S. today who claim to be Pan-Africanists, or least support African unity, while clinging to capitalism as the economic approach that they believe will provide for our people.
Nkrumah never accepted or advanced a non-class based analysis of our struggle for liberation. He understood that our struggle as African people is rooted in the exploitation of Africa’s human and material resources. Consequently, he recognized that our primary struggle is the liberation of our land base – Africa – and so when he, and we, call ourselves African nationalists, we are doing so with a focus on our connection to the land (Africa), not our skin color. Nkrumah also understood clearly that the capitalist system has been developed into the dominant economic system on earth through its exploitation of Africa and other lands/peoples. As a result, he was under no illusion that capitalism could play any role in the self determination of our people or any people on earth.
Nkrumah also realized that a primary strategy of the ruling capitalist classes is to divide workers/people and that doing so along racial lines has proven to be the most effective and sustainable way to ensure mass unity is difficult to achieve. And, this division of course cannot just be limited to European (white) control over African minds and bodies. With the advancement of the African independent movements and civil rights and Black power movements around the world, the ruling classes recognized the need to proliferate classes of petti-bourgeoisie and even bourgeoisie Africans who would protect the capitalist system.
To understand the last statement its necessary to look at the contradictions that those movements forced. Here are some examples to illustrate this point. In 1960 when the Congo became independent, in a country of 25 million people, there were exactly 15 Congolese people who had technical and civil service training and experience. The newly elected government of Patrice Lumumba never had a chance to realistically build an independent government under those conditions which forced the Congo to continue to be manipulated by Belgium and the U.S. in efforts to manage the country. Another example is the response of the U.S. government to over 300 urban rebellions throughout U.S. cities in the late 1960s. In response, the government formed a committee made up of the president of the U.S. – Richard Nixon, McGeorge Bundy, the CEO of Ford Foundation, David Rockerfeller who was the patriarch for all the Rockerfeller ruling class interests that include controlling stock in Chevron, all NBC television affiliates, and Chase Bank, and others. The task of this committee was to study the results of the 1968 Kerner Commission report which argued that the U.S. was two societies, one Black, one White, and unless the disparities created by centuries of institutional racism were addressed the country would continue to rupture. Of course this committee never had any honest intentions of addressing any of the social contradictions articulated in the Kerner report. Instead, its approach was to broaden the existence of the African petti-bourgeoisie class by promoting the institution of Affirmative Action programs that would open doors that were previously closed to qualified African people to have access to assistance to help them achieve college education, minority business contracts, etc. The results of this were and are an expanded African petti-bourgeoisie class within the U.S., or a large class of African people who see their primary interest as that of protecting the capitalist system in order to serve their own political and economic interests as the gatekeepers for this system.
These examples are the things Nkrumah warned us about in “Class Struggle.” Now today, in 2025, there are multiple African billionaires throughout Africa like Akite Bangote from Nigeria, and numerous other African billionaires around the world including several within the U.S. As Nkrumah told us, the role of these people is to pose as leaders of the African masses while using their visibility to steer our people towards loyalty to the capitalist system. The concerted effort has been to replace revolutionary ideology and action with entrepreneurship and business focuses among our people. To promote the belief that hard work and vision will permit us to gain access to the benefits of the capitalist system. Pyramid scam economic approaches like bitcoin have engulfed the imagination of so many of our people today when the reality is all of the business and entrepreneurship in the world has not and cannot liberate our people. It cannot because the number one principle within the capitalist system is in order to have a ruling class, there must be an underclass. For this emerging African petti bourgeoisie, they have made clear choices. They will place all of their eggs into that capitalist basket with the hopes of advancing their ability to rise within the capitalist system. And, since capitalism is again the product of exploiting Africa, a central component of sustaining capitalism is to keep the masses of Africans divided and disorganized. A core element of this strategy is dehumanizing and demoralizing the African masses. Making us believe that the struggles we face are only the result of our own failings and have nothing to do with this system that continues to exploit us.
There are plenty of these African petti bourgeoise who are content to play the role of keeping our people down by any means necessary to uplift their individual stock within the capitalist system. All one has to do is scroll social media and you will find no small number of African people who are proudly parroting long ago discredited racist tropes against our people. Its naïve to believe that their desire to do this is fueled entirely by ignorance. The neo-colonial leaders throughout the 54 countries in Africa and the 16 in the Caribbean along with people like Barack Obama are not all confused. They are the people Nkrumah warned us about. They look like us, but they ain’t like us.
Nkrumah was also very clear about articulating the importance of a class perspective to guide our understanding of how race is utilized as a tool of oppression within the capitalist system. When Kwame Ture, formally Stokely Carmichael, died in 1998, he was an avowed revolutionary Pan-Africanist and scientific socialist with a clear class consciousness, but that was not always the case. In 1968, when Stokely Carmichael first started visiting Nkrumah in Guinea-Conakry (before moving there in 1969 to become Nkrumah’s political secretary), he possessed a dominant race first analysis. This was illustrated by his 1968 speech at Huey P. Newton’s birthday party commemoration in Oakland, California, U.S. (as a result of Newton – the co-founder of the Black Panther Party – being imprisoned for the death of a European police officer). In that speech, during a contentious time where Carmichael was engaged in ideological struggle with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, he indirectly criticized the Panthers in general, and Cleaver in particular, by attacking communism as being “ill-relevant to Black people!” The young Stokely Carmichael’s ideological growth into Kwame Ture has to be largely credited to Kwame Nkrumah who had endless discussions with the young Stokely at Vila Syly in Conakry about the danger of a race dominant analysis that is devoid of class analysis in properly evaluating our problems as African people.
If he were with us in his physical form today, Kwame Nkrumah would most likely see the boot licking of so many Africans in Africa towards neo-colonialism and disgraceful respect so many Africans are showing towards an anti-African fascist who was shot and killed in the U.S. as clear manifestations of class struggle within the African communities. Long before it because fashionable to say so, Nkrumah understood clearly that “all skin folks ain’t kin folks.” Regardless, we are still a long way from developing the type of collective class consciousness that will overshadow race consciousness among African people. We are still in the realm of “I’m rooting for everyone Black!” Nkrumah’s experiences with the betrayal of Lumumba by Mobutu and other Africans in the Congo and the betrayal of Africans within his government in Ghana reinforced for him that the struggle for revolutionary Pan-Africanism is a class struggle. A struggle that will certainly require African unity, but will also see the African struggle in solidarity with non-Africans who are engaging in anti-imperialist struggles while we fight relentlessly against many people who look like us who will not hesitate to work on behalf of the enemies of the masses of Africans and all of humanity.
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