Marcus Garvey and Kwame Nkrumah
Ian Duffield argues that, more than any other African leader Kwame Nkrumah - together with the man whose examples and ideas gave him so much inspiration, Marcus Aurelius Garvey - was responsible for bringing black people into the mainstream of 20th-century history.
Marcus Garvey, 1887-1940, and Kwame Nkrumah, 1909?-72, personified in their own eyes, in the eyes of millions of black men and women, and for that matter to much of the world at large, one of the most profound changes in modern history. At the beginning of this century, half a dozen or so of the most powerful white nations dominated the world in every way – politically, culturally, militarily and in economic affairs – this domination being the climax of a process deeply rooted in the history of the previous four centuries. The only non-European challenge of any seriousness seemed to come from Japan, and the central question for the future seemed to many white leaders – men such as Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Milner, Theodore Roosevelt or Kaiser Wilhelm II – to be which of the great powers should prevail against all others.
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