What is absent in those narratives, however, is the centrality of ideology and worldviews in the formation of those poles, something historians have picked up on.Īfter the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, historians now contend, the US came out on top after a four-decade-long standoff with its ideological rival the Soviet Union.

Since 1945, Washington and Moscow have had their own spheres of influence in Eastern and Western Europe and have sought to carve up the rest of the globe. It is clear that our thinking about international relations still suffers from a myopic focus on Europe and the Cold War. They maximized their interests within a bipolar world by playing off the Soviet Union and the US against each other. Instead, leaders of newly independent states in Africa and Asia in the 1950s were seen as forging fragile alliances with each other out of fear of being crushed by declining empires or ascending Cold War superpowers. Nkrumah’s words, however (like the declarations and ideas of other postcolonial leaders) have often been labeled as inconsequential, obscure, and utopian.

The Ghanaian prime minister proclaimed that “From now on there is a new African in the world … ready to fight its own battles and to show that after all, the black man is capable of managing his own affairs.” According to Nkrumah, the “African Personality”-a confident, independently-minded African-had to be promoted if the African version of modernity was to have any impact.

On the night of March 6, 1957, as Kwame Nkrumah was wiping away tears, he declared the former British colony of the Gold Coast, renamed Ghana, independent.

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