NKRUMAH, KWAME

born September 1909, Nkroful, Gold Coast [now Ghana] died April 27, 1972, Bucharest, Romania Ghanaian nationalist leader who led the Gold Coast's drive for independence from Britain and presided over its emergence as the new nation of Ghana. He headed the country from independence in 1957 until he was overthrown by a coup in 1966. Additional reading Kwame Nkrumah, The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (1957); Bankole Timothy, Kwame Nkrumah (1957), an account of Nkrumah's rise to power by a Sierra Leone journalist; Henry Bretton, The Rise and Fall of Kwame Nkrumah (1966), an unsympathetic account of the nature of Nkrumah's political machine; Robert B. Fitch and Mary Oppenheimer, Ghana: End of an Illusion (1966), a Marxist evaluation, especially of Nkrumah's economic policies; Samuel G. Ikoku, Le Ghana de Nkrumah (1971), a valuable account of the Cpp by a Nigerian who was one of Nkrumah's leading ideologists; Geoffrey Bing, Reaping the Whirlwind (1968), a valuable account of Nkrumah's regime by an Englishman who was one of his principal legal and political advisers; A.A. Afrifa, The Ghana Coup (1966), an account of Nkrumah's policies by one of the leading organizers of the coup. Kwame Nkrumah: A Select Bibliography was published in 1976.