Paper short abstract:

During his rule, Nkrumah attracted around him a group of expatriate women, who served in official capacities and became his close confidantes. These women have shaped in profound ways how we can and will remember the African Revolution and its iconic leader.

Paper long abstract:

Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of Ghana's independence struggle and its first head of state, was a major theorist of pan-Africanism and arguably the most important figure in what was known in the 1960s as the "African Revolution." During his rule, Nkrumah attracted around him a cohort of expatriate women, who served in various official capacities, but who also became his close confidantes and remained so, even after the 1966 coup. This trusted cohort has shaped, in profound ways, how Nkrumah is remembered today and what evidence historians have at hand to reconstruct not only the history of Ghana's first Republic (1960-1966), but the story of the African Revolution. Based on private papers and correspondence (some only recently accessible), newspapers, and government documents, this paper explores the role of the secret and the intimate in the consolidation, the disruption, and ultimately the historical reconstruction of state power in post-colonial Africa. It argues that this circle of women not only erected a protective wall around Nkrumah in his present, they constructed an equally impenetrable wall around his past: conspiring through the destruction of correspondence, through their own writings, and in the crafting of their archival deposits, to preserve a particular masculinist, revolutionary image of Nkrumah, as the lone and ever-dedicated warrior against colonialism and neocolonialism, rarely faltering, his eyes always on the prize. In these ways, they have helped preserve a very particular "Nkrumah" for posterity and have shaped how we can and will remember the African Revolution and its iconic leader.