African Echoes of October: Kwame Nkrumah and Lenin’s Shadow

Abstract

The October Soviet was surely one of the events that most inspired the political imagination of colonial peoples. With regard to the African continent the influence of the Russian Revolution was many faceted. One of those facets, however, deserves special attention: the ideological link between African movements of national liberation and the October Revolution. This article analyzes the works of Ghanian intellectual Kwame Nkrumah, who always acknowledged his debt to the work of the Russian revolutionary leader Lenin. Between the two of them there exists what Harold Bloom called Tessera, a phenomenon in which an intellectual successor maintains open continuity with the work of his predecessor.