On this day in 1966, Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana and co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, was deposed in a coup backed by the US and UK. The coup was part of a coordinated effort to destroy socialist and Pan-Africanist movements on the continent.
The US and UK began discussions about ousting Nkrumah in 1961, and set about suffocating the Ghanaian economy by cutting off international finance and driving down the price of Ghana's main export, cocoa, hoping to create internal tensions.
Pressure on Nkrumah ramped up after he published his book "Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism" in 1965, which openly criticized precisely those forces that ended up orchestrating his demise.
"Neo-colonialism is the worst form of imperialism. For those who practice it, it means power without responsibility, and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress."
--Kwame Nkrumah
--Kwame Nkrumah
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