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THE SECOND EMANCIPATION

Howard W. French

Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide

One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2025 by Foreign Policy

"Howard French's The Second Emancipation stands the second half of the last century on its geopolitical head." David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

The Second Emancipation, a work of Odyssean dimension, recasts the liberation of postWorld War II colonial Africa and the American civil rights struggle through the lens of Ghana's revolutionary visionary Kwame Nkrumah (19091972), who emerges as the most significant African leader of the twentieth century. Determined that readers fully understand Nkrumah's legacy, bestselling author of Born in Blackness Howard W. French newly dramatizes the Nkrumah storyhis humble beginnings, his momentous experience in Harlem, his American education, and his return to Ghana in the final years of British subjugation. The language soars as French evokes an entire continent in the throes of liberation and a roiling United States in the Cold War era. In its dramatic depiction of a continent that once exuded the promise of a newly won freedom, The Second Emancipation is a generational work that positions not only Africa but also the American civil rights movement at the forefront of modern-day history.

Howard W. French is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former New York Times bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China, based in Shanghai. The author of six books, including Born in Blackness, French lives in New York City.

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Book Published 2025-08-26 by Liveright

Comments

French: Editions Calmann-Lévy

In this magisterial account, journalist French (Born in Blackness) revisits the history of the Pan-Africanist movement through the life of Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, who in 1957 became the first head of state of the first colonized African nation to gain independence . . . Weaving a staggering amount of history into a propulsive narrative that recasts the 20th century as a long struggle for liberation, this is a towering achievement.

In this truly monumental biography of the rise and fall of Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, global observer Howard W. French documents the Cold War hubris that foredoomed Africa's aspirations in a Greek tragedy of racist pathologies affronted by emancipated leadership. French's The Second Emancipation stands the second half of the last century on its geopolitical head.

In prose both lyrical and personal, Howard W. French reveals how civil rights and decolonization were bound together by Garvey's ghost, Du Boisian internationalism, a long dream of Black power, and a vision of pan-Africanism based less on returning home than on rejecting the world order and the color line that belts it. A tour de force.

An original, provocative, and important work of history. . . . With meticulous research and crisp writing, Howard W. French helps us see and understand the modern world anew. An extraordinary achievement.

Howard French THE SECOND EMANCIPATION: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide Read more...

Kwame Nkrumah founded a country and became the leading African statesman of the twentieth century. French tells Nkrumah's story wonderfully well, in all its greatness and complexity.

It would be as impossible to overstate the importance of Nkrumah as it would be to overstate the brilliance of this study. For too many, Africa as a whole remains an enigma. Howard W. French's masterwork clarifies the continent, both its history and the backstory to its current conflicts, with remarkable precision.

A brilliant examination. . . . Howard W. French illuminates a period of time when people believed that standards of justice and equality could prevail for African people on the continent and in the diaspora, especially in the United States during the civil rights movement.

French, a professor of journalism at Columbia and a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, covers a lot of ground in a book that merges biography with panorama. His previous book, "Born in Blackness," showed how the making of the modern world wasn't just a story about Europe; it was also about Africa. "The Second Emancipation" is a sequel, bringing that approach into the postwar era... "The Second Emancipation" ably treads the line on Nkrumah's complicated legacy. French keeps reminding the reader of the larger context, pointing out how European colonies were laboratories not for good governance but for authoritarianism.

French adeptly places the rise and fall of Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana, the first liberated African colony, in the context of wider anti-colonial movements in Asia and the Middle East, as well as Nkrumah's influence on racial justice in the U.S.Despite assassination threats, ethnic rivalries, and failure to achieve his greatest goal of a pan African Federation, Nkrumah's influence on African and African American liberation remains unparalleled.

In its dramatic depiction of a continent that once exuded the promise of a newly won freedom, this book offers a generational work that positions not only Africa but also the American civil rights movement at the forefront of modern-day history.

A fluent exploration of an important if often overlooked political leader whose ideas still bear consideration. Read more...