Nkrumah’s legacy, feminism and the next generation

Abstract

This lecture challenges the narratives of postcolonial failure to argue that, Africans have accumulated valuable experiences that can lift us out of transgenerational obscurity and provide transformative lessons for the future. Among these are the legacies of Kwame Nkrumah and his vision of the interlinked nature of economic and cultural processes, and his affirmation of women’s role in African liberation. The lecture reviews Nkrumah’s intellectual legacy to argue that, aspects of this have been taken up in African feminist movements that give an afterlife to a praxis of African liberation. Characterized by transdisciplinary and activist approaches that link theory with practice, African feminism is strongest where it pursues the simultaneous transformation of political, cultural, and economic life. It is an approach exemplified in the digitally-curated, livestreamed Third Kwame Nkrumah Festival, and archived online.