Kwame Nkrumah

Nkrumah was born at Nkroful in the Nzema area of the Gold Coast, his mother's only child, and at the age of three moved with her to Half Assini, where he attended the elementary school run by a Catholic mission. ¹ In 1925, while a student-teacher at the school, he was baptised into the Catholic faith. ¹ He trained as a teacher at Achimota, taught at the Catholic primary school in Elmina and then at Axim, and in 1933 was appointed a teacher at the Catholic seminary at Amissano, where life was strict and he considered becoming a Jesuit. ¹ In the United States he studied at Lincoln University, where he took a Bachelor of Theology among his degrees and received invitations to preach as a guest in Presbyterian churches, and at the University of Pennsylvania. ¹

Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast in 1947 as general secretary of the United Gold Coast Convention, left it to found the Convention People's Party in 1949, and led the campaign of strikes and boycotts that the Arabic article also records. ^{1 2} Imprisoned by the British in 1950, he won the Accra seat from his cell in the 1951 election and was released to lead the government, becoming prime minister of the Gold Coast in 1952. ² On 6 March 1957 Ghana became independent with Nkrumah as its first prime minister. ¹

On 1 July 1960 Ghana became a republic and Nkrumah its first president. ¹ A leading Pan-Africanist inspired by Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois and George Padmore, he was a founder figure of the Organisation of African Unity, which the Arabic article also notes. ^{1 2} His government pursued industrialisation — the Volta dam among its projects — financed by cocoa revenues and borrowing that indebted the country, and a 1958 act prohibited organisations using racial or religious propaganda, part of his insistence on a single national community. ¹

On 24 February 1966, while Nkrumah was travelling abroad, the army overthrew his government and Joseph Arthur Ankrah's National Liberation Council took power. ¹ Nkrumah went into exile in Guinea, whose president Sékou Touré made him honorary co-president, and he never returned to Ghana. ¹ He died in Bucharest, Romania, on 27 April 1972. ^{1 3}

The museum records faith only from texts that name it, and for Nkrumah the texts speak of a Catholic formation, not of Islam. ¹ The English article recounts the Catholic mission schooling, the baptism of 1925, the seminary teaching post and the Jesuit consideration, and files him under Ghanaian Roman Catholics; the Urdu article files him under the same category. ^{1 4} The Arabic article says nothing about his religion at all. ² Wikidata's single structured value is Christianity. ³ The record therefore carries his faith as unknown, one attestation short of a documented Christian affiliation, with the readings preserved in the data file.

Nkrumah married Fathia Rizk, an Egyptian Coptic bank worker and former teacher, on New Year's Eve 1957–1958, and they had three children: Gamal, a journalist, and Samia and Sekou, both politicians; he also had an older son, Francis, a paediatrician. ¹

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.