Nkrumah was the driving force at the 1945 Pan-African Conference in Manchester along with George Padmore, a socialist from Trinidad who settled in Ghana on its independence and became Nkrumah's adviser in pan-African affairs. Nkrumah and Padmore also spearheaded the pan-African movement after 1957, with the two Accra Conferences of 1958: the Conference of Independent African States in April and the All-African People's Conference in December.

The All-African Trade Union Federation Conference of November 1959 was also held in Accra. These conferences marked a shift in pan- Africanism away from a concern with the grievances of black people in the world in general, towards a concern with the unity of the newly-emerging independent African states and the liberation of the rest of the continent still under colonial rule.

Nkrumah believed Africa could never be truly independent of the former colonial powers unless it was strong, and it could only be strong if it was politically and economically united. These ideas are expressed in his book Neo-colonialism, published in 1965.

Sekou Toure, Boigny and another West African leader

Guinea's independence in 1958 gave Nkrumah a chance to launch a political union of two African states. He offered Guinea a loan of £10 million for ten years, as a contribution to help her avoid a total economic collapse after the precipitate withdrawal of all French personnel and cancellation of French economic aid. Nkrumah also proposed a Ghana- Guinea Union. President Sekou Toure of Guinea, himself a radical pan-Africanist, accepted both the loan and the union in November 1958. Nkrumah and Sekou Toure made a joint declaration of basic principles in May 1959: the union of their two countries was to be the nucleus of a future 'Union of Independent African State.-;' which was to be open to any African state.

The Union was to have a flag, an anthem and the motto 'Independence and Unity' and a common citizenship, a common defence policy, a union bank, a common economic policy and co-ordinated language teaching and cultural activities. Nkrumah spoke in the Ghana National Assembly, referring to the Union and his pan-African activities, of his deep sense of pride . . . that I have been an instrument in this movement. This new Africa of ours is emerging into a world of great combinations - a world where the weak and the small are pushed aside unless they unite their forces.

The weekly newspaper West Africa hailed the Union as 'the first check to the progress of disintegration in West Africa which has been going on for years'.

However, the Ghana-Guinea Union never developed into a general union of African states; nor did it really get off the ground as a union of the states concerned. Sekou Toure regarded it as primarily of symbolic value. When Mali Joined in I960 Toure explained that 'It was a psychological coming together at a critical time' - referring to the crisis in the Congo when that country broke up in civil war and the United Nations sent a peace-keeping force there. Sekou Toure did not seem to mind as much as Nkrumah did when no common institutions, either political or economic, were developed. He seemed content with the occasional attendance of Cabinet ministers of one country at Cabinet meetings of another. Yet even in this nothing was achieved.

Ministers spoke either French or English but no common language, whether European or African.

Also the lack of a common frontier between Ghana and the other two states made economic union impracticable. The Ghana-Guinea-Mali Union was less a union than an alliance of states with similar radical pan-African and semi-socialist policies. Even the alliance broke up when Nkrumah and President Modibo Keita of Mali were removed from power by military coups in 1966 and 1968.

Failure of federations 

Keita had earlier played a major part in the formation and break-up of another political union of independent states, the Mali Federation of 1959-60. We saw how the French West African Federation was 'balkanized' (broken up into many smaller states) on the eve of independence. However, an attempt was made to preserve the federation after independence. Senegal, Soudan (later Mali), Upper Volta and Dahomey planned to federate. But Upper Volta and Dahomey withdrew from the scheme when their assemblies refused to approve the federal constitution. Dahomey voted 'No' to federation because of distance from the other states which were not its hinterland. Dahomey had a common border with Upper Volta but its economic hinterland was Niger. In any case, Upper Volta withdrew because it was linked economically and by railway to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast which was strongly opposed to the federation. The Ivory Coast feared joining a federation in which it would be expected to subsidize its poorer partners. Only Senegal and Soudan ratified the January 1959 constitution.

The Mali Federation existed nominally for a year-and-a-half but it could never be said that it had begun to operate normally. Trouble began as early as March 1959 when the Senegalese and Soudanese politicians found it impossible to agree on how to unite their political parties into a common party, the proposed Parti de la Federation Africaine (PFA). Senegal was a multi-party state with a long tradition of open political debate and freedom of expression going back to the nineteenth-century political contests in the four coastal communes.

The Soudan, on the other hand was a one-party state, run by the Soudanese branch of the RDA, with little opportunity for discussion or dissent. The.. Senegalese and Soudanese politicians found it almost impossible to work with each other. Equally important, the two countries had widely differing policies on a number of issues. Senghor of Senegal strongly opposed Keita's proposals for a strong unitary government. Senghor wanted a loose federal structure which could make it easier for other States to join. Senghor also opposed Keita's plans to Africanize the civil service rapidly and to expel French armed forces.

Senghor believed passionately in the virtues of administrative efficiency and he believed rapid Africanization would undermine it. He also wanted to keep French forces in Senegal because of the economic benefits of their presence in the country. Senghor was also alarmed at Keita's plans to nationalize foreign firms, which he believed would lead to economic decline. Senghor's African Socialism was not of the Marxist kind and was more concerned with preserving and fostering African culture. Senegal and Soudan were also divided over allocation of jobs in the federal administration, and over the issue of whether richer Senegal should subsidize the poorer Soudan.

Senegal and Soudan became independent in June I960, with Senghor as President and Keita as Prime Minister. Two months later, on 20 August, Senghor ordered the Senegalese police to arrest Keita and other Soudanese ministers in Dakar and deport them to Bamako. Soudan renamed itself Mali, and in December joined its radical socialist allies Guinea and Ghana.

The break-up of the Mali Federation coincided with the division of African states into two opposing group which were not brought together until the formation of the OAU in May 1963. These groups became known as the Casablanca and Monrovia groups. The Casablanca group consisted of radical states such as Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Algeria and Egypt who met at Casablanca, and supported a strong political union in Africa. In the Congo they favoured a Strong central government under the radical Patrice Lumumba and opposed the Katanga secessionist movement of the pro-Western Moise Tshombe. The Monrovia group consisted of pro-Western states that favoured a loose association of independent states in Africa and a loose federation of provinces in the Congo. The members of the Monrovia group were nearly all of the French-speaking states (except Guinea and Mali), Liberia and Nigeria. The division between the Casablanca and Monrovia groups became clear at the Second Conference of Independent African States held in Addis Ababa in June I960. The leader of the Nigerian delegation opposed the Casablanca group's proposed Union of African States, put forward by Nkrumah. The Monrovia group feared Nkrumah's barely disguised ambition to be President of Africa, especially in view of his dictatorship in Ghana.

Nkrumah was a unifying factor as between Arab and Black Africa and a divisive factor as between English-speakers and French-speakers within Black Africa itself. At the same time, "by antagonizing Nigeria, he helped to forge a bond of shared hostility to Ghana between the largest English-speaking country and most of the French-speaking states. Yet this bond of a shared antagonism towards Nkrumah disguised a more fundamental divide as between the two main linguistic blocs of Black Africa. In March 1964 French-speaking African states dissolved their Afro-Malagasy Union (Union Africaine et Malgache: UAM) on the grounds that its existence as a sectional organization militated against the spirit of broader political accord which the newly created OAU stood for. But by February 1965 the francophone states were seriously considering the UAM's revival. Nkrumah's policies were an important contributory factor to this reappraisal.

In part, the root of the trouble went back to Nkrumah's increasing conviction in the course of I960 that many of the newly independent francophone states were, in effect client states, independent in name'. Their lukewarm attitude towards the FLN in Algeria was only one manifestation of their continued dependence upon France. This view of France's relations with her former colonies influenced Nkrumah's judgement on the issue of African association with the European Economic Community. He regarded the Treaty of Rome of 1957 which set up the EEC as an instrument of neo-colonialism.

A further factor which alienated francophone Africa from Ghana was the hospitality which Ghana continued to extend to political rebels from her French -speaking neighbours - Niger, Ivory Coast, Cameroun and Zaire. In part this also arose out of Nkrumah's conviction that most of his neighbours were in any case under 'puppet regimes'. It was, therefore, from his point of view, proper for Ghana to harbour and even sympathize with the native opponents of those regimes. This factor, perhaps more than any other, was what aroused the anger of the French-speaking African states at their meeting in Nouakchott in February 1965, and which made them threaten to boycott the OAU meeting scheduled to take place in Accra later in 1965- The price which they momentarily extracted for their attendance in Accra was a new 'Good Neighbour' policy to be followed by Ghana, especially in regard to rebels from French-speaking Africa.

Ghana could still give political asylum, but she was no longer to afford the rebels a public platform for their grievances or a training ground for their resistance. However, all indications were that Ghana under Nkrumah would find it hard to maintain the kind of 'good neighbourliness' demanded by her neighbours. Nkrumah seemed to be of the opinion that time was on the side of the more radical French-speaking Africans in opposition to the regimes in power. His continued encouragement of subversive activity turned many African Heads of Slate against Nkrumah and made him the greatest obstacle to the African unity he desired so much.,

The Casablanca group was not under the control of Nkrumah. Indeed, the other members of the group turned against Nkrumah's all-African union government proposals, published in his new book Africa Must Unite, for economic planning, a common currency, a common defence system under an African high command, and a union legislature with an upper and lower house. Sekou Toure and Nasser began to work with members of the Monrovia group and with Emperor Haile Selassie to secure a loose association of all African States. As a result a conference of independent African states was held at Addis Ababa in May 1963 and the Organization of African Unity (OAU) was born.