People, Independence & Pan-AfricanismGhanaiandocumented history
The Statue With No Head
They put a bronze of Nkrumah in front of Parliament House in 1956, before independence, with an inscription that has been argued about ever since: Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all other things shall be added unto it.
Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, Accra. Both pieces are there.
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The Statue With No Head
They put a bronze of Nkrumah in front of Parliament House in 1956, before independence, with an inscription that has been argued about ever since: Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all other things shall be added unto it.
On 24 February 1966, while he was in the air on his way to Hanoi, the army and police took the country. Crowds came for the statue.
They pulled it down and they took the head off it and the head disappeared.
For years nobody knew where it was. The story goes that it was kept — hidden by someone, moved, passed on, held — through the whole long period in which saying Nkrumah's name warmly was not a good idea. It surfaced eventually and was returned.
Now the body of the statue stands in the memorial park where he is buried, damaged, on its plinth. And the head is displayed separately, near it, on its own.
They could have welded it back on. They did not.
A man overthrown and disgraced, then partly rehabilitated, then voted Africa's Man of the Millennium by BBC listeners in 2000, and still argued about in every Ghanaian bar — represented by a broken statue that has been deliberately left broken, in two pieces, a few metres apart.
There is not a better monument in the country.
If you visit Ghana. Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, Accra. Both pieces are there.
They put a bronze of Nkrumah in front of Parliament House in 1956, before independence, with an inscription that has been argued about ever since: Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all other things shall be added unto it.
On 24 February 1966, while he was in the air on his way to Hanoi, the army and police took the country. Crowds came for the statue.
They pulled it down and they took the head off it and the head disappeared.
For years nobody knew where it was. The story goes that it was kept — hidden by someone, moved, passed on, held — through the whole long period in which saying Nkrumah's name warmly was not a good idea. It surfaced eventually and was returned.
Now the body of the statue stands in the memorial park where he is buried, damaged, on its plinth. And the head is displayed separately, near it, on its own.
They could have welded it back on. They did not.
A man overthrown and disgraced, then partly rehabilitated, then voted Africa's Man of the Millennium by BBC listeners in 2000, and still argued about in every Ghanaian bar — represented by a broken statue that has been deliberately left broken, in two pieces, a few metres apart.