Political organizing intensified in the Gold Coast in early January as nationalist leaders pressed for self-rule. The movement, led eventually by Kwame Nkrumah, would make Ghana in 1957 the first sub-Saharan African colony to gain independence from European rule, inspiring liberation movements across the continent.
West Africa in the years after World War II simmered with rising nationalist sentiment. Soldiers who had fought for Britain returned home to colonies that still denied them basic political rights, and a new generation of educated Africans, having studied in London and the United States, began demanding an end to colonial rule outright rather than mere reform.
Kwame Nkrumah, who had studied in the United States and been influenced by Pan-Africanist thinkers like Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois, returned to the Gold Coast in the late 1940s to join the independence struggle, eventually founding the Convention People's Party. His strategy combined mass mobilization, strikes, and boycotts with shrewd political maneuvering within British colonial structures.
The momentum building in these years led directly to March 6, 1957, when Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African nation to shake off European colonial rule. Nkrumah became prime minister and later president, and his famous declaration that Ghana's independence was 'meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent' set the tone for the wave of decolonization that swept Africa over the following decade.