At midnight, the Gold Coast officially became Ghana, ending British colonial rule and igniting a wave of decolonization across Africa. Kwame Nkrumah, who had led the independence movement and spent time in prison for it, declared the moment 'the greatest thing that has happened in Africa for hundreds of years.'
Crowds gathered in Accra's Old Polo Ground as the Union Jack was lowered and Ghana's new flag -- red, gold, and green with a black star -- was raised in its place. Nkrumah, dressed in traditional cloth, addressed the jubilant crowd, framing independence not as an endpoint but a beginning: 'We again re-dedicate ourselves in the struggle to emancipate other countries in Africa.'
The path had not been simple. Nkrumah's Convention People's Party had organized boycotts and strikes through the early 1950s, and colonial authorities jailed him in 1950 for sedition. He won a legislative election from his prison cell the following year, forcing the British to release him and eventually negotiate a transition.
Ghana's independence became the opening act of a continental drama: within a decade, more than thirty African nations threw off colonial rule, citing Ghana as proof it could be done. Nkrumah himself became a leading pan-Africanist voice, though his later years in power grew increasingly authoritarian before a 1966 coup ended his rule while he was abroad.
Key people: Kwame Nkrumah