Quote by Kwame Nkrumah: “We face neither East nor West: we face forward.”

Rather than aligning with either the United States or the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Nkrumah argued that Africa should chart its own independent course. It is a declaration that self-determination means refusing to be anyone else's pawn.

Nkrumah declared this during the early years of African independence and at the height of the Cold War, when newly independent African states were being pressured to align with either the United States or the Soviet Union. His vision of pan-African unity was a bid for genuine sovereignty.

Ghanaian pan-Africanist politician and the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana after independence in 1957. His 1963 book Africa Must Unite outlined the case for a continental African government, and he was a founding member of the Organisation of African Unity. He was overthrown in a coup in 1966.