Quote by Kwame Nkrumah: “Africa must unite or it will be divided and subdivided again.”

Nkrumah's warning was practical: African nations, newly independent and geographically fractured by colonial borders, remained economically and politically vulnerable on their own. United, the continent could negotiate with global powers as an equal. Divided, it would be picked apart — as it had been before — by outside interests. Unity was survival.

Africa Must Unite was published in 1963, the same year the Organisation of African Unity was founded in Addis Ababa. Over thirty African nations had gained independence in the preceding decade, but Cold War powers were actively competing for influence across the continent through economic pressure and covert operations.

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.