What is the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence?
Following a long period of European administration in Africa, in the 20th century many colonies agitated to regain their freedom. In sub-Saharan Africa, the first European colony to gain independence was Great Britain’s Gold Coast, which became independent under the name of Ghana on March 6, 1957.
Beginning in the 1400s, European powers explored the world and staked their claims, including in Africa. Beginning in the late 1800s, with the so-called Scramble for Africa, colonization efforts there accelerated—so much so that by 1914 European countries had collectively claimed about 90 percent of the African continent.
In what is now Ghana, Great Britain declared the coastal area, known as the Gold Coast, a British colony in 1874. In later years it expanded its colonial claims farther inland, annexing the lands of the Asante empire and the Northern Territories. After World War I (1914–18), Britain also administered the western part of neighboring Togoland, the former German protectorate, under a League of Nations mandate and, after World War II (1939–45), as a United Nations trust territory.
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By the mid-20th century, an era of decolonization had taken hold, as colonies in Africa and around the world agitated for independence. In the Gold Coast colony, nationalist J.B. Danquah cofounded the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) in 1947, a party that called for constitutional reforms and eventual self-government. The party’s general secretary, Kwame Nkrumah, later split from the UGCC and formed the Convention People’s Party (CPP) in 1949. Nkrumah and the CPP demanded immediate self-government and, in order to press their demands, initiated a campaign of “positive action” that included strikes, nonviolent protests, the boycott of European goods, and noncooperation with British colonial authorities. In 1951 Nkrumah was elected to the colony’s parliament and was named prime minister the next year. He and the CPP continued to push for independence, culminating with the colony becoming the independent country of Ghana in 1957.
After the stroke of midnight on March 6, 1957, Nkrumah, as the new country’s first prime minister, said, “Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.” Nkrumah saw independent Ghana as a leader in the liberation of the rest of the continent from colonial rule, and soon, many more sub-Saharan countries achieved independence. Ghana was followed in the next year by the French colony of Guinea, which became independent on October 2, 1958, and within the next decade, more than 30 newly independent countries emerged in sub-Saharan Africa.
