The Second Emancipation

Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide

By: Howard W. French

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Hardcover | 24 October 2025 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
512 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.35 x 1.56 x 0.36

Hardcover

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The Second Emancipation, a work of Odyssean dimension, recasts the liberation of post-Second World War colonial Africa and the American civil rights struggle through the lens of Ghana's revolutionary visionary Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972), who emerges as the most significant African leader of the twentieth century. Determined that readers fully understand Nkrumah's legacy, Howard W. French newly dramatises the Nkrumah story. The language soars as French evokes a continent in the throes of liberation and a roiling United States in the Cold War era.

In its dramatic depiction of a continent that once exuded the promise of a newly won freedom, The Second Emancipation is a generational work that positions not only Africa but also the American civil rights movement at the forefront of modern-day history.

About the Author

Howard W. French is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former New York Times bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China, based in Shanghai. The author of six books, including Born in Blackness, French lives in New York City.

Industry Reviews

Howard W. French's Born in Blackness was praised as:

"[S]earing, humbling and essential reading."-Nigel Cliff, The New York Times

"[A] magnificent, powerful and absorbing book [...] beautifully done; a masterpiece even [...] French writes with the elegance you would expect from a distinguished foreign correspondent, and with the passion of someone deeply committed to providing a corrective."-Peter Frankopan, The Observer

"In this truly monumental biography of the rise and fall of Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, global observer Howard W. French documents the Cold War hubris that foredoomed Africa's aspirations in a Greek tragedy of racist pathologies affronted by emancipated leadership. French's The Second Emancipation stands the second half of the last century on its geopolitical head." -- David Levering Lewis, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize

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