The Kwame Nkrumah
Pan-African Cultural Centre

The Kwame Nkrumah Pan-African Cultural Centre is located in Cairo, Egypt

Dr. Gamal Gorkeh Nkrumah is the Founder and Director of the centre. Click here About the Director for more information about him. To contact the Director, send him an e-mail, click here: Director.

"The core of the Black Revolution is in Africa, and until Africa is united under a socialist government, the Black man throughout the world lacks a national home. It is around the African peoples' struggles for liberation and unification that African or Black culture will take shape and substance. Africa is one continent, one people, and one nation." Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, page 88, Class Struggle in Africa

Pan-African Culture

Pan-African Culture is the product of the shared experiences and history of ALL the African peoples, at home and abroad. A shared history of suffering, exploitation and oppression and of resistance to these heinous impositions. A shared experience of Freedom hymns in the Civil Rights movement and liberation songs in Azania. It is the result of a common origin, as people who emerged from the same continent and ancestors. A shared legacy of interacting with each other, sometimes positively, and sometimes negatively. It is the cumulative product of the array of African cultures and the way these cultures responded/respond to human-made problems, such as slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism and to the demands and constraints placed on human beings by nature.

Africa's indispensable contribution to humanity and the world

Human development and civilization, in all its myriad forms, is a result of action and interactions of the planet's multitude of discrete human cultures.

Every people, every nation, every society produces culture. People create culture in response to their physical environment, their biological needs, social requirements and their specific moral-ethical view of the universe as they understand it. The many peoples of Africa are no exception. In fact as the original peoples of this planet, the African demographic has been, and will be again, in the very forefront of human cultural development and human civilization.

The peoples of Africa have given the world much of what is critical to humanity. From the taming of fire, development of tools, crop cultivation and animal husbandry; to architecture, art, religion, science, mathematics and a long list of other achievements; Africa has consistently been in the lead.

Cultures borrow from and reinforce each other as documented by historians dating back to Herodotus. Indeed, Herodotus wrote of the many contributions and achievements of ancient Africa, particularly in the fields of martial skills, physical development, beauty, religion and social organization.

It is evident that the Greeks (and subsequently the Romans) copied the Egyptian architecture styles and adopted it to their ends. This Greco-Roman fascimile is still the perferred style for official buildings (especially governement edifices) in all of western society.

Image 1: This famous rendering of Tutankhamun and his wife, Ankhesenpaaten, exemplifies the mastery of African art.

It is time that Africa reclaimed its proud heritage as the cutting edge of human civilization.

From the moment that the people of Ghana, led by Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention Peoples Party (CPP), won their independence from the United Kingdom the history of the world was changed forever. For, with their victory, with the transition from the Gold Coast colony of enslaved people to Ghana the proud symbol of African resistance, Pan-Africanism had come home. This was one of the seminal events of the 20th Century and its repercussions still reverberate around the globe. It is the signal most important event in modern African history and civilization. In short, it was a grand act of culture.

The urgent need to construct Pan-Africanism

Economically and industrially Europe and the USA are ready and poised for socialism. There are the necessary material ingredients which could make socialism possible overnight. In the USA when automation and cybernation aided by nuclear energy reach their highest form of development, the forces of production will have been developed to a point at which there could be the classless society which Marx predicted could come only under communism. But although the USA is at present one of the most affluent and industrialized countries in the world, it is at the same time one of the most socially and politically backward. Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, pages 73-4, Class Struggle in Africa

We live in a world that is a very complex place. A global society composed of many perplexing problems and great opportunities. The achievements and failures of our time would have both astonished and alarmed many of the peoples of previous eras. Technology and science, political economic struggles, humanity's impact on the global ecological system and many other factors are part of our particular epoch.

It is imperative that African people take greater responsibility for the reconstruction of the human civilization that we essentially ushered in to the world. It is up to the African genius, in concert with the rest of the globe's peoples, to make sense out of what is going on all around us, and preserve human civilization and our planet. The Kwame Nkrumah Pan-African Cultural Centre is poised to contribute to this African and global renaissance.

Image 2: The Ishango bone, found in the Congo, is the world's first mathematical calculating tool.

The Kwame Nkrumah Pan-African Culture Centre

The Kwame Nkrumah Pan-African Culture Centre is designed to provide Africans in particular, and humanity in general, with a credible research and learning institution solely dedicated to the understanding of the global African culture and its history.

It is the contribution of far-sighted Pan-Africanists, such as its Founder and Director, Dr. Gamal Nkrumah, to the overall struggle to complete the unfinished tasks of African liberation and continental unification. As such, it also serves the cause of human dignity, the preservation of human civilization and the planet. The Centre is an Nkrumaist response and alternative to the professional liars and propagandists that dominate much of anthropology, archaeology, history, cultural geography, sociology, political science, economics, psychology, philosophy, theology and so many other contemporary disciplines.

The Centre takes it name from the leading activist and theorist of Pan-Africanism, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. Dr. Nkrumah pioneered the serious study of African Culture and History based on the rigors of the scientific method and dialectical analysis. Kwame Nkrumah was the single most effective and energetic catalyst for Pan-African organization. His contribution to Pan-Africanism and to human progress is an exemplary model for all.

One of his greatest contributions was his clear exposition on the problems caused by the imposition of negative external cultural values, practices and systems on Africa and African people. He clearly revealed the negative impact of corrupt endogenous forces and pointed out that these two forces combined to create the adverse conditions plaguing Africa to this very day. His cogent analysis of the social psychological havoc visited upon African society by slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism and associated forms of oppression and exploitation is impeccable.

Nkrumah was in short, Africa's best carrier of Pan-African culture. He was its best single barrier to the fierce drive of the elements who strived to fully assimilate Africans into a world system and division of labor that was based on their exploitation and oppression; and that of similarly impacted peoples in other parts of the world.

It is for this reason that President Seku Ture called Nkrumah the very personification of Africa and a timeless leader for all peoples, a leader that transcends both space and time. (See his poem dedicated to Nkrumah A Tribute to Kwame Nkrumah )

Click here for page two: Culture is Redemptive