ABSTRACT
For African Americans, the Nkrumah era played host to the literary giants of this century—Richard Wright, W.E.B. DuBois, Maya Angelou, Julian Mayfield, Malcolm X, as well as others. For black Americans, Nkrumah had a special interest and concern in that from 1935-1945 he lived and was formally educated in the US Ghana became internationally known, not only for the African liberation movements against colonialism that originated there, but also as a showcase for black achievement in the arts and sciences. Ghana represented the culmination of their involvement with a racially progressive period, and their creative work was inspired, directly or indirectly, by the Nkrumah era. After I960, the Ghanaian state underwent an important change from nonalignment to a “significant leftward shift in the political centre of gravity”. Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes is perhaps the most comprehensive and revealing a record of what it was like living as a black writer in Ghana from about 1963-1965.
