Africa’s Independence Leaders: Nkrumah, Lumumba, Kimathi and Sankara

Independence movements did not appear from nowhere. In the early twentieth century, Pan-Africanist thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic argued that people of African descent shared a common history and a common future. The Jamaican-born organiser Marcus Garvey turned that idea into a mass movement: his Universal Negro Improvement Association counted members across the Americas, the Caribbean and Africa, and his shipping company, the Black Star Line, became a symbol of self-reliance.

Kwame Nkrumah later wrote that Garvey’s writings influenced him more than any other while he studied in the United States. When Ghana became independent, its flag carried a black star at its centre, a nod to the Pan-African vision Garvey had helped to popularise.

Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast in 1947 after more than a decade abroad. Impatient with the gradual approach of the established nationalists, he founded the Convention People’s Party in 1949 under the slogan “Self-Government Now”. In 1950 he launched a campaign of strikes and non-cooperation he called Positive Action, and the colonial authorities jailed him for it.

He was still in prison when his party won the 1951 election. Released to lead the government, he steered the colony to independence on 6 March 1957, when the Gold Coast became Ghana, one of the first sub-Saharan African countries to break free of colonial rule. “Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa,” he declared that night.

Nkrumah spent the next decade pushing for African unity, and in 1963 he helped found the Organisation of African Unity, the forerunner of today’s African Union. His government also grew increasingly authoritarian at home, and in 1966 he was overthrown in a military coup while abroad. He died in exile in 1972. Ghana marks his birthday, 21 September, as Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Day.

Few independence stories are as short, or as consequential, as Patrice Lumumba’s. A former postal clerk and writer, he co-founded the Mouvement National Congolais in 1958 and quickly became the most popular politician in the Belgian Congo, arguing for a united country rather than one divided along ethnic or regional lines.

On 30 June 1960 the Congo became independent, with Lumumba as its first prime minister. At the official ceremony, in front of the Belgian king, he gave an unscheduled speech recalling the humiliations of colonial rule. Within weeks the country was in crisis: the army mutinied, and the mineral-rich province of Katanga declared secession with Belgian backing.

Lumumba was dismissed in September 1960, arrested, and handed over to his enemies in Katanga, where he was killed on 17 January 1961. He was 35. In 2002 Belgium acknowledged a “moral responsibility” for his death, and in 2022 it returned to his family the only known remains of his body, a tooth. His name remains a byword for the hopes, and the betrayals, of African independence.

Not every road to independence ran through elections. In colonial Kenya, decades of land seizures in the fertile highlands had pushed many Kikuyu, Embu and Meru families off their land. In the early 1950s, fighters of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, widely known as the Mau Mau, took up arms, and Dedan Kimathi became their best-known commander, leading from the forests of the Aberdare range.

The British response was brutal: a state of emergency, mass detention camps and collective punishment. Kimathi was captured in October 1956 and hanged in February 1957. For decades he was officially remembered as a terrorist. Today he is honoured as a national hero: a statue of him stands on Kimathi Street in central Nairobi, unveiled in 2007, and in 2013 the British government expressed “sincere regret” for the abuses committed during the emergency and agreed to compensate thousands of Kenyan survivors.

Kenya became independent in 1963. Kimathi did not live to see it, but his fight is part of why it came when it did.

By the 1980s most African states had been independent for two decades, and the question had changed: not how to win freedom, but what to do with it. Thomas Sankara, a 33-year-old army captain, came to power in Upper Volta in August 1983 with a radical answer.

A year later he renamed the country Burkina Faso, often translated as “the land of upright people”. His government vaccinated millions of children in a matter of weeks, planted millions of trees against the advancing Sahara, campaigned against forced marriage and female genital mutilation, appointed women to senior posts, and cut the privileges of officials, including his own. He drove a modest Renault 5 and asked ministers to do the same.

On 15 October 1987 Sankara was killed in the coup that brought his former comrade Blaise Compaoré to power. In 2022, after a long trial in Ouagadougou, Compaoré was convicted in his absence for his role in the killing. Sankara was 37. His speeches, on debt, self-reliance and the dignity of ordinary people, are still shared by young Africans across the continent and the diaspora.

Nkrumah, Lumumba, Kimathi and Sankara are not saints, and they did not agree on everything. They made mistakes, and some of their governments did harm. But each of them insisted, at great personal cost, that Africa’s future belonged to Africans. All four died violently or in exile, and none of them reached old age.

That is why we put them on stamps. A stamp is a small, official piece of paper that says: this person matters to this nation. For much of the twentieth century, colonial stamps across Africa carried the portraits of European monarchs. Issuing these four, side by side, is our way of telling their story the other way round.