Nkrumah’s support for Somali restitution reflected his Ewe frontier interest

Evidence

A joint communiqué issued by the two Presidents advocated African federalism as the general solution to border problems but also stressed ‘the imperative need to restore the ethnic, cultural, and economic links arbitrarily destroyed by colonisation’. Here Dr Nkrumah was apparently influenced by his own interest in the Ewe problem on the Ghana-Togo frontier. Such comfort as might be drawn from this statement, however, soon disappeared as it became evident that no African state was prepared to see Ethiopia’s rôle in Somali partition as that of a colonizer. — I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Somali_ Nation…, 491

Categorization

• XREF: The brief Nkrumah-Somali convergence is a telling exception within the broader Pan-African rejection.