Howard French with Minkah Makalani & Madina Thiam: THE SECOND EMANCIPATION

Journalist and author Howard W. French discuss his new volume about Africa’s pivotal role in shaping world history at Bird in Hand!

We hope you’ll join us for this exciting conversation, including professors Minkah Makalani and Madina Thiam from the departments of Africana Studies and History at Johns Hopkins University.

Subtitled Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide, The Second Emancipation provides an extraordinary account of Africa’s liberation from colonial oppression, and is a work that fundamentally reshapes our understanding of modern history.

The title—referring to a brief period beginning in 1957 when dozens of African colonies gained their freedom—positions this liberation at the center of a “movement of global Blackness,” with one charismatic leader, Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), at its head.

That so few people today know about Nkrumah is an omission that French demonstrates is “typical of our deliberate neglect of Africa’s enormous role in the birth of the modern world.” The book sets out to re-create Nkrumah’s life as “an epic twentieth-century story.”