On February 24, 1966, a military coup d’état orchestrated by the police and the army overthrew Kwame Nkrumah. The event unfolded in Nkrumah’s absence, with the prior knowledge and approval, and likely the assistance, of the United States and Great Britain. The president was on a peace mission to bring an end to the brutal war in Vietnam.

The coup launched Ghana—Africa’s Black Star—into a quarter century of political instability. This included decades of anti-democratic rule, economic decline, and the World Bank and the IMF dictating draconian measures to liberalize the market. Many would argue that the nation still feels the aftershocks from that fateful day in February 1966.

Seldom discussed is one of the most enduring of those aftershocks: namely, the void in documentary evidence rendered by the illegal seizure of power. The military was relentless in its destruction of official documentation and the personal papers of Kwame Nkrumah. When the soldiers raided Flagstaff House, the site of Nkrumah’s office and residence, they were on a search-and-destroy mission. They seized soldiers loyal to Nkrumah in their determination to destroy anything and everything in their path. Most of Nkrumah’s papers, the records in his office, his notebooks, and his manuscript drafts in various forms of completion, did not survive that fateful day. As was done to the effects of other deposed African leaders, individuals and groups sought to destroy Nkrumah’s personal and political papers. Their deliberateness shows that a lot more than political power is lost in a coup d’état.

Anyone who has worked in Ghana’s public archives on the Nkrumah years, and especially on Nkrumah himself, knows firsthand about the documentary silences, the empty files, and the research trails long gone cold.

Of course, Nkrumah did not just disappear in 1966. While in exile in Conakry, he made regular broadcasts to the people of Ghana. He also began writing and publishing: The Challenge of the Congo, Class Struggle in Africa, Axioms of Kwame Nkrumah, Dark Days in Ghana, Revolutionary Path, The Rhodesia File, Voice from Conakry, and Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, and several pamphlets. Each of these publications appeared after the coup and before his death in Bucharest in April 1972.

Despite Nkrumah’s prolific output of books and pamphlets, his political legacy slowly faded. The vagaries of African politics reduced Nkrumah’s vision of a politically united continent to an artifact of a bygone, far more optimistic age.

That began to change in the 1980s—a decade of political transformation in Africa.

Across the continent, and throughout the African Diaspora, neoliberalism and the austerity it enforced deferred economic and political innovation. Pan-Africanism, socialism, and people-centered development were largely confined to sloganeering. Still, the decade did not lack leaders and movements that strove to provide political-left alternatives. Many of them looked back to Nkrumah for inspiration in their critique of the geopolitical shift toward political and economic conservatism.

In December 1981 for example, Jerry John Rawlings’ second successful coup signaled the Black Star Nation’s return to revolutionary projects. In Grenada in the Caribbean, Maurice Bishop led the New Joint Endeavor for Welfare Movement, Education, and Liberation, or New Jewel Movement. By engaging in a bloodless revolution in 1979, Bishop successfully positioned his movement as the country’s ruling party. However, his five-year project ended with his own assassination in 1983. That same year, in Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara embarked on a project to secure the country’s economic independence from France, its former colonizer, and to dismantle the debt trap set by Western financial institutions.

Throughout the 1980s in other words, optimism continued to flash in pockets of Africa and the diaspora. In the opening year of the next decade, Namibia raised its independent flag. Shortly thereafter, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison in South Africa and went on a six-week, 13-country speaking tour. The global anti-apartheid movement became the largest mass pan-African and human rights movement in history, which helped pave the way for democracy in South Africa.

For Nkrumah’s many friends and followers, the 1980s only evidenced the truth of his prediction further: the absence of African unity left an open door to European neocolonialism and structural dependency, creating poverty in African countries. Nkrumah’s words echoed across the years as a call to action, a call for continued struggle—a luta continua!

But why weren’t Nkrumah’s ideas relegated to the dustbin of history with his overthrow in 1966? How were they kept alive, nurtured, circulated, and repeatedly affirmed, even well after his death in 1972?

Among the most active custodians of Nkrumah’s legacy during the 1970s and 1980s was June Milne. Born in Australia in 1920, Milne was educated in Britain and trained as a historian. She lectured at the University College of the Gold Coast and in 1957 became Nkrumah’s editorial assistant. After the coup, when other publishers dropped Nkrumah from their lists, she started Panaf Books in 1968 to keep his works in print and to publish new ones on pan-Africanism. During the years of Nkrumah’s exile in Conakry, she visited him 16 times. She visited him three times in Bucharest, Romania, where he went for medical treatment in 1971, and was there with him when he died on April 27, 1972. Milne continued to run Panaf until she retired in 1987.

During the 1980s, Milne and her network of pan-Africanists, along with the friends and children of Kwame Nkrumah, preserved his legacy. Through conferences and publications, they strove to ensure that the memory of Ghana’s first president would not disappear into the dustbin of history. Milne herself took up the herculean task of gathering, retrieving, assembling, and organizing whatever she could of Nkrumah’s personal and professional papers. She began to build an archive.

It was June Milne who donated most of the Nkrumah Papers to Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC) in 1984. She traveled to the campus in Washington, DC to officially deposit what she then had at hand. Shortly after, in 1986, she traveled to Conakry and managed to retrieve an additional cache of Nkrumah’s papers and books from Villa Syli, Nkrumah’s home during his Conakry years. She brought this “Conakry Archive” to Howard in 1987. And in 1989, she rounded out these collections with 62 books and administrative files for Panaf.

The bulk of the Nkrumah papers at Howard covers the years 1965-1974. The collection brings together a significant number of letters and cables exchanged between Nkrumah and his acquaintances, friends, and staff. It assembles communications that were made toward the end of Nkrumah’s presidency and during his years at Villa Syli. The correspondence illuminates the circle of personalities orbiting near Nkrumah. To name a few, these included W.E.B. DuBois, Shirley Graham DuBois, Marvin Wachman (then president of Lincoln University, Nkrumah’s alma mater); social justice activists Grace and James Boggs, and Julia Wright, writer, and daughter of Richard Wright. Many others can be identified in the hundreds of files of correspondence found in the collection.

The Nkrumah collection at Howard is essential to any study of pan-Africanism and nation-building in the Africa of the 1960s and 1970s.

Enter two historians: Jean Allman and Benjamin Talton.