Kwame Nkrumah
Foreign and military policy

Nkrumah actively promoted a policy of Pan-Africanism from the beginning of his presidency. This entailed the creation of a series of new international organizations, which held their inaugural meetings in Accra. These were:

Meanwhile, Ghana withdrew from colonial organizations including West Africa Airways Corporation, the West African Currency Board, the West African Cocoa Research Institute, and the West African Court of Appeal.

In the Year of Africa, 1960, Nkrumah negotiated the creation of a Union of African States, a political alliance between Ghana, Guinea, and Mali. Immediately, they formed a women's group called Women of the Union of African States.

Nkrumah was a leading figure in the short-lived Casablanca Group of African leaders, which sought to achieve pan-African unity and harmony through deep political, economic, and military integration of the continent in the early 1960s prior to the establishment of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). In 1961, he was a participant in the 1st Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade, FPR Yugoslavia making Ghana one of the founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Nkrumah was instrumental in the creation of the OAU in Addis Ababa in 1963. He aspired to create a united military force, the African High Command, which Ghana would substantially lead, and committed to this vision in Article 2 of the 1960 Republican Constitution: "In the confident expectation of an early surrender of sovereignty to a union of African states and territories, the people now confer on Parliament the power to provide for the surrender of the whole or any part of the sovereignty of Ghana."

He was also a proponent of the United Nations, but critical of the Great Powers' ability to control it.

Nkrumah opposed the entry of African states into the Common Market of the European Economic Community, a status given to many former French colonies and considered by Nigeria. Instead, Nkrumah advocated, in a speech given on 7 April 1960,

an African common market, a common currency area and the development of communications of all kinds to allow the free flow of goods and services. International capital can be attracted to such viable economic areas, but it would not be attracted to a divided and balkanized Africa, with each small region engaged in senseless and suicidal economic competition with its neighbours.

Nkrumah sought to exploit the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union in order to gain maximum concessions from both sides in their geopolitical attempts to outmanoeuvre one another in West Africa and elsewhere. This was exemplified by the Volta River Dam Project and its back-and-forth oscillation between Soviet and Western financial backing.
oulipo:avoid_letter[o], startend:end_checker