Today, 9th July, 2026 marks 54 years since the body of Ghana’s first President, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, was laid to rest in his hometown of Nkroful.
Nkrumah died on 27th April 1972 at a clinic in Bucharest, Romania, where he had gone for treatment while living in exile in Conakry, Guinea, following his overthrow in the 1966 coup. He had governed Ghana for nearly thirteen years, first as Prime Minister from 1952 and then as President from 1957, before being deposed while on a state visit to China and Vietnam.
His death set off months of tense diplomacy between Ghana’s military government, led by Colonel Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, and Guinea’s President Ahmed Sékou Touré, who had granted Nkrumah asylum and made him honorary co-president after his overthrow. Touré, embittered by how Ghana had treated his ally, refused at first to release the body, insisting on conditions that included the rehabilitation of Nkrumah’s name, the release of his jailed partisans, the reinstatement of his former ministers to their old posts, and the construction of his tomb in front of Ghana’s Parliament. Acheampong refused to negotiate on this basis, rejecting the conditions outright, and instead kept up sustained diplomatic pressure, even enlisting the President of Liberia to plead on Ghana’s behalf. Nkrumah’s own mother, Madam Elizabeth Nyaniba, appealed directly to Touré, saying she wished to touch her son’s body before he was buried. After nearly three months of negotiation, Touré relented.
On 7th July 1972, Nkrumah’s embalmed body was flown into Ghana aboard a specially arranged Guinean Air Force aircraft, with all flags across the country ordered to fly at half-mast. The following day, he lay in state at the State House in Accra for some ten hours, drawing thousands of mourners. On Sunday, 9th July, his coffin was flown onward to Nkroful, the Nzema town of his birth in what is now the Ellembelle District, where traditional rulers performed customary rites befitting his standing as a divisional chief. His widow, Madam Fathia Nkrumah, accompanied the coffin throughout. After lying in state for a further three hours, he was buried in a vault in his hometown.
That burial at Nkroful was not to be his last. In 1992, under the government of Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings, Nkrumah’s remains were exhumed a second time and reinterred at the newly built Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum in Accra, on the very site of the old Polo Grounds where he had declared Ghana’s independence in 1957. He has, in effect, been laid to rest twice: first at Nkroful in 1972, and finally in Accra two decades later, where his mausoleum now stands as Ghana’s foremost monument to his legacy.
The saga did not end there either. In January 2026, Ghana’s government, under President John Dramani Mahama, opened negotiations with the Touré family to acquire Nkrumah’s former residence in Conakry, with plans to restore it as a Pan-African heritage and tourism site, half a century after the two nations first clashed over his remains.
Baabi a mifiri. — feeling blessed in Akim Oda, Ghana.
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