Ghana and the Non-Aligned Movement

As the first decolonized country in Sub-Saharan Africa, Ghana actively participated in earliest efforts to initiate Pan-African and Non-Aligned cooperation.

[1] The first President of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah, together with some other prominent African leaders at the time such as Julius Nyerere from Tanzania and Gamal Abdel Nasser from Egypt, joined hands with non-African leaders from countries beyond Cold War bloc divides, including Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Sukarno of Indonesia, in building what would become known as the Non-Aligned Movement.

[2] The country believed that the Non-Aligned framework might help to shield Africa from becoming directly involved in destructive Cold War United States-Soviet Union rivalries, while providing enough space for collective activist foreign policy aimed at supporting anticolonial liberation movements and African unity.

[3] During the 1st Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 in Belgrade, President Nkrumah called upon other participants to end colonialism, to work on the reform of the United Nations and to act as a "moral force" to avoid war between the Eastern and Western Bloc.

[3] The Ghanaian principled Non-Aligned position at the conference was perceived as remarkable in light of the concurrent Congo Crisis and the murder of Patrice Lumumba, which was expected to trigger potentially stronger anti-western reactions.