How Lincoln University Shaped Africa's First Presidents

Long before either man led an independent African nation, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah walked the same small campus in rural Chester County, Pennsylvania. Lincoln University, chartered in 1854, holds the distinction of being the first degree-granting historically Black college or university in the United States. By the 1920s and 1930s it had become a magnet for a small but influential stream of African and Caribbean students seeking an American education unavailable to them at home, and two of that stream’s most consequential graduates would go on to lead their countries out of colonial rule.

Azikiwe arrived first. Born in Nigeria in 1904, he crossed the Atlantic in 1925, attended a preparatory program at Storer College in West Virginia, and briefly studied at Howard University before transferring to Lincoln, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1930 and a master’s degree in religion and philosophy in 1932, followed by a further master’s in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1933. During his time at Lincoln, Azikiwe worked as an instructor in the university’s history and political science department, an unusual role for a foreign student, and began building the journalistic and political voice that would later make him one of West Africa’s most prominent newspaper publishers. His memoir, “My Odyssey: An Autobiography,” devotes substantial attention to his American education and its influence on his political thinking.

Nkrumah followed a few years later, arriving in Philadelphia in 1935 to enroll as an undergraduate at Lincoln. He completed a bachelor’s degree in sociology, graduating in 1939, then was admitted to Lincoln’s theological seminary for a degree in sacred theology while simultaneously pursuing graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a master’s in education in 1942 and a master’s in philosophy the following year. Nkrumah later wrote about his American years, including his time at Lincoln, in a chapter titled “America” in his autobiography, “Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah,” describing an education that exposed him to Pan-Africanist thought and the writings of Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois, both of whom would shape the political movement he built after returning to the Gold Coast.

Both men eventually became the first heads of state of their newly independent nations, though by different routes and titles. Nkrumah led the Gold Coast, renamed Ghana, to independence in March 1957 as its first prime minister, then became its first president when the country became a republic in 1960. Azikiwe served first as governor-general of an independent Nigeria from 1960, then became the country’s first president in 1963 when Nigeria itself became a republic. Lincoln University commemorates the connection today in Azikiwe-Nkrumah Hall, a residence building constructed in 1865 during the Civil War era, making it the oldest structure still standing on campus. Originally built as housing for professors, it was later renamed for the two alumni and, after a $3.4 million restoration completed in the early 2020s, now houses the university’s institutional advancement offices, a quiet campus landmark commemorating two students who left rural Pennsylvania to found nations.