Pandora's Box - Part 5: "Black Power"

The penultimate episode, originally broadcast on 9 July 1992, looks at how Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of the Gold Coast (which became Ghana on independence from the United Kingdom in 1957) from 1952 to 1966, set Africa ablaze with his vision of a new industrial and scientific age. At the heart of his dream was to be the huge Volta River dam, generating enough power to transform West Africa into an industrialised utopia and focal point of post-colonial Pan-Africanism.

At first, it was hoped the U.K. would help to finance the project, but after the Suez Crisis of 1956, interest was lost. Later, after meeting U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, American backing for the project materialised. A scheme was finally drawn up offering Kaiser Aluminum favourable conditions (including the smelting of aluminium imported from outside Ghana) and the dam was opened to great fanfare in January 1966. Weeks later, in February 1966, while Nkrumah was on a state visit to North Vietnam and China, his government was overthrown in a military coup (possibly CIA backed), and evidence of massive corruption and debt was revealed. As of 1992, for many Ghanaians the promised benefits of the project were still unrealised.

(Wikipedia)