Kwame Nkrumah is a household name not only in Ghana but the whole of Africa. The name is synonymous with freedom and struggle against oppression in whatever form. A prominent twentieth-century champion of Pan-Africanism, Nkrumah served as the head of Ghana and its predecessor state, the Gold Coast, from 1952 to 1966. In 1952, he was appointed Prime Minister of the young Ghanian republic.
Kwame Nkrumah got married to his wife Fathia Nkrumah on New Year’s Eve in 1957. Fathia Nkrumah went on to become the first lady of the newly independent Ghanian republic.
Fathia Nkrumah Helena Ritz is a model and actress. As a Coptic Egyptian, Fathia Halim was born on 22 February 1932 and was the First Lady of newly independent Ghana, serving as the wife of Kwame Nkrumah, who was the country’s first president.
Fathia Nkrumah was born into a Coptic Christian family and raised in the Zeitoun
Early life experience
Fathia Halim Rizk was born in Cairo’s Zeitoun neighborhood in 1932. Her father worked as a clerk for an Egyptian telephone company and died while Fathia was young, leaving her mother widowed and responsible for raising her daughter on her own. She was the eldest of five children in a household of five children.
When she finished high school in Zeitoun, where she majored in French, she went to work as a teacher at Notre Dame des Apôtres, the school where she had grown up. Because teaching did not appeal to her, she accepted a position at a bank.
Fathia Nkrumah’s Marriage with Kwame Nkrumah and her mother’s reservations
As reported by Frederick, a journalist from the United States who published her book in 1967, Nkrumah had asked his buddy, Alhaji Saleh Said Sinare, one of the first Ghanaian Muslims to study in Egypt, to locate him a Christian wife from Egypt, and Fathia was one of the final five women chosen.
At that point, Kwame Nkrumah proposed to her and she accepted. Her mother was apprehensive about seeing another of her children marry a foreigner and leave the nation, especially after Fathia’s brother had done so with his English bride a few years before.
She claimed that Nkrumah was an anti-colonial hero, similar to Nasser, but that her mother refused to speak with her or give her permission to marry Nkrumah. Following Fathia’s arrival in Ghana on New Year’s Eve 1957, Nkrumah married her at Christianborg Castle in Accra on the evening of New Year’s Eve 1957.
Relocation to Cairo
Fathia Nkrumah was a young mother of three children when her husband was toppled in Ghana’s first successful military coup d’état on February 24, 1966, leaving her to care for her children.
She was forced to relocate her children to Cairo, where they would be raised while her husband was in exile in Guinea.
Her children have all gone on to have successful careers in the political field. From 2011 to 2015, her daughter, Samia Nkrumah, served as the chairperson of the Convention People’s Organization (CPP), the Ghanaian political party founded by her father.
Death: Is Fathia Nkrumah alive?
She passed away on May 31, 2007, in Badrawy Hospital in Cairo, following a period of sickness. Fathia had suffered a stroke earlier that day.
On June 1, 2007, Pope Shenouda III officiated at a memorial service in the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral Church in Cairo, where she was laid to rest. Her body remains were then flown to Ghana for a state funeral at the State House, after which she was interred next to her husband at the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, in accordance with her “lifelong request.”
Kwame Nkrumah’s children
Fathia Nkrumahgave birth to three children during their marriage: Gamal (born 1959), Samia (born 1960), and Sekou (born 1962). (born 1963). Gamal works as a journalist for a newspaper, whereas Samia and Sekou are politicians.
Gamal Gorkeh Nkrumah
A Ghanaian journalist and Pan-Africanist, Gamal Gorkeh Nkrumah (born 1959) serve as the editor of Al Ahram Weekly, a weekly publication published in Egypt. The eldest of the Nkrumahs’ three sons, he is the son of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and his Egyptian wife, Fathia Nkrumah.
He got his doctorate in political science from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he had been studying since his childhood. He began his career as a political writer at Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo, where he stayed for more than 10 years.
Samia Yaba Christina Nkrumah
Samia Yaba Christina Nkrumah was born on the 23rd of June, 1960, in Accra, Ghana. She is a politician in Ghana who serves as the chairman of the Convention People’s Party (CPP). She won the Jomoro constituency seat in the 2008 parliamentary election on her first attempt. She is the daughter and the second child of Kwame Nkrumah.
Sekou Nkrumah
Sekou Nkrumah is the youngest of Kwame Nkrumah’s children.
He was given this name in honor of Sekou Toure, the President of Guinea and a close friend of Kwame Nkrumah.
Sekou received his education at Achimota School in Romania as well as the University of Bucharest. He married a Romanian woman during his time there.
