The United Gold Coast Convention was a political party whose aim was to bring about Ghanaian independence from British rule after the Second World War.
Native African merchants were, in the 1940s, ready to finance the organization of a political movement to assure their commercial interests. The party was founded by J. B. Danquah on 4 August 1947 as a combination of chiefs, academics and lawyers.
On 10 December 1947, Kwame Nkrumah returned to Ghana accepting Danquah's invitation to become party General Secretary. Big Six member Ebenezer Ako-Adjei recommended inviting Nkrumah, whom he had met at Lincoln University. Nkrumah was offered a salary of £250, Paa Grant paid the boat fare from Liverpool to Ghana. Danquah and Nkrumah disagreed over the direction of the independence movement and parted ways after two years. Nkrumah went on to form the Convention People's Party and later became the first president of independent Ghana.
The UGCC disbanded after performing poorly in the 1951 elections.
Famous quotes containing the words united, gold, coast and/or convention:
“Fortunately, the time has long passed when people liked to regard the United States as some kind of melting pot, taking men and women from every part of the world and converting them into standardized, homogenized Americans. We are, I think, much more mature and wise today. Just as we welcome a world of diversity, so we glory in an America of diversity—an America all the richer for the many different and distinctive strands of which it is woven.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“‘She has got rings on every finger,
Round one of them she have got three.
She have gold enough around her middle
To buy Northumberland that belongs to thee.”
—Unknown. Young Beichan (l. 61–64)
“What do we want with this vast and worthless area, of this region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, of shifting sands and whirlwinds, of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs; to what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts, or those endless mountain ranges, impenetrable and covered to their very base with eternal snow? What can we ever hope to do with the western coast, a coast of 3,000 miles, rockbound, cheerless, uninviting and not a harbor in it?”
—For the State of Kansas, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Every one knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister’s friends can’t or won’t. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)