Erica Powell
Private secretary who served Kwame Nkrumah, founding president of Ghana, with a closeness that sparked marriage rumours
Erica Powell was an unlikely participant in, and eyewitness to, the shaping of modern Africa. A white Englishwoman who went to the British Gold Coast in West Africa as a secretary in the early 1950s, she was to become the private assistant to Kwame Nkrumah, the founding president of Ghana, the first African country to win independence, in 1957.
Powell was Nkrumah’s devoted assistant for more than a decade, until shortly before he was overthrown in a coup in 1966. During that time she was his almost constant companion in Ghana and accompanied him in state visits all over the world, as he was fêted as a pan-African hero, particularly in the communist bloc.
Her closeness, especially as a white woman, to Nkrumah at times…