The Panther and the Pan-Africanist: What a Forgotten 1972 Correspondence Reveals About the Movement's Fractures

The letters were nearly thrown away. In 2021, archivists cataloguing a water-damaged collection at a research institute in Accra found a manila folder of onionskin correspondence, most of it stuck together, addressed to a woman known only by her Ghana-given name: Efuru. It took two years of conservation work to separate the pages. What emerged is an extraordinary transatlantic conversation from 1971 and 1972 — a debate between an African American activist imprisoned in California and a diaspora radical living in exile in Conakry, in the orbit of the deposed Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah, wh…