Kwame Nkrumah Writes About his Real Date of Birth in his Autobiography

• Ghana's first president, Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, revealed in his autobiography that September 21 is not his actual date of birth
• According to Nkrumah, the date was a guess made by a Catholic priest when he needed to fill in a birth date on a form
• Nkrumah, however, indicates that he believes he was born on September 18, 1909, due to a story his mother told him

Osagyefo Doctor Kwame Nkrumah, the man who led Ghana to independence is recognized to have been born on September 21, 1909, and this birthday is usually marked as a holiday in Ghana.

However, in his autobiography, the first president of Ghana mentioned categorically that the date that is officially recognized to be his date of birth was actually a guess that was made by a priest who baptized him.

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Nkrumah's explanation in his own words

"The priest who later baptized me into the Roman Catholic Church recorded my birth date as 21st September, 1909. Although it was a mere guess on his part, I have always used this date on official documents, not so much because I believed in its accuracy, but in so far as officialdom was concerned, it was the line of least resistance," Nkrumah stated in Chapter 1, page 1 of his book.

Revealing why there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding his date of birth, Nkrumah also stated in his book that he was born in an era and area where nobody cared about taking birth records.

Nkrumah indicated that the people of Nzima at the time of the Gold Coast, measured the birth of their children by how many times the annual festival of Nzima called Kuntum took place after they were born.

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"According to my mother's calculations, forty-five Kuntums have taken place since I was born, which makes the year of my birth 1912," he said.

The most accurate date

Finally, Kwame Nkrumah stated that the date he has decided to accept as more accurate is September 18, 1909, as his mother told him about being born on a Saturday during an eventful shipwreck that took place around that time.

Woman claims to know Nkrumah's mother

Not long ago, YEN.com.gh published a story about Amodzie, an aged Ghanaian woman who has reportedly lived for 198 years after she granted an interview to Onua TV.

During the interview, Amodzie who currently lives at Subri in the Wassa East district of the Western Region said she had personally encountered the mother of Ghana's first president even before Kwame Nkrumah was born.

The aged woman also mentioned that during her youthful age, she was a native doctor and she was the one that gave Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s mother called Elizabeth Nyaniba traditional medications at the time when Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was in his mother’s womb.

Source: YEN.com.gh