Jamaican academic had input in documentary about Kwame Nkrumah

A Jamaican professor from Atlanta, Georgia, was the historical consultant for a documentary about Ghana’s first prime minister and president, Kwame Nkrumah, that had its world premiere last week at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

The Eyes of Ghana by two-time Academy Award–winning Canadian director Ben Proudfoot, profiles the Ghanaian filmmaker Chris Hesse, who was the personal cameraman of Nkrumah.

Among its executive producers are Barack and Michelle Obama, through their production company, Higher Ground, and John Akomfrah, a respected Ghanaian-born British artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator.

Harcourt Fuller, a Jamaican scholar of Kwame Nkrumah who is an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia, flew to Toronto for the opening screening of the documentary.

“I did my PhD at the London School of Economics and in my dissertation, I studied Nkrumah and the ways he used national symbols to build this new nation-state called Ghana,” he said.

That was published as his first book, Building the Ghanaian Nation-State: Kwame Nkrumah’s Symbolic Nationalism, in 2014. Since then, he has published book chapters and academic journal articles about Nkrumah.

“So, I’ve become an expert on him and usually when there are projects about Nkrumah, people reach out to me,” he said, noting that Breakwater Studios in Los Angeles, California, asked him to be a historical consultant on the film.

Fuller is pleased to have a film that he worked on premiere at one of the top five most important film festivals in the world.

GREAT HONOUR

“That is such a great honour and I’m humbled by that, just to be a part of the diverse team,” he said, noting that members of the team were from the United States, Canada, and Ghana.

Fuller was also excited that The Eyes of Ghana was the opening documentary on the first day of the 11-day festival, which runs from September 4 to 14. He is working on a series about Nkrumah and a documentary about Nanny of the Maroons.

His multidisciplinary research and teaching expertise include the socio-political, cultural, and economic history of West Africa – Ghana in particular – and the African Diaspora in the Americas, particularly Jamaica, Peru, and Ecuador.

Fuller’s scholarship focuses on the history of resistance against slavery and colonialism, particularly through Marronage, as well as anti-colonial nationalism, trans-nationalism, symbolic nationalism, and the construction of national and ethno-national identity in the Africana World.

In The Eyes of Ghana, Hesse, who is now in his 90s, passes on his legacy to the younger filmmaker Anita Afonu. Thom Powers, the documentary programmer for TIFF, notes that “the power of cinema has a profound spokesperson in Chris Hesse who toiled in obscurity for six decades”.

“Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Hesse was the personal cameraman to Ghana’s revolutionary leader Kwame Nkrumah. That made him an eyewitness to Africa’s tumultuous liberation movement away from colonialist rule. Nkrumah was deposed in a coup and his rivals sought to destroy all his filmed records. But Hesse found a way to preserve over 1,300 reels. They’ve scarcely been seen since they were filmed.”

In his synopsis, Powers notes, “As Hesse nears the end of his life, we watch him share his legacy with the young Ghanaian filmmaker Anita Afonu, whose passion for cinema burns as brightly as his. Afonu’s dream is to reveal Hesse’s films to a new generation. She sets about trying to stage a public screening in Ghana’s capital Accra at The Rex, a once-grand outdoor cinema badly in need of repair.

“Afonu, Ghanaian-Canadian Nana Adwoa Frimpong, and Moses Bwayo are producers of the film while composer Kris Bowers provides the score.

“The director, Ben Proudfoot, has a gift for honouring overlooked figures and two of his short films where he does so have won Oscars. He met Hesse by happenstance and the two immediately recognized kindred spirits in one another. The coming together of all these talents is a cause for celebration,” said Powers.

The 90-minute documentary is in English, Twi and Ga. The 2025 Docs programme presented by A&E IndieFilms features 23 titles from 18 countries and 16 world premieres.