Today would have marked her 93rd birthday if she were still alive.
Former First Lady Fathia Nkrumah holds a near-mythical place in postcolonial Ghanaian history. Her skin colour mattered as she was not a Black African.
Her native country mattered as Egypt is ancient, biblical, and mystical.
Yet, she is primarily known for one thing; being the wife of Ghana’s first president.
Read the full story originally published on June 15, 2024, by www.ghanaweb.com.
Without the light and glamour of her husband’s eminence, Fathia remains largely unknown to those who should know her. This is unsurprising, as Nkrumah towered over most who stood close to him.
Of course, there is also the age-old tradition in which women are expected to passively adorn and humanize their husbands, leaving their own stories untold.
But Fathia Halim Ritzk held her own. Born into a middle-class Egyptian family in 1932, she was raised by her widowed mother alongside four siblings. Her father, a clerk at a telephone company in Cairo, passed away when she was young.
Her family was Coptic. She attended Zeitoun’s Notre Dame des Apôtres (Our Lady of the Apostles), where she became fluent in French.
After school, Fathia briefly taught at her alma mater but found little enthusiasm for the job. Instead, she pursued work at a bank where fate and politics found her.
The path to becoming Mrs. Nkrumah
About 2,500 miles southwest of Egypt, a young intellectual was becoming a thorn in the side of the British colonial government in the Gold Coast.
Kwame Nkrumah had quickly established himself as the people’s man in the country he would later lead to independence. The colonial administrators were displeased.
When Nkrumah impregnated Isis Nashid, an Egyptian working for the colonial government, he had to keep it hidden.
In a little-known story revealed in 2015 by Souad El Rouby Sinare, Nashid had to leave Nkrumah and the Gold Coast, returning to Egypt, where she quickly married to avoid the shame of having a child out of wedlock.
Nkrumah, meanwhile, remained focused on the freedom struggle.
Shortly after the episode with Nashid, businessman and personal friend Said Saleh Sinare convinced Nkrumah to find a wife, preferably the woman who had borne his child in Egypt.
Instead of Nashid, however, they found Fathia, who was available and willing.
Souad Sinare recounted, “When we informed Dr. Nkrumah of our find of a bride-to-be, he was very happy. He even informed the President of Egypt, Gamel Abdel Nasser, who was pleased that his friend had decided to marry from his country.”
Fathia and Nkrumah had never met before. But she was excited even though her mother disapproved of the idea of marrying a foreigner.
Her brother had already married an English woman in the 1950s and moved away. Fathia tried to convince her mother that Nkrumah, like Nasser, was a freedom fighter. But the older woman would not be swayed.
Determined, Fathia traveled to Ghana in 1957 to marry a man she knew only by reputation. She arrived with only one uncle, without her family’s blessings.
A life in Ghana
Fathia’s first son, Gamel Nkrumah, later reflected on his mother’s isolation, “The new bride, who had cut herself off from her family and country by marrying Nkrumah, was isolated in more ways than one.”
She spoke little to no English, and Nkrumah spoke neither French nor Arabic. But she was determined that by the end of her first year in Ghana, she was delivering speeches in English.
Despite the initial language barrier, Fathia was happy not only in her marriage but also in Ghana. Unlike Egypt, Ghanaian society in the early 1960s was not as conservative.
The Ghanaian women she met were fiercely independent, educated, and wealthy. She endeared herself to a powerful group of “market women” who controlled the trade of wax prints and the famous traditionally woven kente cloth.
So influential were these women that they named a type of kente after her, “Fathia fata Nkrumah” Akan for “Fathia is perfect for Nkrumah.”
But before winning their admiration, she faced resentment. The women’s wing of Nkrumah’s own Convention People’s Party (CPP) was outraged that he was marrying a “white woman.”
They openly expressed their disappointment. Nkrumah had to reassure them that, despite her skin color, Fathia was African.
This tension mirrors modern debates about the Africanness of North Africans.
Some also questioned whether Nkrumah saw Fathia as a tool for his Pan-Africanist ambitions.
Gamel Nkrumah once wrote, “It was not meant to be a marriage made in heaven. It was a political union between Mediterranean-oriented North Africa and the rest of the continent, often pejoratively termed sub-Saharan or Black Africa.”
Carina Ray, writing in 2006, also noted, “The US State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were rumored to be primarily concerned with whether the marriage was intended to create a political union between Egypt and Ghana.”
Whether she was a political pawn or a beloved wife, Fathia Nkrumah found purpose in her role and played it well.
Before traveling to Ghana, she had spoken to President Nasser, who wanted to ensure she truly wished to become the wife of a powerful man from a distant land.
The young woman reiterated her readiness perhaps naively.
Despite cultural shocks and Ghana’s vastly different climate, Fathia hosted some of the world’s most powerful leaders, acting as an unofficial envoy for her country.
Life after Kwame Nkrumah
In 1966, when Fathia’s eldest child was only seven, Nkrumah was overthrown in a coup. Fathia, then just 34, fled with her three children to Egypt once again an outsider looking in.
It is unclear if she ever saw Nkrumah again before his death in 1972.
Still, her ties to Ghana remained.
She was invited to return, and in 1979, she cradled Nkrumah’s mother, Nyaneba, in her arms as the 102-year-old matriarch passed away.
Feeling that those who truly loved her were gone, Fathia left Ghana again this time by choice.
She returned in 1997 for Ghana’s 40th independence anniversary.
In 2007, she passed away in Cairo at the age of 75.
Fathia had been a young woman with grand convictions but was also a victim of political machinations.
Above all, she had dared to follow her dreams and that is what likely matters most.