William Emmanuel Abraham

William Emmanuel Abraham, born in 1934, is a Nigerian-born Ghanaian retired philosopher known for his work on Pan-Africanism and African philosophy. He became the first African elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, headed the Philosophy Department at the University of Ghana, and served as an informal adviser to President Kwame Nkrumah in the early 1960s before becoming Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana in 1965. He later held philosophy professorships at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at Macalester College in Minnesota. His 1962 book The Mind of Africa is a foundational work on Pan-Africanism, African identity and society, and he also studied the eighteenth-century Ghanaian philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo and the metaphysics and logic of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.