Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister and president of Ghana, possessed an enormous painting that hung in his foyer in the years following his country’s independence from British colonial rule in 1957. The painting depicts a massive black human figure, breaking chains of bondage as lightning tears across the sky and the earth trembles. In the foreground, three small, pallid men flee in terror: a colonial administrator, carrying a briefcase; a Christian missionary, cradling the Bible; and an anthropologist, holding a book entitled African Political Systems.