Hello and welcome to a new episode of Legacy.

I'm Peter Franke-Apurn.

I'm Afwa-Hash.

And this is Legacy, the show that explores the lives, events and ideas that have shaped our world

and asks whether they have the reputations that they truly deserve.

This is Kwame and Krumer, part four, rise and fall.

Thank you. rise and forth. Okay, Peter, let's just check in with where we are.

Back in the Gold Coast, it's 1947, just after the Second World War, there's tens of

thousands of Ghanaian servicemen who fought for Britain in

Burma, across Asia, they've come back to the Gold Coast, demanding the things they were promised

from Britain and expecting some kind of change to the colonialism and limited opportunity they had before

the war.

It's been happening in other parts of the former British Empire too.

The Second World War, like all wars, is shattering both on human lives, but also on economies.

And so the apparatus of an empire, suddenly you have an exhausted Britain, which is struggling to hang on to its overseas appendages and the places that it's extracted from.

And also because the empire has been going off for quite a long time,

it's managed to get lots of all the good stuff out over the previous couple of hundred years.

So suddenly there's a kind of change of attitude in Britain about what an empire looks like. You see

the independence movements in places like India start to bring about enormous shifts of people,

geopolitics, you know, transformational. And so that process of what's going to happen in West Africa

starts to become live too, because the devastation that's been caused by the war to West

Africans, to Indians, to people in Southeast Asia has been absolutely epic. So some of it is about

...