1957 — Ghana Joins the United Nations

On March 8, 1957, just two days after independence, Ghana was admitted to the United Nations as its eighty-first member state. A nation only two days old took its seat among the countries of the world, its flag raised alongside theirs, its freedom now recognized in the world's great assembly.

Kwame Nkrumah's message was clear: Ghana's freedom was meaningless unless linked to the total liberation of Africa. Ghana wasted no time acting, deploying seven hundred and seventy troops to the Congo crisis in 1960 and building one of the world's great peacekeeping legacies, a service to the continent that began almost with independence itself.