Zambia Nkrumah: A life well lived She kept her roots to the end

Love Lives ... The following is an article about a wonderful, mature woman who touched my life and the lives of hundreds of people in Louisville, Ky and beyond. I'm reprinting it here so that it doesn't get lost when the local paper moves on to other "news".

The author is Paula Burba | pburba@courier-journal.com

original source = The Courier-Journal - June 27, 2010 13:55 PM

Preparing for her daughter's celebration of life ceremony on June 17, Mary Bridges Gully reflected: "My daughter lived a full life. She didn't live long, but she lived strong."

Her daughter, Zambia Nkrumah, was 56 when she died June 13 of breast cancer at her Louisville home.

"She went out of here kicking and screaming," said her husband, Edward "Nardie" White. "Her last breaths were, 'I am not going to die.' That was her spirit.

"That's why I married her, because she was one of the strongest individuals that I know and one of the giving-est individuals that I know," he said.

Nkrumah was a teacher for 30 years, but her passion for education extended far beyond the classroom. A dancer and storyteller, she worked behind the scenes for community arts groups including the River City Drum Corps, which her husband started nearly 20 years ago and still leads.

As a young woman inspired by the Pan-African philosophy advocated by Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, she cast off her given name, Cleo Gully, early in life.

"She was what I consider to be a keeper of the African culture, and honors all other cultures," said Nana Yaa Asantewaa, also known as Mama Yaa, founder of the Arts Council of Louisville. "She was a person who never ever had a stranger in her life."

Nkrumah took strangers in as family, leaving behind not only her mother; husband; daughter, Aha; son (she didn't use "stepson"), Raynard; two brothers and her grandchildren; but also 16 people she called her "godchildren."

Willing to teach anyone

"She was always teaching. That was her vocation; it wasn't just a job," said one of those godchildren, Aminata Cairo.

"She was tough," said Cairo, demanding nothing but a person's best, but in such a way that her students knew it was out of love.

Cairo met Nkrumah at an arts festival in Louisville when she was a 21-year-old Berea College student from the Netherlands, with no family in the United States. Her sponsors had booked her just one night of lodging and she was telling a friend she wished she could stay for the entire festival. Nkrumah overheard her and said, "'Well, you can stay at my house.'"

"It was just instant family," said Cairo, now a 44-year-old anthropology professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. "She has been present at any major event in my life," she said -- every graduation ceremony, both of her weddings and the births of Cairo's three children.


"The bond is so special that you think you're the only one, but all of us feel that way," Cairo said of Nkrumah's extended family. "It's totally open, unconditional love."

"She was willing to teach anyone that was willing to learn," said 14-year-old George Allen, a member of the River City Drum Corps since he was 11.

His mother, Anna Allen, is a volunteer administrative assistant for the group. "She spent a lot of quality time with the kids, educated them on not just reading and writing, but how to come together, be a team," she said.

Days before Nkrumah died, Allen and another friend were praying with Nkrumah when the teacher told them earnestly, "We've got to get these children ready for this world," Allen said. "Then she nodded back out."

Never afraid of too much

"If Zambia wanted something, she done it; what she wanted, where she wanted and with who she wanted to do it with," her mother said. "You didn't tell her too much (what to do). ... She was never afraid of too much.

Nkrumah had attended the old St. Philip Neri School for a year, where "she was the only black child in that school," her mother said. She completed fourth to eighth grades at the old Immaculate Heart of Mary Elementary School -- to which she would return decades later. The old school building is now headquarters for the River City Drum Corps. They call it "The House of Dreams."

"She was always organizing something, even in high school," Gully said. Nkrumah attended the old Loretto High School, a Catholic all-girls' school in the West End that closed in 1973.


After high school, Nkrumah took off to help organize fruit pickers in Florida, White said. When she returned to Louisville, she got a job as a teacher's aide.

She enrolled at the University of Kentucky and earned an education degree with certification in special education. Nkrumah taught three years in Lexington before getting a job at Hazelwood Hospital teaching children with severe disabilities.

"She had 10 children (in class) and watched seven of them die," White said, and Nkrumah felt that was too much for her. So she went to Westport Middle School, teaching social studies there and later at Knight Middle School.

Her cancer diagnosis in 2002 forced Nkrumah to retire the next year, but that didn't mean she was finished teaching. "She was working with me at the Drum Corps until the day she died," White said.


He recalled how difficult it was for his wife to leave the classroom. "That was the hardest days of our lives, to go and take her stuff from school," he said.

She thought he wasn't serious

The couple met during Christmas season, White said. He was director of the Parkland Boys and Girls Club and wanted to hold an event for Kwanzaa, which begins Dec. 26. A friend told him Nkrumah was the local Kwanzaa authority.

She came to the club, he said, and told him: "'You need to do this, this, this and this.' She was very mean to me, very mean to me," he said, because she thought he wasn't serious enough about the event to do the work.

He took a list of things needed from her, got every item on it and called her. "'I got this, this, this and this. Everything you put on that list I got,'" he told Nkrumah. "'And I need for you to come do what you said you were going to do.'" She was impressed, and they soon became friends, frequently planning cultural programs together. Nkrumah's encouragement pushed him to build the River City Drum Corps.


Despite her illness, last year at Kwanzaa, she still danced. "These rhythms beat in her heart eternally and so when she heard the drummers drumming, she could not resist," said Asantewaa. "She got up, and she did African dancing."

Nkrumah had been education director for Education Arts Inc. at the Presbyterian Center in Smoketown and for 16 years toured with the Kentuckiana African-American Arts Series troupe, which performed twice in Ghana at PanaFest, a festival of African culture and history.

"She and I made our very first trip to Africa together," Asantewaa said. "It's like she's been in my life forever."

Nkrumah was Asantewaa's apprentice before becoming a storyteller in her own right, Asantewaa said, and was always fond of a particular tale.


"There was a story I think she just fell in love with about roots, it was about a tree. ... It's a heritage story to demonstrate when you lose your roots, (when) you lose your ability to hold on to your culture, you die."

"Living with my wife was an adventure," White said. "We've done some wonderful things all in the name of adventure."

Nkrumah planned her funeral "down to a T," he said, including telling people where to sit. "'Because you got all these personalities and I don't want no drama at my funeral,'" she told him.