Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park
Where she lies beside Nkrumah. Open daily; the museum holds family photographs.
Ghana-Net.com · People of Ghana · Women of Ghana · Cairo & Accra · 1932–2007
On the last evening of 1957, a young Egyptian woman stepped off a plane in Accra, was driven to Christiansborg Castle, and married the Prime Minister of Ghana that same night. She had probably never met him before. Her mother had refused to give her blessing. Fathia Rizk, a Coptic teacher from a modest Cairo suburb, became the first First Lady of independent Ghana and the living symbol of Kwame Nkrumah's dream of one Africa, north and south of the Sahara. Eight years later she fled a coup with three small children on a plane sent by Nasser. She never saw her husband again. Forty-one years later she came back to Accra, to be buried at his side.
Fathia Halim Rizk was born in the early 1930s (most sources give 22 February 1932, some 1931) in Zeitoun, a district of Cairo. She was the eldest of five children in a Coptic Christian family; her father, a clerk with the Egyptian telephone company, died when she was young, and her widowed mother raised the children. She was educated by Catholic sisters at the school of Notre Dame des Apôtres, where she learned French, studied Arabic at the University of Cairo, and worked as a teacher and later as a bank clerk.
In 1957 Kwame Nkrumah, newly Prime Minister of independent Ghana, was still unmarried at 48. He wanted a wife, and he wanted his marriage to say something. A bride from Egypt would link black Africa with Arab North Africa, and Nkrumah's Ghana with Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt, the two leading anti-colonial states of the continent. It was a pan-African marriage, arranged with the help of Nasser's government.
Her side of it: Fathia was not simply chosen. She wanted to go. She admired Nkrumah as a freedom fighter like Nasser and argued with her mother, who did not want a daughter marrying a foreigner and leaving Egypt. She went with the blessing of the state, one uncle for company, and not her family's approval.
Fathia flew into Accra on 31 December 1957. That same evening she and Nkrumah were married in a private civil ceremony at Christiansborg Castle in Osu, the old Danish castle that had become the seat of government. According to most accounts it was the first time the two had met in person. Ghanaians woke up on New Year's Day 1958 to learn that their Prime Minister had a wife who spoke Arabic and French but not English or Twi.
The castle where they married had been built by the Danes for gold and slaves; see the Danish Gold Coast and Christian Protten, who taught there two centuries earlier.
She learned English, took on the duties of a head of state's wife, and had three children: Gamal (born 1958 or 1959), Samia (1960) and Sékou (1963), named for Nasser and for Guinea's Sékou Touré, two of Nkrumah's closest allies. She was patron of charities and welfare work, received foreign guests, and travelled with her husband, but she kept away from party politics.
As threats against Nkrumah multiplied in the 1960s, after bomb attacks and an assassination attempt, the family moved from the castle to the heavily guarded Flagstaff House, where the presidency sits today. It was a lonely life: a foreigner in a capital increasingly divided about her husband.
On 24 February 1966, while Nkrumah was flying to Hanoi via Beijing on a peace mission to Vietnam, soldiers and police under Ankrah and Afrifa overthrew his government. Flagstaff House, with Fathia and the children inside, was attacked and fought over; the presidential guard resisted before surrendering.
Nasser sent a plane. Fathia and her three children, the eldest just seven, were flown out of Accra to Cairo. See Ghana's coups, 1966–1983.
Nkrumah went into exile in Conakry, where Sékou Touré made him honorary co-president of Guinea. Fathia stayed in Cairo with the children. They did not live together again. Nkrumah died of cancer in a Bucharest clinic on 27 April 1972, and was buried first in Guinea, then in his birthplace Nkroful, and finally, in 1992, in the mausoleum in Accra.
Fathia and the children later returned to live in Ghana, but the 31 December 1981 coup that brought Rawlings back to power drove the family out again. She lived the rest of her life in Cairo.
The next generation: all three children stayed connected to Ghana. Gamal Nkrumah became a journalist in Cairo; Samia Nkrumah entered Ghanaian politics, sat in Parliament for Jomoro from 2009 to 2013, and led her father's Convention People's Party; Sékou also lives between Ghana and abroad.
Fathia Nkrumah died of a stroke at the Badrawy Hospital in Cairo on 31 May 2007, aged about 75. Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Church led a memorial mass for her in Cairo's Coptic Orthodox Cathedral. Then, as she had asked all her life, her body was flown to Accra for a state funeral and buried beside her husband in the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, on the old Polo Ground where he had declared independence.
A detail most visitors miss: the mausoleum is always described as Nkrumah's tomb. It is also the grave of a Coptic woman from Cairo who crossed Africa to marry him and came back after death to lie beside him.
Where she lies beside Nkrumah. Open daily; the museum holds family photographs.
Osu Castle, where she married on New Year's Eve 1957. See the forts of Accra.
Today's Jubilee House, the presidency, stormed in 1966. Viewed from outside only.
The city hub, with everything else to see.
Fathia Nkrumah's marriage began as a political statement, and the history books have mostly left her there: a symbol of pan-Africanism standing next to a great man. But she was a person who made a brave and strange choice at 25, learned a new language and a new country, raised three children through bomb threats and a coup, and then lived most of her life apart from the husband she had crossed a continent to marry. She held no office and wanted none. Her grave in the Memorial Park is the quiet reminder that the union of Africa Nkrumah dreamed of was also, for one Cairo teacher, a very personal thing.
Verified: 30 September 2026. Her Coptic family in Zeitoun, her education, her marriage at Christiansborg Castle on the evening of her arrival on 31 December 1957, her three children, the departure for Cairo on a plane sent by Nasser after the coup of 24 February 1966, her death at the Badrawy Hospital in Cairo on 31 May 2007, the memorial mass by Pope Shenouda III and her burial beside Nkrumah in the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park follow Wikipedia, Encyclopedia.com (Women in World History), Women of Egypt magazine and GhanaWeb. Her year of birth is given as 1931 or 1932 in different sources. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.