This thesis examines how Frantz Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah can be understood as political theorists confronting the persistence of imperial hierarchy after formal decolonization. Rather than treating independence as the achievement of genuine freedom, I argue that both thinkers recognized a deeper problem. Newly independent states entered an international order that granted juridical sovereignty while preserving major inequalities in economic power, political authority, and institutional influence. To analyze this problem, I draw on Adom Getachew's concept of worldmaking, which reframes anticolonial thought not simply as a struggle for national independence but as a broader effort to transform the global structures that outlived empire.
The thesis argues that Fanon and Nkrumah developed distinct but related responses to this post-imperial condition. Across four chapters, the thesis reconstructs Getachew's theoretical framework, rereads Fanon as a theorist of rupture and political beginning, interprets Nkrumah as a thinker of institutional worldmaking, and finally considers how contemporary African politics reflects a shift from transformative anticolonial ambition toward reform within an unequal global order. Taken together, I argue that Fanon and Nkrumah were not simply concerned with governing new states. They were grappling with how to remake a world whose fundamental institutions remained shaped by empire. Their work, read together, reveals both the ambition of anticolonial political thought and the enduring limits of postcolonial sovereignty.