Chief Moomen’s new play, Nkrumah Showboy Part 1: The Boy from Nkroful, held its main preview at the National Theatre on Friday, October 16. According to MyJoyOnline, this performance followed an initial showing at NkrumahFest ’26 in Nkroful a month earlier. The work examines the early life of Ghana’s first president, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, relying heavily on the experiences recounted in his own autobiography to shape the narrative.
MyJoyOnline reports that the drama is structured around the phrase “so much to do, so little time,” which functions as a recurring motif. This theme appears when the young Nkrumah, then a trainee teacher, learns of his father's death and again after the passing of his mentor, Dr Kwegyir Aggrey. The staging interprets this second loss as cumulative grief, tracing the impulse for haste back to 1927, twenty-two years before the formation of the Convention People's Party. The production aims to humanize the statesman by allowing the younger Nkrumah a sense of humour, uncertainty, and defiance, resisting the temptation to write the child as a miniature version of the future leader.
The performance involves a company of roughly 55 people, including 30 actors and an eight-member band. Moomen handled the writing, directing, and producing, following his previous work Mansa Musa and the Trail of Lost Gold. The soundtrack features a deliberate anachronism, blending highlife music for his time in the Gold Coast with Western styles for his years abroad, including covers of songs by Beenie Man, Shaggy, and Michael Jackson. MyJoyOnline noted that while the National Theatre audience, drawn from creative and media circles, sang along to these tracks, the earlier Nkroful audience showed a generational divide in their musical engagement.
The show is part of a broader effort to tell historical stories ahead of Ghana's seventieth independence anniversary. The main premiere is scheduled for March 2027, when the first and second parts will be performed together. Part 1 ends with Nkrumah's return to the Gold Coast in 1947, while Part 2 will cover his activism, governance, and eventual overthrow. The production’s central argument suggests that Nkrumah’s haste was a personal trait that later acquired a formal political vocabulary, a perspective that MyJoyOnline describes as a compelling way to put the question of his motivations on stage.