Part of review forum on “Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War.”

Over the past decade-plus, the nature and utility of Africa’s postcolonial archives have garnered substantial attention from historians. Troubled by the silences that mark the continent’s postcolonial archival realities, scholars have sought alternatives—often outside the continent—in their attempts to reconstruct the continent’s postindependence past. In 2013, for instance, historian Jean Allman argued that so-called shadow archives offered paths toward filling the historical gaps created by postcolonial Africa’s archival holes. For Allman, who at the time was writing on Ghanaian transnational relationships, Africa’s shadow archives promised opportunities for history-writing that challenged the artificial linearity of state-centered historical narratives. In 2015, historian Luise White took up a similar argument, asking, among several related questions: “What do we do when there’s no archive?” (310). Complementing Allman, White promotes what she calls a “hodgepodge historiography”—a historiography that “begins with understanding states and policies and plans as a bricolage”—in the writing of African postcolonial histories (314).

Nana Osei-Opare’s pathbreaking Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War offers a methodological and empirical reframing of such arguments. More directly, the book challenges what, in a 2021 essay, Osei-Opare described as the “postcolonial African archival pessimism” seeping into discussions of Africanists’ histories of the postindependence period (59). In his initial essay, Osei-Opare questioned the underlying comparative assumptions embedded in much of the discourse as Africanist historians—sometimes explicitly and others tacitly—sought out archival practices and order analogous to those found in North America and Europe. Lost in what he feared was the potential sidelining of African archives in the writing of African histories were the multiplicity of voices found in the petitions, letters, partial notes, and other documents that remain hidden in archives defined by their inchoateness. It is in these documents, Osei-Opare suggests, that historians gain the opportunity to reconstruct the perspectives of the continent’s many different constituencies as they sought to have their voices heard amid a range of new states under construction (59–65). Osei-Opare’s answer in 2021, and one he picks up again in Socialist De-Colony, is specifically a turn to Ghana’s underutilized regional archives. However, Socialist De-Colony goes even further as Osei-Opare reads these debates as more than localized political and social conflicts. Rather, by putting them in conversation with a varied collection of American, British, and Russian archives, he presents them as foundational pieces in his exploration of a multi-scalar Ghanaian pan-African and socialist epistemic.

At the core of Socialist De-Colony is a reflection on the postindependence Ghanaian government’s relationship with the Soviet Union. Unlike most histories of this relationship, Socialist De-Colony avoids overcentering the diplomatic wranglings of high-level Cold War politics. Such a framing, for Osei-Opare, is too simplistic. Instead, he advocates for exploring this relationship through what he calls a “Ghana-Soviet space.” This “space,” he argues, “is both an epistemological concept and a mobile site” (6). In other words, he views the “Ghana-Soviet space” as encompassing a contested and evolving transnational terrain of relationships, ideas, and worldviews rooted in the ideals of a socialist political economy, questions of decolonization-era national and pan-African sovereignty, and commitments to fighting anti-Black racism. Eschewing quests for Marxist orthodoxy in his analysis, Osei-Opare importantly turns to works such as Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism as inspiration for showing the organic, adaptive role African peoples played in shaping and redefining Marxism to fit their unique goals, interests, and needs. Like Robinson, Osei-Opare rejects attempts to define such creativity as lacking in any way. Rather, he presents these attempts as part of a pluralistic retheorization of socialism to meet Africa’s postcolonial needs.

At one level, Socialist De-Colony is a major work of African intellectual history. However, Osei-Opare’s commitment to Ghana’s postcolonial archive provides Socialist De-Colony’s readers with another layer in deepening their understanding of Ghana’s postcolonial story. By putting Ghanaian regional archives in conversation with the many non-African archives he also worked in, Osei-Opare reconstructs how Ghanaians understood, pushed back against, and reframed the “Ghana-Soviet space.” To this end, he shows how workers contested what they viewed as the seemingly capricious actions of government officials in their work sites, while Ghanaian students in Eastern Bloc countries protested the anti-Black racism they faced in societies officially claiming to be beyond racism. In other chapters, Osei-Opare guides his readers through the negotiated politics of Soviet technocratic initiatives in the Ghanaian north, the longue durée of West African and diasporic socialist thought, and the definitional fights between “African socialism” and “socialism in Africa.”

In each of Socialist De-Colony’s chapters, Osei-Opare offers a nuanced and multilayered history of the “Ghana-Soviet space” and the role of socialist thought in Ghana. Just as importantly, the richness and depth of his analysis ought to encourage much more qualified takes on the state of the African postcolonial archive as well as experimental investigations of its potentiality. In many ways, Osei-Opare’s use of these archives is similar to how historians of the colonial era have utilized the colonial archive, reading with and against its grain and putting it into conversation with imperial archives and oral histories. The methodological question that underlies Socialist De-Colony, therefore, is not necessarily an either/or of local versus transnational archives, but instead what openings (and potential closings) do both the uniqueness and mundaneness of the postcolonial archive provide in writing Africa’s postindependence histories.