Part of review forum on “Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War.”
Socialist De-Colony is a novel exploration of Ghana–Soviet “entanglements” since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, but with a focus on the period in which Kwame Nkrumah served as both the prime minister and president of Ghana in the 1950s and 1960s respectively. While Nkrumah is a key figure, it foregrounds how Ghanaians grappled with their precarious independence in a bipolarized world, which was bifurcated into the sharply contrasting Eastern and Western ideological blocs. Thus, although the monograph centers on Ghana, it should be read within African and global contexts because of its intersection with decolonization, racism, and the Cold War. With an existing connection with the West through colonialism, Ghanaians sought Soviet diplomatic relations with the fundamental aim of curtailing neocolonial exploitation. However, in attempts to safeguard its independence and being aware of anti-Black racism from both competing blocs, Nkrumah and his Ghana pursued the “socialist state-capitalist” socioeconomic policy, which as Osei-Opare has meticulously illustrated, was an important endeavor “in reclaiming the importance and value of African and Black leadership” (9). Although Ghanaian intellectuals embraced the ideological and economic policies from the Soviet State, everyday Ghanaian socialists used the diplomatic relations to shape global geopolitics and connections. Osei-Opare has theorized this within a fascinating framework called the “Ghana-Soviet space.”
Socialist De-Colony is structured into two parts, and the numerous interventions are weaved around it. The first part explores the diplomatic and material evidence of Ghana’s entanglements with the Soviet Union, highlighting how the country’s postcolonial aspirations for a socialist state-capitalist modernity panned out. A key intervention in this part is the idea that Ghanaians, both home and abroad, mobilized their experiences of racism to create new national awareness. Osei-Opare calls this the “racial citizenship moments,” in which he postulates that racist and antiracist experiences provided a rallying point for Ghanaians to create nationalist consciousness in addition to the top-down approach championed by the Nkrumah-led government. And creatively, Ghana becomes a “mobile space” because these racial citizenship moments of “being (or becoming) Ghanaian” occurred worldwide.
Part Two examines Ghana’s political economy under Nkrumah. At the heart of it is the argument that the Nkrumah-led government intentionally pursued both capitalist and socialist policies. It shows how Ghanaians embraced the economic philosophy of the Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin, who, contrary to popular view, favored capitalism as an essential component of a socialist state. Nkrumah’s administration then became a global symbol of Marxist-Leninist socialism in the 1960s. Yet still, within Ghana and African historiography, Nkrumah’s capitalist leanings have overwhelmingly been restricted to the support he received from American and Canadian investors, particularly regarding the construction of the most ambitious project of his administration, the Akosombo Dam. Osei-Opare has provided numerous other evidence such as the 1963 Capital Investments Act, which encouraged private investors, while at the same time the government pursued socialist policy as a strategy for neutralizing Western capitalist exploitation.
Given that Part Two focuses on Nkrumah’s economic policies, I wondered if it was useful to have centered some of the famous and critical studies of Nkrumah’s administration particularly within this sector. Clearly, Socialist De-Colony, even if not explicit, has substantially challenged the argument by the prominent Ghanaian historian, Adu Boahen, that Nkrumah’s shift towards “authoritarian socialism” and “state control” was disastrous to the country. I wondered if foregrounding and deconstructing Boahen’s arguments would have been useful in furthering knowledge, generating future conversations, and ultimately deepening the advancement of scholarship about the political and economic systems that guided Nkrumah’s “socialist state-capitalist” government.
The interventions in Socialist De-Colony are made possible through its exhaustive research methodology, which is characterized by the archives and newspapers from around the world. For a story in which Nkrumah is a key actor, Osei-Opare has been excellent in assembling evidence from regional archives and newspapers instead of from national sources. This rigorous in-depth methodology allowed stories of everyday Ghanaians and non-politicians to be grounded in Nkrumah’s Ghana, and it facilitated the generation of another key intervention, the “provinciality of freedom.” Central to this methodology is the rejection of what Osei-Opare calls the “postcolonial African archival pessimism,” a framework which basically rules out the postcolonial African archive as worthless in recuperating the African past. Rather, it is argued that if scholars put aside their Western lens and reimagine the postcolonial African archive on its own merits, they can use it to “reclaim the voices of Africans scattered throughout them” (15). To this end, Socialist De-Colony is an exemplary monograph, in terms of both its thematic and methodological conceptualizations.
