Nana Osei-Opare has written a thought-provoking and deeply researched book that deserves slow, engaged, and open-minded reading. Socialist De-Colony challenges older interpretations of Cold War scholarship that treat nations in the Global South as glorified extras in a world drama featuring the United States, western Europe, and the USSR. However, it goes one step further, arguing that these “extras,” such as Ghana, were more than forgotten decolonies: they were a site of innovation that generated new thinking about race, economics, empire, development, identity, and nation.
Osei-Opare offers a multi-layered postcolonial history of Ghana that cross-pollinates the euphoria of formal independence and revolutionary nation-making with the heartbreak and pathos of building a postcolonial economy that aspired to be egalitarian and prosperous. He argues that Ghana’s socialist experiment (1957–66) was an intellectual, economic, and political project of decolonization that involved a cross-class coalition of intellectuals, technocrats, workers, students, and journalists. The country faced the enormous structural challenge of transitioning from a colonial and race-based economy. Ghana’s efforts to replace a lucrative British-controlled cocoa plantation economy powered by cheap native labor and embedded in global networks led to new solutions. Postcolonial nations in the Global South faced the dual burden of decolonization and development after obtaining independence. The challenge was to secure political sovereignty and create an economy without labor exploitation and intensive resource extraction.
There were deep disagreements and loud intellectual battles over what constituted national sovereignty, citizenship, and economics after gaining formal independence from the United Kingdom. Intellectuals such as George Padmore—who, like Manabendra Nath Roy, had lived in the USSR—were wary of replicating Soviet political or economic models. Others, including Kwame Nkrumah, the influential African leader who had been educated in elite institutions in the United Kingdom and the US, attempted to adapt elements of the Soviet NEP-era mixed economy by combining socialist planning with selective capitalist institutions.
Western critics accused Nkrumah of being a pawn of the USSR, but Soviet officials worried about his political reliability and that of his people. Their concerns were not unfounded. Though state-trained teachers and propagandists worked at the grassroots level in Ghana to disseminate socialist principles, they often encountered indifferent or skeptical audiences. Ghanaian socialism was innovative in that it incorporated Christianity into its worldview. Soviet built factories and mines that rarely delivered efficient modernity, often devolving into “ghost projects” of an aspirational Third World socialism. Osei-Opare shows that while socialist decolonies learned to curtail labor rights and repress trade unions, management lessons borrowed from both the USSR and capitalist economies, workers learned how to find a voice in national politics.
Osei-Opare probes the contradictions of post-imperial politics with a clear eye. Of the many voices featured in this book, however, we hear less from the practical builders of the economy—traders, farmers, bankers, and business owners, both small and large—and more from intellectuals, journalists, and technocrats inclined toward “planned systems” that validated their theoretical models of what an economy ought to look like. This imbalance reflects a broader tension in postcolonial historiography that tends to privilege economic theory over commercial practice, promises of radical egalitarianism in the future over improving living standards for the many in the present, and efficient governance for ideological orientations.
Finally, Osei-Opare analyzes the complications of race and racial categories in the making of empire, national identity, and subjectivity in Ghana and abroad. Race was embedded in the making of a global economy that relegated former colonial nations to supply cheap commodities and labor to the advanced countries of Europe and the US. Figures such as George Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah positioned Ghana’s independence as part of a broader Black international struggle and hosted anti-colonial activists from across Africa, and the diaspora in the US and the Caribbean. But racial solidarity did not automatically result in economic or political victories, and the struggle to build successful anti-imperial global alliances was a long and protracted one. The USSR, post-Soviet Russia, and countries in eastern Europe claimed to be anti-racist, but Osei-Opare argues that Ghanaian students continue to encounter violence and extreme racism in these capitals. Protests about the ill-treatment of Ghanaian students from the embassies and consulates have led to few investigations or prosecutions and are routinely dismissed as isolated incidents of “hooliganism.”
Many historians of postcoloniality and decoloniality celebrate “indigeneity,” nationalism, and ethno-nationalism of small countries without interrogating the larger force field in which these projects unfold. It is to Osei-Opare’s credit that he has written a nuanced and complicated account of a socialist decolony that analyzes the debates between individuals, nations, and empires, rather than finding evidence for a preferred ideological position or side in the Cold War, no mean feat for a first book.
