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

First, I want to thank Jeffrey Ahlman, Bright Gyamfi, and Tony Yeboah for generously agreeing to participate in an African Studies Review Book Forum on my book, Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War. I am honored that they have spent the time reading and engaging with my monograph. I am new to this genre, so my brief comments are intended to address two of the comments and questions they have posed or had after reading my work. I hope that my response is received in the same friendly disposition that the comments and questions were themselves articulated.

To address Gyamfi’s question, I attempted to demonstrate in Chapter Five that the radical socialists in Ghana, including Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana’s leader from 1957 to 1966), did indeed engage with, albeit with contempt, the other socialist ideas and projects, particularly what they labeled as “African Socialism,” coming out from certain quarters of East and West Africa. At their most generous position, the radical socialists in Ghana derided those ideas as corrupted forms of socialism for their failure to follow doctrinal Marxist teleology, particularly their disinterest in industrialization and their romanticization of life in pre-colonial African societies. In their harshest criticisms, they insisted that these other socialist ideas were not socialist at all, but fronts for Western neocolonialism. While I do mention that socialist teachers from Nigeria and Senegal taught at the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute in Winneba, one of the hotbeds of global socialist education, interaction, and global-pollination, unfortunately, I was unable to recover the specific debates and conversations attending students had with those figures (Chapter Five). I suspect that this discovery will be fascinating and enlightening to myself and others interested in continental debates about socialism in Africa.

Regarding Yeboah’s comment on my lack of sustained engagement with the historian and political aspirant Adu Boahen, this is certainly a very fair point. I agree that it was a missed opportunity to continue the circulation of Boahen’s ideas and writings within the Ghanaian historiographic circuit. However, I sought to elevate the works of scholars such as John Esseks and Kofi A. Tetteh—people who, in my estimation, understood the economic mechanisms operating in and underpinning Nkrumah’s Ghana more accurately into the broader historiographical record. I wanted to make them important parts of any future conversations “about the political and economic systems that guided Nkrumah’s Ghana.”

To conclude, I am extremely grateful that Ahlman, Gyamfi, and Yeboah have embraced, or at least acknowledged, some of the main arguments and contributions that I have sought to outline in Socialist De-Colony. First, the rejection of what I called, “postcolonial African archival pessimism,” and the recognition that postcolonial African archives remain rich sites simultaneously to write the histories of everyday Africans and postcolonial African and Cold War histories. In addition, as Ahlman notes in his review, they are important for exploring “the growth of a multi-scalar Ghanaian postcolonial pan-African socialist epistemic.” Second, that the socialist theorists in Ghana attempted to remake global socialism and that their ideas are important for how we think and write about socialism. Third, that the Ghana-Soviet space was a dynamic site of contested liberation, and as Ahlman sums up, a site “encompassing a contested, evolving, and transnational terrain of relationships, ideas, and even worldviews rooted in the ideals of a socialist political economy.” Indeed, I sought to argue that it was within these spaces that we can see a global Ghanaian national consciousness forming, what I called “racial citizenship moments,” and the importance of using race as an analytic to understand this moment in African and Cold War history. And finally, as the scholars point out, Socialist De-Colony sought to move beyond the “overcentering” of “diplomatic wranglings of the push and pull of high-level Cold War politics” to examine how ordinary Ghanaians influenced and shaped “Ghana’s foreign policy and global geopolitics.”

Again, I am grateful for this opportunity and to the reviewers, and I hope that readers will take the time to read the monograph, which one can download for free via Open Access thanks to a generous grant from Rice University’s Fondren Library, and to come to their own conclusions about the value (or not) of this monograph to postcolonial African and Cold War histories. Thank you.