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

Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War by Nana Osei-Opare examines the “Ghana-Soviet space” as a robust site where workers, writers, students, technical experts, ministers, and diplomats debated the meanings and import of socialism in Ghana. Osei-Opare notes that while the Nkrumah government regarded itself as a socialist regime, it equally embraced capitalist economic policies. Consequently, Osei-Opare argues that “the people in Ghana tried to forge a socialist state-capitalist society that would navigate the perils of fundamentally transforming a colonial economy, creating a new citizenry (Black subject), and a new African” (5). At the core of Socialist De-Colony lies a fundamental question: how to build a newly liberated nation-state amid Cold War politics, European colonial domination, and anticolonial freedom struggles for independence.

Drawing on oral interviews as well as government and institutional records in Ghana, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Osei-Opare investigates the ways in which the Ghana-Soviet space, as “both an epistemological concept and a mobile site” offered Ghanaians an avenue to “decolonize and delink its economy and its political formation away from white supremacist structures and imperial and colonial powers” (6). He asserts that just because the Soviet Union was regarded as a world power did not mean that it simply dominated its interactions with Ghanaians. Thus, Osei-Opare uses presidential correspondence, diplomatic exchanges, workers’ petitions, technocratic policy drafts, and student protests to reveal how the Ghana-Soviet space served as a site of contested liberation. At the same time, Osei-Opare invites scholars to take seriously the utopian aspirations and contradictions that animated socialist worldmaking in postcolonial Africa.

The book, organized into two parts, begins in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution and concludes in 1966, when Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup. The first part, which comprises the first three chapters, focuses on “Ghana-Soviet Entanglements.” Chapter One examines how, from the 1940s to the 1960s, Black Marxists and anti-colonial activists navigated Western imperial structures that sought to suppress anti-colonial movements. At the same time, the chapter also analyzes how factors such as anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and anti-colonial politics informed the newly independent Ghanaian state and which foreign states it considered as “friends.” Chapters Two and Three investigate how African-Soviet technoscience and infrastructure development projects became contested sites where Ghanaians registered their concerns about ethnic and racial discrimination and abuse they experienced from their Soviet and Western colleagues. Osei-Opare argues that these experiences, which he calls “Racial Citizenship Moments,” instilled in them “a global Ghanaian national consciousness.” Part Two, which covers the last three chapters, focuses on “Socialist Dreams.” Chapters Four, Five, and Six examine how Ghanaian socialists sought to actualize the vision of the Ghanaian state to create a socialist and capitalist economy. At the heart of these chapters were the lives, intellectual discourses, and working conditions of those who carried out this project. Osei-Opare concludes the book by centering the ways in which anti-Black violence and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have shaped the contemporaneous nature of Ghana–Russia relations.

Osei-Opare’s significant contributions lie in his persuasive argument that the Ghana-Soviet space was not simply an epistemological concept for nation-building; rather, it was a dynamic, vibrant, and contested site that became directly entangled with the daily lives of Ghanaians in both Ghana and the Soviet Union. As a result, Osei-Opare powerfully shows how ordinary Ghanaians, especially students, also influenced Ghana’s foreign policy and global geopolitics while concurrently navigating Nkrumah’s increasingly authoritarian rule and the anti-Black politics and racism in the Soviet Union. An equally important intervention is how Osei-Opare’s work centers Ghanaian socialists not merely as intellectuals who borrowed Western socialist ideas, but rather as intellectuals, in their own right, who sought to theorize a new form of socialism based on the particularities of the Ghanaian nation in order to “transform global socialism and rescue socialism from its Western-centric and imperial self” (20). Yet one key aspect of African socialism was the way that it transcended the borders of the nation-state and linked to a larger story of African liberation and anti-colonialism. It would be interesting to know more about how ordinary Ghanaians, especially students, also engaged with other socialist ideas from various parts of the continent.

Osei-Opare’s brilliant examination of the Ghana-Soviet space will be of great interest to scholars of socialism, decolonization, nation-building, early postindependence nationalism, the Soviet Union, race, racism, and Cold War politics. Osei-Opare’s insightful book is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate audiences.