Socialist De-Colony - Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana''s Cold War

Led by the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana won its political independence from the United Kingdom in 1957. It precipitated both the dying spiral of colonialism across the African continent and the world's first Black socialist state. Utilising materials from Ghanaian, Russian, English, and American archives, Nana Osei-Opare offers a provocative and new reading of this defining moment in world history through the eyes of workers, writers, students, technical-experts, ministers, and diplomats. Osei-Opare shows how race and Ghana-Soviet spaces influenced, enabled, and disrupted Ghana's transformational socialist, Cold War, and decolonization projects to achieve Black freedom. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

List of contents

Introduction; Part I. Ghana-Soviet Entanglements: 1. 'Highlife solidarity': white supremacy and black postcolonial statecraft; 2. Ghost projects: contested cold war scientific-technical liberation zones; 3. Racial citizenship moments: social diplomacy and the cold war; Part II. Socialist Dreams: 4. Black marxists and the character of an African leninist economy; 5. Socialism reconsidered: the domestication and worldmaking of socialism; 6. Utopias, dystopias, labor, and socialist 'contradictions'; Conclusion: 'forward ever, backward never'; Bibliography; Index.

About the author

Nana Osei-Opare is Assistant Professor of History at Rice University. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities/Ford Foundation Fellow at the Schomburg Center (2023–2024) and an Andrew J. Mellon Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies (2022–2023). He coedited Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World (Bloomsburg, 2024).

Product details

• Authors: Nana Osei-Opare, Nana (Rice University Osei-Opare
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 31.12.2025
• EAN: 9781009601436
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0960143-6
• No. of pages: 348
• Series: Global and International History
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Ghana, Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000, HISTORY / Africa / General, African History, Former Soviet Union, USSR (Europe), USSR, Soviet Union, The Cold War, c 1945 to c 2000 (Post-war period), c 1945 to c 1990 (the Cold War period), Cold wars and proxy conflicts