Introduction

In the 1950s and 1960s, Ghana was the heartbeat of socialist and liberationist movements not simply in Africa but around the world. Leftist thinkers in Ghana and from around the world shared multiple and competing ideas about socialist nationalist development projects and the meanings of African and Black freedom in Ghana. Sites such as secondary schools, universities, the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute in Winneba (Institute) – a Ghana-based socialist educational center and think tank, newspapers, magazines, lectures, and conferences became forums where global socialist ideas found expression and character. They were sites where formerly colonized people were being transformed into state and global socialist citizens.

Once suppressed under British colonialism, socialism, Marxism, and the histories and living conditions of China, Cuba, and the nations behind the Iron Curtain became widely disseminated and debated in Ghana. Rather than a singular definition of or state-led construction of socialist principles, people in the socialist de-colony were introduced to varieties and conflicting conceptions of socialism and Marxism. These socialist theorists were Marxist-socialist nation-and-world-builders.Footnote ¹ They grounded their ideas about the nature and tenants of socialism within local and global debates and paradigms. In so doing, they were simultaneously domesticating socialism in Ghana, decolonizing socialism from its European roots, and remaking it globally.

This chapter then unpacks how socialists in Ghana were being made and the multifaceted debates that animated them, such as: socialism’s relationship to Black liberation, whether socialism could be reconciled with religious belief; morality in a socialist African society;Footnote ² the importance of creating a nation of Marxist-Socialists and how to do it; the historicization and historical accuracy of an egalitarian precolonial African society; or whether they were building “African Socialism” or “socialism in Africa.” Whereas global histories of socialism have often understood and framed Nkrumah’s Ghana as a key embodiment or leading charge of “African Socialism,” this chapter argues that from the onset leading socialist theorists in Ghana rejected that association. They called African Socialism reactionary and neocolonial, arguing that the historical and ideological premises underpinning African Socialism were ahistorical and dangerous. They maintained that African Socialism situated African societies and its histories outside of world history, corrupted their conceptions of socialism, and constrained African and Black liberation.

Underlying this chapter’s arguments is the contestation that portrayals of Nkrumah’s government as an environment underpinned by the increasing suppression of dissent and freedom of speech is untenable when we move beyond the narrow confines that situate discussions of Western liberal political, social, and economic traditions as indicative of an open, pluralistic society.Footnote ³ Whereas the British colonial government had previously shut down public debates on socialism and Marxism in its African colony, confiscated and banned books on African liberation, socialism, and communism, and unleashed a global security apparatus to spy on and incarcerate people on the basis of ideology and political thought as seen in the previous chapters, this chapter shows that a multiplicity of socialist ideas and knowledge about different societies and political-economic systems were courted and flourished in Nkrumah’s Ghana. Nkrumah’s Ghana was something new. It was a fledging state in the throes of building its own conceptions of an African and global socialist society. This chapter is concerned then with these processes and returns to this exciting national-and-worldmaking socialist moment.

Creating Socialists in Ghana: “Socialism Needs Socialists to Build It”

Ghana’s socialist intellectuals believed that a new socialist citizenry had to be fashioned to erase almost a century of colonial “corruption” and decadence. Despite British and American anticommunist hysteria and efforts to prevent and demonize socialist nation and worldmaking efforts, including plotting coups and assassination and bomb attempts in Ghana, socialist thinkers in Ghana forged ahead with their visions. After a second bombing incident against Nkrumah and members of the CPP in Accra, Ghana’s capital city, in late March 1963, resulting in numerous deaths and injuries, the CPP kept their decision to hold their forthcoming national seminar on socialism a few weeks later in the coastal city of Cape Coast. John E. Hagan, the regional commissioner of the Central Region (where Cape Coast is located) and a key socialist theorist, told the participants that “We [Ghana] cannot build socialism … [w]ithout socialists.” Hagan continued, “we must take positive steps to ensure that the Party and the country produce men and women who can handle a Socialist Programme.”Footnote ⁴ On April 5, writers in the CPP’s socialist, pro-African liberationist and Pan-Africanist magazine, The Spark, were unambiguous on the need to create socialists to achieve the socialist de-colony. “Let it be said without equivocation that no one can become a good architect of the socialist society if he has no faith in socialism.” They were insistent that socialism was necessary to transform and create a “totally new civil service.”Footnote ⁵ Later that year, on December 11, Kofi Batsa, The Spark’s editor, wrote: “Socialism can never be built without socialists.”Footnote ⁶ Nkrumah agreed: “Socialism needs socialists to build it.” Nkrumah maintained that Ghana needed to take “positive steps to ensure that the party and the country produce the men and women who can handle our socialist programme.”Footnote ⁷ Echoing Hagan and Nkrumah, George Padmore, the Caribbean Marxist who had been influential in Moscow and now Ghana, concluded, “you cannot build socialism without socialists.”Footnote ⁸ Schools and television programming would aid in this transformative process. Nkrumah demanded that Ghanaian television “assist in the Socialist transformation of Ghana.”Footnote ⁹ The leading voices of socialist reconstruction were clear on a few points. First, people in Ghana were not naturally socialists. There was no inherent socialism animating from the population. Instead, the state had to produce socialists. Without the socialist-types they envisioned, the state could not construct and implement the totality of its domestic and global socialist program.

For the non-celebrated, and well-known everyday socialist thinkers like J. Ofosu Appiah, socialist-modeled schools would “promulgate the ideals of socialism to the people.”Footnote ¹⁰ Schools would not just teach students the alphabet, geography, and mathematics but instruct them with socialist principles. Padmore agreed. “The new education,” Padmore emphasized, “must be geared to producing a different kind of citizen from the one we know: one who will know his history, his background, and his socialist future.”Footnote ¹¹ Throughout the Nkrumah-era, political theorists, writers, government officials, and others argued that the new state had to create socialists to remedy deliberate colonial efforts at creating colonial subjects both ignorant of their histories and hostile to socialism (see Chapters 1 and 4). These figures understood that the socialist de-colony’s long-term success was tied to making a new, socialist orientated society. From the civil service to engineers to drillers, every sector of society needed socialist orientated individuals to ensure immediate, intermediate, and long-term Black and African freedom. Consequently, alongside the creation of an African Studies Institute at the University of Ghana, Legon, in October 1963, to project Ghana’s version of the African personality to liberate the African mind,Footnote ¹² the government built socialist-inspired schools.

Two years after Ghana had become a Republic and started to engage earnestly with their Soviet counterparts, on March 16, 1962, the Ghanaian presidential cabinet decided to construct the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute at Winneba to spread the socialist state-capitalist gospel.Footnote ¹³ Putting the Ideological Institute in the coastal town of Winneba, approximately seventy kilometers from Accra and eighty-six kilometers from Cape Coast, was not accidental. Socialism had a history in Winneba. The Ghana United Kingdom based National Association of Socialist Student Organization (NASSO) hosted a weekend-long seminar in Winneba in 1958 to discuss socialism. Tawia Adamafio, a leftist CPP stalwart who would be charged and then acquitted of treason charges in 1963 in relation to the first bombing attempt on Nkrumah, formed the branch to train Ghanaians in the UK in socialist thought and to counter the National Liberation Movement’s (NLM’s) alleged efforts to use the Ghana Students’ Union to criticize Nkrumah’s government’s socialist plans. Indeed, at the 1958 weekend seminar, lectures were given by key government and party officials.Footnote ¹⁴ As the creation of the NASSO-UK branch demonstrates, Ghanaian socialists were being created in Ghana and globally. While the earlier generation of Colonial Ghanaians like Nkrumah and Awooner-Renner did not have spaces like the NASSO-branch in the UK to discuss their socialist ideas, this new generation of politically liberated Ghanaians, with the backing of a sympathetic Black socialist state, could openly create a national socialist organization in London, the former heart of Western empire. However, NASSO was not free from internal strife.

While tensions within the Ghana Students’ Union resulted in NASSO, problems between NASSO’s members came to the fore over a disputed leadership contest, fracturing NASSO and prompting the Ghana High Commission in the UK and Nkrumah’s office to intervene. The disgruntled losers, Kweku Budu Acquah and K. Gyemu Kyem, formed a breakaway group, the Socialist Association.Footnote ¹⁵ The rift reached Nkrumah’s office, upsetting him. Nkrumah’s office chided the warring factions, and called for the NASSO leadership to forgive the breakaway group, urged unity and reconciliation amongst the Ghanaian socialist movement abroad, and disciplined conduct. Nkrumah noted that all who “claim to be loyal to him” or the “party” should endeavor to ensure unity of purpose and vision within NASSO.Footnote ¹⁶ In the early years of Marxist-socialist nation-and-worldmaking, Nkrumah was simultaneously calling for generosity, leniency, and discipline among the comrades. Nkrumah understood that internal division among the socialists would undermine their political project. However, asking for party unity did not mean a conformity of ideas.

Back at Winneba, Nkrumah envisioned everyone “meet[ing] at Winneba … to broaden their political knowledge and ideological understanding.”Footnote ¹⁷ “The Institute should,” the government believed, permit those without a formal education “to bring themselves up to the intellectual level expected of graduates whilst at the same time providing them with academic training in the ideology of the Party and in other subjects related to the government, economic and social life of the country.”Footnote ¹⁸ Besides its history as a site of socialist thought, Winneba was also part of Nkrumah’s broader ambition to ease the stranglehold Accra, the nation’s capital, had on intellectual innovation and money in the new nation. Just as development projects were conducted in the North (as seen in Chapter 2), intellectual centers of power would be distributed across the country.

Winneba then became the hotbed of global socialist thought. People throughout Ghana and the world sought it to enhance their socialist knowledge. Literature such as Marxism Today lined the Institute’s shelves.Footnote ¹⁹ The Institute’s instructors taught courses such as Nkrumaism, Marxism, and Leninism.Footnote ²⁰ On May 17, 1963, a writer named Kwame Atuapem was proud that Ghana was “providing lessons for the enrichment of the teachings of Marx and Lenin, based on Nkrumaism…”Footnote ²¹ While much has been made about of the non-African teachers from “the United Kingdom, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia,”Footnote ²² many of the teachers came from Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal.Footnote ²³ While the former were intended to unpack the particularities of European socialist ideas, the West African and diasporic contingent were there to demonstrate how local conditions in West Africa and the Black world were necessary to making socialism a truly global ideology. Thus, the West African and diasporic Black socialist instructors were important conduits of the state’s plan to educate and disseminate socialist ideas both to the local population and to their European comrades. In effect, the European instructors would be like bees, taking the intellectual pollen from their African and Black colleagues and spreading it to their European socialist circles, thus assisting in the global proliferation and pollination of socialist theories from Africa.

Yet, for those unable to gain admission into the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute’s gates or unwilling to risk weeks or months without an income while studying there,Footnote ²⁴ they could find solace in knowing that the Institute’s instructors traveled throughout the nation lecturing on socialism, socialism’s relationship to the party, African unity, and its role in Ghana’s development (Figure 5.1). People like J. Kwasi Nsarkoh traveled to places like Sekondi-Takoradi, in the Western Region, to give lectures to city council members and party chairpersons.Footnote ²⁵ Figures like R. Annoh-Apremsem went to Apowa, a small town west of Takoradi, to speak at the Teachers’ Training College,Footnote ²⁶ and others like Nana Nketia, the director of the Institute of Art and Culture, went to Tamale, Northern Ghana, to present “on the Dynamics and Values of African society or the Cultural Foundation of Socialism in Africa.”Footnote ²⁷ These addresses were frequent and sprinkled throughout the country, but at times suffered from organizational issues, with seminars often canceled or rescheduled. Administrative lapses, at times “incompetence,” and a lack of interest from hosts poked holes in the state’s mission to build a new socialist citizenry.Footnote ²⁸

Figure 5.1 “They Hear Baako’s Speech,” The Ghanaian Times, January 3, 1963.

The nation’s new socialist ideologues complained that certain local authorities did not always give them the proper respect or fanfare they thought they deserved. Addison reprimanded the regional commissioner of the Western Region for the widespread reports from his lecturers that their treatment within his region, compared to the others, was unsatisfactory. Addison informed the commissioner “to make sure that in [the] future [that] all arrangements are straightened up before invitations [we]re extended.”Footnote ²⁹ The directive appeared to fall on barren soil. Some hosts continued to welcome the lecturers apathetically, showing that local receptions to the socialist preachers varied considerably. Some were enthusiastic. While others were annoyed and uninterested.Footnote ³⁰ As the above section highlights, it would be a gross exaggeration to assert that everyone in Nkrumah’s Ghana felt empathetic to or enthused about the country’s new socialist orientation. Indeed, some sought to resist the development of socialist ideas in the nation through bombs, senate hearings in the United States denouncing the socialist project, “incompetence,” or by canceling talks. However, despite these setbacks and acute realities, the socialist theorists in Ghana pushed on with greater enthusiasm to educate their fellow citizens about socialism and devised new strategies to connect with their compatriots.

The socialists urged their comrades to publish “pamphlets and books in various Ghanaian languages to arouse the firm interest of the people of all calibre of work even in the remotest villages.”Footnote ³¹ Figures like D. A. Quansah, the assistant regional secretary, were adamant that socialist instructors should translate “all aspects of Socialism in simple English and possibly in local languages.”Footnote ³² He further advised that lectures on socialism around the country should be conducted in the evenings and in local languages. To make socialism accessible to the vast majority of the nation, socialist theories needed to be translated into the local vernacular. The promoters of socialist thought in Ghana sought to remove linguistic and occupational barriers to the building and circulation of socialist knowledge throughout the nation. Others called for more celebrated local theorists to produce “more matured,” “authoritative literature” for study.Footnote ³³ In one sense, some argued that the current literature on socialism was not sophisticated enough to convince their countrymen of its virtue. There was a genuine belief amongst the socialist intellectuals that the socialist de-colony’s subjects would be conversant in Marxist-Leninist-Nkrumahist terminology. That teachers, teenagers, market women, and those without a formal education and perhaps not fluent in English would throw around opaque terms such as dialectical and historical materialism, relative form of value, mass and relative surplus value, neocolonialism, and commodity fetishism in casual discussions in farms, market spaces, verandas, and tro-tros.Footnote ³⁴ Theorists in Ghana, however, were not simply concerned about disseminating their socialist ideas to people in Europe and Ghana but to their non-Anglophone African counterparts as well.

The Institute established a French Department and added Arabic and French courses to further the diffusion process. In opening the Department, Kodwo Addison, the Institute’s director and a member of the Presidential Commission, argued that Arabic and French would permit students to “foster” unbreakable and “indispensable” “links” with other African “vanguard activists,” ushering in the “great revolution of our times,” including African “unity” and continental “reconstruction.”Footnote ³⁵ Nkrumah’s government envisioned the Institute as an ideological site for a continental-wide push toward Black freedom and socialism. These additional languages underscored deliberate attempts to spread outside of Ghana the socialist ideas brewing within it, underscoring these figures’ intellectual foresight and their global aspirations. Socialists in Ghana explicitly linked African liberation to Ghana’s version of socialism. While adding more languages made the socialist vocabulary more intelligible to people in Africa and beyond, one’s gender impacted access to and experiences within some of the nation’s socialist educational hubs.

At the onset of locating students for the Institute, the state and its male socialist theorists emphasized geographic and demographic diversity but neglected gender variance, making socialist educational spaces challenging for women. Of the 113 people admitted to the Institute in 1964, only 10 were women.Footnote ³⁶ While they were women socialist theorists in Ghana, they were a distinct minority. At the two-day Nkrumaist Seminar in Cape Coast, women constituted a small minority of attendees, and they even cooked for and served their male counterparts. Historian Merve Fejzula urges us not to dismiss such tasks as menial but as intellectual labor.Footnote ³⁷ However, in the spaces where women helped theorize about socialism, they were also vulnerable to sexual exploitation. For instance, Guadeloupean-French theorist Maryse Condé was forced out of the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute when she “stopped having sex” with Addison, the Institute’s director.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, socialist making spaces were also dangerous and unequal spaces for women. Yet, during its heydays, the Institute was a political space for and symbol of socialist re-education. It also served as a model for other independent African states.Footnote ³⁹

The creation of socialists was not solely a top-down affair, however. Initially, government officials sent explicit directives to high school principals that the creation of NASSO branches within their institutions was the sole prerogative of high school students, and not the principals. State officials wanted students to take the initiative. On July 12, 1960, the principal secretary of the Ministry of Education, E. S. Peckham, wrote to school principals that “The Minister [of Education] considers it necessary that … the establishment of such societies [NASSO] should be come from the students themselves and the formal permission of the Principal or Headmaster should be obtained.”Footnote ⁴⁰ High school students accepted this role. By 1961, NASSO branches had been or were being established across numerous schools around the country, such as the Cape Coast schools of Adisadel College (an all-boys school), Ghana National College (an all-girls school and the site of the 1962 Seminar Report on Nkrumahism, where over 500 people attended),Footnote ⁴¹ and the co-ed Aggrey Memorial Zion Secondary School.Footnote ⁴² While the formation of NASSO groups was voluntary and student initiated in 1960 and 1961, as time passed and violence against the ruling party sharpened, they became top-down directives.

In 1963, the Central Region party attaché wrote to all the school principals in the region that Nkrumah had declared that “study groups should be established in all Secondary Schools, Colleges and Universities.”Footnote ⁴³ Within a few years, the government felt that more urgent action was needed to build socialists. In 1965, the minister of Education and Citizenship, Kofi Asante Ofori-Atta, introduced to the nation’s primary and middle schools a new socialist syllabus.Footnote ⁴⁴ This act satisfied the calls by numerous socialists for teachings on socialism to be embedded within the socialist de-colony’s educational structures. The following year, the Western-backed NLC instigated a successful coup against Nkrumah’s party, ending any hope that a new generation of socialists could and would be built within the public school system.

While the process of creating socialist citizens was an important state goal and preoccupied the new state’s financial and intellectual energies, it was not easy or straightforward. The socialist intellectuals did not believe that they were drawing upon an older, lost version of socialism that could be manipulated into a new version. Instead, they believed that they had to build new socialists to create their new society. To do so, they constructed institutes, traveled to cities, towns, and villages around the country to educate the people about the tenets of global socialism and its applicability for the new society and world that they were building. The coastal town of Winneba became a hotbed of socialist conversations in Ghana and around the world. The goal was not simply to spread socialist ideas to the educated or the English-speaking populace but to convert Marxist-Leninist-Nkrumahist thought into local vernaculars and idioms, and to share it with those who spoke and read Arabic and French as well.

The minds and hearts of both the younger and older generations were cherished. Ministers encouraged secondary school students and principals to create study sessions on socialism. Initially, these were to be organic, not forced, but toward the end of Nkrumah’s tenure, increasingly compulsory. For those in primary and middle school, a socialist curriculum became institutionalized. Its tenure was too brief to ascertain its impacts. Nonetheless, throughout the country, the leaders of the socialist movement called on their comrades to both teach and learn about socialism from the people. Socialist education in Ghana had to be dialectical and dialogical. Despite efforts to spread the socialist message throughout the land, not all received the news with open hearts.

A Global and Local Socialism

Socialist theorists in Ghana drew from the rich global socialist traditions in circulation. As noted in Chapter 4, figures like Nkrumah and certain Black Marxists had studied and drawn their political and economic inspiration from Lenin and their understanding of early Soviet history. Founded by Nkrumah in 1962 and run by Kofi Batsa and Samuel Ikoku, The Spark was a hotbed for socialist and decolonization theories and debates.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Spark’s name mirrored Lenin’s first Russian socialist newspaper, Iskra, meaning “the spark.”Footnote ⁴⁶ According to Batsa’s 1985 autobiography, the paper was intended to “propagate” and debate “radical ideas.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Like the contemporaneous Ngurumo newspaper in socialist Tanzania,Footnote ⁴⁸ The Spark and the Ghanaian press were sites where events and issues in Africa and the globe were brought to the attention of its readers and debated. They introduced their readers to countries and people from the socialist world, ranging from Cuba to Hungary to Romania to the USSR. In this sense, the global socialist world inspired the socialist movement in Ghana and Ghana was a site of global socialist articulations.

Romania became a site of one such study. It was but one reminder to the formerly colonized, whose economic and political development colonialism had stifled, that it did not need to wait for centuries like the Western imperial powers to achieve modernization and industrialization.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1964, an article in The Spark praised the Romanian socialist experiment for its stunning success. Since Romania’s transition to “socialist industrialization” in 1938, the article noted that its “gross industrial output” “rose by 7.4 times” by 1963. The article praised Romania’s phenomenal economic and industrial growth. Its “textile industry was more than 3.5 times bigger than in 1938,” “the garments industry 11 times bigger and … the leather, fur and footwear output 5.6 times bigger.” The Spark gushed over “the advance[s]” in Romania’s economy and particularly “the growing material welfare of the people.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In another article, Dumitru Dumitrescu, the first secretary of the Romanian People’s Republic Academy, tied Romania’s “remarkable” scientific “growth” to its socialist orientation.Footnote ⁵¹ For those in Ghana, the two nations were similar in a few key respects. They lacked the material conditions and foundations that spurred Western industrialization and modernization.Footnote ⁵² Thus, Romania too had to devise a strategy to “catch-up with the West.” Through socialism, people in Ghana learned that Romania had collapsed and solved the space–time problematique of industrialization and modernization. It was not over centuries but in a singular generation had the Romanian government and people significantly improved their material conditions. Similarly, the Ghanaian writers noted that within a generation, Black Africa, with the shackles of colonialism removed, could catch up with the West through socialist industrialization. Not only would socialism transform Black Africa’s material and economic fortunes, it would also boost significantly their quest for “scientific equity,”Footnote ⁵³ a scientific-technological and intellectual monopoly that the Western and Eastern blocs believed they had over Africans. The rapid economic success of the socialist experiments globally provided people in Ghana with a renewed optimism about transforming their own societies.

The press published adulatory pieces about the lives, works, and histories of socialist luminaries, including but not limited to Lenin, Engels, Marx, and Fidel Castro. The latest books and articles on socialism, communism, and Marxism were published in the Ghanaian reading commons. For instance, in 1963, The Ghanaian Times, a newspaper geared toward women,Footnote ⁵⁴ publicized Nikita Khrushchev’s Socialism and Communism. The paper informed its readers that the book contained Khrushchev’s ideas “on the key practical and theoretical questions of Socialist and Communist construction and the problems related to the peaceful competition of the two socio-economic systems.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The people of Ghana were avid students of international socialist regimes and their political zeitgeist.

However, the written word was not the only space through which conversations and pedagogy about socialism were occurring in Ghana. On June 16, 1961, the CPP’s Cape Coast study branch wrote to the Chinese ambassador to Ghana, Huang Hua, to “repeat” his lecture on “‘Socialism as practiced in the People’s Republic of China” to the University of Cape Coast’s CPP study group.Footnote ⁵⁶ Similarly, the CPP’s Cape Coast study branch also wrote to P. H. Bertelsen, a member of the Extra Mural Department at the University of Ghana, Legon, to “repeat” his lecture on “Socialism in practice in the Scandinavian Countries.”Footnote ⁵⁷ On November 10, the same branch also contacted the German Democratic Republic’s acting trade representative to “give a talk on the ‘East Berlin Crisis,’ a subject agitating the minds of all members of the Study Group.”Footnote ⁵⁸ State representatives from around the world were giving lectures on how socialism was practiced in their respective countries. These talks greatly appealed to the excited youth in Ghana, prompting further requests for lectures. Furthermore, the aforementioned requests reveal that young Africans felt empowered to correspond directly with foreign dignitaries and intellectuals about socialist societies, socialist governing systems, and geopolitical concerns involving a socialist nation. Barriers to accessing socialist knowledge that had once existed during the colonial era had broken down. The youth learned about multiple socialist policies and practices occurring throughout the world in diverse spaces as far as East Asia and Scandinavia. There were no political repercussions for expanding one’s global perspective and knowledge. In fact, this was encouraged.

Young socialists in Ghana were actively seeking and building global socialist knowledge. The lyrics of NASSO’s hymn is indicative: “Let all forms of Socialist Contest / Which gives best results is best / From each according to ability / To each according to need.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Those lyrics indicated that Ghana was not wed to a particular socialist system. Each socialist idea and political-economy would be subject to scrutiny. After rigorous debate and study, the form of socialist economic and cultural development that produced the best results would be exalted. Such debates during the repressive intellectual tradition of British colonialism were unimaginable. However, in Nkrumah’s Ghana, ideas from the world’s Eastern nations, previously shackled, became topics of debate and the basis of knowledge making and pedagogy in Ghana.

Yet, while drawing heavily from the experiences and words of other socialist traditions, the Ghanaian socialist circles dismissed Ghanaian socialism as a mimicry of other socialisms. They argued that their ideas had to be situated within and adapted to local historical and material conditions and realities. “Our road to socialism must be a road designed and charted in accordance with the conditions of Ghana and the historical and social conditions and circumstances of Africa as a whole,” Nkrumah reminded the nation in an April 1961 speech.Footnote ⁶⁰ In September 1962, Hagan reiterated that socialism in Ghana was neither British nor Chinese or Soviet. While socialism in Ghana might be similar to and draw from those other forms of socialism, Hagan argued that it was “a different brand of socialism peculiar to Ghana,”Footnote ⁶¹ which fit within Ghana’s “culture and tradition,”Footnote ⁶² and was “most appropriate to our (Ghana’s) needs.”Footnote ⁶³ Similarly, Padmore implored Ghana not to “follow blindly the socialist lines of approach which have occurred either in Western Europe or in Soviet Russia, where conditions are entirely different from those in Africa.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Instead, Padmore encouraged Ghanaians to adapt everything to their own conditions and historical experiences. “While admitting the universal validity of the cannons of socialism,” Batsa argued in 1964 that Ghana’s brand of socialism needed its people to “see that the institutional forms vary with different social milieu, since pattern of social organisation owes much to the history, traditions and the psychology of a people.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Theorists could only understand the psychology, traditions, and culture of a people by embedding themselves within that community. Batsa encouraged this approach, admonishing socialist thinkers divorced from the everyday person. “These men of letters must leave ‘their ivory towers,’ Batsa wrote, “and live with the people. For it is only by living with the people, by sharing their fears and aspirations that the socialist intellectuals can understand the people and correctly chart and illumine the path of socialist advance.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Socialism then had to be dialectically constructed from within and outside the nation-state, from the top down, and the bottom up. The project of reimagining one of the world’s greatest historical political-intellectual projects could not be completed by intellectuals alone. An accurate theory on society had to incorporate its different peoples, components, and histories. The ideas and experiences of the nonelite, those without state-sanctioned educational certificates and international acclaim, had to find a space and be reflected in any socialist theory.

By localizing and domesticating socialism, intellectuals in Ghana rebuked the universalization of European socialism. They accepted the charge to decolonize Marxism’s “Western construction,” as historian Cedric J. Robinson wrote, to decouple Europe’s particular historical “structures and social dynamics” from a “world-historical” teleology.Footnote ⁶⁷ Socialists in Ghana then were deconstructing the analytical paradigm that European and socialism were one and the same, and that their own forms of socialism were adjectives to the noun of European socialism. They were reinvigorating socialism through African histories and conditions. African societies and histories had currency and value in the exchange of socialist ideas. Socialist societies that did not trade or incorporate this new currency into their economies of socialist thought were cheapening their products and intellectual rigor. In an unironic sense, figures in Ghana understood that the conditions in Ghana were both parochial and universal.

Socialism in Africa or African Socialism?: New Epistemologies in African History

While many scholars have categorized the socialist ideology emanating from Ghana as part of the intellectual canon called “African Socialism,”Footnote ⁶⁸ for mid-20th-century socialist thinkers in Ghana, African Socialism and “socialism in Africa” – what they were practicing – were two distinct and heavily contested categories. They represented two different conceptions of socialism, African history, Africa’s connection to world history, and Africa’s future. The radical socialists in Ghana denounced African Socialism as a conservative, neocolonial ideology that was dangerous to African liberation because it mischaracterized socialism, African societies, and African histories, and that it would stunt present and future economic and scientific development in Africa. Yet, for some Africans, the allure of a decolonized, romanticized African historiography that African Socialism brought was too seductive to dismiss.

For the backers of African Socialism, Africans did not need to turn to “Western” liberal-parliamentary or socialist traditions to create non-oppressive societies. Africans could turn to their own histories – undistorted and untainted from European corruption and myth – to forge new egalitarian societies.Footnote ⁶⁹ For instance, thinkers like the Nigerian priest, Father Bebe Onuoha, argued in 1965 that “Classic African society was homogenous and unstratified.” For Onuoha, precolonial African society had “no capitalists and, therefore, no one without property.”Footnote ⁷⁰ A few everyday socialist theorists in Ghana prefigured Onuoha’s idea at the seminal two-day socialist seminar in Cape Coast in 1962. Echoing the president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, and Jacques Rabemananjara, the Madagascan theorist, these figures insisted that Africans did not need to read Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels to learn about socialism.Footnote ⁷¹ “[B]efore the advent of the whiteman,” the participants argued, their “forefathers” practiced and “enjoyed” socialism.Footnote ⁷² They dismissed the idea that socialism was “completely alien” to Africans,Footnote ⁷³ arguing essentially that African societies were egalitarian. Furthermore, if the idealized version of socialism, according to leftist Anglo-European thought, represented the highest stage of socioeconomic and political equality and development amongst humans, then a proper retelling of African history, they maintained, would demonstrate that Africans had already reached the pinnacle of human civilization.Footnote ⁷⁴ Consequently, it was not Africans who had to learn from the West, but the West who had to learn from Africans. This formulation reversed the axis of intellectual exchange and knowledge production and consumption between Africans and Europeans. This push to counter centuries of anti-African historiography that had justified slavery and colonialism was certainly seductive and had its adherents. However, it also had its critics. Not only from the Global North, but among some of the most radical elements of socialist thought in Ghana, who argued that the aforementioned ideas were part of African Socialism’s seductive, but misleading ideology and mischaracterization of African societies and histories.

For the socialists in Africa against African Socialism, a return to precolonial or colonial Africa did not represent the socialist modernity they imagined, but a mythologized, romanticized, and regrettable stage of African history. They maintained that African societies had not been egalitarian but oppressive and exploitative. Samuel Ikoku argued in 1963 that the “traditional collectivist way of African life is a mere illusion.” Referencing Tsarist Russia to elucidate African history, Ikoku wrote that the “old” traditional African lifestyle was “based on the hegemony of a few big families larding … over [the] less privileged ones and even serfs. Human rights were non-existent and industrialisation was absent.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Ikoku turned to cocoa production in Ghana – the state’s primary means of acquiring foreign capital – to prove his point. The social and economic facts surrounding cocoa production, Ikoku noted, demonstrated unequivocally a system of exploitation and domination. Similarly, an unnamed University of Ghana lecturer dismissed the idea that “Class structure in traditional African society” was “horizontal” and not “vertical.”Footnote ⁷⁶ From the sanctuary of Guinea-Conakry a few years after his presidency ended via a military coup and with plots to forcibly kidnap him and return him to Ghana, Nkrumah wrote: “All available evidence from the history of Africa up to the eve of the European colonisation shows that African society was neither classless nor devoid of a social hierarchy.” Nkrumah maintained that prior to colonialism, “Feudalism existed in some parts of Africa.” Like Ikoku before him, Nkrumah evoked a European historical experience to make sense of African realities. Because of different and unequal access to land ownership in Africa, Nkrumah argued that precolonial Africa was not egalitarian but deeply exploitive and fostered “social stratification.” Nkrumah was adamant that the biggest supporters of a romanticized, egalitarian African historical narrative were those using the phrase “African Socialism.” “Such a conception of socialism,” Nkrumah wrote, “makes a fetish of the communal African society. But an idyllic, African classless society (in which there were no rich and no poor) enjoying a drugged serenity is certainly a facile simplification.” Drawing on his doctoral training and research in anthropology, Nkrumah concluded that “there is no historical or even anthropological evidence for any such society. I am afraid the realities of African society were somewhat more sordid.” During the precolonial era, Nkrumah noted joylessly that “Africans were prepared to sell, often for no more than thirty pieces of silver, fellow tribesmen and even members of the same ‘extended family’ and clan.”Footnote ⁷⁷ In Class Struggle in Africa, Nkrumah was adamant that “the term ‘African Socialism’ is … meaningless and irrelevant. It implies the existence of a form of socialism peculiar to Africa and derived from communal and egalitarian aspects of traditional African society. The myth of African socialism is used to deny the class struggle, and to obscure genuine socialist commitment.”Footnote ⁷⁸ For Nkrumah, then, “African Socialism” was dangerous precisely because it offered a misguided and an ahistorical account of the African past. It was a shameful and painful history that they did not wish to return to. Yet, for others, even if African society was egalitarian at some historical juncture, a “return to it [wa]s completely out of the question,” if not futile.Footnote ⁷⁹ For them, “African society” had to “evolve.” It could not return “to two or three centuries ago” because human society “is always changing in response to the interplay of social and economic forces from the both internal and external sources.”Footnote ⁸⁰

For figures like Nkrumah, the University of Ghana lecturer, and Ikoku, their ideas about the African past were embedded within an older African historical tradition of understanding suffering and domination. For example, in 1903, Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford, one of the most educated and respected voices in Colonial Ghana, wrote about the history of slavery and social stratification in West Africa. In Gold Coast Native Institutions, Hayford wrote that while slavery in West Africa was different from that in Ancient Rome and the Americas, two classes of people did exist: “freemen and slaves or pawns.” This “dividing line between the two classes of people was always clearly defined.” To support his point, Hayford referenced an old saying: “‘Akwa onyi ni wura ba rigura, na nakwa owo ni tsirin;’ meaning, ‘When a slave is playing with his master’s son, he remembers his condition of being a slave.’”Footnote ⁸¹ While enslaved peoples in West African societies were perhaps not subjected to similar levels of physical and psychological degradation and torture as those in the Americas and could rise up to prominent positions in society, they were continuously aware of or reminded of the precarity of their condition.Footnote ⁸² Such histories, circulating in West Africa for at least half a century by the 1960s, undercut claims of a classless, egalitarian Africa. While colonialism, Nkrumah admitted, certainly “deserves to be blamed for many evils in Africa,” Africans could not argue then that “an African Golden Age or paradise” “preceded” European colonization.Footnote ⁸³ For Nkrumah, this was a logical and historical fallacy. “A return to the pre-colonial African society,” Nkrumah concluded, “is evidently not worthy of the ingenuity and efforts of our people.”Footnote ⁸⁴ For figures like Nkrumah, the intellectual and political imagination of socialists in Africa was endless and the window to dream and turn them into reality was brief and could not be squandered on reclaiming a mythical, non-oppressive past. Energies had to be put (or redirected in some cases) toward a more useful and utopian purpose – the reimagination of Ghanaian, African, and global society. They were living in a revolutionary movement and had to embark on revolutionary intellectual exploits.

Criticisms of a classless precolonial Africa simultaneously served to also undermine Nkrumah’s domestic and international political rivals. As historian Priya Lal argues, the governing principles of ujamaa, socialism in Tanzania, advanced by the Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, was the rejection of “class conflict as an organizing principle.”Footnote ⁸⁵ This perspective clashed with the ideas emanating from the socialists in Ghana that societal differentiation was present and already an organizing principle of society in Africa. Thus, in positioning themselves against African Socialism’s conceptions of societies in Africa, socialists like Nkrumah were seeking to garner international support, both privately and publicly, for their political visions while diminishing Nyerere’s increasing popularity. In addition, Ikoku’s critique of cocoa production in Colonial Ghana was an implicit knock on the United Party (UP) – the latest incarnation of anti-CPP and Nkrumah forces – whose historical fortunes were derived partly from enslaved labor in cocoa production and in the kola, gold, and slave trades.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, deconstructing the fetishized African past, acknowledging that slavery and oppression existed in Africa before Europeans arrived, did not translate to a failure to distinguish between types and degrees of slavery and its brutality.

Thinkers like Ikoku and Nkrumah were also wading into contemporaneous anthropological and historical debates – often against prominent and preeminent Western historians of Africa – about the nature of slavery in Africa.Footnote ⁸⁷ While acknowledging that “slavery” existed in Africa prior to European contact, Nkrumah sided with the Guyanese Marxist historian Walter Rodney’s contemporaneous argument that the nature of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade spurred the particular harshness of the institution of slavery in Africa.Footnote ⁸⁸ Nkrumah wrote: “slavery existed in Africa before European colonisation,” but “European contact gave slavery in Africa some of its most vicious characteristics.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Intellectuals like Rodney, Nkrumah, and Hayford argued that the Transatlantic Slave Trade had exacerbated cruelty within African societies. Whereas Nkrumah and Rodney disagreed on the issue of state capitalism and its historicity within the Marxist-Leninist tradition, on the question of the institution of slavery and its character in Africa, they agreed that the particular bestiality of chattel slavery was not endogenous to Africa but a product of the European Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

Socialists in Ghana maintained that the ahistorical, romanticized view of precolonial African society furthered racist paradigmatic conceptions of African peoples and their histories. In a lecture in the early 1800s, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel opined influentially that Africa and its peoples were outside of world history. Hegel maintained that Africans and “Africa proper,” which was south of the Saharan desert, lay “beyond … self-conscious history” and existed outside “the category of Universality.”Footnote ⁹⁰ During the middle of the 20th-century, through their criticisms of African Socialism, figures like Nkrumah directly challenged Hegel’s characterizations of African society and its peoples. Nkrumah argued: “For too long, social and political commentators have talked and written as though Africa lies outside the mainstream of world historical development – a separate entity to which the social, economic and political patterns of the world do not apply.”Footnote ⁹¹ In proffering the concept of a classless, egalitarian society, African Socialists were one such entity. Thus, the radical socialists encumbered it upon themselves to nullify this narrative. They were reclaiming Africans and their history from History’s dustbin. It was only through a serious reckoning with the African past, socialists in Ghana believed, could Africans reclaim and make a revolutionary present and future for themselves. In doing so, they were simultaneously domesticating socialism and decolonizing anthropology, history, and philosophy.

For the radical theorists in Ghana, the concept of African Socialism was a Western vessel for neocolonialism to flow into and flourish on the continent. It was a deliberate Western ploy to undercut African liberation, sabotage development in Africa, and was not simply a naïve intellectual or political undertaking or (mis)understanding.Footnote ⁹² On April 19, 1963, an unnamed Ghana University lecturer published “‘African Socialism’ – A Neocolonialist Ruse,” in The Spark, arguing that “After the foregoing analysis of the content of the doctrine of ‘African Socialism’ one is strongly tempted to identify its origin with neo-colonialist sources.”Footnote ⁹³ Batsa concurred. Focusing on Western scholars’ writings about socialism in Africa, Batsa maintained that “The imperialist powers are busy forging a new ideology for Africa … conveniently labeled ‘African Socialism.’” This was a deliberate “attempt to beguile the unwary. It is significant,” Batsa continued, that “in 1964 alone at least three books have appeared on ‘African Socialism.’ And it is no mere coincidence that all these are written by non-Africans, that the authors are all from imperialist nations of the world; that one each of these books is published in France, in Britain and in the U.S.A.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Ikoku was adamant that the “Leaders of the Western world have decided to pass on to their [italicize mine] African intellectual … pro-imperialist ideas which should be diseminated [sic] throughout Africa under the deceitful label of ‘African socialism.’” “African Socialism,” Ikoku continued, was an imperialist imposition that Western intellectuals employed to “flatter African intellectuals into believing that the new ideology is of their creation.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Ikoku went on to criticize the famous 1962 African Ways to Socialism Conference in Dakar, Senegal, and its delegates for holding imperial or colonial ambitions and using socialism to mask them. For example, Ikoku charged Senegal’s president Leopold Senghor with having “strong right-wing connections.” He lambasted the Frenchman M. Guy Mollet as “a supporter of the colonial wars” in Algeria and Vietnam, and mocked Nigerian Saburi Biobaku, the vice-principal of the University of Ife in Nigeria, as not even “remotely associated with the socialist movement inside Nigeria.” Ikoku wondered what “sort of socialism can such a motley gathering of spokesmen of imperialism [resolve]?”Footnote ⁹⁶ Like Ikoku, Nkrumah denounced the 1962 Dakar Conference, describing it as a willful attempt to confuse socialist-minded Africans and subdue “genuine” socialism. Nkrumah wrote:

Yet, unlike the imagined and ill-defined concept of African Socialism at the 1962 Dakar Conference, where “‘no single definition of African socialism emerged,’”Footnote ⁹⁸ for Batsa, socialism in Ghana “extracted [from] the cannons of socialism … which are universally valid. To these we have added the essence of traditional Africa life – group responsibility for the individual, and individual welfare being conditional on group well-being.”Footnote ⁹⁹

One of the biggest curiosities of academia and the collective historical memory more broadly over the last sixty to seventy years has been the linking and celebration of socialist thought in Nkrumah’s Ghana as one of the premier examples of “African Socialism.” Yet, Nkrumah and socialists from Nkrumah’s Ghana from the beginning ridiculed and explicitly distanced themselves from African Socialism. Indeed, the Ghanaian lecturer lamented in the 1960s that Nkrumah’s name was being identified with African Socialism. The lecturer concluded correctly that Nkrumah was “too mature” of a socialist to subscribe to a bankrupt doctrine like African Socialism.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Indeed, the historical record shows that for figures like Ikoku and Nkrumah, the proponents of African Socialism had hallowed socialism by squeezing all useful meaning from it. Its emptiness represented a danger to African liberation. These figures warned that African Socialism was an unscientific, racist, colonial, and imperially imposed nomenclature that simultaneously belittled ‘real’ socialist theories from Africa, posited Africa outside global historical processes, and compartmentalized socialism in Africa as distinct from the “real” socialist tenants globally. They maintained that “‘African socialism’ is the ideal ideology of neo-colonialism” and was dangerous because it masqueraded as endogenous while exogenous.Footnote ¹⁰¹ For these thinkers, the West had deliberately sown this confusion to enslave “the minds of Africans.” The task of true socialist theorists from Africa, then, was to liberate the African mind by waging “a relentless war … against the revisionism and opportunism cleverly labelled ‘African socialism.’”Footnote ¹⁰².

Socialism and the Question of Corruption and Moral Decay

Besides building socialists and warring against the doctrine of African Socialism, the socialist theorists in Ghana were consumed with cleansing the national body politic from colonialism’s moral rot. In September 1962, Hagan demanded that socialism cleanse “the filth of the old” colonial society.Footnote ¹⁰³ Others concurred, noting that “all imperialist and colonialist vestiges, including bribery and corruption, nepotism, ‘lording it over the friend,’ should be wiped out” by socialism.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In 1965, the CPP political activist J. Ofosu Appiah observed that Ghana was changing from a “corrupted system of society like colonialism to a progressive system – socialism.” Appiah called on Ghanaians to “debunk the colonialist superstructure of society.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Ghana’s socialist circles echoed Appiah’s ideas. In December 1963, at a conference for the northern sector of the Eastern Regional branch of the Institute of Public Education, Hagan argued that socialism “is the only answer to the centuries of economic exploitation and cultural degradation” that Africans had endured.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ While Nkrumah’s Ghana was one of the first socialist African states to address concerns of morality and social degradation, others would follow suit. Historian Benedito Machava eloquently explored how the socialist program of Mozambique from 1968 to 1990 focused heavily on these issues.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

While Ghana’s socialists linked “corruption” and “moral decay” to British colonialism and its legacies, they also criticized those who used “socialism” to enrich or politically advance themselves and their families. On September 3, 1962, Kofi Baako complained to Nkrumah that the UK-NASSO branch “was a breeding ground for professional opportunists who believed that by their mere membership … the road was clear for a job of high remuneration at home.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ On July 17, 1963, writers of the CPP’s The Party Chronicle worried that “violent political enemies” were circumventing background checks by bribing “long standing members.” The authors called on “all Branch Executives [to] do their duty … and … prevent ‘ex-omos’ [sic] from holding any key posts … in the Party and … Government.” The writers chastised the rise of “indiscipline” amongst CPP members, and of individuals seeking positions to enrich themselves. These “schemes,” which the paper characterized as “shameful” and “selfish,” were undermining the party’s socialist goals.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ On April 17, 1964, another writer in The Party Chronicle cautioned that party members must shun “bribery and corruption,”Footnote ¹¹⁰ and for the central government to stymie such activities. Three years prior, Nkrumah had delivered his famous Dawn Broadcast speech to the nation, urging all party members and government officials to shun corruption and work hard to develop the nation. While some had certainly heeded those calls, others had completely disregarded them. Thus, the complaints, memorialized in The Party Chronicle and other public and private channels, underscored that Nkrumah’s words had certainly fallen on barren soil (more on this in Chapter 6). Yet, some continued to have faith that a socialist reorientation could stop this ongoing societal problem.

Indeed, some still noted that socialism would lead the people toward postcolonial nirvana – a society free of “social evils.” These were defined as illness, illiteracy, insecurity, laziness, corruption, and foreign domination. To do so, socialism had to penetrate every sphere of public and private life. It was only socialism, Hagan argued, “that could bring the basic amenities of a good life to the whole people of Africa within the shortest possible time.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The CPP activist M. K. Akomeah distinguished the travails of colonialism from the marvels of socialism. “Under colonialism we lived over a century, in hardship,” but in socialism, he argued, people would establish “a happy life,” and “generations yet unborn” would “enjoy” it.Footnote ¹¹² In a letter to the editor of the Nkrumaist, George Kwaku Duah, from Benin-Mampong Ashanti, praised the country’s socialist agenda in part for the “great strides in industrial development, education, health, communication, and living standards.”Footnote ¹¹³ In the Evening News on July 19, 1963, Mama Gonja from Dodowa praised Nkrumah’s “admonition on the lowering moral standards among the youth in the schools, offices and workshops.” It was through socialism, she argued, that “youth must be saved to ensure that the nation’s future leaders become unimpeachable and reliable.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ In his welcome speech to Anastas Mikoyan, the first deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union, on January 16, 1962, Hagan argued that Ghana’s socialism would “banish fear, mistrust, disease, ignorance, and suspicion, … the legac[ies] of imperialism and colonialism.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Others agreed, claiming that “illiteracy creates ignorance and ignorance is a disease,” but that socialism stood to “eradicate disease, poverty, and squalor.” The thinkers continued, “Socialism can only triumph in Ghana if nepotism and laziness are completely eradicated in the country.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Comrade J. J. Mensah-Kane, the headmaster of Ghana National College in Cape Coast, summed up the virtues of socialism: “Freedom from disease, Freedom from ignorance, Freedom from poverty, unemployment, and tribulations.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Horace M. Lashley’s poem, “The Revolution’s On,” in The Spark on November 1, 1963, captured the multiple hopes socialist theorists in Ghana had:

For others and Lashley, socialism was the harbinger of culture and the cure for hunger, disability, and illiteracy. Socialism could change the “fate of the oppressed” and “poor.” It was their carriage toward a glorious new life. Socialism then was not simply a political or economic project or ideology, but a miraculous substance that could cure and heal all. To save Ghana and Africa, the people simply had to swallow the medicine, then, laziness, illness, poverty, illiteracy, disease, hardship, corruption, foreign domination, and insecurity would disappear.

Socialism, Morality, and Christian Nationalism

Unlike the Soviet Bolsheviks and the Chinese Maoists, who denounced or distanced themselves from religion or considered it a form of bourgeois alienation, the socialist theorists in Ghana saw no contradiction between religious belief and Marxist-Socialism. Religious belief was intertwined with their own existence. Religion was a vehicle through which expressions of socialism could be mobilized, refined, and debated.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Alongside socialist educational institutions, African-American sociologist St. Clair Drake noted that in the socialist de-colony churches were being built at a rapid pace for worship and leisure.Footnote ¹²⁰ Despite the tremendous religious plurality in Ghana, knowledge of socialism grew with or perhaps because of Christian imagery, metaphors, and symbols. Even in Africa, this was unique. Historian Emma Hunter argues that “direct discussion of religion” in socialist Tanzania was “explicitly banned.”Footnote ¹²¹ In Ghana, however, Christian ontologies were employed to strengthen, translate, and domesticate socialism, ensuring that socialist construction and the growth of Christianity were co-constitutive.Footnote ¹²²

Many socialists in Ghana could not envision themselves or their society embodying atheist Marxist-Socialist traditions or becoming hostile toward religious belief and practice. In 1962, CPP socialist theorists reminded each other that “freedom of religious worship [wa]s ensured by the State and there is every indication that the state has no intention of interfering in religious practices …. The Ghanaian is by nature highly religious and has practiced religion for ages free from controversy.”Footnote ¹²³ Ghana’s socialists foregrounded Kenyan philosopher John Mbiti’s claims that no African could be an atheist as their religion permeates all “departments of [their] life.”Footnote ¹²⁴ In 1964, Sir John Howard, an influential British businessman and negotiator with the Ghanaian government to sell British fish trawlers to Ghana, relayed “a long conversation” he had had with Kofi Baako to British officials. Baako, one of Nkrumah’s chief supporters, stressed that he was “a devout Roman Catholic” and that socialism in Ghana would never jeopardize religious belief.Footnote ¹²⁵ How socialism was practiced in Ghana supported Baako’s private words to Howard. At the two-day seminar on socialism in Ghana, a church service opened proceedings and the participants sung four Methodist hymns, including Rudyard Kipling’s “Land of Our Birth.” They received a benediction while listening to two religious lessons and a sermon.Footnote ¹²⁶ Batsa, the radical socialist leader of The Spark, admitted that he loved “singing hymns” to himself while driving.Footnote ¹²⁷ He would comfort himself with the Anglican hymn, “Lord, It Belongs Not To My Care” and the British hymn, “God is Working His Purpose.”Footnote ¹²⁸

More than devices of self and spiritual care, the architects of Ghana’s socialist project employed the rhetorical flourishes and imagery of Abrahamic religious traditions to explain their socialist ideas to a population steeped primarily in Christian missionary education.Footnote ¹²⁹ “We must be born anew,” Hagan asserted, “and become socialist individuals possessed of an entirely new outlook of a new moral and political type.”Footnote ¹³⁰ He echoed Jesus’ call for his disciples to be born again to embrace and see the new kingdom fully.Footnote ¹³¹ People in Ghana were called to die figuratively in order to leave the colonial world behind and to arise as new, holy socialist beings. It was only through that could they enter and partake in the new economic and geopolitical order and kingdom its leaders were fashioning. Even Lashley’s poem borrowed from the cultural capital of the Abrahamic faiths. Lashley mirrored the lyrics of John Newton’s hymn, “Amazing Grace,” “was blind but now I see,” with, “Once illiterate now reads.” In 1965, Akomeah referenced the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert under Moses to argue that Ghanaian socialism would be the “gigantic tree” from which fruit would “drop like manna” to “feed generations yet unborn.”Footnote ¹³² In the biblical story of Moses, the Israelites escaped slavery in Egypt and wandered in the desert for forty years looking for the promised land. During those moments, God sent “manna,” a bread-like substance from the sky, to feed the starving Israelites. Moreover, God transformed Himself into a cloud to protect the Israelites from the scorching sun. Similarly, for Ghana’s socialists, colonial rule represented bondage, a dark period in their history where a foreign power ruled over them and social ills were incubated and had grown. Now, Ghanaians were leading themselves into the promised land. It was not God but socialism that had to protect them from the desert’s heat and provide manna for them. Socialism would provide for them until they reached their promised land, Black liberation. But, like the cautionary tale of the Israelites, would this generation enter the promised land? Not all in Ghana were raptured by the coalescing of religion and socialism, however.

A minority disagreed on whether religion and socialism could coexist, arguing that the coexistence of genuine socialism and religion was an imperial construct. On April 19, 1963, a week after one of the most important Christian calendar days, Good Friday, an anonymous University of Ghana lecturer wrote that attempts to reconcile one’s religious convictions and socialism was “revisionism.”Footnote ¹³³ For this individual, the ongoing existence of religious belief fundamentally undermined the obtainment of socialism. However, these figures occupied a distinctly marginal position. Indeed, for many in Ghana, religion and socialism had to coexist. Many Ghanaians remained suspicious of atheist societies.

Even the perception of Soviet atheism was dangerous to Ghana–Soviet relations. For instance, in early January 1964, in the Volta Region, a Ghanaian asked a few Soviets whether they believed in God? One of the Soviets responded: “We believe in science, youth and the future.” The Ghanaian listeners subsequently “booed” the speakers “out of the place.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Such reactions in Ghana nudged the Soviets to allay Ghanaian concerns about Soviet atheism. At the Ghana–Soviet Friendship Society in Ghana, George Barabaschev, a law professor from Moscow State University, tried to reassure Ghanaians that “churches in the Soviet Union … were a private organ and had nothing to do with the state but freedom of worship was allowed [sic].”Footnote ¹³⁵ The Soviets sought to counter Ghanaian skepticism that they were a godless society and American efforts to paint them as religiously intolerant.Footnote ¹³⁶ Soviet intellectuals in Ghana publicly rejected assertions that they had outlawed religion, understanding that it was diplomatically and politically unwise in the socialist de-colony.

For the politically ambitious in Ghana, embracing atheism (or being cast as an unbeliever) was political suicide. As historians Sean Hanretta and Dennis Austin have shown, the CPP battled with other explicitly religiously affiliated parties to co-opt religion and their adherents into their fold. Indeed, one of the most damaging CPP attacks against their opponents, like the former CPP socialist stalwart, Bankole Awooner, was that he was an unbeliever.Footnote ¹³⁷ Rather than denouncing religion, the state co-opted the Abrahamic faiths, particularly Christianity, and others into its socialist project. Socialism and Christian nationalism were cultivating and reproducing each other in Nkrumah’s Ghana. In unique ways, the two became intertwined.

Conclusion

The socialists in Ghana were creating something fundamentally new; they were not simply dreaming about a socialist utopia. Never before had there been a systematic program in Ghanaian history to teach Marxist-Socialism. Nor had its philosophy been acceptable or tolerated in Ghana’s history until the Nkrumah era (and some could argue not since). The new schools, lectures, classes, magazines, journals, and newspaper articles created and devoted to the study and discussion of socialism, Leninism, and Marxism, and the histories, lives, and political-economies of the broader socialist world during the Nkrumah-era were revolutionary. For the everyday socialist thinkers, Ghana “[wa]s living in an intensely socialist revolutionary era.”Footnote ¹³⁸ Through education, debates, and policy measures, socialists in Ghana were making socialism a concrete reality. They were building the socialist de-colony.

Yet, the socialist-decolony was an intellectually contested place. A plethora of global socialist theories and histories were being published, circulated, and debated within Ghana. As the NASSO hymn underscored, these ideas and histories were heavily scrutinized to determine which ones were most useful for Black liberation. While the socialist intellectuals strove to ensure that the nation’s inhabitants knew about Global Northern and Eastern articulations of socialism, they ensured that their compatriots would also appreciate the specificities of their material and historical conditions and locate an African, Ghanaian brand of socialism. They reversed the colonial and neocolonial economic and intellectual vectors of exchange between Africa and the Global North. Whereas Africa transmitted raw materials to the Global North for refinement, these intellectuals imported the raw materials of Global Northern and Eastern socialism and transformed it. In so doing, they were domesticating and rescuing socialism from its European centricity.

These radical socialists in Ghana dismissed the idea of the mythical, classless African society, insisting that Africans were neither outside world history nor Hegel’s global human spirit. Even if an egalitarian African society had existed before European contact, they doubted that Africans could return to it. Only through an honest reappraisal of the African past, they argued, could Africans construct a new present and future, the socialist de-colony. Anything short of this invited reproachment and societal stagnation. They also repudiated the idea that religious belief and socialism were incompatible. Instead, religious metaphors and incantations played a key role in domesticating socialism to the people, leading to the rise of a Christian nationalist state through socialist discourses.

Last, these socialists denounced the label and concept of African Socialism, dismissing it as a Western, neocolonial construct that undermined the “real” socialist ideas emanating from Africa. Yet, it is ironic that popular memories of and the historical literature on global socialism has generally labeled or associated Ghana’s socialist experiment with the idea of African Socialism.

The socialist theorists in Ghana were creating and offering a new template for the socialist and Black world to use. As the Caribbean Marxist C. L. R. James explained, they were part of an extraordinary state and private effort to revolutionize Ghanaian society and the world. They were remaking socialism nationally and globally.

While this chapter has been interested in the attempts to bring socialist ideas, people, and histories to Ghana, Chapter 6 explores the lives of workers, those whom the state tasked literally with building the socialist utopia, the socialist de-colony.