Introduction

In 1963, the Ghanaian government passed the Capital Investments Act, removing the requirement that companies reinvest 60 percent of their profits after tax to Ghana.Footnote ¹ The nation’s leader Kwame Nkrumah hailed the Act’s success in “encouraging … many private investors … to flock in with proposals to establish business[es] in Ghana.”Footnote ² In his speech at the opening of the Unilever Soap Factory in Tema that year, Nkrumah simultaneously supported the Act’s introduction and outlined some tenants of his and his government’s economic governing philosophy – the welcoming of private capital and foreign investment – in essence, capitalism, within a socialist society. He noted, “Some people think that Capital Investment is in contradiction with our socialist aims and ideas. This is not true.”Footnote ³ Nkrumah’s statement next to Unilever, a British company that had amassed power and wealth during the colonial era at Africans’ expense, indicated that not only were capitalism and socialism compatible with Ghana’s political project but that foreign companies, even those with a dark colonial history, had a space within Ghana’s new socialist society. As a governing and economic philosophy, both socialism and capitalism had a role to play in Ghana’s construction.

Nkrumah’s remarks about the economic, intellectual, and political coherence of pursuing capitalism and socialism within a national economy exemplified a hot 20th-century international debate within Black and global political thought about whether combinations of capitalism and socialism could cohere within a Marxist state project.Footnote ⁴ Caribbean Marxist historians Walter Rodney and C. L. R. James vibrantly represented two ideological spectra of critique. Both used the example of Nkrumah’s Ghana to articulate their positions. In a 1975 lecture at Queens College in New York City, Rodney robustly criticized Nkrumah’s political-economic project as ideologically unviable and contradictory because it was a “mish-mash” of both socialism and capitalism. For Rodney, Nkrumah’s socialist policies were “whimsical” and failed to address the contradiction between “socialist premises” and the capitalist system, which could not coexist within a singular economic model.Footnote ⁵ The former was an economic system where the state and workers owned and dictated the industries and the economy writ large, and the latter an economic system where private individuals and companies, under the moniker of “market forces,” have free reign to act on and operate with little to no government intervention. James disagreed with Rodney, arguing that capitalist and socialist policies could exist side-by-side, concluding that a combination of capitalist and socialist modes of production was at the root of the Soviet Union’s 1920s economic philosophy and political-economic project called the New Economic Policy (NEP). He called this state capitalism and questioned how anyone could understand the USSR system, the epitome of a Marxist state project, as anything else.Footnote ⁶ Underlying the James–Rodney debate was the recognition that both capitalism and socialism were operating simultaneously within Nkrumah’s Ghana.

This chapter revitalizes the Rodney–James debate by first reconceptualizing Nkrumah’s links to the Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin’s state capitalist ideas, particularly whether capitalism and socialism could coexist within a Marxist framework. In doing so, the chapter recreates the intellectual and geographic biographies and circuits of Nkrumah and a few key Anglophone Black Marxists from 1917 to 1957. It demonstrates that Nkrumah’s political-economic philosophy and Ghana’s economic project were embedded within Anglo-Black Marxists’ understanding of both Lenin’s state capitalist ideas and their rehistoricization of Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s. This shows how ideas from the Soviet experiment were useful for Black socialist leaders to reimagine their own societies. Second, this chapter reassess Nkrumah’s Ghana within the praxis of socialist state capitalism. It undercuts the historiography that Nkrumah was carte blanche against foreign investment and capital, showing instead, how the Ghanaian state sought foreign capital and investment while staying true to its socialist ethos despite some internal rumblings about the socialist character of its development. Ultimately, a proper understanding and rehistoricization of the Ghanaian economy permits an alternative reading of postcolonial and socialist economies, socialism in Africa, and how formerly colonized peoples envisioned remaking new societies and Black freedom out of colonialism’s extractive ashes.Footnote ⁷

Interconnected Black Marxists, Geographies, and Histories

In 1901, Cyril Lionel Robert James was born in Trinidad. He attended Queen’s Royal College, a secondary school in Trinidad, on a scholarship. After finishing secondary school, James returned to Queen’s Royal College to teach journalism and writing.Footnote ⁸ According to James, he started writing about West Indian political figures and histories in the 1920s. In 1932, he moved to England to succeed as a writer. While earning wages as a cricket correspondent, primarily for the Manchester Guardian and Glasgow Herald, James keenly followed the global anticolonial movements and politics, and the Communist International movements’ debates. In 1934, he would join the Trotsky movement.Footnote ⁹

He gave public lectures in England and frequented France to attend communist-inspired meetings and conferences. It was in this highly mobile, cross-Atlantic space where he began writing World Revolution: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International. While writing World Revolution, James became the editor of Fight, a Trotskyite journal. By the time World Revolution hit the shelves in 1937, James anointed himself “perhaps the leading British Trotskyist of the day.”Footnote ¹⁰ The following year, James visited the United States to give “a lecture,” not knowing that he would not return to England for another fifteen years due to the twin misfortunes of illness and the outbreak of World War II. At this historical juncture, the Trotskyist movement also splintered and fell apart, which James attributed to the Stalin–Hitler pact and Trotsky’s assassination in 1940 in Mexico.

During these political and intellectual crises, James returned to the writings and histories of the Bolshevik Revolution and its Marxist progenitors to reshape his understandings of Trotskyism and to (re-)historicize 1920s Soviet history. After eleven years of studying “Marxism in all its respects – philosophical, economic and political,” James concluded that “Trotsky had misled the movement” and left it in 1951. This led to James’ State Capitalism and World Revolution.Footnote ¹¹ Within State Capitalism’s pages, James conveyed his understanding of state capitalism and the Soviet New Economic Policy (NEP), which entailed the pursuit of capitalism alongside socialism during the 1920s.

In 1917, under Vladimir Lenin’s leadership, the Bolsheviks took over the Russian Empire and initiated a new society, a revolution, the world’s first state explicitly built on Karl Marx’s socialist principles. The former Russian aristocrats did not go away quietly, however, prompting a civil war between the Reds (the Bolsheviks and their supporters) and the Whites (the aristocratic class and their allies). During the war, the Bolshevik leadership introduced an economic program called War Communism, which was the near-universal nationalization of the economic sector and the forced acquisition of peasant goods. The Russian Civil War and War Communism, from 1918 to 1921, devastated the Soviet landscape and economy. War Communism’s failures were crystalized with the Kronstadt and Tambov revolts in 1921, which the Bolsheviks violently suppressed, making it increasingly difficult for the Bolsheviks to support the measures.Footnote ¹² To rehabilitate the economy and their political fortunes, the Bolsheviks switched from War Communism to NEP. NEP called for the restoration of private capital, the suspension of forced grain requisition, the reestablishment of small-scale industry, and Bolshevik requests for “private investment from the West.” Nikolai Bukharin – one of the Bolshevik Party’s foremost theorists, leaders, and advocates for the NEP – argued that the state should remove its monopolistic restrictions on foreign capital, allow foreign capital and investment to operate within the economy, and urged the peasants to “enrich” themselves, accumulate capital, and develop their farms. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Trotsky and Joseph Stalin repudiated NEP and Bukharin’s position. In 1928, NEP came to a halt and Stalinism became the governing economic philosophy of the USSR, which called for rapid industrialization at the expense of the kulaks (wealthy peasants). Stalin won the power struggle to succeed Lenin and began killing his political rivals and the NEP’s supporters. Bukharin was killed in 1938, and Trotsky suffered the same fate two years later in Mexico.Footnote ¹³

Drawing evidence from both, Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, and Lenin’s works on state-monopolies, James revisited this period, arguing that state capitalism in the USSR was in fact a necessary and pragmatic method to achieve an ideal socialist society. James’ arguments centered on revisiting four texts in particular: Lenin’s two books and two pamphlets: Imperialism (1915), State and Revolution (1917), “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It” (1917), and “The Present-Day Economy of Russia” (1918).Footnote ¹⁴ Together, these texts emphasize that state capitalism is not simply a stage of socialist development but rather the vehicle for its fruition, particularly in the transnational world economy composed of nation-states, or in Lenin’s words: “state-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs.”Footnote ¹⁵ James was compelled by Lenin’s historical analysis of the Bolshevik Revolution, which reminded readers that state capitalism would not undermine a socialist revolution or its gains because it provided the “surest road” to socialism. James noted that Lenin argued that establishing state capitalism in the USSR within six months would ensure that socialism would “have gained a permanent firm hold and will have become invincible in this country.”Footnote ¹⁶ According to Lenin, there were no degrees of socialism; state capitalism was the way to socialism. Historian Elisabeth Leake notes how Afghan actors in the late 20th century turned to Soviet history to make contemporary nation- and worldmaking claims.Footnote ¹⁷ Similarly, although geographically far away, Black Marxists returned to the intellectual debates, events, and the history of the USSR’s early years to make contemporaneous political-economic claims.

After reading Lenin’s and Marx’s works, James chided Stalinists and orthodox Trotskyism for failing to address Marx’s and Engel’s take on state capitalism. Instead, James praised Lenin’s analysis of state capitalism as the Marxian model, arguing that state capitalism was ubiquitous within Lenin’s writings, and claimed that one could not “escape the theoretical possibility that Russia might be a form of state capitalism.”Footnote ¹⁸ In this re-reading of Lenin, the effects of the Russian Civil War was not the only catalyst for Lenin’s shift towards permitting the continuation of private capital within the USSR. Instead, James noted that Lenin had been foregrounding this point a few years prior to War Communism and the NEP. Consequently, James argued that a return to Lenin’s writings demonstrated that state capitalism was not an aberration or necessary economic retreat as scholars have generally claimed but the embodiment of a socialist society. James then concluded that “Lenin’s method of economic analysis is ours to use” and that the “problems of production which Lenin had to tackle in Russia in 1920 are universal (his italics).”Footnote ¹⁹ This reading then posited Stalinism, the last incarnation of Trotskyism, as a corruption of socialism. James’ revisitation of the nature of the Soviet socialist experiment came to shape his views on Nkrumah’s Ghana. In James’ 1977 book, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, he dedicated a chapter to the relevance of Lenin’s ideas to Africa and “underdeveloped economies.”Footnote ²⁰ Nkrumah’s Ghana, then, was not an aberration or an inconsistent Marxist-Leninist policy but in some measures its successor, its African incarnation. Black Marxists were not simply having conversations about race or decolonization as a project of racial replacement but also grappling with questions about political-economic development and alternative economic models. It was this James – very knowledgeable about Leninism, the internecine communist debates, and grappling with their meanings and his place within it – who met the young Nkrumah in the United States in 1943.

Eight years before, in 1935, James Kwegyir Aggrey, Nkrumah’s intellectual mentor, encouraged Nkrumah to apply for a non-quota immigration visa to attend Lincoln University, a historically Black educational institution in the United States. Aggrey was a founding member of Achimota College, an elite Colonial Ghanaian secondary school institution in Accra.Footnote ²¹ Perhaps to their later regret, the US government granted Nkrumah the visa, and he departed from Sekondi, a port city in the Western Region, on August 6, arriving in America on October 31.Footnote ²² Four years later, he graduated from Lincoln with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Economics while studying at the Theological Seminary.Footnote ²³ He won the Robert H. Nassau Prize for best exemplifying “the ideal of the Theological Seminary of Lincoln University in scholarship and personality.”Footnote ²⁴ Nkrumah then continued his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a Master of Science in Education and Master of Arts in Philosophy in 1942 and 1943, respectively.Footnote ²⁵ Born around 1909 in the small town of Nkroful, in Ghana’s Western Region, by 1943, Nkrumah had gone on to receive a master’s degree from one of the world’s most elite universities.

Between 1943 and 1945 James and Nkrumah became close.Footnote ²⁶ Their social circles traveled up and down the Eastern Coast of the United States between Pennsylvania and New York City, sharing and having vibrant debates with each other.Footnote ²⁷ As James was peeling away from Trotskyism and engaging seriously with Lenin’s and Marx’s state capitalist ideas, Nkrumah attended James’ Trotskyist group meetings.Footnote ²⁸ In that space, they spoke about “Marxism,”Footnote ²⁹ Leninism, imperialism, and the export of capital.Footnote ³⁰ Through these gatherings, Black Marxists debated Lenin’s state capitalist ideas, the success and failures of NEP, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Black liberation, and imperialism. Traces of these social gatherings in autobiographies and in letters suggest that these figures sharpened each other’s analysis of Marxism, particularly Marxist-Leninist thought. They also exposed Nkrumah to some of Lenin’s more obscure writings and contemporary debates around Lenin’s state capitalist ideas and the Soviet experiment. Nkrumah sought to further his knowledge about communism and Soviet history. On August 21, 1943, he wrote to the secretary of the Communist Party of Minnesota, Carl Ross, to discuss going to New York City to train at the Communist Party School. It is unclear if he ever attended. However, he did apply successfully to Cornell University to undertake an intensive study of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1944,Footnote ³¹ but due to financial constraints, he was unable to attend.Footnote ³²

During those impressionable years, Nkrumah wrote a short essay called “The Philosophy of Property,” which rejected the premise that a government could nationalize all lands or private property even if it deemed necessary.Footnote ³³ The essay provides a window into his early thinking on Marx’s ideas of private property and nationalization and their applicability for Ghana. For Nkrumah, land did not belong to the laborer in the Marxian sense, and the nullification of private property was impractical. Nkrumah was rather consistent on this issue from this time period, and during his presidency he did not nationalize private property or lands.

Nkrumah’s last few years in the United States were marked by financial and academic frustrations as he sought to further his knowledge about communism and Soviet history. In 1944, after almost a decade away from West Africa, Nkrumah felt homesick and wished to return home.Footnote ³⁴ Before returning, though, Nkrumah hoped to spend a few months in the Soviet Union.Footnote ³⁵ As his financial and academic problems mounted in the United States, Nkrumah decided that a change in scenery was warranted. In 1945, he moved to Britain to study law and anthropology at the London School of Economics and to engage in political activity.Footnote ³⁶ Consequently, James introduced Nkrumah to his childhood friend, George Padmore, and asked him to train Nkrumah in revolutionary matters.Footnote ³⁷ According to historian Marika Sherwood, Nkrumah “received an ‘injection of Marxism’” from Padmore.Footnote ³⁸ In 1945, Padmore was one of the most renowned Black communists and Marxists of the era.Footnote ³⁹ In his introductory letter to Padmore, James described Nkrumah as “not very bright.” James explained his comments: “Nkrumah was a very sophisticated and fluent man – I didn’t mean he was a fool … I knew he was politically sound. He was determined to throw the Europeans out of Africa and I asked [Padmore] to do what he could for him. George understood at once: This man is a born revolutionary, devoted completely.”Footnote ⁴⁰ James argued that Nkrumah’s exploits in Ghana were only possible through Padmore’s political education and guidance.

Like C. L. R. James, George Padmore (his parents called him Malcolm Nurse) was born in Trinidad, but two years later, in 1903. Padmore’s father, Hubert Alphonso Nurse, converted to Islam from Christianity. He taught agriculture, and his home was “completely covered in books.” James and Padmores’ families knew each other well. They watched cricket and races together.Footnote ⁴¹ Padmore attended St. Mary’s College. Afterward, he became a journalist and reporter for the Trinidad Guardian.Footnote ⁴² At a young age, Padmore got married and had a child. In 1923, at approximately twenty years of age, Padmore left his family in Trinidad and went to the United States. To evade the police, Padmore dropped his name, Malcolm Nurse, and assumed the name, George Padmore.

While studying at Howard University,Footnote ⁴³ Padmore joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). When the British ambassador went to speak at Howard, Padmore printed numerous leaflets denouncing imperialism and “threw them in his (the British Ambassador’s) face.” He was subsequently expelled.Footnote ⁴⁴ In 1932, he moved to the Soviet Union. Padmore was elected as a delegate to the Moscow City Soviet, lived in the Kremlin, and during the Soviet May Day celebrations sat on the platform with Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, and other prominent Soviet officials.Footnote ⁴⁵ Padmore also taught at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV), which was established in 1921 to train the world’s bourgeoning communists to lead a worldwide revolution.Footnote ⁴⁶ Padmore soon moved to Hamburg, Germany, and replaced the African-American communist James Ford as the main figure in the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW), also known as the Hamburg Committee.Footnote ⁴⁷

As the Hamburg Committee’s figurehead, Padmore communicated to the outer reaches of what historian Holger Weiss calls the “Radical African Atlantic” and provided support to spread communism in Africa and tackle European colonialism. Due to the combination of the seeming omnipresence and repressive nature of the colonial security apparatus, communication difficulties, and a lack of sufficient interest among Africans, Padmore’s efforts to spur a communist movement were largely unsuccessful. Soon, as Chapter 1 highlighted, Padmore had become disillusioned with the Soviet state.

Padmore’s relationship with the Soviet Union and the Communist International (Comintern) quickly soured on the question of Black and African independence. He left the USSR in 1934 when the Soviets refused to defend Ethiopia against the invading Italians. Padmore returned to England and knocked on James’ door. James opened it and found a “disheveled” man, noting that Padmore’s “eyes were not what they ought to be.”Footnote ⁴⁸ It was at this juncture that Padmore’s and Nkrumah’s lives intersected.

Here, Nkrumah encountered Dorothy (Pizer) Padmore, George Padmore’s partner.Footnote ⁴⁹ James declared that Dorothy understood Marxism as well as anyone in the Communist Party. Dorothy helped George write his books, advised him on what books to acquire, and aided him in reading his books, raising a series of questions regarding the unrecognized intellectual labor of Black women.Footnote ⁵⁰ Like James, the Padmores wrote two books, How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire: A Challenge to Imperialist Powers (1946) and Pan-Africanism and Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa (1958). They focused on the Soviet experiment and its potential impact on Africa. This knowledge was transferred to Nkrumah.

During his time in England, Nkrumah spent “much time sitting in Padmore’s small kitchen, the wooden table completely covered by papers, discussing” politics, and listening possibly to George Padmore’s exploits at the heart of the Soviet empire, Europe, and the United States.Footnote ⁵¹ While Chapter 1 highlighted how Padmore and Nkrumah’s discussions on the USSR centered on its place among other white empires, in this chapter, I am concerned with how Nkrumah imbibed and engaged their thoughts about the USSR, NEP, and the varied strands of Leninism, Stalinism, and Marxism. Nkrumah’s engagement with the Padmores, just as his conversations with James and his circles across the Atlantic in the United States, sharpened these Anglophone Black Marxists’ understanding and analysis of the Soviet experiment and its viability and applicability for Black political and economic liberation.

In addition to James and the Padmores, one other Black Marxist figure, Bankole Awoonor-Renner, the first African to study in Moscow in the 1920s, became part of Nkrumah’s intellectual and political world and helped shape Nkrumah’s Marxist and Soviet ontologies.Footnote ⁵² They overlapped in England between 1945 and 1948 before returning to Colonial Ghana. Historian Basil Davidson noted that Nkrumah “further developed his ideas about socialism, talking with colleagues such as Bankole Awooner-Renner, though still in a very theoretical way.”Footnote ⁵³ Unlike the other comrades born outside of the African continent, Awoonor-Renner was born in Elmina, Colonial Ghana, as a British colonial subject on June 6, 1898. In 1921, Awoonor-Renner went to the United States to study journalism at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pennsylvania and Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1924, Awoonor-Renner’s life fundamentally changed when he met the African-American communist Lovett Fort-Whiteman, and he registered with the CPUSA the following year.Footnote ⁵⁵ With Fort-Whiteman’s aid, Awoonor-Renner left the capitalist empire for the communist oneFootnote ⁵⁶ around August or SeptemberFootnote ⁵⁷ in 1925, where he underwent communist training at KUTV until 1928.Footnote ⁵⁸ The school offered courses on political economy and Leninist thought.Footnote ⁵⁹ During his studies, the Soviet Union was at the height of its state capitalist development project. Lenin’s political-economic philosophy and the NEP surrounded him in the classroom and on the streets. In 1928, Awooner-Renner left the USSR for Latvia and Lithuania, supposedly “posing as a journalist and representative of an American publication called ‘Asia.’”Footnote ⁶⁰

Despite leaving the USSR for West Africa between 1928 and 1929,Footnote ⁶¹ Awooner-Renner continued to think favorably of the Soviet Union and Stalin. Moreover, he still communicated with leading Marxist intellectuals and dignitaries from the Eastern Bloc, even cabling “Comrade Stalin” in 1936. In 1940, he wrote to the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, congratulating him on the Soviet Union’s foreign policy in the Baltic States and suggesting that the Soviets should open a consulate in Accra.Footnote ⁶² Thus, Awooner-Renner appears to be the first individual either in Colonial Ghana or the USSR to call for an embassy in either country. In respect to their views on the USSR post-1930, Awooner-Renner and George Padmore differed sharply. While Padmore viewed the Soviets quite negatively and as another white empire, Awooner-Renner praised the Soviets’ imperial ambitions. Nonetheless, while Padmore lived in Paris during the mid-1930s, he and Awooner-Renner were in frequent contact.Footnote ⁶³ In 1943, Awooner-Renner moved to England to consult eye and heart specialists and study law at Lincoln’s Inn.Footnote ⁶⁴

The British feared that his relationship with communists, his strong anticolonial pronouncements, and his favorable views of the USSR might “cause trouble to the police.”Footnote ⁶⁵ According to British intelligence reports, Awooner-Renner remained in close contact with “known Communists” in Britain and the British Communist Party’s headquarters in LondonFootnote ⁶⁶ while frequenting the Czechoslovakia Embassy to meet “communist plotters.”Footnote ⁶⁷ While in England, Awoonor-Renner and Nkrumah quickly became intellectual interlocutors and co-created the Pan-Africanist and anticolonial union, the West African National Secretariat.Footnote ⁶⁸

Nkrumah’s knowledge of Marxism and Marxist-Leninism was not merely confined to his Black interlocutors. The British monitored Nkrumah as a member of a more extensive communist network.Footnote ⁶⁹ Their anti-communist reports suggested that Nkrumah associated “mostly with communist and other extremist groups.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Furthermore, they often remarked upon Nkrumah’s links with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and his supposed “communist views.”Footnote ⁷¹ The British also monitored Nkrumah’s calls to and from the CPGB.Footnote ⁷² These observations unearthed the stark reality that Nkrumah was involved in Black and white Marxist circles. Nkrumah was friendly with William Rust, the editor of the British Communist Paper, the Daily Worker, and with Michael Carritt, the head of the British Communist Party’s Colonial Section.Footnote ⁷³ Through British communist Maud Rogerson, Nkrumah sought the CPGB’s “support … for the West African National Congress [sic].”Footnote ⁷⁴ Nkrumah possessed notebooks containing the names of numerous CPGB members, including Margot Parish and Rogerson, a pamphlet entitled “The Communist Party in the Factories,” a collector’s card, and a CPGB membership card.Footnote ⁷⁵ During his trial in April 1948 before the “Commission of Enquiry into the Disturbances in the Gold Coast,” Nkrumah admitted to attending “many of the Communist meetings” during his time in London.Footnote ⁷⁶ On September 15, 1953, a British security liaison officer in the West Africa department noted that Marxist teachings were “ingrained” within Nkrumah’s mind and underpinned his anticolonial and anti-imperial utterances.Footnote ⁷⁷

When Awooner-Renner and Nkrumah returned to West Africa in the late 1940s, British intelligence reports suggested that Awooner-Renner convinced Nkrumah to “repudiate” the United Gold Coast Convention Party (UGCC) and to start his own party, the Convention People’s Party (CPP) in 1949.Footnote ⁷⁸ This decision had profound repercussions for African decolonization. Rather than the gradual approach to independence that the UGCC advocated, the CPP demanded independence now, forcing the British to hold elections in their colony. Black independence, especially that coupled with Marxist-socialist thought, scared the British since it dared to revamp not only the political but the economic world-order they had spent years crafting and solidifying.

In response, in 1954, the British banned communist literature from entering into and circulating within Colonial Ghana.Footnote ⁷⁹ Yet, the Black Marxist-socialists still found ways to receive the literature. Kojo Botsio, the then minister of state for Nkrumah’s transitional government, still received communist literature despite ceremonially approving the ban.Footnote ⁸⁰ To safeguard Black independence, Nkrumah was forced to expel his fellow CPP member Anthony Woode and other suspected communists from the CPP and his transitional government. Yet, Nkrumah assured Woode that “he and his colleagues were still true ‘socialists at heart,’ and it was only force of circumstances which made them keep their opinions to themselves.”Footnote ⁸¹ Nkrumah’s decision to remove Woode and the others was a tactical ploy, a one-step retreat to advance three steps forward with a bold Marxist-Leninist political-economy in the near future.

On July 6, 1956, Rita Hinden, a South African London Socialist Union and Fabian Society member, wrote to Nkrumah reminiscing about their long debates about socialism during their London years. She enclosed a copy of a “controversial” book, Twentieth Century Socialism, by Socialist Union, a group on the right wing of the British Labour Party, which, she alleged, challenged the “old [socialist] dogmas and slogans” they were “brought up” on. Hinden concluded: “Who would have thought it possible [the imminence of self-government] when we were fighting out these battles [socialist ideas] – so bitterly and controversially among ourselves ten-years ago!”Footnote ⁸² On August 15, Nkrumah responded: “Thank you very much indeed for the copy of ‘20th Century Socialism’ which you sent me. … [A]s a Socialist the title appeals to me.”Footnote ⁸³ Later on, Nkrumah would label himself a “Marxist socialist.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The bitter and controversial debates Hinden mentioned almost certainly centered on the correctness of the NEP, state capitalism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, and on socialist economic development models. These documents underscore Nkrumah’s wide-ranging discussions with and contacts among key figures of the Marxist movements in the 1920s through to the 1950s. Personally, Nkrumah was building his own library on Marxist-Leninism and the Soviet experiment.

Nkrumah’s library possessed books such as Joseph Stalin’s Problems of Leninism and History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a well-marked copy of Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute’s Vladimir I. Lenin: A Political Biography.Footnote ⁸⁵ These texts discussed the NEP and state capitalism in some measure. For instance, chapters nine and ten of the History of the Communist Party were dedicated to those topics. Stalin wrote: “The Tenth Congress … adopted the New Economic Policy (NEP). The turn from War Communism to NEP is a striking instance of the wisdom and farsightedness of Lenin’s policy.” Stalin acknowledged that the NEP entailed the “freedom of trade” and the “revival of capitalism in the country.” Even Stalin admitted that Lenin had thought it “necessary to permit private trade and to allow private manufacturers to open small businesses.” Stalin declared that “the state-owned industries would be restored” and would become “the economic foundation of Socialism.”Footnote ⁸⁶ By analyzing the remaining contents of Nkrumah’s library to consider the range of texts that may have shaped him, I take the archive’s materiality and Nkrumah’s library’s remnants as historical artifacts worthy of serious analysis. These collections permit us to (re-)think the intellectual worlds Nkrumah was exposed to during his lifetime. More than merely a receptor of Marxist and socialist debates, he contributed to these discourses.

When Nkrumah and members of the CPP, backed by figures like George Padmore and James, wrestled political control of the colony from Britain on March 6, 1957, not only had they been discussing and studying Marxist-Leninism, socialism, the history of the USSR and Black liberation for several decades both in Ghana and across the world, they had also been influential in shaping these histories and ideas. These figures were far from naïve socialists. They were theoretically sophisticated global characters who would seek to implement Lenin’s state capitalist ideas in the socialist de-colony, with Nkrumah as its leader, to achieve Black economic freedom and political independence.

Foreign Capital, Capitalism, and Socialism

Operating within the Red-Scare paradigm, where communist witch hunts transpired, major American newspapers like The New York Times produced misleading and fear-mongering headlines that obfuscated the Ghanaian political-economic project, revealing more about its internal anti-leftist views than about Nkrumah’s Ghana. On January 8, 1964, The New York Times published an article entitled, “Ghana Is Viewed as Going Marxist,” alleging that “Diplomats in Accra … almost unanimously” concluded that Ghana was engaging in a “Total War” on “Capitalism.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Such hyperbolic and misleading commentary have masked and betrayed the real economic policies the Ghanaian state pursued, despite contemporaneous reports and evidence to the contrary, that socialism and capitalism were both instrumental components of Ghana’s construction and governing economic philosophy.

I return to the chapter’s opening scenes, the launch of the Unilever Soap Factory in Tema and Nkrumah’s introduction of the Capital Investment Act in 1963 to outline how there was no war on capitalism in Nkrumah’s Ghana. Seven years after independence, Nkrumah remained steadfast that Ghana was a socialist state and that it had been and was pursuing foreign and private investment to establish businesses in the country. Nkrumah rubbished claims that this was a contradiction. Indeed, despite claims to the contrary, Nkrumah’s government actively pursued foreign capital and investment. It had never waged a war on capitalism, only on the ways capitalism could further exploit and exacerbate the precarious economic positions of people in Ghana and the state itself.Footnote ⁸⁸

From its inception, the Ghanaian government hunted for capital from various racial groups, multinational companies, and ideologically opposed governments. In March 1957, American vice-president Richard Nixon and Nkrumah “discussed American economic and technical assistance.”Footnote ⁸⁹ That same month, the Ghanaian government encouraged Shell Oil Company to invest in Ghana.Footnote ⁹⁰ Nkrumah and Bob Fleming, a Mobile Oil executive, also discussed how Fleming could convince “international banking firms in New York” to “give favorable consideration to” investment in Ghana. More famously, Nkrumah also conversed with American presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr., members of the Henry J. Kaiser Company, and the Soviets to secure funds for Ghana’s Volta River Project.Footnote ⁹¹ In September, Ghana’s minister of finance Komla Gbedemah met with Curtis Candy Company executives to inquire whether the Chicago-based company would establish an export-import business in Ghana.Footnote ⁹² Gbedemah also met “with the World Bank, the American consortium in New York,” and the Aluminum Limited Company in Canada to secure foreign investment.Footnote ⁹³ Organizations like the American Rockefeller Brothers Fund concurrently arranged meetings and workshops to help Ghana entice “international financial organizations.”Footnote ⁹⁴ On April 12, 1958, M. B. Bursey, Ghana’s commercial counselor in Canada, wrote to the Canadian Department of Trade and Commerce “to ascertain whether a Canadian firm or firms” would invest in “a commercial tuna fishing industry” in the nation.Footnote ⁹⁵ Letters were also sent to the Americans and Italians on this subject matter. In 1959, the Ghanaian Ministry of Industry contacted the German companies, J. Morin & Co and Messrs. Schlotterhose & Co. of Bremerhaven, to “erect a factory for manufacturing fish meal and its by-products,” and for machinery, respectively.Footnote ⁹⁶ Indeed, historian Emmanuel Akyeampong maintained that Nkrumah’s “favourable stance … towards foreign investors … protected Lebanese gains in the Ghanaian economy.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Similarly, historian Tracy Mensah has shown how the new state’s economic policies benefited Sindhi businessmen and their firms in Ghana.Footnote ⁹⁸

Often framed in terms of racial solidarity and uplift, Ghanaian officials encouraged the African-American community to provide financial capital and expertise to the newly independent Black state.Footnote ⁹⁹ This message found fertile soil. For example, a March 1958 edition of the African-American magazine Ebony encouraged its readers to invest in Ghana. After reading the issue, African-American businessman John M. Scott contacted Nkrumah on March 2 about the “possibilities of [establishing] a garment industry” in Ghana.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The Ghanaian government also created tax-friendly policies for foreign companies to funnel money to and keep in Ghana. In an internal memorandum on acquiring Star-Kist’s investment in the tuna industry, Ghanaian trade officials noted that “No Export Tax or Excise Duty” should be “levied.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Moreover, Star-Kist was given tax exemptions on machinery and plant importations, permitted a five-year period of no export controls on all “fish and fish products,” and the ability to “convert” their “sterling funds into US dollars at the current rate of exchange,” which was quite favorable to them.Footnote ¹⁰² In explaining Ghana’s 1958–1959 budget, the minister of finance Gbedemah stressed the importance of “private capital” and “reducing the company tax” to support “pioneer industries” and industrialization.Footnote ¹⁰³ In April 1960, the government removed exchange controls “of money coming from outside the sterling area by companies with authorized capital of £15,000 or less,” and guaranteed companies “permission to remit profits and repatriate capital from Ghana.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Ghana had a very simple and practical reason for seeking capital from abroad.

Ghanaian officials were “obliged to seek investment from abroad” to industrialize because it lacked a large domestic base to extract foreign currency from, Nkrumah wrote.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Tapping into the wealth of the cocoa farmers – whom anthropologist Polly Hill described as early colonial capitalists – Footnote ¹⁰⁶ was insufficient to build the state capitalist society Ghana’s leaders envisioned.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ British officials agreed. They commented that Ghana lacked the “finance for urgent development”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ and “level of capital” to undertake its development schemes.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ “Investment capital” and “foreign capital,” Nkrumah admitted, “is our great need and important for an emerging developing country where large-scale sources of capital accumulation” was difficult to mobilize domestically.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Even the small surplus it had upon independence, £200 million, was locked up in England’s security exchanges and being mismanaged by British Crown Agents. From 1957 to 1958, Ghana’s minister of finance Komla Agbeli Gbedemah and chief economic advisor Sir W. Arthur Lewis traveled to England to wrestle those funds back.Footnote ¹¹¹ New streams of revenue had to be actively explored and courted.

After Ghana had become a Republic in 1961, the year some have argued the state turned away from capitalism,Footnote ¹¹² Ghana’s cabinet secretary informed Ghana’s ministers that “There was no proposal that the establishment of projects by private enterprise should be discouraged or forbidden; the ‘private enterprise,’ sector will remain.”Footnote ¹¹³ Some took this decision as evidence that Nkrumah and his “henchmen” had finally done away with capitalism, that nationalization efforts were underway, and that Ghana had become wholly devoted and enamored with communism and the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹¹⁴ However, this was and remains a severe misreading, and it was economically dangerous for the new state, as it scared off investment, prompting the Ghanaian government to address the issue directly. In 1962, the Ghanaian presidential cabinet drafted a statement reminding the world that it had “no intention of considering any proposals from the owners of private business for the sale of their business to the government.” Moreover, the government stressed its support of private capitalism and initiative – in fact, it welcomed it. The document continued: “The Government takes this opportunity to restate what it has stated on many occasions in the past, namely, that it gives recognition to the existence of private initiative and investment in the nation’s economy, and that it expects private initiative to play its role in the economic development of the country, side by side with state and co-operative enterprises.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

At a dinner with businesspersons at the Flagstaff House in early 1963, Nkrumah informed the attendees that Ghana’s ideas “of socialism can co-exist with private enterprise.” Nkrumah was adamant that private capital and private investment capital, in particular, had a “recognised and legitimate part to play in Ghana’s economic development.” Nkrumah was emphatic that socialism and capitalism could exist. He continued: “I have never made any secrets of my faith in socialist principles, but I have always tried to make quite clear that Ghana’s socialism is not incompatible with the existence and growth of a vigorous private sector in the economy.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ In an interview with the BBC Network of Africa in 1979, Imoru Egala, the former minister of Industries in Nkrumah’s cabinet, maintained that Ghana had a “mixed economy” under Nkrumah, where the state did not own most of the means of production.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The US State Department concurred this assessment. In 1963, the American ambassador to Ghana, Wilson Flake, and the US State Department concluded that Ghana pursued “a mixed economy in which private capital is active and foreign investment welcomed.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ The US State Department boasted about its strong investment in Ghana’s economy, especially its financial support for the Volta River Project.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The combination of socialism and capitalism – state capitalism, the mixed economy – was a hallmark and deliberate feature of the socialist decolony. It was not a bug, an accident, or an ill-conceived or ideological contradiction. Instead, it drew from a longer political-economic and intellectual heritage situated within Black Marxists’ reading of the Soviet experiment. Nkrumah publicly informed members of the business community that “Ghana expected businessmen, industrialists, manufacturers and investors to play a significant role in” Ghana’s economic growth and development. “Invite your business friends to come here and see with their own eyes the happy atmosphere pervading everything we do.”Footnote ¹²⁰ This was not a secret speech. It was reproduced in The New Ashanti Times. Nkrumah did not articulate his position privately so that only businesspersons might discover his ‘real’ pro-capitalist leanings. Nor did he articulate it clandestinely to cover his left flank.

Even contemporaneous British officials and the British conservative press concluded that Ghana was indeed pursuing pro-capitalist policies. On October 16, 1963, the British conservative newspaper The Daily Telegraph conceded that Ghana “continued to … welcome” private investors as long as they were “fair to us (Ghana).”Footnote ¹²¹ Another article acknowledged that Ghana’s “lifting of … re-investment regulations” would enable British corporations like the Ashanti Goldfield Company and the Consolidated African Selection Trust, a diamond group, to continue “to make large investments in Ghana.”Footnote ¹²² These measures prompted the British Financial Times to admit that Ghana was making numerous concessions to “foreign investors and would-be investors.”Footnote ¹²³ In fact, Ghana was one of the nations calling for the unrestricted movement of goods internationally, criticizing alleged pro-capitalist countries for state intervention in the market.

At the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) meetings in May and June 1962, Ghana, alongside Nigeria, Indonesia, and Brazil, called on the former colonial powers, the public promoters and defenders of capitalism, to reduce and remove trade barriers for their goods. The Ghanaian delegation criticized Japan and France’s cocoa “restrictions” and urged the former (and current) colonizing powers to reduce, if not certainly remove, their tariffs.Footnote ¹²⁴ Ghana called for the unrestricted circulation of its goods within the global economy. Western industrial countries were attacking Ghana’s leaders for seeking to protect its economy from foreign exploitation while engaging in similar tactics!

On November 29, 1963, a writer with the pseudonym X’ray published “Sugar Industrial Complex” in the CPP’s socialist, pro-African liberationist and Pan-Africanist magazine, The Spark. X’ray acknowledged that the “private sector of the [Ghanaian] national economy is forging ahead as seen in the strides being made under Capital Investments Act.” X’ray welcomed the influx of private capital and capitalism because it was “subordinate” to Ghana’s broader economic visions.Footnote ¹²⁵ “The Government,” Nkrumah noted, “will continue to encourage private investors to establish and operate in Ghana. Our Government has no plans whatever to take over industries in the private sector.”Footnote ¹²⁶ This statement was consistent with Nkrumah’s long-held view that the state should neither eliminate private property nor nationalize all private assets or lands. Other socialist theorists in Ghana echoed a similar message. They maintained that “the right to use of private property and the pursuance of private enterprise is recognized by all sectors of the community.”Footnote ¹²⁷ The editorial board of the Evening News wrote in 1963: “No doubt a few elements have allowed themselves to be carried away by the dogmatists’ view of what socialism means in Ghana, some are certainly affected by the infantile paralysis of which Lenin spoke years ago, but Osagyefo’s clear-cut message to businessmen must set both the rumor-mongers and adventuring investors’ mind at ease.”Footnote ¹²⁸ On March 2, 1963, an anonymous individual wrote in The New Ashanti Times: “Let us all join with Osagyefo (Nkrumah) in encouraging foreign investors.”Footnote ¹²⁹ James informed an audience in Ghana that Ghana’s policy was “to say to quite frankly to capitalism, particularly, fast capitalism: we need you.”Footnote ¹³⁰ From the president’s mouth, to the state’s leaders, to the Ghanaian press, to the pro-socialist Ghanaian magazines, and to the Black Marxist intellectual circles in Ghana, there was a consensus and understanding that the socialist state had not abandoned capitalism or rejected private enterprise. From the state’s inception, it had acknowledged the important role capitalism, foreign investment, and private enterprise had to play in its socialist reconstruction and in the safeguarding of Black freedom. What explains then the complete misrecognition (or deliberate misreading) of Ghana’s political-economic objectives and project?

The Ghanaian state had grown increasingly frustrated by private companies and foreign investors bursting at the seams to do business in Ghana, requesting that the Ghanaian state pump its own money into private ventures and assume financial liabilities if said ventures collapsed. This undercut the purpose of the state’s push for private investment. Private funds were supposed to flow into Ghana and offset government spending in those sectors, freeing up state finances to invest in essential projects.Footnote ¹³¹ Moreover, Ghana’s leaders had concluded that certain economic measures and ventures would function better if they were entirely privately operated, meaning that they needed to make a profit and be self-sustaining entities, or become wholly government owned. The Standing Development Corporation, the entity within the government charged with overseeing Ghana’s state enterprises, had been particularly adamant that the government withdraw itself and its finances from many enterprises.Footnote ¹³² Consequently, government officials compiled a list of companies it had “invested capital” in and debated whether or not they should sell their share to the private coowner or purchase the private investors’ shares. The goal was to leave “companies free to operate economically as autonomous bodies.”Footnote ¹³³ Ghana’s leaders had made it abundantly clear that they were not engaged in the process of nationalization. The state sought to undercut the big myth circulating in late 1961 to early 1962, which, in fact, would have a long afterlife after Nkrumah’s death, that the government was seeking to nationalize the economy. Rather, the cabinet wished to reiterate the state’s position, that it “did not intend to purchase any existing private commercial businesses.”Footnote ¹³⁴ The state was neither nationalizing private enterprises nor preparing to do so.

Claims that Ghana was against foreign investment and capitalism were attempts to frighten foreign and private investors away from Ghana. These were manoeuvres to bring the Ghanaian economy to its knees and then proclaim that the economic policies and philsophy in the socialist de-colony and the incompetence of the independent Black government were to blame for a faltering economy. Yet, the archival record offers a different narrative. Ghana strategically positioned itself economically as explicitly open to capitalist investment while being politically critical of the Western capitalist geopolitical world order. It signaled this political strategy through increasingly friendlier ties to the Soviets (as the previous chapters have indicated), its anger about the UN and the West’s betrayal and murder of the first democratically elected Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, and its sincere efforts to undercut Britain’s monopoly off of its economy.

As Chapter 2 outlined with the Soviet cotton textile mill, another underlying motive that drove Ghana’s leaders’ pursuit and selection of particular foreign adventures was the latter’s willingness to develop local industries that would eventually be operated and managed entirely by local actors. Ghana’s discussions with Star-Kist Foods, INC., “the largest fish processor in the world,”Footnote ¹³⁵ about the conditions necessary for them to create a tuna factory in Ghana is illustrative. Ghana’s minister of Commerce and Industry’s outlined in a memorandum:

As the minister of Commerce and Industry highlighted, the purpose of seeking foreign capital and expertise was to achieve the state’s goals of simultaneously decolonizing itself from British capital, building the socialist de-colony, and to Africanize the economic sector. Thus, these interests were often intertwined.

The Ghanaian government sought to provide the necessary training and conditions for local economic actors to play key roles in the domestic, then African, then hopefully global economic arenas. It saw then the acquirement of foreign experts as a temporary measure, a short-term necessity to achieve its goals and not a long-term policy or strategy.Footnote ¹³⁷ Ghana’s vision of freedom, Black freedom, entailed drawing upon local experts to propel its socialist and modernization visions.

For the more radical elements of Ghana’s socialist project, the government’s decision to pursue socialism and capitalism was ill-advised. Writers in The Spark more forcefully expressed this opinion. In an April 12, 1963, editorial, Kofi Batsa argued, “Socialist Intellectuals must out and debunk those views which call for some sort of modified capitalism for Africa.”Footnote ¹³⁸ Batsa exemplified radical politics and thought in Nkrumah’s Ghana. Born on January 8, 1931, and raised in a Christian household, Batsa was well traveled and “cosmopolitan.” During his high school days in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Batsa became drunk on the palm wine of African liberation. The British portrayal of Nkrumah as the instigator of the February 1948 riots in Colonial Ghana and the movement as communist-inspired elevated Nkrumah and communism in Batsa’s impressionable eyes. After class, Batsa hurried to the Accra Evening News, a Nkrumah founded paper, to absorb its intellectual vitality and political vigor and to complete odd jobs. At the Evening News, Batsa found a “leaflet from the Communist Party of Great Britain.” He read the entire document, including the coupon, and contacted the Communist Party of Great Britain.Footnote ¹³⁹ However, Batsa’s explicit association with communism and the leftist world was too dangerous for African independence. Due to Britain’s virulent anticommunist policies, discourses, and actions and its ability to curtail Ghana’s impending independence, Nkrumah expelled Batsa and Anthony Kobina-Woode from the CPP in the 1950s.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ This was not the end of Batsa’s political career, however. Nkrumah kept him close. After independence, Nkrumah tapped Batsa to run perhaps the most explicit socialist paper in Ghana and Africa. Nkrumah would call Batsa and Samuel G. Ikoku, a leading socialist intellectual who hailed from Nigeria, to come to his residence late at night or during his early morning walks to discuss socialism, government policy, the provinciality of African freedom, and African unity.Footnote ¹⁴¹ On many issues, Batsa found himself on Nkrumah’s left. He was not the only one.

On January 29, 1965, an anonymous writer in The Spark offered a similar refrain against capitalism within the Ghanaian economy: “The mixed economy of real life, envisaged as a permanent economic form operates in the interests of the capitalists.” The author continued, “Control in the hands of the capitalist class or those sections sympathetic with them will always ensure that the economy remains mixed and that the state owned section will merely serve the interests of the capitalist sections.”Footnote ¹⁴² Predating Rodney’s argument, these theorists believed that Nkrumah’s policy to advocate for capitalism and socialism was misguided and would undercut the socialist gains they sought to achieve. While these conversations certainly happened behind closed doors, they were also articulated in very public forums. These criticisms were expressed in an internationalized space, a site where many international socialists and theorists produced thoughts and insights. Criticism of the state’s plans did not simply circulate domestically or within the presidential cabinet agenda meetings. Dissent and criticism were not outlawed in Ghana. They were expressed in new avenues, branches, and idioms. During the Nkrumah era, the government never remained above reproach – although criticism of it would certainly intensify during the post-Nkrumah era.

A Remarkable Feat: The Demonopolization of the Ghanaian Economy

Ghana’s trade relations reflected a state committed to economic sovereignty, were no foreign state or entity held excessive economic leverage over it. One of the Nkrumah government’s most remarkable feats was its ability to significantly diversify Ghana’s trade relations portfolio within just seven years. Whereas the UK accounted for about 37 percent of Ghana’s total imports in 1960, it was reduced to 27 percent by 1964. Similarly, while the UK accounted for 36 percent of Ghana’s exports in 1960, this figure went down to roughly 23 percent in 1964. The “Dollar Area,” including the United States, accounted for just above 8 percent of Ghana’s imports in 1960. By 1964 it had increased to 11.5 percent. Ghana’s exports to the dollar area stood at slightly under 16 percent in 1960 but increased to nearly 23 percent in 1964. Ghana’s imports from other African countries also increased during this same period. In 1958, Ghana’s exports to “Iron Curtain Countries”Footnote ¹⁴³ accounted for a miserly 0.0013 percent of Ghana’s total exports. However, in 1960, it hovered around 9 percent.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In 1958, Ghana’s imports from those same countries were slightly below 3 percent. A few years later, in 1960, it was roughly 4 percent of Ghana’s total imports. While Ghana’s imports from “centrally planned economies” such as the USSR, China, and other Eastern European countries was about 4.5 percent in 1960, it grew to approximately 16 percent in 1964. Ghana’s exports to those countries in 1960 were roughly 7 percent, but rose to just below 12 percent in 1964.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

The socialist government’s goal of moving its economy away from its colonial trappings was, in fact, working. On January 5, 1963, the Soviet African specialist Ivan Potekhin wrote in The Spark about Ghana’s trade relations: “the development of economic relations with all countries irrespective of their system … preclude any possible dictates on the part of some country or a group of countries.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ For instance, in 1962, Ghana signed a deal with Poland to construct the Akuse Cane Sugar project.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Moreover, Ghana awarded “major contracts” to seven firms from Nigeria, Japan, Canada, Italy, Austria, and the United States to fund the Volta River project.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In 1963, Ghana partnered with Petroleum Company (GHAIP) Limited, an Italian company, to build the Tema Oil Refinery. The refinery was supposed to process 100,000 metric tons a year and “eliminate Ghana’s dependence on imported petroleum products.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Ghana was actively forging economic links with foreign companies in Nigeria, China, Japan, Israel, the Eastern bloc, and others.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ This was deliberate. It did not mean that Ghana’s early leaders had become beholden to the Eastern bloc or any other self-described entity or its advisors. In fact, sectors of the Ghanaian state had a policy in place to prevent such problems. In an internal memorandum explaining the “Agricultural Programme For The Workers Brigade,” the Office of the National Organizer of the Workers Brigade Camp in Accra noted that one of the key aims and objectives of the brigadiers’ farming practices was to “meet the nation’s industrialization” goals and “the expanding external [economic relations] with both Western and Eastern countries.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ Indeed, Ghana deliberately sought to foster ties with all “group of countries” and to diversify the actors in its economy to ensure its own economic and political freedom.

Nkrumah’s government’s demonopolization of Ghana’s economy from Britain created new economic opportunities and spaces for foreign private and state firms. The advertisements in Ghanaian newspapers simultaneously promised Ghanaians access to Western and Japanese capital, clothes, vehicles, and material comforts, and Soviet and East and West German light industry and cosmetics – despite West Germany’s diplomatic crusade to isolate East Germany (Figure 4.1).Footnote ¹⁵² Ghanaian newspapers became arenas for African, Asian, Western, Eastern European, Ghanaian, and Soviet governments, companies, and firms to compete for the hearts, minds, and wallets of those in Ghana (Figure 4.2). Historian Bianca Murillo has argued that Nkrumah invested in consumerism and utilized commercial spaces to “help legitimize Ghana as a new nation,” “establish Accra as a desirable destination,” “help shed the country’s image as a colonial dependency, attract further foreign investment, and assert a sense of global membership.”Footnote ¹⁵³ Anthropologist Brenda Chalfin notes how people in Ghana coveted foreign cars during the Nkrumah era to denote a “worldliness” and wealth status. Moreover, vehicles were seen as a “marker” of modernization.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Like Nkrumah’s political-economic philosophical outlook, the ads linked and situated Ghana within the global capitalist and socialist worlds. They embodied Ghana’s dual capitalist and socialist orientations and its stance toward genuine nonalignment.

Figure 4.1 “Fiat 2100,” Daily Graphic, February 9, 1963.

Figure 4.2 “Okukuseku Gin: The Real Gin,” Daily Graphic, January 23, 1965.

Nevertheless, while crisscrossing the globe to secure capital and openly calling for foreign investment, Ghana’s political and literary elite remained wary of capital’s ability to destabilize the new state’s sovereignty. In attracting “capital,” Nkrumah was very adamant that Ghana would be “continually … alert to ensure that” it did not “subordinate [itself] to a new form of imperialism.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The capitalist colonial economy had scarred and frightened the early leaders of Ghana. Nkrumah wrote in Class Struggle in Africa that “Capitalism developed with colonialism.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The crux of Ghana’s economic and political problem was, Nkrumah concluded, “how to obtain capital-investment and still keep it under sufficient control to prevent undue exploitation; and how to preserve integrity and sovereignty without crippling economic or political ties to any country, bloc or system.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ To counteract this, socialist thinkers and the state officials believed that state industries were necessary to blunt the power of foreign firms within the local economy and thus were necessary to protect Black freedom. Consequently, by August 1964, the Ghanaian government had established thirty-one state enterprises.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ These industries were part of Nkrumah’s goal of creating “a society in which private capital and certain state-controlled agencies can both operate.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ On February 26, 1963, the editorial board of the Evening News wrote: “Our state corporations compete side by side with private enterprise, but if and when these lose sight of their aims, embodied in Osagyefo’s text, and start interfering in our internal affairs, then they can be sure all the apparatus of our democratic state machine will be used to crush subversion and intrigue from whatever source.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ “State planning,” a feature of socialist state capitalism, others argued, would “counteract the evils of industrialization.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ State industries then were pivotal to realizing the dreams of a Leninist African economy in a world hostile to Black economic independence.

Conclusion

Black people in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s absorbed its economic and intellectual happenings. The complexities of the Soviet experience and Lenin’s ideas dominated the intellectual circles that Black socialists and Marxists traversed from the 1920s to the 1960s. While C. L. R. James and the Padmores would repudiate particular factions and intellectual trajectories of Marxism or the Soviet experiment, they reached this juncture after close scrutiny of the Communist movement. Black Marxists were some of the best students of the USSR and its political-economic ideas. They reclaimed that history for their own ends. Whether Black Marxists considered the Soviet experiment a betrayal of or as necessary to the Bolshevik Revolution, they lived at a time of fantastical political-economic experimentation and debate. These Black sojourners transported these experiences and ideas with them to their compatriots across the world.

While visiting the USSR in July 1961 – after a wave of African colonies had become independent, post-Patrice Lumumba’s assassination, and Ghana’s decision to cut another political tie with the United Kingdom and become a Republic – Nkrumah declared that he was making every effort to “Leninize” Ghana and Africa.Footnote ¹⁶² References to the Soviet experiment and its history could be heard from the lips of Ghanaian statesmen. J. E. Hagan, the regional commissioner of Ghana’s Central Region, spoke in glowing terms of Ghana’s growing appreciation for the Soviet political-economic experiment and Ghana’s own attempts to achieve similar results during Anastas Mikoyan’s, the first deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union’s, trip to Cape Coast in January 1962. “In our desire to reform the social structure of our young nation,” Hagan elaborated, “we are inspired and encouraged by the many achievements standing of the credit of the people of the Soviet Union within the short period of existence as a Socialist state.”Footnote ¹⁶³ In a letter celebrating the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev’s birthday in April 1964, Nkrumah informed the Soviet head of state that “the monumental progress made by the Soviet Union has been, and remains, a source of inspiration to me and my people in our efforts to chart a socialist path.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The intellectual-political Ghana–Soviet space – spearheaded by the Bolshevik revolution and Lenin’s ideas about state capitalism – offered fascinating possibilities and unmasked troubling realities for these global Black intellectuals. While Pan-Africanism, anti-racism, decolonization, and global Black liberation movements and ideas were essential components of Black people’s relationships to the Soviet Union and Leninist thought, they were not the only significant dimensions.

For these Afro-socialists in Ghana, there was no intellectual contradiction in pursuing socialism and capitalism – Lenin and his comrades had already broken that intellectual barrier. From the beginning, the duality of the capitalist and socialist project – state capitalism – was underway in Ghana. Unlike how the Ghanaian economic program has been portrayed generally,Footnote ¹⁶⁵ it was distinctively not against capitalism or foreign capital per se, but only the complex ways in which foreign capital and capitalism – operating primarily through older colonial and new imperial, transnational economic forms – could exploit the new nation and its inhabitants. This fine but significant theoretical and practical distinction is important in reexamining the early years of the Ghanaian state. Nkrumah advocated and governed on a political-economic philosophy and policy that aligned with Lenin’s and James’ conception of the duality of socialism and capitalism. This was not duplicitous. The tacit historical, political, and intellectual acceptance of Stalinism as the Marxian, socialist, and Soviet model from the 1960s to today has unfortunately erred commentators to insist that the political economic project Black Marxists in Ghana pursued had no Marxian intellectual or historical genealogy. However, for Black Marxists, as this chapter has argued, Stalinism and Trotskyism had corrupted socialism. Thus, returning to Lenin’s state capitalist ideas – a Leninist African economy – offered a Marxian way toward Black freedom.

Chapter 5 moves our discussion away from the economic to the intellectual and cultural facets of Ghana’s socialist nation-and-world-making projects.

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.

Introduction

The final chapter examines the working conditions, lives, and intellectual discourses surrounding those who were supposed to build socialism in post independent Africa. Kwame Nkrumah’s dream of economic salvation and sovereignty could only be achieved through the workers. Workers were to prove the maxim from his Independence Day Speech that the “Black man [wa]s capable of managing his own affairs” and to demonstrate to the world that, when given the chance, the African could “show the world that he is somebody!”Footnote ¹ With the future uncertain during this exhilarating moment of decolonization, the CPP’s magazine, The Party Chronicle, reminded the workers that it was their job “to build Ghana into that showpiece of African success which we are all so proud to think of.”Footnote ² From the head of state to the press, workers were charged with building the socialist de-colony, Black freedom.

For their part, the workers embraced and subverted the socialist visions of the state and its leftist supporters to articulate a more equitable present and future. Perhaps without irony, Ghana’s ruling party justified their power in relation to the workers, calling themselves a workers’ party and arguing that their and the workers’ interests were interchangeable and aligned – despite passing strong measures to try and curtail workers’ ability to unionize and strike outside of state channels. The workers were not muted, however. Despite these measures, workers used their voices, feet, and letters to highlight the contradictions and the limitations of a postcolonial African government and its socialist intellectuals that both championed workers’ rights and sought to put the means of production into their hands.Footnote ³ Indeed, the chapter demonstrates how workers skillfully made significant use of the state’s growing bureaucratic channels, such as the Trade Union Congress (TUC), the district and regional commissioners, and the district labor officers to challenge decisions, particularly sackings, increased working hours, and verbal and physical attacks against them.

Despite contravening laws and regulations, workers courageously formed small, divisional unions within companies that operated quite autonomously from the TUC and government. These small, local unions encouraged and led strikes against unfair labor practices and found ways to circumvent the blunting of their collective labor power. Workers then were sophisticated actors. They were astute students of labor laws and agreements. Consequently, these local unions became important sites of clashes between workers, the state, private companies, and the TUC. The workers forced Nkrumah’s government to reconsider their relationship to capital, domestic labor, and their socialist aspirations. The workers demanded a space that embraced the revolutionary ideals and ‘political kingdom’ Nkrumah and his associates had constantly referenced. These revolutionary slogans could not be empty rhetorical measures; they had to be actualized. The revolutionary rhetorical currency of Ghana’s socialists became simultaneously valuable to the Ghanaian worker and dangerous to the Ghanaian state, its socialist visions, and private enterprises. While the lives and experiences of workers have been scattered throughout the previous chapters, this chapter centers them.

* * *

Workers in Ghana were internationalized, very mobile, hailed from different regions, and possessed different skill sets. The British “internationalized” the Colonial Ghanaian labor force by importing inexpensive and forced laborers from China, Nigeria, and the French colonies.Footnote ⁴ By 1939, approximately 54 percent of the workforce in the mines came from northern Ghana, Nigeria, and the French colonies.Footnote ⁵ From 1937 to 1940, about 35,000 Northerners migrated to the south for work. This number reached 46,000 by 1945. Around 1948, this figure doubled to nearly 92,000. In 1954, approximately 200,000 Northerners had migrated south seeking employment and seasonal migrant labor.Footnote ⁶ Perhaps as many as 47 percent of female workers in Ghana could be classified as migrant workers.Footnote ⁷ Only a paltry percentage of women in the Northern Region were employed in nonagricultural work.Footnote ⁸ As noted in Chapter 2, the British colonial apparatus and mining companies contributed to this migratory pattern by funneling people from the northern to southern regions.Footnote ⁹ Simultaneously, the cocoa industry boom in southern Ghana made it an attractive site for northern laborers.Footnote ¹⁰ This had a dark underbelly, however. Forced female labor underpinned cocoa production and was critical both to its productivity and profitability.Footnote ¹¹ However, with the cocoa boom, Northerners were increasingly able to transform wage or enslaved labor into what historian Gareth Austin calls “managerial share-cropping.”Footnote ¹²

By 1960, urban areas such as Accra, Kumasi, Sekondi, and Takoradi in southern Ghana witnessed “considerable” growth, while southern mining towns such as Tarkwa and Obuasi also grew modestly.Footnote ¹³ Women constituted 1,870 out of 33,840 miners, quarrymen, and related workers. They also comprised 101,520 out of 395,940 craftsmen, production process workers, and laborers “not elsewhere listed.”Footnote ¹⁴ Regarding female employment more generally, approximately 80 percent were self-employed or employers, with most being “petty traders or hawkers.”Footnote ¹⁵ While factory workers’ constituted a “very small proportion of the total population,” they were crucial to Ghana’s “future development.”Footnote ¹⁶ Southerners overwhelmingly tended to occupy skilled positions, while Northerners and foreigners occupied unskilled ones. Historian Richard Jeffries has argued that occupational differences were converted into ethnic and cultural ones, undermining workers’ solidarity.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet, workers in Ghana often banded together within trade unions, whose origins lay in the colonial period, to fight for better working conditions.

The Ghana TUC became a vehicle for both anticolonial and nationalist activity and an avenue for economic protection for laborers in various sectors.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1941, the British colonial government legalized trade unions in response to widespread discontent in the colony.Footnote ¹⁹ Soon, British union leaders traveled throughout the colony to try and develop trade unions that functioned in concert with the government’s interest. Unfortunately for the British, this did not come into fruition. According to historian Jeffrey Ahlman, mine workers in Colonial Ghana had “emerged as one of the most militant and politically aggressive groups” by the early twentieth century.Footnote ²⁰ Scholar G. M. Carter argued that the TUC’s radical wing caused both Nkrumah and the British difficulties leading up to independence.Footnote ²¹ To counter this development, Ahlman argues that Nkrumah and the CPP brought “the colony’s labor movement into its fold” to harness their anticolonial activity by both appointing Nkrumah’s allies and declaring the CPP a workers’ party. Indeed, the TUC’s magazine, Labour, told the workers to sideline their interests for the state’s. Labour argued that the trade union’s role was “firstly, to mobilize and organize the workers to carry out state plans, and secondly, to be concerned with systematically improving their living and working conditions.”Footnote ²² Nkrumah echoed those sentiments. Nkrumah opined, “We [the workers and the state] must, therefore, mobilise our efforts again in grand unison in order to ensure the success of our economic revolution.”Footnote ²³

Despite these pronouncements or hopes of unity, labor under Nkrumah’s government had not been pacified, nor had they linked increased production and achieving the state’s goals to their own success and well-being.Footnote ²⁴ In December 1959, according to F. S. Miles, a British official in the British High Commissioner’s Office in Accra, despite foreign perceptions that the TUC had become the government’s arm, it continued to secure gains for its members. Miles ventured:

As we will see, small, local unions went on strikes without the TUC’s consent or knowledge. In fact, as Miles noted, the labor movement in Ghana was more independent and perhaps more militant than their British counterparts. Moreover, although the senior Ghanaian trade union officials were “well” compensated, they worked doggedly. They traveled across the country “putting across … new ideas to the workers,” increased membership, created a robust bureaucratic machine,Footnote ²⁶ organized annual conferences, created educational rallies, organized self-help seminars, and provided members with basic forms of literacy.Footnote ²⁷

* * *

Yet, the utopian life Ghana’s independence leaders envisioned remained out of reach for many workers as constant and visible monuments and whispers of corruption within the governing party and the government swirled. While wages in public and private sectors remained stagnant during the early years of Nkrumah’s government despite the increasing costs of rent and living,Footnote ²⁸ Kojo Botsio, an influential cabinet member and minister, had recently built “a very ostentatious new house”Footnote ²⁹ and people witnessed TUC vehicles utilized as private property at nightlife entertainment “spots.”Footnote ³⁰ Perhaps here was the first betrayal. In addition, European companies such as Elder Dempster Agencies Limited and the United African Company (UAC) fired workers over dwindling profits and rising costs.Footnote ³¹ Public calls to embrace socialism and struggle became hollow to workers when Nkrumah increased his cabinet ministers’ wages from £1,200 to £1,800 a year in June 1960.Footnote ³² Some workers “began to mutter ‘one law for the rich’” and another for the rest.Footnote ³³

During the TUC leader, John K. Tettegah’s absence to the Soviet Union, on August 3, 1960, about 100,000 workers in Accra “threw the municipality into pandemonium when they staged a demonstration at midday … demanding more pay and better working conditions.” The workers carried placards reading: “We want better pay,” “We too know how to drink whiskey and educate our children,” “One man no chop in the Republic of Ghana,” “£1,000 a month too big for one man,” among other signs. While holding these placards aloft, the protesters “sang war songs and made terrific noise, booed and rained abuses on TUC officials who were under police protection.”Footnote ³⁴ Some workers referred to the concept of socialism as the “the devilsown [sic] crafty instrument” for continuing to oppress them.Footnote ³⁵ Thus, while Chapter 5 articulated how the socialist ideologues believed that socialism was the cure to oppression and social evils, some workers viewed socialism as a mechanism and smokescreen for their continued suffering and alienation.

In response to the mass strike, the executive board of the TUC released a statement that they were “absolutely convinced that the recent demonstrations in Accra and other parts of the country were not direct [sic] against the Convention People’s Party, the Government or the Trade Union Congress.” Instead, the executive board insisted that the workers were reacting “simultaneously … to long standing [sic] anomalies and grievances existing in certain employments [sic] and the demonstrations were directed against employers’ adamant refusal to negotiate on these issues and the consequent deadlocks that occurred.” The executive board reiterated their full support for “the workers’ general demand for wage increases in line with its devoted aims to raise the standard of living of the workers.” They tried to assure their members that they were in active consultations with the government to address their grievances.Footnote ³⁶ Such concerns could still be heard four years later. Not only from workers but from parliamentarians as well. J. D. Wireko, a Ghanaian parliamentarian representing the Amansie-East district and a CPP party member, questioned the minister of Finance’s 1964 budget proposal and seemed to support the workers’ concerns:

While the TUC’s promises sought to placate the striking workers, parliament quickly passed amendments to the Labor and the Criminal Codes in August 1960. Together, the bills granted the minister of Labor and Co-Operatives the authority to decide salaries on the grounds of “public interest” and effectively made strikes illegal. The state could now scrutinize newspaper publications reporting on country-wide revolts,Footnote ³⁸ permitted a “union shop”Footnote ³⁹ requiring workers to join a union and pay dues, and granted the CPP and Nkrumah greater control and scrutiny over the “activities of individual union leaders.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Every worker now had to “possess [a] trade union membership,” and employers were barred from “hiring non-union members for more than a month.” British observers argued that the measures put the minister of Labor in control of the TUCFootnote ⁴¹ and dissolved all unions unaffiliated with the TUC,Footnote ⁴² merging approximately 100 unions into 16 national unions.Footnote ⁴³ It was a reconfiguration Tettegah had called for in September 1957.Footnote ⁴⁴ The TUC’s Education and Publicity Department noted that the bills created an “elastic system of negotiation and conciliation which” rendered “strikes almost unnecessary.” However, not only had strikes become ‘unnecessary’ but were effectively illegal.Footnote ⁴⁵ These measures were intended not only to bolster state control over workers but to further Ghana’s economic program of seeking foreign capital – as discussed in Chapters 1 and 4.

The state sought to make Ghanaian labor more attractive to foreign capital and interests. Ako Adjei, the Ghanaian minister of External Affairs, assured foreign investors that “Ghanaian labor would not be troublesome.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Consequently, the 1960 Labor and the Criminal Codes were part of an attempt to assuage foreign investors, not domestic interests, that labor in Ghana would be sufficiently muzzled and productive in their pursuit of profits. In 1962, a further eight regional labor departments were created, with each employing a regional labor officer to provide the government with greater administrative and political control.Footnote ⁴⁷ These anti-worker measures were criticized by some and fiercely contested.

Joe Appiah, an important figure in the oppositional United Party, expressed grave concerns that the amendments contravened the Ghanaian constitution’s “fundamental principle of the liberty of the subjects and human rights.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Even among the CPP faithful, the measures were difficult to swallow.Footnote ⁴⁹ Critics argued that the new draconian measures deprived the unions of their teeth. At a CPP meeting, a few of the “Bill’s exponents” were given “rough treatment” while explaining the Act’s benefits.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Ghana United Africa Company Workers Union severely derided the TUC’s attempts to create sixteen unions. “[W]hy 16?,” the newsletter questioned. It then continued, “Just sixteen (16) as if the workers are like flocks of sheep and cattle that can be grouped just as herdsmen want.”Footnote ⁵¹ The newsletter then criticized the “scheme” as simply a “copy-book” of the German and Israeli trade union “patterns.” The workers saw the new structure as an “instrument of exploitation” to transfer wealth from the union members to benefit a handful of career professional trade union leaders. They called the measures “undemocratic and contrary to known practices in all democratic countries.”Footnote ⁵² Indeed, in the Ghana United Africa Company Workers Union’s analysis, they distinguished themselves, the workers, from their leaders, who they described as career professional trade unionists. The distinction was intended to emphasize to their readers or would-be sympathizers about their own predicament, which was separate from their leaders. This was further demonstrated by the reality that the workers, and not their leaders, suffered repercussions from the state following their 1961 strikes. Following the affair, the sociologist St. Clair Drake noted that approximately fifty workers were arrested “under the provisions of the Preventative Detention Act.”Footnote ⁵³

Despite the measures to limit strikes and worker power within the first three years of independence, British officials wrote with amazement that trade unions’ regional secretaries were “continuously bombarded by streams of workers bringing their grievances,” creating “an atmosphere in a Regional Office … often near … bedlam”Footnote ⁵⁴ and “rank and file” workers still influenced “their leaders.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In one particular incident, a Regional Labor Advisory Committee meeting on July 21, 1962, in Tamale, raised serious concerns about the numerous reports indicating that contractors knowingly employed girls under the age of fifteen and paid women laborers below the minimum wage.Footnote ⁵⁶ The secretary to the regional commissioner in the Northern Region wrote that the government’s “efforts to get the contractors to pay the approved minimum rates have tended to involve the replacement of the female labor by male labor.” Not only did the men replace the women laborers, but the contractors increased the men’s wages for the same tasks. Owing to the loss of employment and income, the women “created pathetic scenes much to the embarrassment of the Labor Officers.”Footnote ⁵⁷ As the next stories demonstrate, workers in Ghana did not cower behind these new laws and neither did said laws silence them. Ghanaian workers remained emboldened. They studied these laws, found loopholes to subvert them, and flaunted them.

Workers created smaller unions that operated effectively outside the TUC’s direct control within their companies. These unions continued to devise clever methods to circumvent the socialist government’s legislative attempts to curtail strikes and control labor. For instance, on Saturday, February 27, 1960, in Takoradi, 275 Construction and General Workers Union workers from Messrs. A. Hoffman and Sonner Company went on strike to protest “against the dismissal of a carpenter for insubordination and insulting behaviour.” Within the day, the union and the company’s management negotiated a settlement to terminate the strike. The company agreed to reinstate the fired carpenter “on the condition that 2 hours extra work would be put in” that day “for the loss” of labor that occurred that “morning.” However, at the day’s conclusion, the workers refused to complete the extra two hours and went home. Management retaliated. They did not reinstate the carpenter. Two days later, one laborer urged his comrades “not to resume duty but to continue the action strike.” His colleagues agreed. After two and a half hours of striking, the district labor officer “intervened,” and the workers returned to work. The company retaliated, firing the employee who had urged his companions to strike. However, the regional labor officer of the Western Region convinced the company to suspend rather than sack the worker. As part of the peace-settlement, the officer informed the company and the workers that inciting “workers to go on strike [wa]s an offence under Section 39 [sic] of the Industrial Relations Act” and urged the workers to study the laws that criminalized strikes, and notified the employer that they could not enforce state law. “[N]o employer ha[d] jurisdiction over it,” the officer warned. Thus, the company could not dismiss a worker for breaking the legal code. The following day, the Western Regional secretary of the TUC visited the workers and reinforced the regional labor officer’s point that the workers left “themselves open for prosecution under Section 29 [sic] of the Industrial Relations Act,” which prohibited “strike action.” However, the issue was far from settled. The company was determined to show their ruthlessness and pettiness to their employees.

A few days later, the company dismissed nineteen workers “on grounds of redundancy.” If the company had expected a subdued response, they had severely miscalculated. Rather than call another strike, “all” the workers asked the company “to pay them off individually.” The workers had effectively resigned en masse. It was an ingenious tactic. It could not be classified “as a strike” nor could any laborer be “held responsible for any stoppage of work.” Fashioned in the Western Region, this novel maneuver nullified the Industrial Relations Act and the government’s attempts to pacify labor. It also paralyzed capital and left the regional labor officer simultaneously stupefied, impressed, and caught off guard.Footnote ⁵⁸ These workers were brave.Footnote ⁵⁹ In a perilous economic climate and uncertainty over new streams of income for themselves and their families, they accepted the words of Benjamin Franklin, one of the founders of the United States: “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” The workers knew that they had to stand together or be dismissed individually or in groups at the company’s whim. Their recent experience had supported this reality. The company had already fired workers one-by-one and then dismissed nineteen without cause.Footnote ⁶⁰ To show their commitment and loyalty to each other and to highlight their sophisticated understanding of the power of solidarity amidst precariousness, the workers were willing to, and did, resign en masse. While posing threats to the state and foreign capital and companies, these actions severely undermined the TUC’s Education and Publicity Department’s prediction that strikes would almost cease to exist. They also demonstrated that labor had not been co-opted into the state machinery.

In another incident, on February 15, 1965, the Kalmoni & Co. Workers’ Union Divisional secretary, B. Asare, wrote to the general secretary of the TUC and the management of Kalmoni & Company Limited that the company’s decision to lay off seven workers without first informing the local union contravened their collective bargaining agreement. Asare criticized the TUC’s general secretary for not notifying the local union of the impending cuts. “Also (assuming you got the said notice),” Asare wrote, “you have up to now not made it known to us [the local union] in spite of the fact that it deals with a matter which involves, without any form of compensation, a loss of means of livelihood to many of our comrades and their dependents.”Footnote ⁶¹ The leaders of Kalmoni & Co. Workers’ Union demanded a seat at the negotiation table. They sought clarification about the need for the redundancy measures, who was on the chopping block, and demanded an extension of the redundancy timeline from one week to two months. Referencing Clause XVII, Number 6, of their collective bargaining agreement, the local union noted that “The Company shall be called upon to pay two months of salary to a redundant employee if the former fails to notify the Union of his intention to declare redundancy.” Asare shrewdly defined “union” in the agreement to refer to the local union and not the TUC. Thus, he noted that the company had failed to satisfy the redundancy clause of their agreement by not consulting with the Kalmoni & Co. Workers’ Union even if it had communicated with the TUC. As a result, Asare demanded that his colleagues receive two months of additional salary because the company had broken their contractual agreement.

By creating an institutional and ideological wedge between the TUC and the local union, Asare sought to secure greater financial gains for his “comrades.” Through letters, local unions inscribed and inserted their influence into labor disputes. On the grounds of proximity to and familiarity with their colleagues, local unions argued that they, and not the TUC, had a legal right and moral standing to know and participate in employment decisions. They insisted that employment-related matters about their colleagues had to be transmitted through them first. Local union leaders closely studied and understood the gaps within complex state laws and collective bargaining agreements, and its implications for themselves and their comrades.Footnote ⁶² These parochial unions often acted without the approval or knowledge of the regional and district labor officers or the TUC. Instead, their main purpose was to ensure the protection of their members’ jobs and rights against all other interests and parties.

While the Labor Acts and Amendments tried to “dissolve” all unions not officially tied to the TUC, small, local, independent unions arose in its wake and continued to operate well into the final year of Nkrumah’s government. While the harshest and most cynical critics of the Labor and Criminal Acts and Amendments argued that labor would become “toothless” and that power would be centralized, this reality was not borne out due to the ingenious and savvy means local unions devised to keep power in the “margins” and away from the center. Despite the dominant Ghanaian historiography that centers the hegemonic control of the TUC and the state over labor in Nkrumah’s Ghana, smaller unions operated with strong autonomy and posed (significant) challenges to the state, the TUC, and to industry.

Moreover, workers individually made significant use of the state’s growing bureaucratic channels, provided by the TUC and the district and regional commissioners, to challenge decisions, to highlight abusive state behavior, and ill-treatment (see also Chapter 2). For instance, in 1962, a European contractor in charge of constructing the army barracks at Appremdu, a town slightly west of Takoradi, failed to pay his Ghanaian workers and fled. The workers had traveled with their wives and children from Koforidua and Accra to build the barracks. Unable to afford food because the European had vanished and failed to pay them their wages, the workers and their families ventured to nearby “cassava farms to beg” for food. Using the language of Nkrumah’s dutifulness and love of Ghana in their letter to the Western Regional commissioner, the workers noted that they continued to work on the army barracks despite their predicament because it was their “duty to serve our country-Ghana and to serve her well.” On the morning of May 12, 1962, the minister of Defense, Kofi Baako, arrived on the scene.Footnote ⁶³ The editor of the socialist magazine, The Spark, Kofi Batsa, had described Baako at one point as someone who was “passionate and impulsive, would always rather act than consider.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The unfolding events perhaps proved Batsa’s character assessment of Baako.

Baako instructed the workers “suddenly” to stop working. The workers admitted being “all mixed up” in their minds and confused by Baako’s order. Events took a violent turn. Baako chased after the workers “with his stick, clearing” them “as if we were goats.” The workers informed the Western Regional commissioner that while they had already contacted the TUC and district labor office about their plight, nothing had changed. While the workers thought that the two organizations were doing their best to support them, they still believed that they needed to write to the Western Regional commissioner “to come to their aid,” and pay them before they died “of hunger.” The workers warned that “perhaps” Baako had “forgotten that if you trouble a hungry snake, you will force it to bite you. Yet we are not snakes and will never act like that [sic].” Despite the second clause insisting that they would not bite the state, the workers warned the regional commissioner that they were almost “one thousand” and that if they “were to die of hunger, it will be a great disaster to the Ghana Nation, yet we belief in the freedom and justice of Ghana [sic].”Footnote ⁶⁵ The archival record ends there. We do not know if Baako faced any disciplinary action. Nonetheless, workers in Ghana were unafraid to use bureaucratic channels to report on the misconduct of prominent government officials like Baako or their bosses, as we witnessed in Chapters 2 and 3. These actions created an archival record, a trail of misconduct that could be used to discipline or remove senior officials as we saw in Chapter 2 with Darko or Chapter 3 with Roman, the European, who called Allasan Moshie, a “Blackman Monkey.”

These stories indicate that workers felt emboldened to write complaints about anyone, even about the minister of Defense, to seek remedy. This is where the political and social currency of a state beholden to the worker had weight. It was through these letters that allegations and incidents of neglect, oversight, unfair treatment, and discrimination came to light and forced the state, whether superficially or substantially, to address them. It also compelled the state to confront its self-fashioning ideology as worker-centered.

Ghanaian Labor and Black Liberation

Ghanaian labor and intellectuals theorized and situated Ghanaian workers within global debates on workers’ rights, Black liberation, and the political economy. “By reporting on strikes and the living and working conditions of the proletariat in various countries around the globe,” the Ghanaian literary class “triggered” what historian Ilham Khuri-Makdisi argues is “the audience’s deep empathy with the suffering of world populations and masses.” In so doing, Khuri-Makdisi maintains that “the press … contributed to the creation of a sense of solidarity among workers in different realms.”Footnote ⁶⁶ While Khuri-Makdisi referenced early-1900s Mediterranean workers, the same could be argued for workers in Nkrumah’s socialist Ghana.

Through words and images, the press and political class took it upon themselves to ensure that the workers in Ghana remained abreast of international affairs, particularly the plight of other workers, fostering a sense of solidarity across race and class. Articles on the horrors of white supremacist rule in southern Africa circulated widely and constantly in Ghana.Footnote ⁶⁷ For instance, in June 7, 1963, Steve Lawrence wrote in The Spark about how white minority rule in Apartheid South Africa was leading to the nation’s self-immolation. Lawrence argued: “Mad with fear, the racialist tyrants of South Africa are rushing the country headlong to a holocaust – and their own destruction.”Footnote ⁶⁸

On March 21, 1960, the Pan African Congress (PAC), a splinter political group from the African National Congress (ANC), encouraged Black South Africans to leave their passes at home, boycott work, and to go to their local police stations to be arrested. The apartheid government required all Black South Africans to carry a passbook or face arrest; the passbook contained an individual’s employer, race, ethnicity, homeland, and their area of residence. Residents of Sharpeville followed the PAC’s call. Soon, the South African security forces arrived and gunned down unarmed Black South Africans.Footnote ⁶⁹ The caption in The Spark succinctly captured the horror: “Colonial police mow down African patriots.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Images of the South African police shooting at and mercilessly beating defenseless and desperately fleeing Africans in Sharpeville disseminated throughout Ghana. Another image of a white police officer grabbing and dragging a Black South African woman by the arm despite her protestations circulated in Ghana. The words: “Arrest and jail have become the daily lot of African women, as well as men,” were published under the image. On May 15, 1964, the Welsh scholar Idris Cox lamented in “Zero Hour in Southern Rhodesia” that over the “past four months 45 Africans have been shot dead by armed police. In one week in April over 300 Africans were arrested, among them were 60 women carrying babies on their backs.”Footnote ⁷¹ People in Ghana learned that African women suffered under white minority rule. White supremacy and apartheid’s victims were not gendered and the youth and old suffered equally. No one was safe in southern Africa. These articles showed the depravity of white supremacist rule.

Nearer to home, the Evening News informed the public that the Nigerian police had fired upon striking dockworkers in Nigeria. In February 1963, John K. Tettegah, then the secretary of the AATUF, sent a public cable to the Nigerian prime minister, Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, criticizing “the death of two workers, as a result of the brutal beatings by the police.” Tettegah urged the Nigerian government to address “this genuine industrial struggle of the Nigerian dockworkers in defence of their living standards.” This was not the only message from Ghana’s labor leaders about the incident. The TUC wrote to S. Imodu, the leader of the Independent United Labour Congress of Nigeria, that “the working people of Ghana alongside their brothers all over Africa express their sympathy and full solidarity with their struggling Nigerian Comrades.”Footnote ⁷²

These headlines, images, and top-down directives, radiating from across the African continent to Ghana, allowed workers in Ghana to link their strikes and demands to a broader movement against anti-Black racism and political systems that employed law enforcement to dismiss, arrest, or kill disgruntled Black workers. For instance, the striking workers at the Pioneer Tobacco Company in Ghana in the vignette that opened Chapter 3 held aloft placards stating: “We are not in South Africa. Down with Flood. Away with Mclean. We want our rights. Mate-Nicols Aide-Camp. Flood go back to South Africa. Remove NC. Nicol – Big Stooge.”Footnote ⁷³ International discourses made their way back into the protest vocabulary of everyday workers. Not only were international events used to make local claims, but some Ghanaian workers thought of themselves as leading a new vanguard of workers against imperialism, white supremacy, colonialism, neocolonialism, and injustice. Through such demonstrations, Black Ghanaian labor simultaneously informed their socialist Black liberationist government and their white employers that while whites in southern Africa might be able to treat Blacks with impunity, it would not be tolerated in the socialist de-colony. Because the Ghanaian political elite positioned Ghana and themselves as the heartbeat of the global Black liberation movement, it permitted workers and their leaders to coopt global events and discourses to make and stake domestic claims against white supremacy and anti-worker statism into a coherent narrative to bolster their demands.

Anti-worker violence across Ghana’s borders were painful reminders of the fragility of workers’ rights in postcolonial Africa. While the Ghanaian government had not deployed such police force against striking domestic workers, the threat of violence hovered constantly. In response to each strike, the Criminal Investigation Department (CIDPOL) conducted investigations. Afterward, it produced and received wireless messages on whether “the Industrial Relations Act No. 56/58 Sections 23, 1-3 AND (1) AND B has been complied with” and what actions the police would or should take.Footnote ⁷⁴ As in the case of Mensah, the story that opened Chapter 3, the police and management hounded him. And if Kofi Baako had had his way, perhaps the weapon of choice he used to chase away the workers, the stick, might have been more deadly, a rifle.

Demonized Labor

Not all forms of labor were celebrated in Ghana, however. Despite its legality, some within the government and the press demonized sex work frequently. On July 21, 1962, Oliver Frimpong in the Ashanti Pioneer called “prostitution” a “social evil” and lamented its “alarming and unprecedented heights in recent years.” He urged the government to revoke “licensed prostitution,” since it was an “exotic” practice, “and a vicious legacy of colonialism.” Frimpong argued that sex work was a Western import, with Lebanese and whitemen driving young Black women into the profession. The writer castigated “debauched foreign nationals who inveigle – our women folk into perversion with money,” maintaining that “school girls” were being seduced by the “fruits of this evil-practice” and were “prepared to sell themselves” to people with “white skin … for anything next to nothing.” To counter this “evil,” Frimpong called on pub owners to stop housing “a number of girls in their bars,” to cease engaging in “unlicensed prostitution,” and called on the “male sex” to “stop patronising license prostitution.” By doing this, Frimpong noted that everyone could save Ghana and create a society “free from all social evils.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Whereas “Prostitution [has] become [an] accepted social evil in other parts of the world,” Frimpong declared that there “should be no reason whatsoever for allowing them to flourish” in the socialist de-colony. The writer concluded that sex work provided the “imperialist skeptics whose greatest delight is to paint Ghana in the most sordid pictures, something to talk about when they go back to their country after a stay or visit here.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Frimpong’s demonization and foreignization of sex work was not new. As historian Jean Allman has shown, the “general chaos in gender relations that shook the Asante” in the 1920s and 1930s manifested itself in fears over “prostitution.” British government officials and the Asante leadership linked the spread of venereal diseases to sex work and unmarried women. Officials detained single women, “spinsters,” and demanded fees for their release.Footnote ⁷⁷ While the CPP attempted to transform gender and social relations fundamentally, figures like Frimpong sought to control the types of labor women could do. To do so, Frimpong offered an ahistorical argument about the origins of sex work within a larger accepted anti-imperialist discourse to cobble support for his position.

By 1965, angst over sex work loomed large and shifted from inflammatory press reports to the corridors of Nkrumah’s cabinet. Susanna Al-Hassan, the then minister of Social Welfare, and T. M. K. A. Yarney, the acting secretary to the regional commissioner, adopted Frimpong’s cause but, unlike Frimpong, had the support of the state machinery. Al-Hassan had become gravely concerned “with the soaring rate of prostitution and lewdness” amongst young women and about “how best to combat such evils.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Al-Hassan created an eighteen-person committee representing various religious and government sectors and interests to end “PROSTITUTION [all caps in original],” their “arch enemy.” The committee offered an eleven-point solution, urging the community to view the young girls as their “own daughters,” and not “aliens,” who were “fallen victims … to social evils.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Yarney argued that “serious minded citizens” were “greatly concerned with the soaring rate of prostitution and … depravity and lewdness among … young working girls.” Yarney called for a “relentless war on those undesirable social practices and see to their complete eradication from” Ghana.Footnote ⁸⁰ The social anxiety and moral panic surrounding young working women was echoed in Uganda and Tanzania.Footnote ⁸¹ Whereas Frimpong had foreignized sex work, Yarney situated it within the intimate, the personal and familial. Yarney called on the CPP to hold “rallies to help educate both young and old to desist from prostitution.”Footnote ⁸² Moreover, he urged law enforcement to “intensify” their “checks” of “drinking bars and hotels” to ensure that young women were not engaged in “undesirable social practices.”Footnote ⁸³ If the owners failed to comply or were complicit, Yarney called on the police to “suspend [their] licenses.”Footnote ⁸⁴ While the campaign against sex work had drawn prominent public and private figures within the Northern Region into its orbit, the committee did not substantially address the socioeconomic realities that pushed these young women into “undesirable” occupations or that women engaged in more “desirable” occupations were being underpaid and then dismissed when government officials sought to compel their employers to increase their wages.Footnote ⁸⁵ Calls to criminalize both sex workers and business owners’ complicit in encouraging it landed on barren soil. Police officers seemed uninterested in making arrests and doling out fines and parliament did not pass laws criminalizing it.

While sex work appeared to threaten the moral fabric of the new society, laziness threatened the entire political economic project that state officials and socialist theorists envisioned. Indeed, while celebrating the CPP’s fifteenth anniversary, Nkrumah instructed workers to “work hard and eschew anything that borders on laziness, dishonesty and subversion.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Other figures throughout the socialist de-colony and the Nkrumah-era reinforced this message. In 1962, the Accra City Council chairman, E. C. Quaye, warned workers that the council would not “tolerate any sign of laziness and indiscipline.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In February 1963, the Ghana School of Law Employees’ branch of the Educational Institutions Workers’ Union of the TUC “warned against laziness and rumour-mongering,” arguing that such “evils” impeded the nation’s progress.Footnote ⁸⁸ That same month, K. A. Kwateng, the district commissioner for the Manso-Achease area in the Eastern Region, urged all employees “to close their ranks against laziness, and tribalism” and “to work hard to make the council’s development programme a success.”Footnote ⁸⁹ On August 27, The Party Chronicle castigated workers who showed an “unhealthy desire to get rich quick” instead of “working hard to build Ghana.” “Some workers,” The Party Chronicle argued, were “criminally addicted to laziness” and thus stealing from Ghana.Footnote ⁹⁰ Nkrumah acknowledged that workers had to “work doubly hard now that” they “were laboring for ourselves and our children, and not for the enrichment of the former colonial power.”Footnote ⁹¹ In 1964, the chairman of the Ghana Rural Corporation concurred with this sentiment. He told his listeners that “hard work and greater sacrifices” were necessary to ensure the nation’s success.Footnote ⁹²

During the Nkrumah-era, the government and press spent considerable time bifurcating the worker into two types: the parasitical and the selfless worker. They defined the former as lazy and selfish, while the latter was considered industrious and altruistic. The theorists maintained that the lazy worker guarded their own interests while the industrious laborer looked out for the community. Ghana was not alone among socialist countries harboring these dualistic conceptions of the worker. In the Soviet Union, lazy workers were framed as saboteurs, resulting in their murders in some cases. In the 1960s, without the state violence Stalin inflicted upon “hostile workers,” the Soviet leadership urged workers to be disciplined, to abscond laziness, and to increase production. From the USSR to Ghana, leading officials argued that it was only through worker ingenuity and hard work could their nations achieve socialist freedom.Footnote ⁹³ One of the traits of an ideal socialist worker, the theorists maintained, was one who voluntareed to improve the material conditions of their neighbors.

Self-Help and Nation Building

Like other parts of the postcolonial world, local and volunteer work, and self-help projects and labor were encouraged and repeatedly praised during the Nkrumah era.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the socialist de-colony, volunteer labor was framed as a local necessity and as a moral and national duty. It underpinned the socialist utopia Nkrumah and his associates advocated. For instance, Nkrumah maintained that “the building of a new state” required “voluntary service.”Footnote ⁹⁵ On February 14, 1963, the Evening News praised and welcomed reports of “self help projects” coming to their attention. The paper highlighted the construction of a new chapel, street drains, and market sheds across the country. Its competitor, The Daily Graphic, not only welcomed volunteer labor, but praised women and men for financially contributing to these projects.Footnote ⁹⁶

To legitimize and popularize free labor, the press sought to co-opt and associate monarchy with volunteer labor and to delink it from slavery. On February 9, 1963, The Daily Graphic showed a monarch, the Omanhene of the New Juaben area, leading a “group of communal workers” in using pick axes and shovels to clear the area around the Koforidua sports stadium.Footnote ⁹⁷ Similarly, on January 20, 1965, The Daily Graphic published an image of over thirty women cleaning Mankissim’s markets and streets, with the Queen Mother leading the procession (Figure 6.1).Footnote ⁹⁸ Pictures of traditional rulers alongside their subjects doing communal work merged and submerged them with the new state’s postcolonial dreams and authority. It permitted the advocates of self-help initiatives to argue that no one was too important or unimportant to build the socialist de-colony. Everyone had a role to play in making Ghana better, cleaner, and more productive. Everyone had to make sacrifices. Sacrifice could not simply be relegated to the masses. Whereas the British colonial authorities compelled and co-opted local monarchs to acquire forced labor to engage in colonial projects,Footnote ⁹⁹ the press sought to distinguish the socialist, postcolonial government’s intentions from the British’s. The press implied that in the colonial regime, individuals were forced to work for the monarch and foreign power. However, in the socialist de-colony, monarchs worked side-by-side with the people. The press reminded its readers that one was working to enrich their future and to ensure Black freedom and not to bolster the British empire. The press and government argued that the people’s interests were not separate but intimately tied to the state’s socialist project. At all levels of power, from the Ghanaian president to the ordinary party operative, there was a unified front to stir communities to develop and deploy self-help schemes and seek “volunteer” labor to complete it. Yet, the press had masked the dangers of communal labor and severed it from its colonial and precolonial history. In fact, as historian Rebecca Shumway reminds us, notions of self-help could be traced to the Asafo Companies, which were military units formed to protect communities from the violence of slavery along the Fante Coast.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Like the acts of the 19th-century Asafo Companies, self-help projects were seen as social and moral imperatives for the safety and betterment of the people.

Figure 6.1 “Women Clean Up Their Town,” Daily Graphic, January 20, 1965.

Despite the moniker of volunteerism and self-help, there was a dark underbelly to these campaigns in the socialist de-colony. At times, forced labor masqueraded as volunteer labor. On April 21, 1960, the principal Community Development officer instructed individuals in Northern Ghana to “start work … immediately” on building dams, roads, wells, market sheds, and centers.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Those who refused fell afoul of the law. Area district commissioners instructed development officers to report “any cases” where individuals or groups failed to work voluntarily.Footnote ¹⁰² Those reported were not merely insulted or listed in the government’s ‘bad books,’ but were “fined” and arrested.Footnote ¹⁰³ There is no archival evidence yet to suggest that Nkrumah or members of the presidential cabinet directed local officials to arrest individuals for failing to engage in self-help projects. This practice appeared to happen independently of central authority or knowledge. Local officials on the ground, apparently with great latitude to, pursued actions that were entirely reminiscent of the colonial era. Yet, officials and the press continued to extol and eulogize communal labor’s impact and its importance in fomenting and inspiring socialist ethos and personal accountability and responsibility.

Ableism

In a society increasingly constructed around the rhetoric of national development and production, disabled Ghanaians became both increasingly antithetical to the national economic agenda and the site of government efforts to make them economically productive. Kofi Baako suggested that those who “accumulated wealth through hard and honest labor, would have their property protected from ‘lazy, unscrupulous undisciplined but able-bodied citizens.’” According to historian Jeff D. Grischow, “By implication, those who did not comply would not be allowed to share in the fruits of economic development.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Toward the twilight months of 1960, at least 100,000 Ghanaians were considered disabled.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Oliver Frimpong, who earlier called for a ban on sex work, authored a vicious attack on disabled people, claiming that they used their ailments for “public exhibition.” The “more horrible and serious their disease,” Frimpong insinuated, “the better chance they stand in exciting compassion and, subsequently, money from passers-by. These maladies,” Frimpong continued, “include such revolting ones as shrivelled hands and feet atrophied fingers of a leper places … which catch the eye every day when we [abled-bodied persons] go about our daily duties.” He called “the physically weak who cannot work” as the “most nauseating group of beggars” in relation to those who were able-bodied but feigned “sickness” or those who were “quack fortune tellers.” For Frimpong, the disabled who begged “infest our streets, alleys, public houses, nooks and crannies.” Frimpong’s language of ‘infestation’ linked disabled people to insects and viruses that had to be “disinfected,” “cleansed,” and removed from society. Like sex work, Frimpong insisted that mendicancy provided the “imperialist skeptics whose greatest delight is to paint Ghana in the most sordid pictures, something to talk about when they go back to their country after a stay or visit here.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This language was dangerous. It was designed to create fear, animosity, and alienate those suffering in the socialist de-colony.

Whether it was undergirded by a leftist socialist mission or a rightist abhorrence of the disabled, both camps believed that disabled Ghanaians needed to be integrated “into the workforce as productive wage laborers.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ These ideas and policies, as Grischow revealed, had its roots in the 1940s British colonial policy to “retrain” disabled ex-colonial Ghanaian soldiers into “productive workers.” For Nkrumah, Rehabilitation Centers were central to incorporating and converting disabled Ghanaians into productive labor. In 1961, the government established a National Rehabilitation Service “for the benefit of the adult blind, deaf and dumb.” The state also created Rural Rehabilitation Units in Kwaso in the Asante Region, Ho in the Volta Region, Tamale in the North Region, and Bolgatanga in the Upper Regions, and an Industrial Rehabilitation Unit in Accra for “the urban disabled.” Owusu Afriyie, the minister of Social Welfare and Community Development, argued to the Ghanaian presidential cabinet that such spaces would “encourage” the disabled “to learn three or four trades … should demand fail in another.” During their leisure, the minister envisioned the residents discussing “the week’s news, the work of the central government” and local councils, and “the responsibilities of the individual to the welfare and security of the state.” These measures were to ensure that disabled individuals could “take their place in the counsels of the people.” “The objective of the rehabilitation courses,” Afriyie maintained, “is to restore the disabled as nearly as possible to the economic and social position which they would have occupied but for their disability.” However, due to “staffing and accommodation” issues, these places could only accommodate “160 male disabled people” at “any one time.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Herein lay the problem.

Those aforementioned programs and services, including training in farming, poultry, “tailoring, sandal making, craft work in raffin and cane rural building and wood carving” had not “been extended to disabled women.” The minister admitted that access to the new training centers had been gendered and requested similar spaces for women. Consequently, he urged his cabinet colleagues in July 1963 to accept the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind’s offer to create a home training scheme for “blind women” in Ghana. The minister noted that the courses would assist “blind women” “gain confidence in themselves, when carrying out normal household and domestic duties”; and “readjust their attitude to their blindness, to revive hope, encourage effort in the daily round of activity, and retrain them in the methodological handling and use of articles in the domestic environment.” Furthermore, the minister hoped that the courses would teach blind women to “clean, cook, grow food, sew and care for the family.” Afriyie expressed hope in the program because it was “integrated” and that “the blind and the sighted” would be “trained together.” It would be the first such course taught in the world and would position Ghana as a leader in this field, Afriyie observed. “The objective of the rehabilitation courses,” the minister argued, “is to restore the disabled as nearly as possible to the economic and social position which they would have occupied but for their disability.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ While the men’s rehabilitation centers were designed to teach them nondomestic trade skills and provide them with a means to (re-)enter the workforce, the minister’s vision for blind women was to domesticate them. He saw their labor and place in society as primarily in a caregiving capacity at home. The home, Afriyie implied, was where blind women could add the most value to the state’s socialist project.

While Afriyie’s views on the place of women in Ghana’s socialist society left much to be desired, Nkrumah’s government decided to utilize funds from the Kwame Nkrumah Trust to support organizations like the Ghana Society for the Blind, Ghana Child Care Society, Ghana Society for the Deaf, the Ghana Cripples Aid Society, and the Society of Friends of Lepers.Footnote ¹¹⁰ On March 17, 1964, the presidential cabinet approved to allocate funds to “provide a pipe-borne water supply for the Central Destitute Infirmary at Bekwai” and to “serve the needs of the physically handicapped and infirm inmates of that institution.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Nkrumah’s government did not distinguish between the disabled behind bars and those outside of them. The state policy was to ensure that incarcerated disabled people should also have an opportunity to transform themselves into productive workers. For individuals like Frimpong, who abhorred the disabled, it was not the state’s responsibility to care for them. Instead, it was the duty of religious institutions, such as churches to “sponsor the education of a number of blind men in the Ghana Blind School,” so that they could “learn a trade to be useful citizens.”Footnote ¹¹² Now, I turn to the case of Abolga Frafra, a laborer at Messrs. P. & W. Ghanem Traders and Contractors in Tamale, who became disabled through an unfortunate work accident, to understand the relationship between disabled workers and the state. Albeit one example, the letters about Frafra, hidden in the archives, opens a small window for us to unpack the life of a disabled worker within the socialist de-colony.

Frafra was maneuvering a “tripper truck” at work on September 15, 1961, when he was involved in an accident. “I am now completely paralyzed,” Frafra wrote, “and cannot do anything other than sitting on the wheelchair presented to me when I left hospital [sic].” Through the Ministry of Labor’s intervention, P. & W. Ghanem, his former employer, awarded Frafra a single, lump-sum payment of £490.5. By October 30, 1965, however, Frafra’s finances had withered. “All that amount has been spent by me on my livelihood and continued treatment,” Frafra wrote to the Upper Region’s regional commissioner. Frafra was “now completely destitute.” Due to his “invalidity,” most of his family members had “abandoned” him. Frafra begged for pity and an extra “some small ex-gratia award to enable” him “to live.”Footnote ¹¹³ While rehabilitation centers, designed to educate, re-train, and strengthen disabled workers and make them ‘productive’ economic parts of society had been opened in Accra, Ho, Bolgatanga, and Tamale by 1963,Footnote ¹¹⁴ it is unclear whether Frafra had joined any. However, in September 1961, Frafra had no centers to join.

An official, E. K. Ando-Brew, took “pity” on Frafra’s “pathetic” plight and urged the regional commissioner to assist Frafra, noting that Frafra could not be “offered any gainful employment however light it may be” because he was “totally paralyzed in both legs and can only move about in a wheelchair with the constant help of others.” Ando-Brew acknowledged that P. & W. Ghanem had done their legal duty to Frafra by both compensating him with the lump sum of £490.5 and providing him with “a wheel-chair costing £30.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Nonetheless, Ando-Brew beseeched the regional commissioner to help Frafra acquire some extra funds. However, I. B. Ashun, the secretary to the regional commissioner, curtly dismissed the request.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Frafra’s situation underscored both the revolutionary agenda’s economic, political, and social contradictions, and perhaps the limitations of Black freedom and ableism as the new state’s economic foundation. While the government and industry expected workers to be devoutly loyal to the course of national development, those succumbing to its debilitating effects, besides minimal financial compensation, were largely relegated to invisibility. Frafra’s relationship both to the archive and the revolutionary, socialist project was one of squalor, discomfort, and hardship. His tastes, interests, dreams, and hopes outside of his “disability” are unrecorded, unknown, and forgotten; they reveal the limits of an archive and postcolonial project centered on ableism and economic production. Yet, it is through his pleading communications that we can peer into his life and into the lives, perhaps, of other people in similar circumstances.

Conclusion

The politicians and intellectuals needed the workers to build socialism.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Workers were charged with making the, at times, overlapping dreams of Nkrumah, the state, and the broader African and Black world a reality. Workers in Ghana then became the bedrock of the state’s global and domestic ambitions. The literary and political elite constantly informed the workers that they were not simply laboring for profit, their families or the colonial economy, but for a new Ghana and future. They were laboring for global socialism and against centuries of anti-Black and African denigration. The literary and political elite admitted that it was only through the workers could Ghana embody Black power and socialism’s freedom and potential. Yet, not all types of labor were respected or revered. Critics assailed sex work, lazy workers, and mendicancy as colonial and imperial vices that had to be cut from the national body politic.

While state officials extolled the workers and insisted that their political power derived from them and that the workers were indispensable to Ghana and Black freedom, they passed laws to curtail the workers’ power and to control their labor. Workers in Ghana then embodied the contradictions of the socialist de-colony. While they were characterized as the owners of the state and supposed to embody Black liberation, state laws and foreign and domestic capital sought to undermine their rights. However, measures to cower workers failed spectacularly. Workers fought back with ingenious techniques. They created local unions separate from the TUC. They studied the laws and their collective bargaining agreements closely. These movements and moments perhaps represented the truest embodiment of Black liberation in the postcolony. Workers understood that their positions were tenuous and that true liberation, perhaps, was only possible in coordination and in conjunction with each other. Black liberation was not a solo affair; it could never be. As Nkrumah had famously articulated on Independence Day: “[T]he independence of Ghana’s was meaningless unless it was linked up to the total liberation of Africa.” For workers in Ghana, it was a truism; their liberation was linked up with the survival and success of Black labor worldwide. Events and time would perhaps prove them right.