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.