Introduction

On June 16, 1959, two years after Ghana’s independence, approximately 400 Pioneer Tobacco Company workers were “hooting” and singing “Asafo war songs” and holding 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 ¹ They marched through Takoradi, the coastal capital of Ghana’s Western Region, for better labor protections and the reinstatement and prison release of their two colleagues – Joseph Alexander Odoi and Isaac Mensah. Odoi and Mensah had been fired and imprisoned for reacting to a white Pioneer Tobacco Company managerial staff member, Crowther-Nicol, calling Odoi a “monkey.” Upon hearing those words, Odoi became infuriated and broke the glass on Crowther-Nicol’s desk and threatened to kill him.Footnote ² Mensah had struck a “gong-gong” to mobilize a strike and locked himself behind the general manager’s office door. When the police and company authorities pounded on the door searching for him, Mensah escaped through the “air-condition apparatus hole.”Footnote ³

Four years later, in December 1963 and across the world, a twenty-eight-year-old Ghanaian medical student, Edmond Asare-Addo, lay dead on the outskirts of Moscow. Ghanaians suspected that Asare-Addo was killed because of his impending marriage to a white Russian woman. Like their counterparts at the Tobacco Company in Ghana four years earlier, Ghanaians in the Soviet Union quickly mobilized around this racist incident, drawing in members of the Ghanaian state apparatus and Ghanaians internationally.Footnote ⁴

The mythologies surrounding the lives and deaths of figures like Asare-Addo, Odoi, and Mensah illuminate the untold story of the intersection between race, gender, racism, citizenship, socialism, African decolonization, and the global Cold War. They ignited international diplomatic crises, raised troubling questions about the treatment of Black people globally, and the meaning of Black political independence if a Black state could not protect its Black subjects.

I do not revisit or reveal these racist incidents to show simply that racism existed in the USSR, the United States, Bulgaria, or Ghana. The historiographical literature sufficiently debunks the myths of its absence in those states and empires.Footnote ⁵ Chronicling and revisiting these anti-Black racist moments – important and traumatic in their own right and buried within global and local archives, out-of-print newspapers, and historical memories – urges a reexamination of the formation of a nascent Ghanaian national identity and state in an ideologically fractured world and its implication for Black postcolonial statecraft. Historian Shelly Chan employs the term “diasporic moments” to argue that “diaspora is less a collection of communities than a series of moments in which reconnections with a putative homeland take place.”Footnote ⁶ By “considering how ‘diasporic moments’ emerge,” Chen argues that we can understand “Chinese identity … in relation to global forces.”Footnote ⁷ Anthropologist Vivian Chenxue Lu notes that diasporic Nigerian Igbos in Asia mobilize through “particular events, crises, and projects that deliberately engage the postcolonial state.”Footnote ⁸ “Diasporic agitations,” Lu maintains, is “a targeted mode of engagement – of protests, strikes, and awareness-raising – as well as a state of being, of heightened political consciousness and readiness to demand change.” They “invoke broader imaginaries of the African continent and transnational Black racial community.”Footnote ⁹ Anthropologist J. Lorand Matory has mused whether Africans have appeared “marginal to [discourses on] the nation-state” because much of African mobilization against racism has, in fact, “transcend[ed] … or crosscut” imperial and national borders.Footnote ¹⁰

Following Chan, Matory, and Lu, I refer to the two incidents that birthed this chapter and the subsequent events in this chapter as “racial citizenship moments.” This chapter’s arguments “coalesce around particular events … and moments.”Footnote ¹¹ These racialized citizenship moments disintegrated geopolitical borders and class and ethnic cleavages. Ghanaian mobilizations against racism reflected nationalist aspirations. These were at once transnational in formation and highly localized. They also operated on overlapping and competing registers of global Black and nationalist solidarities. During the embryonic moments of the new state’s life, they created an “ongoing ‘dialogue’” between everyday Ghanaians domestically and abroad; the state and its citizens; the Ghanaian print media and its readers; and Black subjects and citizens of Western and Eastern governments.Footnote ¹² These incidents tested the Ghanaian government’s credibility while unraveling claims of global socialist tenets and allyship.

“What follows” then in this chapter “is a historical” account “of the multifarious ‘transnational’ [and domestic] phenomena that have mobilized Ghanaian national identity against anti-Black racism and violence.”Footnote ¹³ This chapter argues then that anti-Black racism, “racialized citizenship moments,” domestically and globally, particularly in Bulgaria, the US, and the USSR, were key to shaping a global Ghanaian national consciousness. Racial citizenship moments galvanized organic nationalist movements and feelings among university students, truck drivers, journalists, miners, etc. These individuals, without state sanctioned power or state appointments, made citizenship claims through state and non-state channels. While most of the incidents outlined in this chapter are new to the historiographical record, some have prior historiographical lives.Footnote ¹⁴ With the latter, I reread them against new details I have found to illustrate their significance to our (re)understanding of global Ghanaian citizenship and race as key paradigms in understanding the global Cold War, African decolonization, and socialist “solidarity.”Footnote ¹⁵ These incidents shaped what it meant to be a Ghanaian and the state’s duty to its citizens, even if at times, the state sought to downplay or retreat from taking action. Calls for protection against racism and ill-treatment were central to articulating ideas of citizenship. Conversely, protecting and supporting Ghanaians against racism and unfair accusations, and ensuring their well-being became a critical mission and function of the nascent state. These episodes created “new forms of political belonging,” as historian Gregory Mann suggests.Footnote ¹⁶

Citizenship Laws and Top-Down Nationalism

Officials in colonial and postcolonial Ghana designed and passed laws that sought to define who could obtain Ghanaian citizenship. In February 1957, a month before their impending exit, the British hoped that the Ghanaian Constitution would “secure genuine national unity in the Gold Coast once” it became independent. Historian Emmanuel Akyeampong argues that the British pushed a form of Ghanaian citizenship that was “uniracial and not multiracial.” In May 1957, the Ghanaian parliament passed the Ghana Nationality and Citizenship Act of 1957, defining a citizen as anyone “born [on] or after” the Act’s passing, and who, prior to the Act’s “commencement,” “was a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies or a British protected person.”Footnote ¹⁷ However, if one’s parents or grandparents were not “born in Ghana,” they could not be classified automatically as citizens. On the flip side, if one were born outside of Ghana immediately prior to or after the Act’s passing, one could claim citizenship if either of their parents were born in Ghana. Conceptions of Ghanaian citizenship were also gendered. The Act decreed that a non-born Ghanaian woman, who “was by virtue of her marriage [to] a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies or a British protected person,” could become a Ghanaian citizen. The same did not apply for men.Footnote ¹⁸

Passed a year after Ghana became a Republic, the Ghana National Act of 1961 added a few clauses to the 1957 Act. Pending presidential approval, the Act noted that people seeking naturalization could only do so if they had “sufficient knowledge of a language indigenous to and in current use in Ghana” and had lived in Ghana for a “period of five years.” Some have argued that the 1961 Act went furthest in “racializing” citizenship by denying dual citizenship or requiring knowledge of “indigenous” languages. The new Act certainly went furthest in framing Ghanaian citizenship through certain forms and claims of indigeneity. Yet, neither the 1957 or 1961 Acts had completely racialized Ghanaian citizenship.Footnote ¹⁹ Instead, Ghanaian nationality was determined by either one’s grandparents, parents, or birthplace. Symbolic, cultural, and material measures from the top were also introduced to construct a Ghanaian national identity.

Nkrumah’s government employed architectural monuments and “spatial organization” to create a distinct idea “of the ‘nation’” and “community.”Footnote ²⁰ Nkrumah’s image was put on Ghana’s new postage stamps and currency. The latter had the Latin words “Kwame Nkrumah, civitas Ghaniensis conditor” (italics mine) inscribed on it. Both sought to create the impression of Nkrumah “as coterminous with the Ghanaian nation-state.”Footnote ²¹ Like other 20th-century nations, Ghana’s leaders devised a new national anthem and flag to unite disparate peoples together and construct new forms of bonds and loyalty to the state and perhaps Nkrumah himself. The state’s new inhabitants would learn, recite, and sing these lyrics: “We’ll live and die for Ghana … / This be our vow, O Ghana, / To live as one, in unity, / And in your strength, O Ghana, / To build a new fraternity!”Footnote ²² However, attempts to fashion a new state identity or create fealty to the new political entity met fierce opposition by fractured and splintering loyalties to the Ghanaian state project.

The sternest domestic political challenges to the ruling CPP came from religious and ethnolinguistic groups and political parties such as the GA Standfast Association – representing the Ga Adangme Shifimo Kpee; the National Liberation Movement (NLM) – representing the Asante region; the Togoland Congress (TC) – representing the Ewe Togoland region in Eastern Ghana; the Northern People’s Party (NPP) – representing people from the North; and the Muslims Association Party – representing the diverse Muslim population and coalition increasingly dissatisfied with Nkrumah and the CPP.Footnote ²³ In March 1957, the very month of Ghana’s independence, Ghanaian troops and police officers were dispatched to the Ewe-speaking Alavanyo district in the Volta Region to quell a rebellion led by TC party members, who “banded … in camps, marched up and down in … military formation, and practiced with shotguns” to “hasten … Togoland unification.”Footnote ²⁴ Under the guise of stopping ethnic-linguistic chauvinism and secessionist movements like the TC’s alleged efforts, Ghana’s early leaders banned flags and the display of “flags purporting to represent any subnational group.”Footnote ²⁵ Despite these acts and intentions, the Asante continued to fly their flag in defiance.Footnote ²⁶ Through the Avoidance of Discrimination Acts in 1957, regional, ethnolinguistic, or religious based political parties were banned. While suppressing “separatist” ethnolinguistic or religious forces might keep Ghana intact, it also certainly solidified Nkrumah and his party’s grip on political power. The CPP was the only real party that cut across ethnolinguistic, geographic, religious, and gendered lines.

Thus, by hamstringing and divesting political power from regional, religious, or ethnolinguistic groups, Nkrumah’s government was at once hoping to galvanize and compel all domestic allegiances toward his personhood, his party, and the state. While there were strong top-down initiatives to create a Ghanaian identity, this chapter will demonstrate that the process of creating a Ghanaian national identity was also a bottom-up affair, particularly in response to anti-Black racism in Ghana and abroad. It was racialized citizenship moments that spurred the creation and construction of a global Ghanaian national identity among a fractured body politic.

The Need to Study Abroad and Breaking Atlantic-Anglo Education Circuits

Due to a lack of serious investment from the British during colonial rule, the new socialist state only had two colleges and no universities at independence. Yet, in 1960, about 70 percent of Ghana’s population was under thirty, with 26 percent between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine.Footnote ²⁷ In 1961, the two colleges, the University of College of the Gold Coast (founded in 1948) and the Kumasi College of Technology, became universities and were renamed the University of Ghana, Legon, and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, respectively.Footnote ²⁸ However, these two institutions lacked the space and infrastructure to educate all the people in Ghana.

Consequently, hitherto, to access higher education, generations of people went to the UK or United States, particularly African-American higher educational institutions.Footnote ²⁹ As Chapters 1 and 2 noted, Ghana’s leaders and press had begun to praise the Soviet educational system in the early 1960s. This was politically and culturally necessary to attempt to loosen the stranglehold American and British higher educational institutions had over Ghana. Thus, from the 1960s onward, Nkrumah’s government ruptured the well-trodden Atlantic Ocean and Anglocentric education circuits by sending students to socialist-aligned countries and other nations willing to welcome a new generation of Black, Ghanaian, and African students. The state’s eagerness to Africanize its bureaucratic apparatus and create the technocrats, scientists, and medical professionals necessary to construct its socialist utopia and postcolonial sovereignty necessitated this geographic and ideological pivot while building and expanding its own higher education institutions and capacities.Footnote ³⁰

Much national fanfare greeted the educational sojourners to the USSR, which started in earnest in 1961 after the Ghanaians and Soviets signed three bilateral economic and technical cooperation agreements in 1959, 1960, and 1961.Footnote ³¹ Mirroring the scale of its economic partnership, the number of Ghanaians going to the West dwarfed those going to the East. While 3,800 Ghanaians were studying in the UK by 1962,Footnote ³² approximately 700 were in the USSR by 1964.Footnote ³³ However, the press sought to capture the excitement of this historical, educational, and political reorientation. For instance, on October 12, 1961, The Daily Graphic informed the nation about Ghanaian cadets heading off to the USSR with the headline: “71 Off to Russia.” The group were pictured smiling enthusiastically, wearing a combination of dark and light-colored suits, light-colored shirts, and ties.Footnote ³⁴ Such reporting was not an anomaly (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1

“3 Graduate in Moscow,” The Daily Graphic, February 2, 1965.

The Ghanaian press took great national pride in its nationals going abroad and in their accomplishments (Figure 3.2). In 1963, The Ghanaian Times informed the public that four Ghanaian nurses, who worked at Korle Bu Hospital in Accra, Kumasi Central Hospital in the Ashanti Region, and Cape Coast Hospital in the Central Region, respectively, had flown to London for a year to study at the Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford.Footnote ³⁵ An image of the four nurses – Monica Sampennie, Hannah Opoku, Cynthia Mantey, and B. E. Hlomador – smiling together before their flight to the United Kingdom was reproduced. Similarly, an image of three jovial students from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology after their brief stint in Frankfurt, West Germany, was published.Footnote ³⁶ In another episode, the press waxed lyrically about a Ghanaian nutrition student, Elise Henkel, and how she organized an “African Market” in London.Footnote ³⁷ On March 30, 1963, The New Ashanti Times proudly declared: “Ghanaians Shine in London College Play.” They wrote in admiration that Paulina Ofori and Sophia Lokko earned “enthusiastic acknowledgement from leading theatre critics” in London for their role in John Gay’s play, Polly, set in 1729 West Indies.Footnote ³⁸ The geographic or ideological orientation of the educating country did not dampen or increase the sense of national pride emanating from the press.

Figure 3.2

“Off to Study in the U.S,” The Daily Graphic, July 12, 1963.

Figure 3.2 Long description

From left to right, the names of the officials in the photograph are E.C. Ohemeng from Wiaga, near Navrongo, E.K. Gyasi from the Soil Conservation Unit at Vieri near Wa, E.M.K. Adzei from Damongo, Northern Region, S.K. Ankoma from Navrongo, and J.D. Aaku from Zuarungu near Bolgatanga. The United States Agency for International Development in Ghana sponsors their training.

The press proudly produced images and circulated stories of Ghanaians in Australia, the USSR, Israel, Britain, East and West Germany, and the US among many places (Figure 3.3). The public learned what courses the students were studying, where they were studying, how long they had been at said place, or how long they would be there. Printing the students’ names, geographic origins, and gender in the captions or stories demonstrated to the new country that people from all over the new state – from the historically marginalized North, from anti-Nkrumah regions, and women – were part of a collective movement to fashion the new state’s lofty dreams. While a student’s race was not stated, the faces of only Black Ghanaians in the images informed the public implicitly that those opportunities were available only to Black Ghanaians. Furthermore, there was an implicit discourse that to be Ghanaian meant to be Black. Black Ghanaians then were being chosen to go abroad and learn technical skills as varied as dentistry, mechanical engineering, theater, nursing, medicine, and land use and irrigation techniques. They were expected to return home and build the new socialist society (Figure 3.4). There was broad consensus among most of the press and government officials that Ghanaians had to leave and return to the young nation with further education or technical skills to bolster the state’s ambitious political and economic project.Footnote ³⁹ Yet, behind the exuberant faces of Ghanaians breaking new educational frontiers by going eastward lay a bitter story of neocolonial espionage and Cold War politics that threatened to derail this new educational frontier.

Figure 3.3

“He Studies in Britain,” The Daily Graphic, January 4, 1965.

Figure 3.4

“They return home after studying in USSR,” The Ghanaian Times, November 21, 1963.

Figure 3.4 Long description

The photo has five Ghanaian men smiling after returning to Ghana from Moscow, USSR, after completing a diploma in trade and planning economics at the Moscow Co-operative Institute. From left to right, the men are Aboagye Kwateng, D.N. Enyonom Adzosi, J.A. Appiah Danquah, Frank Opong Bawua, and J. A. Osei. The Ghana Central Co-Operative Council and the Soviet Central Council of Co-Operative jointly sponsored their studies.

Sinister Plots to Stop Students Going East

Some members of Nkrumah’s cabinet, Ghana’s British Army Major General H. T. Alexander, Colonel Aferi, and British officials, with Canadian, American, and minimal Israeli assistance, sought to sabotage Ghana’s academic and political reorientation. In August 1961, Nkrumah and Ghana’s minister of defense Charles De Graft Dickson decided to send 400 cadets to the USSR for military training, causing a big diplomatic stir. Alexander refused to obey his superior’s orders, informing Nkrumah that it was “quite unacceptable” to send the cadets to the USSR. Subsequently, Alexander slowed down the directive and leaked the request to British officials.Footnote ⁴⁰ Alexander wrote a secret memorandum to British officials suggesting they withdraw their troops from Ghana if Nkrumah pursued this policy.Footnote ⁴¹ Under extreme imperial secrecy, British officials held discussions with their Canadian and American counterparts about the issue. Despite Israeli attempts to court Ghana and cultural, economic, diplomatic, and labor union exchanges between the two, Israel was gathering sensitive intelligence from Ghana and conveying it to the United States.

The British and Canadians “emphasized [the] necessity of safeguarding General Alexander’s position” to protect both Alexander and the flow of highly classified information he provided to them.Footnote ⁴² It was imperative that other Ghanaian leaders not suspect that Alexander was duplicitous and engaged in espionage and treason. While Alexander’s efforts stalled and limited the state’s plans to offer additional and new higher educational pathways for its citizens, it did not curtail it. In fact, they underscored the immediate urgency of the Africanization project and the active threats of neocolonialism and white supremacy to Ghana’s socialist project and freedom dreams. While sending Ghanaians to the USSR sparked frantic reactions, we begin the next section, not in the USSR, but in Bulgaria, a Soviet ally and self-proclaimed communist state. Bulgaria was one destination Ghanaians traveled to acquire higher educational degrees. It is where we begin our story of bottom-up nationalism.

Racism and Mobilization in the Communist and Capitalist Blocs

Bulgaria

By February 1963, there were about twenty Ghanaian students in Bulgaria. Many had arrived in December 1962 “with open minds, and in the beginning were filled with high hopes.” Initially, the Eastern European socialist world welcomed them with open arms and was friendly. To express racial and ideological solidarity, the Bulgarian authorities housed some Ghanaian students “in the same hostels” and “rooms” with other Bulgarians.Footnote ⁴³ However, relations began to deteriorate. A twenty-five-year-old Ghanaian economics student and the secretary of Ghana’s Student Union in Bulgaria, Robert Kotey from Accra, outlined in a powerful op-ed in The Ashanti Times on March 9, 1963, about the plight of Ghanaian students in Bulgaria.

Kotey wrote that some Ghanaian students began to complain about their living conditions. They were “cramped four in a room which was only 14 by 9 feet, with four beds and one table in the middle with a chair at either end. It made studying very inconvenient, as some in the room had to sit or lie on their beds in order to read.” Living in tight quarters was not their only concern, Kotey wrote. The students also complained about their meagre allowances. Within the ecosystem of Ghanaian students in the Eastern bloc, this complaint was not an anomaly. Ghanaian cadets in the USSR raised similar concerns, including a lack of sufficient and different clothing, much to the joy of some British officials.Footnote ⁴⁴ In response to the students’ complaints in Bulgaria and the USSR, the Ghanaian government increased their stipends.

The idea that African students in the socialist and communist worlds lived materially better or had greater access to desirable goods elicited both scorn and reverence. While the Ghanaians might have found their material conditions wanting, the Bulgarians complained that the Ghanaians “lived a bit luxuriously as compared with the standard of Bulgarians.” Kotey claimed that the Bulgarians thought the Ghanaians were “bourgeois” because they wore “neckties” and “suites.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Historian Maxim Matusevich noted that African students in the USSR enjoyed much “greater freedoms of expression and movement” compared to their Soviet counterparts and often “acted as the conduits of Westernization, giving their Soviet friends, fellow students, and girlfriends their taste of things foreign; jazz and rock ‘n’ roll records, blue jeans, popular music,” and other cultural phenomena.Footnote ⁴⁶

Others in the European socialist world believed that their governments were buttressing the Africans’ luxurious lifestyles to their detriment since there was no way Africans could self-finance or produce such goods. The East Berlin Communist Radio announced that “the Bulgarian Government offers foreign students from economically less developed countries the best possible conditions for study.” This implicitly perpetuated the myth that the African students’ bourgeoisie attire was Bulgarian, not Ghanaian, financed. This attitude was shared among other East European communities. Bulgaria was not an anomaly. Historian Thom Loyd argues that some Soviet Ukrainians linked their financial struggles with the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s policy of spending Soviet finances on the third world.Footnote ⁴⁷ Historian Alessandro Iandolo concluded that some linked the Soviet premier’s demise to his financial support for non-European movements and governments.Footnote ⁴⁸

Despite thinking Africans embodied Western bourgeoise modernity, some viewed Africa as a state of primitivity and its peoples as intimately tied to the natural world. The idea and image of Africans prancing around in leaves or no-clothes were circulated in Europe, North America, and across the world. For instance, one episode of the popular Belgian cartoon, “The Adventures of Tin Tin,” in the 1930s depicted Africans in the Congo without much clothing and seemingly in harmony with nature. Such cartoons and images produced and reinforced ontologies of Africans and nature as symbiotic, if not one.Footnote ⁴⁹ Bulgaria and the larger European socialist world were not inoculated from these ideas. As Kotey informed his Ghanaian compatriots, some Bulgarians believed that “snakes” slithered on Africa’s non-paved streets and that Africans either wore leaves or went “about naked.” In one sense, Africa represented backwardness, the ontological Western other, where Western forms of modernity or cultural tastes did not exist. Thus, Kotey noted the Bulgarians’ amazement and surprise when the Ghanaians informed the Bulgarians “that the suits” they wore “had been made in Ghana.”Footnote ⁵⁰

However, Kotey and the Ghanaian press did not let these mischaracterizations of Africa slide. They strongly condemned them. The New Ashanti Times brandished the East Berlin Communist Radio communique a joke, and placed it within their “Joke of the Week” section.Footnote ⁵¹ Kotey found the arguments that European socialist governments were bankrolling Africans’ lavish lifestyles in the Eastern bloc misleading and disrespectful because they masked the sacrifices African families undertook to support their children and relatives abroad. If Bulgarians had more wealth than their African counterparts, why could they not send their children and relatives “money” to purchase new “cold weather wardrobes,” Kotey wondered?Footnote ⁵² Soon, anti-African sentiments in Bulgaria turned violent.

In August 1962, approximately six Ghanaian students missed their dinners at their dormitories and went to “a nearby restaurant.” It was not an ordinary sit-down restaurant. Music blasted over the patrons and people danced freely. Men and women congregated in that space. The rhythms of the music prompted one Ghanaian male student to ask “a Bulgarian girl” to dance with him. She agreed. While frolicking together, “a young [Bulgarian] soldier” walked up “to the girl and asked her: ‘Is it not a shame for you to dance with a Black monkey?’” The Bulgarian woman appeared stunned by the question and did not respond. While angered by the racist remark, the Ghanaian went to his seat to avoid a confrontation. However, events spiraled out of control quickly. As the Ghanaian lowered himself to sit, “another Bulgarian boy pulled his chair out from behind him.” And the Ghanaian fell to the floor. “Before he could even get back on his feet,” another Bulgarian grabbed a chair, smacked him over the head, leaving the Ghanaian unconscious. The other Ghanaians witnessed the scene and became incensed. They confronted the culprits and a “general fight ensued between the dozens of Bulgarians who were in the restaurant and who were in the streets and the handful of Ghanaian students at their table.” The Bulgarian police did not “intervene” to protect the heavily outnumbered Ghanaians. Instead, they went outside. However, the Bulgarians failed to press home their numerical advantage. The Ghanaians miraculously held “their own.” Realizing the stalemate, the police reentered the building and “broke up the fight.” Kotey informed the Ghanaian reading public that the Bulgarian police “made no effort to find the young Bulgarians who had started the fight, but rather arrested only the six Ghanaians.”Footnote ⁵³ The aggressors had escaped any state sanction. Instead, the victims, the Ghanaians, had been blamed and arrested. Yet, this was not the first instance of police inaction against attacks and insults against Africans in Bulgaria.

Kotey painfully recalled that African students in Bulgaria were “beaten up” frequently “while the policemen nearby would protest that he could do nothing because he was assigned to another district, or would merely disperse the crowd while letting the beating continue.” To add insult to injury, the four injured Ghanaians were released from prison but the remaining two, George Armah and E. A. Attiga, were imprisoned “for one full month before their case came before any kind of court for a hearing.” After their court hearing, the judge handed Armah a one-year and Attiga a three-year prison sentence, respectively.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Ghanaian government immediately demanded the injured Ghanaians returned to Accra. This was not the end – only the beginning.

In February 1963, students from Ghana continued to face racial discrimination in Bulgaria and mobilized around these incidents. News of their troubles even reached New Zealand. The Salient: Victoria University Students’ Paper wrote that Ghanaians in Bulgaria continued to be “called Black monkeys and jungle people and … were treated like dirt.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Kotey outlined other humiliations. Bulgarians “spat upon [African men] from buses and trains,” or “poured” water on the Africans when they “walked beneath windows.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Kotey concluded: “We are absolutely certain that this discrimination was not incidental, but backed from above – by the Communist authorities.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Consequently, Ghanaian men and women took to the streets of Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, to protest these incidents and the arrest of two African students, including a Ghanaian. The protest was “bloody.” “Three police officers … jump[ed] on one African and hold him down while another policeman … hit … [him] over his head.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Ghanaian women were not spared from the violence. The Bulgarian militia knocked down Christina Nyannor, a twenty-year-old Ghanaian student, and “dragged [her] … through the snow.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Others were placed on buses and sent to prison.Footnote ⁶⁰ A Somali student alleged that “he was kept … for three days without food or drink, stripped of all his clothes and interrogated at gun point during the night.”Footnote ⁶¹ The situation deteriorated into an international debacle and a headache for the Ghanaian government.

Not only were the incidents reported in the American, British, and New Zealand newspapers, but in Ghana as well, prompting domestic furor. The Ghanaian press called the Bulgarian police’s actions terrorist.Footnote ⁶² They countered the Bulgarians’ assertions that the Ghanaians instigated the violence. The press linked the 1963 debacles to the prior assaults against Ghanaians in Bulgaria. The Evening News reported that three Ghanaian students had returned to Accra from Bulgaria the previous year “dumb-founded … with bandaged heads.” The image of one such student was reproduced in the paper (Figure 3.5).Footnote ⁶³ The Ghanaian press and students abroad like Kotey exposed the Ghanaian public to the events in Bulgaria, creating a shared public imagination of violence against its citizens. These episodes were racial citizenship moments. With these, there ensued a mobilization of Ghanaians both domestically and abroad around anti-Black racism and harassment.

Figure 3.5

“Bandaged Ghanaian Student from Bulgaria,” Evening News, February 14, 1963.

The violence damaged self-proclaimed socialist and communist states’ assertions that “only” capitalism and imperialism coproduced and reproduced racism and the logic of colonial rule. It also undermined the promises and principles of socialist cooperation and the broader fight against colonialism and white supremacy. These episodes dampened the enthusiasm of everyday Ghanaians, its intelligentsia, and leadership for white European socialist states and undercut the Ghanaian state’s attempts to distinguish the Eastern bloc from other white empires, as discussed in Chapter 1. On February 20, an anonymous Ghanaian student in Accra wrote in the Evening News that the attacks against Africans “proved clearly that Bulgaria’s socialism has a twist which Africans should be wary of.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The Evening News editorial board was more emphatic: “We wish to condemn in no uncertain terms this flagrant repudiation of the socialist principles and unabashed disrespect by so-called Socialists for the colour of the African.” The editorial board continued: “The very fact that Bulgaria has been socialist for many generations, with ample opportunities to educate the man in the street against racial prejudice as proclaimed in the Socialist Manifesto …. By indulging in this unedifying orgy of bacchanalian revelry,” the editorial board condemned Bulgaria for “disgrac[ing] … the whole socialist world.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Anti-Black racism damaged socialist ideas and critiques of capitalism and imperialism. An article, “Red Treatment,” in the New Ashanti Times on February 23, 1963, condemned the anti-Black racism by socialist Bulgaria and its implications for socialist solidarity. “By their deeds ya shall know them; judge men by their actions not their protestations. Many nations in the modern world claim that they practice socialism. But let us beware that such a claim does not blind us to their true character.” The piece continued: “[L]et us take guard against those Eastern countries which profess socialism but at the same time do not extend the equality of man to the equality of the Black man.” The writer concluded by warning the socialist world and Black people that

Behind the Iron Curtain and like many other parts of the world where Africans are studying there cannot be one rule for the white and one for the Black …. African students are seeing through the thinness of the “hand of friendship and fraternal brotherhood of the races” which our friends from the other side of curtain have always extended to them as a lure.Footnote ⁶⁶

The Ghana Times admitted, “If we condemn the need for armed soldiers to insure [sic] James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi, we are entitled to condemn any form of prejudice against African students in Bulgaria.”Footnote ⁶⁷ “Jim-crowism,” the Evening News reported, “must be condemned whether it occurs in Johannesburg, Mississippi or Sofia.Footnote ⁶⁸ The term “apartheid” has come to symbolize white supremacy, anti-Black policies, the epitome of an evil system that strikes against humanity globally, and has been deployed by pro-Palestinian and Dalit advocates against the Israeli state and the Indian caste system, respectively.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, by using “Jim-crowism,” the Ghanaian press maintained that the policies and practices in the United States, and not South Africa, were the quintessential embodiments of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. In so doing, the Ghanaian press rejected the idea of the United States as a site of democracy and liberalism, and of democratic envy and political aspiration. Just as the generation of Black Marxists from the 1920s to the 1940s critiqued white imperialism and supremacy, a new generation of socialist sympathizers in Ghana were attacking white supremacy and imperialists, whether they had socialist or capitalist proclamations.

The fear that racism would undermine socialism was not confined to Bulgaria. Historian Sara Pugach noted that an East German pub manager in 1963 worried that “if discrimination” against Africans by East Germans “became rampant, it would not serve the continuous struggle of honest socialists the world over for the abolition of racial antagonism.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Historian Loyd goes further, noting that one of the limits of “Third Worldism” in Soviet Ukraine was its “inability – or refusal – to recognize anti-Black racism as a reality under socialism.”Footnote ⁷¹ If the Soviets and Bulgarians were unwilling to recognize anti-Black racism and the damage it could do to socialism, Ghanaians certainly saw the danger. Kotey admitted that Ghanaians who fled racism in socialist Bulgaria were “not anxious to return to a [European] Socialist country for fear that our experiences might be similar and that our freedom might again be limited.”Footnote ⁷² Ghana’s literary class and students demanded their government take action.

The Ghanaian press urged their government “not” to “tolerate having her students beaten and jailed,” and to take the “appropriate measures to deal with the situation.”Footnote ⁷³ The Ghanaian state could not ignore the anti-Black racist episodes against its citizens and these public calls to intervene and did so. Appan Sampong, the Ghanaian ambassador to Bulgaria, demanded the Ghanaians’ release from jail and blasted the Bulgarian state’s claims that the Ghanaians caused the violence. In rejecting the Bulgarian government’s summons, Sampong said: “I rejected the note because it was incorrect. Our people behaved peacefully, but they were beaten.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The debacle reached Nkrumah’s office. The prime minister dispatched “Kwesi Armah and Victor Woode,” two London High Commission officers, to investigate the claims. Armah “was sufficiently distressed” that he “recommend[ed] that all Ghanaian students be brought back home immediately” from Bulgaria.Footnote ⁷⁵ The Ghanaian press praised the government for “taking appropriate steps” to safeguard the interests of its citizens.Footnote ⁷⁶ But, Bulgaria was just one theatre – the USSR would be another.

Moscow: A Second Alabama

In the 20th century, white colonial and imperial regimes – from South Africa to France to Germany to the United States – created, shared, and purposed tropes of Black men as sexual predators in juxtaposition to the vulnerability and innocence of white women, who were portrayed as needing state and white male protection.Footnote ⁷⁷ The term “Black Peril” has come to define these panics and attacks.Footnote ⁷⁸ In 1952, Martinican philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote, “For the majority of Whites the Black man represents the (uneducated) sexual instinct. He embodies genital power out of reach of morals and taboos.” Black men were seen and understood at the level of the genitalia.Footnote ⁷⁹ According to gender, sexuality, and feminist scholar Robyn Wiegman, Black men assumed “the form of … a mythically endowed rapist.”Footnote ⁸⁰ These myths had material consequences for Black men. White colonial regimes and their citizens across the world executed – judicially or extrajudicially – Black men accused of raping or sexualizing white women, with some victims castrated.Footnote ⁸¹

Communist ideologies and sympathies did not inoculate the Soviets and others in the Communist bloc from the circulation of global Black Peril ideas and practices. In the middle of 1963 and a few months before Asare-Addo’s death, the second vignette that introduced the chapter, an article in the Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Soviet Communist Youth League’s newspaper, appeared. It recounted a story about a promising “Russian” law student named Larisa, who met a student named Mahmoud while intoxicated at a party. From that encounter, they married and Larissa went to Mahmoud’s home country (which is never mentioned). There, Mahmoud sold Larisa “into the harem of a friend of his sixth wife.” While Larisa tried to escape, she was “apprehended before” reaching “the Soviet Embassy.” “Nobody knows what has happened to her now,” the article concludes. “And she could have had a better life.”Footnote ⁸² The article revealed Soviet anxieties over Soviet women marrying foreigners. It also served as a cautionary tale for Soviet women to avoid intimate relations with African and international students and perpetuated the myth of the Black sexual predator. African students complained bitterly about the article’s veracity and sought a “retraction.” In response to the outrage, the Komsomolskaya Pravda editorial board informed the nine-person African commission that “the Larisa story was made up and is typical of many such articles used to educate [Russian] girls who might be intending to marry foreigners.”Footnote ⁸³ Such caricatures, depictions, and fears over Russian women dating “foreigners” can be traced to ideas in the Russian empire in the early 1900s. Historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein commented that the “picture of a captive [Russian] woman might evoke anxiety about … change” or Russians’ “struggle with modernity.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Thus, while the Soviets might certainly draw upon older lexicons, ideas, and tropes to comprehend the intimacies between African men and white Soviet women, it sat uncomfortably, or perhaps conveniently, within existing global circulations and anxieties over Black masculinity and sexuality.

These dual intellectual genealogies, colliding at this moment, had real consequences for African men in the Eastern Bloc. Recall earlier in this chapter the story of a Bulgarian male knocking a Ghanaian student unconscious with a chair for dancing with a Bulgarian woman. In June 1963, “a number of Africans had complained of being attacked by Russians because they had appeared publicly in the company of Russian girls.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Moreover, Loyd has uncovered an episode in Bucharest, Romania, in early December 1963, where violence surrounded the physical intimacies of Ghanaian men and Romanian women. A Romanian “dormitory porter … ejected” Ghanaian “male students alongside their female visitors” from their dorms. The Ghanaian students appealed to the Ghanaian chargé d’affaires in Bucharest for two students to gain “entry to their dormitory rooms.” In response, “a mob of around 200 [Romanian] students beat the [Ghanaian] chargé d’affaires” and the two students, sending them to the hospital.Footnote ⁸⁶ In 1964, the African-American Philadelphia Tribune observed that the friction between the Soviet citizens and Africans was over “money and women.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The Soviets, an African student commented in 1965, “would not allow us to dance with white women, and if we attempted to dance with a Russian girl in a club, we were beaten up.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The issue of Black Peril, and its dangerous consequences, were circulated and internationalized in transnational Black media outlets from The New Ashanti Times in Ghana to the Philadelphia Tribune in the United States.

Around the time of Asare-Addo’s death in December 1963, other domestic events in Ghana had consumed the attention of the Ghanaian public and state. There had been an assassination attempt on Nkrumah at Kulungugu, Northern Ghana, which injured Nkrumah but killed a little girl. Furthermore, there were bombings that rocked Accra. Three people – Tawaia Adamafio, Ako Adjei, and Coffie-Crabbe – with important government portfolios were arrested and charged with treason and conspiracy to commit treason. Led by chief justice, Sir Arku Korsah, Ghana’s Supreme Court oversaw the treason trial in late 1963 and acquitted the men on December 11. Pandemonium ensued. The papers blasted Sir Korsah for bringing “disgrace on … himself.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Demonstrations ensued, with people waving placards with the words: “The Judge Have let the Nation Down,” and “The Masses Know that They are Guilty.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The presidential cabinet held two emergency meetings. Soon, the president’s office announced that Sir Korsah had been sacked with immediate effect.Footnote ⁹¹ The decision was not without controversy. In a letter to Nkrumah, C. L. R. James, Nkrumah’s longtime friend and intellectual confidant from their American days, criticized Nkrumah’s decision to dismiss Sir Korsah.Footnote ⁹² Their relationship never recovered. Alongside this domestic turmoil, the Soviet tour party’s visit to Ghana had received considerable media attention.

While Asare-Addo’s death in December 1963 – sandwiched between the aforementioned incidents – did not draw intense domestic public scrutiny, it drew the attention of Ghanaians around the globe. It crystallized their ongoing concerns about anti-Black racism and ignited outrage.Footnote ⁹³ Ghanaians demonstrated at the Red Square in the USSR.Footnote ⁹⁴ It was the largest protest at the Red Square since Leon Trotsky’s expulsion from the Communist Party in 1927. Trotsky was one of the leading figures of the Bolshevik Revolution and led their Civil War fight against the Russian oligarchs and monarchy. One protestor’s placard read: “Moscow, a second Alabama.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Like Apartheid South Africa, Alabama conjured up the worst excesses of racism in the collective global psyche. For instance, Ugandan leader Milton Obote wrote an open letter to US president John F. Kennedy, attacking the “inhuman treatment of Negroes in Alabama” in May 1963.Footnote ⁹⁶ Four months later, in September 1963, white terrorists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young Black girls.Footnote ⁹⁷ The incident cemented Alabama in the world’s pysche as a space where Black adults and children, even in God’s house, were unsafe. Christ’s doors and blood did not spare Black children from the horrors of white supremacy.

Yet, the students’ sign had a double meaning. On the one hand, it signaled transnational Black solidarity. On the other hand, it was a deliberate attempt to link anti-Black racist incidents against Ghanaians internationally together. This was another racial citizenship moment. In September 1963, a few months prior to Asare-Addo’s death, three Ghanaian university studentsFootnote ⁹⁸ embarked on a road trip and stopped at a service station in Northport, a Tuscaloosa suburb in Alabama, and began taking pictures of “segregated rest room signs.” Shortly afterward, the Northport police detained and questioned them for four hours. Fortunately for the Ghanaians, they were not killed. After being released, “three carloads of white men” intercepted them. With handkerchiefs or shirts “pulled over their heads,” the white male aggressors carried guns, chains, and automobile tools. One pistol-wielding attacker “jumped into the front seat of the station wagon and drove it a rural road.” There, the gang of white men assaulted and terrorized the students, physically assaulting them with a pistol, clubs, leather belts, and automobile tools. One of the white men removed one of the Ghanaians’ shoes and “pointed a gun at his feet.” After the harrowing incident, the Ghanaians fled about four hours north to Nashville, Tennesee, and were treated at Vanderbilt Hospital for “facial and body injuries.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The story quickly became public and greatly embarrassed the Kennedy administration, prompting a quick apology to their Ghanaian counterparts, if not to the students themselves.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ It was not the only anti-Black incident involving a Ghanaian in the United States over the last six years. In October 1957, the Ghanaian finance minister, Komla Gbedemah, and his secretary, Bill Sutherland, were denied orange juice at Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Dover, Delaware, because they were Black. The then US president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, publically apologized to their Ghanaian counterparts and offered Gbedemah orange juice at the White House.Footnote ¹⁰¹ While the US government issued rapid formal apologies to foreign Blacks, none was often forthcoming to its Black citizens.

Ghanaians in the United States and USSR linked the Alabama and Moscow incidents together. Ghanaian students in North America took active actions to support their brethren in the USSR. On December 19, 1963, the executive committee of the Ghana Students’ Association of the Americas wrote to the Soviet ambassador to the United States and the Soviet Foreign Ministry in the USSR about Asare-Addo’s death and reports of hardships Ghanaians faced in the USSR. The executive committee held an emergency meeting to “strongly protest the suspicious circumstances that surrounded the death of Mr. Addo, a Ghana (italicization mine) medical student, near Moscow on December 13, 1963.”Footnote ¹⁰² The letter originated from the organization’s objective to promote the welfare of Ghanaian students in the Americas, “to study Ghana’s problems and exchange information relating to them,” to build a close fraternity with other globally dispersed Ghanaian student organizations, and “to promote goodwill and understanding among Ghanaians, Americans, and other Africans.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Such national student organizations were not unique to Ghanaians. As theorist Elleni Centine Zeleke discusses, there was also an active Ethiopian Student Association in North America (ESANA), whose leaders would eventually play a leading role in Ethiopia’s socialist revolution.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

In early 1964, a journalist in America asked Johnson D. K. Appiah, the Ghanaian first secretary of the Mission to the UN, about the Ghanaian student demonstrations in Moscow and whether Ghana would cease to send its students there. Appiah responded, “It is a very serious matter when a student dies mysteriously or is killed.” Appiah continued, “You know, the three Ghanaian students were beaten up in this country this year, and we wouldn’t consider not having students take every opportunity to get an education here.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ These were racial citizenship moments. They entailed an intentional mobilization around anti-Black racism. The Ghanaian state and Ghanaians did not distinguish between anti-Blackness in the United States, Bulgaria, or the USSR. Instead, Ghanaians connected these episodes together. Further Hollywood-esque and violent incidents against Ghanaians in the USSR prompted a much stronger rebuke by Ghanaian officials abroad against the white empire, whom, ironically, their domestic counterparts in Ghana had praised as being a different white empire (see Chapters 1 and 2) because of the Soviets’ commitment to Black and African liberation.

On January 25, 1964, five Ghanaian embassy employees – Brown, the embassy’s first secretary, and Boateng, Ocran, Baah, and Kufuor – were instructed to return to the embassy in the early morning. Brown rode alone while his colleagues drove together via a different route in a separate Ghanaian diplomatic vehicle. While Brown was driving, an unidentified car containing four men chased him and “dangerously rammed into” his vehicle, completely damaging his driver’s door. As Brown tried to escape, the interceptors put their car in front of him and forced him to exit it. The four Soviet individuals proceeded to interrogate Brown. Within “three minutes,” a Soviet police motorcycle arrived. While ignoring Brown’s assailants, they questioned Brown. Boateng, Ocran, Baah, and Kufuor were not spared.

Other assailants chased the other car containing the four Ghanaian officials. Their vehicle was “rammed in twice from behind and then a third time on the right rear side and intercepted.” The Ghanaians’ car, which had “a diplomatic badge,” was severely damaged. Soon, numerous vehicles and a “contingent” of ununiformed Soviet officers arrived. The Ghanaians were “forced out of their car,” accused of being drunk, “pushed about,” insulted, and “then forcibly lifted off their feet and thrown … into the police wagons and driven into a nearby police station.” Everything transpired despite the Ghanaian officials presenting “their diplomatic identity cards.” The police detained the officials for almost an hour, prevented them from communicating with the Ghanaian embassy, and tried to force them to sign a police statement in Russian. The Ghanaian officials refused. Consequently, they were booted from the station and “compelled to walk a mile through snow to the point where they were originally taken from their car.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The Ghanaian embassy demanded an explanation of what transpired to its diplomatic officials and why it had happened. Soviet Russia was not the only space Ghanaians faced anti-Black racist incidents in the USSR.

On July 26, 1964, a Ghanaian student in Kherson, a port city on the Black Sea in present-day southern Ukraine, was standing, nonplussed, and smoking a cigarette when a Soviet citizen moved toward him and requested a cigarette. When the Ghanaian replied that he had none, the individual attempted to grab the cigarette the Ghanaian was smoking, resulting in an altercation. Nearby Soviet citizens joined the fracas. When other Ghanaians noticed other Soviets “gang[ing]-up” against their fellow citizen, they joined the melee. After the fight, the Soviets suffered a few “casualties,” and others sustained severe physical injuries. Like the incident in Bulgaria, the other Ghanaians’ decision to mobilize around their fellow Ghanaian in distress was a racial citizenship moment. In response to the fracas, the Soviet government blamed the Ghanaians for the incident, prompting a response from the Ghanaian embassy. While categorically condemning “any acts of lawlessness perpetrated by any Ghanaian citizen in the USSR,” the Ghanaian embassy noted it was their duty to “ensure that Ghanaian citizens” were “not indiscriminately blamed for any breaches of the peace.” The embassy lambasted the Soviet decision to seek legal and financial restitution against the Ghanaians while neglecting the injured Ghanaians. The Ghanaian embassy warned the Soviets that if they “further pursued” damages, the Ghanaian students would “feel entitled” to them as well.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

While the Soviets sought legal and financial damages from the Ghanaian students, the Ghanaian embassy steadfastly stood behind its citizens. After meeting with its nationals, the Ghanaian embassy noted that the attack was part of ongoing skirmishes between Ghanaian trainees at the Kherson Marine Institute and Soviet citizens. Soviet citizens had explicitly targeted the Ghanaians. Some Kherson residents had ventured to the Ghanaians’ school to warn their principal “that they would molest” the Ghanaians. The Ghanaian embassy was very disturbed that Soviet authorities ignored those “warnings.” While the embassy regretted the brawl, it “hoped that the appropriate authorities would take … measures to ensure that Ghanaian trainees are not subjected to any provocation or wanton molestation.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ It was not the first time that Ghanaian officials had complained bitterly about Soviet officials ignoring and tacitly supporting attacks against Ghanaians. Over the previous few years, Ghanaian authorities were inundated with reports of violence against its citizens. On April 25, 1963, the Ghanaian embassy in Moscow – led by its ambassador J. B. Elliott – wrote a scathing letter to the Soviet Foreign Ministry that the Ghanaian embassy had received numerous complaints from its nationals about “unprovoked assaults … by Soviet citizens” while Soviet police and citizens stood idly by.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Due to the white empire’s inability or unwillingness to address anti-Black racism within their borders, the Ghanaian government took matters into its own hands.

The Ghanaian state created mechanisms and changed travel logs in distant lands to try and protect and monitor its students’ well-being. In 1961, the Ghana High Commission in the UK created the Ghana Technical Education Section in London to ensure its students’ well-being and safety in the UK and other European countries.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In the USSR, after receiving a barrage of complaints about ill-treatment toward its citizens, Ghanaian officials monitored and followed Ghanaian students.Footnote ¹¹¹ They reorientated their excursions to local Soviet industries and cultural institutions, etc., where Ghanaians lived and studied. These centers and initiatives were created and undertaken as part of a broader initiative to protect Ghanaians abroad. Ghanaians considered their embassy and ambassador, which had not existed only a few years prior, as a key outlet to tell their side of events, seek redress, and acquire protection from hardships, racism, and discrimination.Footnote ¹¹² The embassy’s initial charge to establish positive diplomatic and economic relations with the communist and capitalist powers had morphed. It now had a duty to protect its citizens’ rights in foreign white countries – even relocating economic and cultural sites of interest to where their citizens resided – to ensure that Ghanaians were not attacked wantonly or blamed for transgressions in foreign lands. These events also went a long way to undercutting Nkrumah’s poignant statement in the USSR in 1961 that “nowhere have I felt to myself and to Africans such friendly and sincere and unbiased attitude as in the USSR …. In the USA and England, I always felt slightly palpable, but noticeable of neglect and arrogance to Africans. Here, in the USSR, my companions and I feel as in our own family, among sincere friends.”Footnote ¹¹³

These violent anti-Black Ghanaian episodes occurred against the backdrop of the West and East tossing racism accusations against each other to weaken their foes’ claims of moral and political superiority. Western observers often watched gleefully at reports of Ghanaian and African students suffering in the USSR.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Nkrumah “resented” how the West “exploited” racist incidents against Ghanaians in non-Western countries but kept silent on the “sustained discrimination against Africans in America.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ This sentiment was echoed in the Ghanaian press. On December 21, 1963, the headline: “Western propaganda over student’s death exposed,” appeared in The Ghanaian Times. The article sought to downplay antiracist incidents against Ghanaians in the USSR, marking a stark departure from how the Ghanaian press had usually treated accusations of violence and discrimination against Black Ghanaians. It quoted the Ghanaian ambassador to the USSR, Elliott, questioning the claim that Asare-Addo was killed. Instead, the article appeared to support Soviet autopsy reports that Asare-Addo died because he drank too much, fell down, and never regained consciousness in the frigid Moscow weather.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Ironically, a generation earlier, in January 1934, the Black South African communist Albert Nzula died under mysterious circumstances in Moscow. While others claimed that the Soviets had killed Nzula, the Soviets insisted that Nzula had drunk too much alcohol and while walking home fell on the snow. The Soviets insisted that Nzula then contracted pneumonia and died shortly afterwards.Footnote ¹¹⁷ While the Africans did not have access to Nzula’s dead body, the Ghanaian ambassador Elliott admitted seeing Asare-Addo’s lifeless body and not “notic[ing] any traces of bruises.” Instead, Elliott framed the international controversy surrounding Asare-Addo’s death as an attempted attack on the Ghana–Soviet and “Africa-Soviet friendship.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ The Ghanaian Times’ editorial staff sought a balancing act. While cautioning against rushed conclusions about Asare-Addo’s death, they reminded the Ghanaian government of its “responsibility to protect its citizens both at home and abroad.” The editorial staff tried to reassure the Ghanaian reading public that the Ghanaian state had “never shirked” away from protecting its citizens and that it would “never … do so.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Yet, Ghanaians’ sufferings in non-Black empires and spaces made the antiracist slogans – and support for the plight of Africans – emanating from the communist and capitalist worlds appear hollow. Racism cut across ideological divides. “Racial disrimination,” argued a writer in the Evening News on February 26, 1963, “whether in America, South Africa, or Southern Rhodesia, is a world menace and must, just like the Atomic Bomb, be dismantled for the peace and security of Africa and the world. Africa demands stringent action from America and Britain to uproot this evil. We have had enough of words!”Footnote ¹²⁰ If Eastern and Central European socialisms produced and reproduced such public displays of anti-Blackness like the white capitalists of the United States, Rhodesia, and South Africa, then Blacks would, perhaps, be mistaken to conclude that the problem was not one of economic ideology but white supremacy masquerading in socialist and capitalist tenets. While anti-Black racist moments in the white socialist world were spurring a global Ghanaian nationalist consciousness via a Black racial paradigm and through racial citizenship moments, these moments were also undermining transnational socialist solidarity amongst members of the new socialist state. The next section turns to racial citizenship moments in Ghana.

Domestic Racial Citizenship Moments

The colonial era witnessed the expansion and monopolization of European firms and capital on the West African coast. Historian Basil Davidson noted that racism was harshest in the areas where “white settlers … saw themselves as a ‘local master race.’” In Colonial Ghana, many white settlers viewed themselves as such.Footnote ¹²¹ Anthropologist Jemima Pierre notes that Europeans “imposed through a system of inequality based on racial difference that grated differential access to goods, services, property, opportunity, and even identity” in Colonial Ghana.Footnote ¹²² By 1960, approximately 12,000 Europeans resided in Ghana,Footnote ¹²³ many in the coastal areas.Footnote ¹²⁴ Despite the arrival of the ‘new political kingdom,’ racism’s non-discreet and discreet forms – born out of the culmination of slavery, scientific racism, imperialism, and colonialism – were still keenly felt among Ghanaian workers and businesses.

Six months into independence, Ghanaian regulations and codes still had segregationist provisions. During the presidential cabinet meeting, the minister Responsible for Commerce and Industry alerted his colleagues to one such provision in the Mining Rights Regulation Ordinance, which dealt with the changing and drying of clothes for underground workers:

The minister noted that the law was “obviously undesirable” and suggested the word “persons” replace the term “white miners.” While the Chamber of Mines and the Mines Employees’ Union agreed, the Chamber of Mines – comprised of the mining companies’ European bosses – requested that the new regulation come into effect “18 months after the date of promulgation” in order for them to make the “necessary constructional alterations, etc.” The Chamber of Mines’ proposal seemed to face little resistance within Nkrumah’s government. The minister Responsible for Commerce and Industry noted that “12 months would be sufficient … with an extension of up to a further six months where the Chief Inspector of Mines is satisfied.”Footnote ¹²⁵ In effect, the Chamber of Mines’ eighteen-month probationary period request became the de facto policy, suggesting that other government officials were ambivalent on immediately ending “Jim-Crowism” in Ghana.Footnote ¹²⁶ The use of segregated facilities was not the only space where Black and white workers were treated differently.

While illegal mining, galamsey, in contemporary Ghana has been racialized with the Asian face of Aisha Huang, a historical dive shows that white workers have engaged in widespread theft of Ghanaian minerals, and their European supervisors either collaborated with or shielded their compatriots from legal consequences.Footnote ¹²⁷ On July 30, 1962, the Ghanaian state uncovered an ongoing scheme by some Europeans to rob the new state of its riches. They had discovered that European miners had installed “an ingenious device” at the Amalgamated Banket Areas Limited Mill pipelines in Tarkwa, Southern Ghana, in the early 1960s. When the mills were “closed” on the weekends, European miners and the corporation’s European deputy secretary, Thomas Ennison, opened the sand vents and took gold from the blankets. “Some of the pipes concerned [we]re large and heavy,” requiring “six men to lift.” Thus, at least three shifts of Europeans were involved in this act of robbery. In another case, a European foreman at Bibiani Limited had stolen large sums of gold. Before the Ghanaian state could launch an investigation into the crime, the foreman’s European manager at Bibiani Limited shielded the European by sending him back to Europe on May 2, 1962. Months later, the minister of Industries complained to the Ghanaian presidential cabinet that European managers deliberately helped their compatriots suspected of theft flee and only notified the Ghanaian police about said incidents after sending the accused back to Europe, if they reported them at all, leaving the police and government paralyzed in dealing with the situation.Footnote ¹²⁸ The “alarming rate of gold theft” and financial losses prompted the state to “take over the gold mines”Footnote ¹²⁹ to arrest the flight of funds and “diverted [them back] into state coffers.”Footnote ¹³⁰ This was not the only time a European had designed plans to defraud the Ghanaian people and state.

In 1963, Ghana’s security apparatus uncovered a plot by a British man, Sidney Charles Shalders, alongside two others in the UK, to print fake Ghanaian currency notes and circulate them within Ghana. The Ghana police caught the conspirators and charged them with “two conspirac[ies] to forge Ghana currency notes.”Footnote ¹³¹ The minister of Industries called for the “tightening of the security measures at the mines” to ensure that white Europeans were not robbing the newly independent Black state and that criminality was not Africanized.Footnote ¹³² In response, in 1965, the Ghanaian state passed the Minerals Control of Smuggling (Amendment) Act, which stipulated “that any person who unlawfully engaged in the export of gold, diamonds or any other precious metal or stone, or any other commodity would be convicted and sentenced to a prison term of a period not less than twenty-five years.”Footnote ¹³³

Despite widespread evidence of Europeans stealing the new nation’s wealth, European supervisors subjected Blacks and not Europeans “to routine search[es].”Footnote ¹³⁴ Through evasive and routine searches on the bodies of Black miners in 19th-century Kimberley, South Africa, historian William H. Worger argued that European mine owners created the category of African criminality.Footnote ¹³⁵ This practice continued in the Black socialist de-colony, opening spaces for Europeans to assault, insult, and harass African workers. These led to Ghanaian mobilizations against such incidents, like the opening vignette which opened this chapter, making them racial citizenship moments.

During the early years of independence, Europeans continued to attack Africans, leading to African mobilizations against such incidents. In December 1957, a European supervisor – whom the African workers described as a “bully” – working for Gliksten (West Africa) Limited Company – assaulted an African tree-feller clerk in Dwenase, Sefwi-Wiawso.Footnote ¹³⁶ In early March 1958, Wilson, the United African Company’s (UAC’s) motor manager, assaulted an African fitter mechanic.Footnote ¹³⁷ Six months later, another violent racial incident arose at Gliksten. R. A. Trickett, a European saw doctor, attacked two African night guards.Footnote ¹³⁸ Like their counterparts in Eastern Europe, African workers did not take these incidents lightly. They aggressively called for the offending parties’ dismissals. Gliksten’s Employees Union’s secretary informed the district labor officer that they had sent two letters, on December 8 and 9, 1957, to Gliksten to notify them that their approximately 250 members would strike unless the European supervisor was fired.Footnote ¹³⁹ In Wilson’s case, 126 UAC motor department employees in Takoradi went on strike for two hours on March 10, 1958, demanding his sacking.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Similarly, in the Trickett affair, between 1,000 to 1,700 railroad workers in October 1958 stopped working in protest.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Despite the workers’ multilayered efforts to bring about a zero-tolerance policy and culture against racial violence, the European managers’ responses to those incidents were often lenient and evasive, just as their response to Europeans stealing gold had been. Gliksten hesitated to release the European supervisor from his position because he “was a good worker and an expert on a special crane, one of which had recently been introduced into the establishment to increase production.”Footnote ¹⁴² Similarly, Gliksten refused to discharge Trickett because it would take six to twelve months to replace “a person of Mr. Trickett’s abilities.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Gliksten deemed an “apology” and “reprimand” sufficient to address the European supervisor’s actions. For his trouble, Trickett received “a very severe public reprimand.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ However, the UAC transferred Wilson within three days.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The secretary to the regional commissioner wrote to Gliksten that they were only “surprised” and “displeased” that Trickett “so attempted to take the Laws of Ghana into his own hands and trusts that you (Gliksten management) will see to it that there is no recurrence of such warranted and disgraceful behavior.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The district labor officer echoed the regional commissioner’s report. He urged all company employees, “whether white or Black,” to report all disciplinary cases to the company’s general manager, as though that body would adequately deal with the matter.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ These statements, omissions, and gestures were not lost on the workers, union, and management. They gave the impression that European management could assault Black workers with impunity if profits were being garnered. Profits appeared to supersede racial justice in the new state. If prior actions indicated future ones, the government’s belief that the company would effectively deal with racial violence was severely misplaced.

Yet, European firms and the Ghanaian legal system could react where public outcry over anti-Black racism emerged. On July 17, 1963, a European, Terry Foster, published an advertisement in The Daily Graphic seeking only European renters. The public swiftly condemned the advertisement as racist. Terry’s employers, Messrs. Widnell and Trollope, quickly apologized to the Ghanaian public over the incident, “sack[ed]” Foster, and “repatriated” him. Foster’s company wrote: “We feel the whole situation is so unfortunate that we have decided he (Foster) should be repatriated immediately … the discriminatory tone of the advertisement was, in our opinion, particularly painful and inexcusable.” In their lamentation, the firm hoped that the regrettable incident would not mar their sixteen-year presence in Ghana and their extremely close association “with Ghana’s development and progress.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Again, the firm shielded their compatriot from any legal consequences in Ghana by returning him to Europe. On July 13, two Europeans invited a Black Ghanaian artist, Quaye, to drinks at the elegant Ambassador Hotel in Accra. A European engineer, Desmond Lilly Senior, “objected to Mr. Quaye’s presence at the table and said, ‘I am not going to drink with a nigger like you.’” Senior then left the table immediately. Within a week, charges were brought against Senior. An Accra magistrate, Modupe Wassiamal,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ recommended Senior’s “deportation.” Senior’s actions were “not only an insult to Ghana but the whole of Africa,” the magistrate declared. The Evening News hailed the decision and called “for more action such as this in order to put sense into the heads of arrogant whitemen like this English bloke.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ In a separate editorial, the editors of the Evening News wrote: “We accept no nonsense from ill-bred expatriates,” the Evening News editors declared:

Anti-Black racism galvanized Ghanaian national identity and solidarity among a new state and citizens. These were racial citizenship moments. They forced Ghana’s judiciary to adjudicate anti-Black racism with one eye toward African solidarity and another toward the rights of its citizens. However, the magistrate’s deportation order and the firm’s decision to fire and “repatriate him [Senior] immediately” on the “first available plane” seemed to be an exception rather than the norm.

Black Ghanaians endured workplace retaliation for exposing racism. On September 16, 1963, Tingah Moshie, a night watchman at Agir-Ghana Company Limited, a private company, claimed that his dismissal for sleeping on the job was categorically “false, malicious and untrue.” Moshie insisted, however, that he was suffering retribution because he provided evidence in another case pending before the district commissioner and the Takoradi police department that Roman, his boss, had called another watchman, Allasan Moshie, a “Blackman Monkey.”Footnote ¹⁵² Similarly, on September 18, a Black Ghanaian carpenter filed a complaint with the district commissioner against a European named Witney for both creating an inhospitable work climate and dismissing him because he told them to stop insulting the Ghanaian government through racial innuendo. Witney colluded with other Whites, Tingah alleged, especially with white women, to “tell [him] certain nasty words just to infuriate me to anger.” “I feel,” Tingah concluded, “that I have been dismissed out of sheer prejudice and malice.”Footnote ¹⁵³

Rumors that Europeans were dismissing Black Ghanaians to accommodate European workers or that government contracts were being given to European firms laid bare the limits of Black freedom. They pushed Ghanaians to frame economic justice and rights via a racialized conception of citizenship. After the dismissal of approximately twenty-seven workers in December 1957 at Tarkwa mines, the regional labor officer wrote to both the commissioner of Labor and minister of Labor and Co-Operative Division that there was “a great suspicion that [the] retrenchment of African employees has been planned to enable more Europeans to be employed on the mine as already a number of them (Europeans) have been engaged at various sites during this year.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Whether real or imagined, Black workers and Ghanaians were conscious of the reality of white supremacy and how their Blackness put them in a vulnerable economic position. As a result of the rumors, Black Ghanaians went on strike together. These racial citizenship moments helped frame ideas of national citizenship and forge cross-ethnic alliances among Black Ghanaians.

Natural and public spaces also became sites of racial citizenship moments. One day in April 1963, some Black Ghanaians went to Miamia beach, near Nkroful, Nkrumah’s birthplace, after a road leading to the beach was constructed. There, two Europeans chased them away, insisting it was now their private property.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ On April 29, 1963, a medical officer, H. P. Schwendler, inquired to the secretary of the Western regional commissioner on the “legal grounds” that “expatriates” could rent out the public beach.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The following month, J. K. Amiah, the district commissioner, and his friends returned to the beach and saw a “Private No Admittance” signboard “erected.” A European named Rose, an employee of Technoa Company in Takoradi, approached them and told them they could not enter the beach or “take bathe there.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Amiah dismissed Rose, reminding him that he was not “Vasco da Gama,” the 15th-century Portuguese sailor whom Eurocentric scholarship claimed discovered the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ In a stinging letter to the Ghanaian regional commissioner, Amiah claimed that Rose waited for the Ghanaian government to spend “thousands of Pounds to construct the Miamia road before … prevent(ing) … indigenous ones from using it.” Amiah “strongly object[ed] Rose’s plans” and hoped that the government would undertake the necessary actions to stop them.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Amiah framed his complaint within the nexus of race and citizenship and what benefits and privileges white Europeans could ascertain from state funds. Schwendler and Amiah attacked the concept of European private property on public, Black land. Undergirding Schwendler and Amiah’s letters was the belief that it was the government’s duty and prerogative to ensure that Europeans did not mistreat Black Ghanaians in Ghana or bar them from public spaces. Others wrote to the Ghanaian government not to express concern about Europeans’ access to public lands but to government financial contracts.

In 1962, S. K. Oman, OSCO Shipping Agencies Limited’s executive director, wrote three letters about the emptiness of Ghana’s independence and the rhetoric of the African personality if business contracts were being given to European firms. Oman attacked the heart of Nkrumah’s African personality project and his Independence Day speech that Ghana’s independence would show the world that Black people could manage their affairs. Oman wrote to the Ministry of Construction and Communications minister that “giving these jobs back to expatriates make [sic] our independence meaningless, and defeats the purpose of our attempt to project the African personality.” Oman complained that the Master Porterage and Stevedoring schemes should be under “Ghanaian control so that the disbursements to be presented to the shipowners which amounts to about £130,000, may remain in the country instead of the shipowners collecting the amount in the form of freight.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Oman wondered why local Europeans operated master porterage schemes in Europe, yet, in Ghana, Europeans, who had “already taken a lot from this country,” should acquire these contracts?Footnote ¹⁶¹ Oman’s message struck a delicate chord. The regional labor officer, E. K. Ando-Brew, was “chary about commenting” on Oman’s letters and dismissed them. Ando-Brew concluded, “Surely the Ports Authority is not an expatriate concern and as I gather that some local shipping firms may be tipped as sub-contractors to the Authority I see no reason why the OSCO Shipping Agencies should not approach the General Manager of the Railway and Harbors Authority on the matter.”Footnote ¹⁶² In Oman’s letter, a white person, an European, could not be a Ghanaian. Thus, who could be Ghanaian had been racialized. While the regional labor officer deferred on Oman’s concerns, the Ghanaian Immigration Committee took similar concerns more seriously and applied racial categories to define who was Ghanaian and consequently permitted to do business in Ghana. The case of Mrs. Frange A. Sfeir, “a Lebanese national and owner of” Mrs. F.A. Sfeir business, is instructive.Footnote ¹⁶³

By 1962, Ghana required “foreigners” to apply or register to establish a business or be listed as “a proprietor” or “owner.” Frange A. Sfeir established her business in 1937 in Colonial Ghana. Shortly after independence, the principal immigration officer informed her that she needed to apply for “an immigrant quota” to cover her three sons as business partners and not “resident permits.” Her three sons – Tanus Antony Sfeir, Elias Tanus Antony Sfeir, and George Antony Sfeir – had different relationships with Ghana. Tanus Sfeir arrived in Colonial Ghana in 1946 and had been a “resident ever since.” Elias Sfeir arrived in 1950 and never left. George Sfeir was born in Colonial Ghana, studied abroad, and returned in 1954. The Immigration Committee labeled and “treated” George Sfeir as a British subject and not a Ghanaian citizen, although “he was born in Ghana.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ State officials performed intellectual and bureaucratic gymnastics to rationalize why someone born and raised in the landmass known as Ghana was not a Ghanaian citizen but a British subject, underscoring the racialization of who could or could not be a Ghanaian.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

The racialization of citizenship was mirrored in other African nations. In the 1960s, Tanzania provided citizenship and “permanent residency to Black Jamaican Rastafarians.” Historian Monique A. Bedasse argues that Tanzanian officials’ “use[d] … race as a criterion for citizenship.” These moments underscored how “race – as both a sociopolitical construct and somatic reference – remained salient throughout … decolonization.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ While the Sfeirs had economic and social ties to Ghana, including as a birth site, they were not granted automatic citizenship status. Instead, their non-Blackness marked them as foreigners and subject to the power and constraints of the state immigration bureaucracy. The last example of this chapter is revealing for showing how some Black Ghanaians made calls to whiteness and not their Blackness to receive rights vis-à-vis the state.

On January 14, 1959, a woman named Yaa Nutwey from Asankragua, Western Region, wrote to A. B. Ampaw, the Western Region’s district government agent, about a “painful matter” and trusted that he would “not refuse” to assist her. She had married a white Englishman and bore two children. Soon thereafter, the man abandoned them for England, leaving a small amount for the children’s education, which was now exhausted. Both her children were in elementary school and without funds to proceed.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Nutwey lacked familial support. Her father had died, and her mother was “too old” to support them. “As their father is [a] whiteman,” Nutwey wrote, “I do not like to allow them to grow with out (sic) having better education (sic).” Nutwey’s request for government support was ordinary. However, what is striking is the evocation of her children’s whiteness – not their or her Blackness – to access government support. Nutwey did not think that their Blackness or the pursuit of education and financial assistance in and of themselves would suffice to receive assistance. Instead, she maintained that they had to get an education precisely because their father was white. Thus, like the story of Oman, whiteness appeared to be an asset – not a liability – in the newly independent Black state. Nutwey – a sophisticated character – perhaps understood the new state’s racial dynamics more astutely than the other complainants. Indeed, the government agent who received her pleas forwarded her letter to the senior welfare officer in Sekondi, who responded within two days that “appropriate action” would take place “in due course.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸

As historian Carina Ray has argued, Nutwey’s story fit into a larger moral panic and anxieties among Black men in colonial and postcolonial Ghana about white European men getting romantically involved with Black women and abandoning their children in West Africa. In response to Black Peril ideas in Europe, in 1919, Atu, a writer in the Gold Coast Leader, angrily wrote that “white men freely consort with coloured women … and … abandoned offspring to the precarious protection of needy native families.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Such concerns had not abated in the socialist de-colony. In 1963, a Ghanaian civil servant complained to Nkrumah about the “intolerable” way European men “treat[ed]” Ghanaian women. The author urged the Ghanaian government to take “‘drastic measures to stop’” European men from having babies with Ghanaian women “throughout the country” and leaving them destitute.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Stories like Nutwey certainly gave credence to these fears.

Conclusion

On Ghana’s Independence Day, what it meant to be a Ghanaian did not exist, and the state’s duty to its citizens had to be fleshed out. This chapter suggests that accounts of nationalism, particularly in the postcolonial context, must also consider racism and antiracism as unifying political state-building projects and discourses from the bottom up and not necessarily from the top down. Benedict Anderson argued famously that the advent of print capitalism was crucial to creating nationalist cohesion and identities. Anthropologist Engseng Ho noted that “print journalism created a common public sphere.”Footnote ¹⁷¹ It was through letters that accounts of anti-Black racism and ill-treatment toward Ghanaians were being circulated from and between Ghana, the USSR, the United States, Bulgaria, and Romania, amongst other sites, creating a global Black Ghanaian national consciousness. Ghanaians like Kotey in Bulgaria and the Ghana Students’ Association in the United States wrote about and shared the experiences of their compatriots abroad. In writing, these people were creating a community amongst readers and people whom they did not know or would probably never meet. Similarly, writers of Ghana’s major newspapers published scathing critiques of anti-Black racist incidents in Ghana and abroad. They urged the new Black socialist government to respond forcefully to those accusations. For these figures, anti-Black Ghanaian racism could not, or at least, should not, happen without consequences for the perpetrators.

Global and domestic acts of racism against Ghanaians played a role in forging a global Ghanaian consciousness. These were racial citizenship moments. Ghanaians also interpreted such incidents in relation to the experiences of other Ghanaians and Blacks in other far-flung places. Racial incidents transpired against Ghanaians irrespective of their socioeconomic, educational, or political status. Rather than quietly absorbing these moments of prejudice at home or abroad, Ghanaians employed protest letters and their fists and feet to disclose and confront prejudice in their workplaces, schools, and sites of leisure–provoking intense mobilization and scrutiny. Like the cases in Sofia, Bulgaria, and Kherson, Soviet Union, such mobilizations were dangerous and potentially fatal. Yet, in each episode, Ghanaians felt compelled to protest and protect their Black brethren in foreign lands.

Domestically and internationally, Ghanaians responded to these moments in multiple ways – reaching out to foreign governments and their own, to their local representatives, writing in newspapers, establishing student organizations like the National Union of Ghana Students in 1962 to protect Ghanaian students abroad, going to court, or with violence. For Ghanaian nationals abroad and domestically, reading the newspaper, listening to radio reports, or hearing from their peers and family members that “African” or “Black” students were being attacked, the victim’s name was a marker of their Ghanaian origins and connectivity.

Acts against Ghanaians in the communist and capitalist worlds and Ghana redefined the relationship between the Ghanaian embassy, the state, and its citizens. Black Africans forced their government to grapple with race in their decolonization and Cold War agendas. The Ghanaian state was forced to protect its citizens in racialized terms at the precise historical moment its leader, Kwame Nkrumah, pushed for a nonracialized Pan-African Union, a United States of Africa. These new postcolonial Black African states could not so easily disentangle racial decolonization and economic socialist development. Indeed, if an “independent” Black government could not protect its citizens from anti-Black racism, then what was its purpose?

Part II of the book explores the political-economic project and socialist theorization that unfolded in Nkrumah’s Ghana. Chapter 4, in particular, re-historicizes Black Marxists links to the economic philosophy of the Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin and USSR, their historicization of the USSR, and reconceptualizes the nature of the Ghanaian economy under Nkrumah’s leadership to argue that the socialist de-colony deliberately functioned both as a a capitalist and socialist state.