Introduction

As Ghanaians danced into political independence on March 6, 1957, under the backdrop of Ghanaian highlife musician E. T. Mensah’s sweet “Ghana Freedom” rendition, the Soviet Union became increasingly anxious about its place in the new nation’s foreign policy and the shifting global geopolitical landscape. At Kwame Nkrumah’s behest, Ivan Benediktov, the minister of Soviet State Farms and Agriculture, and Yakov Alexandrovich Malik, the Soviet ambassador to England at the time, participated in Ghana’s Independence Day celebrations.Footnote ¹ Although the Soviet ambassador enjoyed the highlife music and festivities, he was upset by his exclusion from the “high table” at the dashing Savoy hotel, where other esteemed dignitaries sat. The Soviets felt that Nkrumah had reneged on an earlier promise to enact favorable ties between the two states. A month prior to the festivities, in February, Benediktov and Nkrumah, then Ghana’s impending prime minister, met and agreed to create an “advantageous relationship” by establishing “diplomatic missions,” and working together internationally to combat Western geopolitical hegemony.Footnote ²

Historians and contemporaneous British, Russian, and American officials paint a picture of American and British pressure stalling open diplomatic relations between the Ghanaians and Soviets from 1957 to 1959.Footnote ³ Some have even suggested that “Nkrumah could not have visited Russia in 1959 without seriously weakening his domestic position.”Footnote ⁴ Despite E. T. Mensah’s Independence Day song lyrics, “Ghana, we now have freedom,”Footnote ⁵ and Nkrumah’s proclamations that Ghana was “free forever,” the Soviets convinced themselves that the British continued to exert undue power over the new state’s foreign policy decisions and had pressured Nkrumah to renege on their “gentleman’s agreement.”Footnote ⁶

White imperial powers’ perception of Ghana as a satellite state, in the thralls of either the Soviets or the West, their “competitors,” would come to dominate their perceptions and attitudes, and their writings of the newly independent Black state. These writings and ideas were circulated internally within white imperial government corridors and in the public domain by newspapers such as the New York Times, which wielded tremendous influence among the Western reading public and intelligentsia. These fabulations assumed that Black African leaders and diplomats lacked the sophistication or astuteness to make informed, well-calculated foreign policy decisions, but, rather were at the mercy of their savier and, sophisticated white partners (or masters). However, these deceptive narratives overlook African agency and the role of race in international relations. Anthropologist Jemima Pierre maintained that failing to think of the postcolonial African state without contextualizing it within “updated … racial legacies of European hegemony and white supremacy” is to fundamentally misunderstand the postcolonial African state.Footnote ⁷ In returning to the archival record and a re-reading of some “well-known” episodes through an anti–white-supremacist lens, this chapter argues that, alongside concrete considerations like a lack of finances and diplomatic personnel, we cannot fully comprehend a Black African state’s foreign policy maneuvers and diplomatic objectives without taking seriously their fears of white supremacy and how the Eastern and Western white empires and states (re-)produced and projected their own visions and versions of white supremacy and modes of anti-Blackness onto the international arena.

This feeds into another argument, that early liberationist and radical Black and African leaders and states were not “junior players” or “puppets” during geopolitical deliberations, despite Western and Soviet officials’ claims to the contrary.Footnote ⁸ Following other pioneering works, this chapter demonstrates that state leaders in Ghana had agency and dictated the pace and contours of their relationship with the USSR and other white imperial states.Footnote ⁹ However, like all states without nuclear bombs or economic conditions fueled by slavery and colonialism, their agency was, of course, constrained by their domestic economic and military situations. Yet, inserting the framework of white supremacy into Cold War and decolonization histories permits us to reconstruct this period within the ontologies of our Black actors who understood that white supremacy had no “Cold War” camps when it came to the issue of the provinciality of Black freedom.

Communist Boogeymen and the Fragility of African Independence

The inception of the Soviet state in 1917 through the Bolshevik Revolution amidst European colonial rule in Africa meant that the question of race and racism would cast a large shadow over both Ghana and the Soviet Union and their relationship to Western colonialism. In the 1920s, the Soviet government was the only significant white power calling for the elimination of colonialism, racism, and sexism, and the only one to advocate for the right of Blacks to self-determination – even though they had their own internally subjugated populations.Footnote ¹⁰ This contrasted vividly with the terrorist acts systematically meted out toward Blacks in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. These included lynchings, race riots, racism, forced labor,Footnote ¹¹ property destruction, exclusion from capital,Footnote ¹² and the denial of civil liberties.

The anti-imperialist, anticolonial, anti-capitalist, and occasionally antisexist slogans emanating from the USSR resonated with Blacks, colonized, and marginalized peoples across the world.Footnote ¹³ Such was the allure of the USSR that some Africans and oppressed peoples across the globe traveled to the “Red Mecca,” as historian Woodford McClellan famously coined, in the 1920s and to a lesser extent, in the 1930s, to think about this new white state and its potential allyship against white colonial rule.Footnote ¹⁴ “For revolutionaries from the colonized world and beyond, the Soviet Union,” as historian Ali Raza noted, “stood as a symbol of world revolution, as the patron in chief of national liberation struggles, and a site where a new age, a new future, a new world, were being inaugurated.”Footnote ¹⁵ However, this vision of the Soviet Union that Raza eloquently described came crashing down in the 1930s for many Blacks.

Several incidents forced many Blacks to reconsider the Soviet Union’s claims of solidarity. After the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin’s death on January 21, 1924, the Bolshevik Communist Party’s general secretary Josef Stalin consolidated power by marginalizing and killing his rivals.Footnote ¹⁶ Stalin’s rise to and solidification of power also signaled a shift in Soviet foreign policy toward Africa and the colonized world.Footnote ¹⁷ Not only did Stalin repudiate global interventionism and revolution against Western colonialism and imperialism, in 1935, the Soviets sold fuel to Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italian regime that was invading Ethiopia – one of the only non-colonized African countries.Footnote ¹⁸ In effect, Stalin’s USSR was fueling the fascist empire. Furthermore, on February 23, 1934, the Soviet Communist Party released a statement noting that George Padmore (born Malcolm Nurse), a leading Black figure within the Communist Party, was expelled for prolonged contacts with “bourgeoisie elements.” The Soviets questioned Padmore’s attitude toward the national question, his preference for racial unity over class unity, and a failure to hand over committee affairs upon his departure.Footnote ¹⁹ Within the expulsion document, the seeds of Padmore’s concerns over Soviet anti-Blackness and white supremacist geopolitical constructions were germinating and becoming visible.

Fortunately, Padmore escaped Stalin’s purges. Albert Nzula, the first Black person to hold the position of general secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) in 1928, and Lovett Fort-Whiteman, an African American Communist in the Soviet Union, were less fortunate. Nzula died in mysterious circumstances on January 7, 1934.Footnote ²⁰ On January 13, 1939, in Magadan, Siberia, Fort-Whiteman died at the Sevvostlag Prison Labor Camp.Footnote ²¹ These incidents coincided with revelations of Stalin’s agricultural policies in Soviet Ukraine and Kazakhstan had left millions dead in the early 1930s.Footnote ²² For some Asian communists, like M. N. Roy, “the Soviet turn toward national chauvinism” represented “a resurgence of Russian Pan-Slavism” and were “deeply critical of” it.Footnote ²³ These episodes damaged Stalin’s and the USSR’s reputation in the minds of the early Ghanaian leaders and tied the Soviet leader to broader imperial processes. Indeed, these were important moments of reflection in considering the limitations of Soviet anti-racist and anti-imperialist discourses.

From the 1930s, leading figures of Colonial Ghana’s anticolonial movement saw no distinctions between white empires for colonized Africans. While Padmore worked in the USSR, the Soviets had asked him to distinguish between “democratic imperialists” and “fascist imperialists.” Padmore balked at the suggestion.Footnote ²⁴ Historian Susan Dabney Pennybacker noted that Padmore “lump[ed] the Soviet Union together with the Western powers.”Footnote ²⁵ In 1935, Padmore argued that the Soviet leaders were part of “the Versailles camp,” and it was “very important for Negroes to understand this.…”Footnote ²⁶ The Soviets were indistinguishable from the Western imperial powers. On July 1, 1942, as World War II raged, from his Philadelphia abode, Nkrumah wrote to the New York-based Gold Coaster, Jones-Quartey, criticizing his attempts to distinguish between the British and Germans. For Nkrumah, “the true renascent African” had “no choice … between ruthless Nazi barbarism and the cold, selfish, heartless exploitation and domination to which the British have subjected our people for so many years … !” Nkrumah declared that it was the Africans’ mandate to ensure that those seeking “to exploit and maintain empire, whether they be British, German, or anything else, will find a living hell in Africa.”Footnote ²⁷ In fact, Nkrumah’s dissertation committee failed his dissertation, “Mind and Thought in Primitive Society: A Study in Ethno-Philosophy,”Footnote ²⁸ “on three separate occasions because it was nothing more nor less than a vicious indictment of Imperialism and could not qualify as a philosophical thesis.”Footnote ²⁹ At a speech in London in late 1942, the Marxist and Sovietophile Gold Coaster Bankole Awooner-Renner stated: “West Africa can no longer stand any form of selfish exploitation, be it British, German, French, Italian, American.”Footnote ³⁰

After World War II, the ingredients of rampant inflation, slumping wages, food and goods shortages, and workers’ strikes were stirring a soup of widespread discontent in Colonial Ghana. In January 1947, J. B. Danquah – a formidable Ghanaian lawyer and intellectual of the 20th century, who would perish in prison in 1965 under Nkrumah’s rule – founded the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC). The UGCC sought to channel and cultivate this restlessness to garner political and economic concessions from the British and to position themselves as the heirs to any post-British political order.Footnote ³¹ Danquah and Kojo Botsio, a figure who would occupy several prominent cabinet portfolios within Nkrumah’s socialist government, invited Nkrumah to return to Colonial Ghana and become the party secretary.Footnote ³² Despite his initial hesitations, Nkrumah accepted their offer and returned in 1947 after twelve years in the UK and US. In early 1948, Nii Kwabena Bonne, a Ga sub-chief, organized an Anti-Inflation Campaign to boycott the prices of British and Syrian imported goods sold within the colony.Footnote ³³ Nkrumah’s return coincided with these mass mobilizations against racial and economic marginalization and discrimination.

Buoyed by these political developments and aggrieved by unpaid pensions, unemployment, and financial desperation, Colonial Ghanaian World War veterans rallied in Accra on February 28, 1948, and marched to Christiansborg Castle, the seat of British power in the colony. Colin Imray, the European police superintendent, “grabbed a rifle from one of his men” and unleashed bullets, murdering three World War II veterans.Footnote ³⁴ The martyrdom of Sergeant Cornelius Francis Adjetey, Corporal Patrick Attipoe, and Private Odartey Lamptey further fanned discontent and anger among the populace. Wide-scale riots and looting erupted.Footnote ³⁵

Danquah recalled:

Where some saw carnage, others saw an opportunity to dismantle the empire’s carceral system, if only piecemeal, and forced their way into Ussher Fort prison and released inmates. At the end of the disturbances, 29 people had died, more than 200 were injured, and “two million worth of property had been destroyed.”Footnote ³⁷ The British scavenged the scene for scapegoats.

Often, within a racialized framework to suggest that African leaders were being puppeteered, the British imperial apparatus employed Soviet and communist linkages and affiliations to suffocate or discredit independence movements and anti-British sentiments. This dual threat also muddled Ghana’s future leaders’ interaction with the Soviets.Footnote ³⁸ The British quickly portrayed the UGCC leaders as communist stooges, participating in a Marxist conspiracy, and arrested them.Footnote ³⁹ The British searched Nkrumah’s belongings and found a document called the Circle and Nkrumah’s “Communist Party card.” The Watson Commission, which was set up to study the turmoil in the colony, declared that the Circle was “all too familiar to those who have studied the technique of countries which have fallen victims of Communist enslavement.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The communist escape hatchet for Britain’s disastrous colonial policies had been found. These tactics were not limited to Africa. Historian Heather Streets-Salter has demonstrated how Western European colonial powers in Southeast Asia during the interwar period, imbued with similar racist ideas, were “convinced that the intellectual, theoretical, and organizational driving force behind communism [to push for independence] in the ‘Orient’ only could come from the Russian center.”Footnote ⁴¹ Nkrumah’s UGCC colleagues, cut from the cloth of British liberal traditions, were deeply unsettled by the communist-linked charges and blamed Nkrumah for their travails. A divorce between the parties loomed.

On June 12, 1949, in the coastal town of Saltpond, Nkrumah and the pro-Soviet Bankole Awooner finalized their divorce from the UGCC. With the slogan, “Independence Now,” Nkrumah and Awooner formed their own political party, the Convention People’s Party (CPP).Footnote ⁴² This contrasted with the UGCC’s slogan: “Independence in the shortest possible time.” While the differences between the two slogans have consumed the historiography of Ghana’s colonial independence movements, scholars Jon Olav Hove and Kofi Baku have argued that other political parties, although electorally irrelevant, called for a much slower push toward independence.Footnote ⁴³ On January 11, 1950, the CPP leaders started a Positive Action campaign, urging further strikes against the “railways, electricity services, communications and other key services.”Footnote ⁴⁴ It was a direct assault on British colonialism. Charles Arden-Clarke, the governor of Colonial Ghana, immediately sought to quell the unrest. The governor resuscitated the communist boogey trick and framed the Positive Action Campaign as the “tactics of the communists.”Footnote ⁴⁵ George Padmore observed astutely: “The word ‘Communist’ is just a term of abuse, used loosely by Europeans and reactionary Black politicians to smear militant nationalists whose views they dislike.” Padmore continued, “There is hardly a colonial leader worth his salt who at some time or another has not been branded a ‘dangerous Communist agitator.’”Footnote ⁴⁶ On January 21, 1950, the British arrested many of the strikers. The following day, Nkrumah was charged “with sedition and incitement to violence” and joined the other protestors in prison.Footnote ⁴⁷ Nkrumah’s second stint in prison lasted thirteen months, bringing his overall tally to fourteen months.Footnote ⁴⁸ Arden-Clarke’s efforts backfired spectacularly.

Nkrumah’s popularity grew and his resolve hardened while in prison. On July 8, 1950, Eyo Ita – a Nigerian academic and the principal and founder of the West African People’s Institute from Calabar, Nigeria – thanked Nkrumah for igniting “the external light of human struggle, for human freedom” in “Ghanaland.” Furthermore, Ita noted that “when I heard of your [Nkrumah’s] imprisonment the first thought that came to my mind was that a new revolution had started in Ghanaland that would take in the whole of West and the result of which would be the liberation of the peoples of West Africa. It was the beginning of a new era in West Africa.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Similarly, Maud Rogerson, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and on its Africa Committee, believed that Nkrumah’s imprisonment had further stirred feelings of independence among the peoples of West Africa. Rogerson informed attendees at an April 1950 meeting that “the national feeling was very strong.”Footnote ⁵⁰ K. A. B. Jones-Quartey wrote to Padmore prophetically on November 27, 1950, that it would be the “beginning of the end of foreign rule” if Nkrumah remained in prison during the 1951 elections.Footnote ⁵¹ He was not wrong.

Despite languishing in prison, Nkrumah ran for a parliamentary seat in Accra,Footnote ⁵² and, with his party, the CPP, stormed to victory.Footnote ⁵³ On February 12, 1951, the British released Nkrumah from prison to thousands of rapturous and adoring supporters. According to the British newspaper the Daily Mail, jubilant Colonial Ghanaians “broke through the police and shouldered Nkrumah to a car.” Furthermore, a priest “knifed” a “sheep on Nkrumah’s feet” to “‘cleanse’ Nkrumah from jail and to propitiate ‘the old gods.’”Footnote ⁵⁴ The masses and gods had proverbially spoken. History would celebrate Nkrumah as one of the first prison-to-president graduates that would come to define the political landscape of 20th-century Africa. Others would include the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela. However, Nkrumah’s victory did not mean that Colonial Ghana’s future independence was guaranteed or that the British would not employ pro-Soviet or communist sympathies as a pretext to curtail Black independence.Footnote ⁵⁵ Black freedom was very fragile.

As the events in Colonial Ghana unfolded, the British waged a savage war against the Mau Mau across the African continent in Kenya in 1952.Footnote ⁵⁶ Padmore wrote to Nkrumah: “Brother, since the storm in Kenya I have been working night and day. [Mbiyu] Koinage the official representative of the Kenyan African Union is here and I am trying to send possible aid. His old man, brothers and Jomo [Kenyatta] are all arrested. Brother, it is hell let loose. Only the gods of Africa know how it will end.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Despite the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Charter in 1948 in response to the atrocities committed during World War II, outlawing and “condemn[ing] torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” Britain constructed detention camps in Kenya and forced suspected Mau Mau fighters there.Footnote ⁵⁸ The British, white Kenyan officers, and their African supporters (Askari) tortured the Mau Mau fighters and their supporters there. Suspected liberationists had sand, water, eggs, and sticks put in their anuses and vaginas. Their heads were put into a bucket of water and beaten; they were “mercilessly” stomped upon and their “brains [were] splattered everywhere.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Witnesses recounted seeing dead bodies piled on each other and tossed away.Footnote ⁶⁰ Furthermore, the detainees were forced to build the present-day Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.Footnote ⁶¹ Across the world in the Americas, other repressive efforts to stop the colonized from obtaining their independence transpired.

In 1953, the British offered British Guiana a constitutional referendum, paving the way for independence. When Cheddi Jagan, the People’s Progressive Party’s (PPP’s) leader in British Guiana, stormed to victory, the British and Americans overthrew him over fears he was a communist. They suspended the constitution, and deployed British troops to stop any “communist revolt.”Footnote ⁶² The events in British Guiana and Kenya warned Nkrumah and his comrades that Black independence was tenuous; it was not self-evident. Sociologist St. Clair Drake’s hopes in 1962 that Portugal would “retreat from Angola and Mozambique” and that South Africa’s prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s “dream … of white supremacy” would “collapse” were misplaced.Footnote ⁶³ Historian Marc Matera shows that the British Fabians, supposed allies of the anticolonialists, still continued to imagine a future with British colonial possessions.Footnote ⁶⁴ The duration of apartheid in South Africa until 1994, Zimbabwe’s Independence in 1980, and the ongoing and concurrent Lusophone African and Algerian wars for liberation underscored this truth. In fact, Nkrumah died in 1972, before the Lusophone African liberation battles had ended. These parallel struggles loomed large from the vantage point of 1956 and during Nkrumah’s tenure as Ghana’s leader. The Ghanaian press published daily articles denouncing the monstrosities of white minority rule and colonialism in Africa.

Black independence was precarious – not inevitable. Both teleological ideas of civilizational progress, presentist knowledge that political “independence” would come, and imperial attempts to rewrite history to underscore their “benevolence” and “willingness” to “grant” their subjects’ independence have obscured the realities and precariousness of Black liberation, and the depths and horrors Europeans underwent to maintain colonial order. The white Western powers had demonstrated that they were more than willing and could put the brakes on Black and African independence.

Even before British and American governments pulled the rug of independence from underneath the people of Guiana, Nkrumah had been cautious over how Western communist smears or Soviet associations could jeopardize Black sovereignty. During his trip to the United States in 1951 as prime minister of Colonial Ghana to receive his honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Lincoln University, Nkrumah dodged and downplayed pro-Soviet attitudes despite being “confronted by a direct question” on the subject matter.Footnote ⁶⁵ As Chapter 4 will illustrate, Nkrumah felt compelled to hide his socialist sympathies and expelled suspected communists from his government during this period. Events in the British colonies of Kenya and Guiana in the 1950s informed Nkrumah and his CPP government that their impending independence on March 6, 1957, could not be taken for granted and had to be carefully managed. While anti-Soviet and anti-communist tactics failed to harm Nkrumah and his colleagues’ popular support – for now – they had important implications for how Nkrumah and his early government navigated Soviet communications and linkages before independence.

In 1952, a year before Stalin’s death, Nkrumah noted that while he “greatly admire[d] … Lenin,” he held Stalin “in aversion because he regard[ed] him as an Imperialist.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Nkrumah’s pronouncement came two years after his stint in the gaols, and three years after the CPP’s formation. These fears, coupled with the USSR’s failure to support Ethiopia, its inward turn, the horrific scale of death from its economic policies, and the persecution of dissident Black intellectuals, made the future Ghanaian leaders wary of the USSR. Padmore’s scathing critique of Soviet paternalism and nationalism in Pan-Africanism or Communism in 1956, a year before Ghana’s independence, underscored his bitter rift with the USSR and had a profound impact on early Ghana–Soviet relations.

Thus, while attending Liberian president Harry Tubman’s inauguration between December 31, 1955, and January 15, 1956, Nkrumah and his delegation secretly met with a Soviet party.Footnote ⁶⁷ The records are silent about the nature or extent of their communications, but the African delegation must have expressed an eagerness to establish ties with the Soviets after independence. A month later, the political landscape in the Soviet Union, so detested by some of Ghana’s early leaders, began to shift. On February 25, 1956, the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, behind closed doors, in his now infamous speech, “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” denounced Stalin and Stalinism. Khrushchev sharply criticized Stalin’s “brutality, and his abuse of power,” and for murdering and silencing those “dedicated to the cause of communism” and bringing “untold harm” to the Soviet cause and the Bolshevik party.Footnote ⁶⁸ A thaw, or rather, a potential new opening, even if it had to be done secretly to avoid British imperial might, was transpiring. Three months before independence, Nkrumah invited Soviet officials to Ghana’s weeklong Independence Day festivities.Footnote ⁶⁹ The overture was an act of courage. Nikolai Bulganin, the Soviet Union’s premier, happily accepted Nkrumah’s invitation and promised that the Soviet government would send two representatives and a secretary-interpreter to the festivities.Footnote ⁷⁰

Beginning of Ghana–Soviet Relations

Although Ghana’s early leaders sought to strengthen ties with the Soviets at independence, they still viewed the Soviets as part and parcel of white empire and were loath to subsume or relinquish their sovereignty to a different white empire, even one with communist or socialist pretensions. For Africans born in the belly of European empire and whose lives were impacted by white supremacist laws, violence, cultures, and norms, economic or linguistic differences among Europeans did not expunge or mask white supremacy. In the tumultuous 1950s, key figures of Ghana’s think tank saw no distinctions between white empires for colonized Africans. While capitalism and communism in their infancy might not have originated as tools of white European supremacy, they certainly were used to expand European imperialism and then colonial rule.Footnote ⁷¹ Ghana’s early leaders saw white supremacy as the ordering principle of the international order.

From the onset of Ghana’s independence, Nkrumah had famously linked Ghana’s independence to the liquidation of white European colonial rule across the African continent. At multiple and subsequent occasions, Nkrumah repeated that vision. On December 8, 1958, at the All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) in Accra, a “mechanism through which the independent countries of Africa could assist the dependent territories [in Africa] gain their independence,”Footnote ⁷² Nkrumah reiterated his desire to eradicate European colonialism. He declared to the world that it was “Only with the internment of Imperialism will Africa be free from menace and live and breathe in liberty, where men of colour shall walk with head held high in human dignity.”Footnote ⁷³ The other delegates declared that “Africa is not an extension of Europe.”Footnote ⁷⁴ During a March 1, 1961, dinner in Accra with the socialist Yugoslavian leader Josef Tito, who also instigated the nonaligned movement, and his spouse, Madam Broz, Nkrumah said: “The tragedy of the world situation of today is that the imperialists and colonialists refused to reconcile themselves to the simple fact that all people were created equal, were born equal, and have an equal right to self-determination.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Similarly, on Africa Freedom Day, on April 15, Nkrumah lamented that “there are living millions of Africans languishing in colonial bondage and living in the most wretched conditions in many parts of this continent.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Nkrumah critiqued white supremacy unabashedly. It was the Europeans and European settler-colonialism that were denying colonized people’s their rights. In Nkrumah’s vision, those who suffered from the ills of white supremacy, “men of colour,” would be liberated. Nkrumah declared gallantly that “all Africa shall be free in this, our lifetime. For this mid-twentieth century is Africa’s. This decade is the decade of African independence. Forward then to independence. To Independence Now.”Footnote ⁷⁷

The gauntlet was set and the problem framed – colonized and formerly colonized people and their governments had to remove white racial systems of domination in order to walk with their heads aloft and breathe in the sweetness of liberty. Nkrumah’s actions and words signaled to the world that Black and African sovereignty were central to Ghana’s foreign policy agenda in a world dominated by white supremacist international systems.Footnote ⁷⁸ This system had predated the USSR’s rise or communism as an ideological foe to capitalism and Western imperialism. Colonized subjects living in the belly of white supremacy and empire understood that the problem for Blacks and colonized people was not different European ideologies fighting for global power, but rather their subjugation by all such racist ideas.Footnote ⁷⁹ Even in the postcolony, historian Uzma Quraishi writes that Pakistanis sharply criticized America as a beacon of liberty because of its anti-Black laws and living conditions in the 1960s.Footnote ⁸⁰ Ghana’s relationship with the USSR, Britain, and America was being shaped by its early leaders’ astute understanding of how white supremacy operated and their evolving ideas about neocolonialism and imperialism. Black Marxists offered their contemporaries and future scholars a new framework to understand the postcolonial African state within its positionality to white superpowers, white supremacy, and history.Footnote ⁸¹ For “a true renascent African,” as Nkrumah wrote, there was no choice but independence and the avoidance of neocolonialism’s trappings, imperialism, and white supremacy – however they manifested themselves.

As a result, Ghana’s early leaders were preoccupied with dismantling the stranglehold of white supremacy and preventing its reemergence in the new Ghanaian state. “Do not let us also forget,” Nkrumah said, “that Colonialism and Imperialism may come to us yet in a different guise – not necessarily from Europe. We must alert ourselves to be able to recognize this when it rears its head and prepare ourselves to fight against it.”Footnote ⁸² Thus, when Ghana acquired political independence from Britain, its next priority was to achieve economic independence by revamping its colonial economy to limit and blunt neocolonial sabotage and Western or Eastern European capital or diplomatic pressure. Nkrumah wrote: “We (Ghana) have emancipated ourselves politically, and we have now to shake off the economic monopoly that was the objective of foreign political control.” The Ghanaian leader continued, “This is the crux of our economic policy, and the essential heart of our endeavours. For unless we attain economic freedom, our struggle for independence will have been in vain, and our plans for social and cultural advancement frustrated.”Footnote ⁸³ As Chapter 4 will explain in more detail, economic independence meant demonopolizing the power American and British capital and firms had on the Ghanaian economy. Furthermore, it entailed building state industries that would eventually compete with and outperform foreign firms, moving the state from a model agrarian and export-orientated economy into one that produced, refined, and distributed a range of commodities. Where the Soviets could aid in Black freedom, they were consulted – see Chapter 2 for instance. In constructing hierarchies of geopolitical importance, restructuring Ghana’s colonial economy was more important than hastily diving into diplomatic relations with the Soviets.

Indeed, on January 14, 1958, Nkrumah’s cabinet accepted a bill proposed by Krobo Edusei, the Ghanaian minister of Interior, that any government body “receiving any request for information emanating from a Communist country should be required to pass it to the Ministry of Defense … for scrutiny and consideration.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The Ghanaian cabinet was eager to ensure that a new European empire, albeit with socialist and communist pretensions, would not compromise its independence through destabilization or other means. Ghana cautiously approached the Soviet Union with the fear of swapping one set of white masters for another.Footnote ⁸⁵ Within a few months of independence, Nkrumah rejected the minister of Soviet State Farms and Agriculture’s invitation to send Ghana’s Agricultural Minister, Boahene Yeboa Afari, and his two top aides to the USSR. While Nkrumah expressed his sincere gratitude for the invitation, he noted that the Ghanaian government was reviewing its entire “economic policy and programme” of which the agricultural sector was an integral component and thus it would be imprudent for the individuals above to leave Ghana. Nkrumah had hoped that the Soviets would empathize with Ghana’s “difficulty … in establishing” a robust postcolonial economy and wished for a future invitation. Nkrumah was adamant that Ghana was not aligned with any power bloc or country and would engage in policies that ensured its security and true neutrality.Footnote ⁸⁶

After Nkrumah’s first national assembly address in August 1957, Malik characterized Ghana’s foreign policy toward the USSR as hostile.Footnote ⁸⁷ On June 11, 1958, N. A. Makarov, a Soviet official, wrote an internal memorandum that American and British capital held dominant positions within Ghana’s economy, causing Ghana to fear that Britain and the United States would decrease its financial assistance to it if the new state established relations with the USSR.Footnote ⁸⁸ Orestov, a Soviet journalist touring Ghana, agreed with Makarov’s assessment. Orestov surmised that Nkrumah’s obsession with constructing the Volta River Project to industrialize and electrify Ghana, to increase Ghana’s global prestige, and to end Ghana’s economic dependency actually put him under the thumbs of the Americans, the British, and Canadians.Footnote ⁸⁹ On April 22, 1959, Orestov accused Ghanaian newspapers of attacking socialist-oriented countries.Footnote ⁹⁰ However, as I will discuss later, Ghanaian newspapers actually praised socialist-orientated countries’ technological, educational, and cultural feats while strongly condemning socialist countries that permitted and failed to punish racist attacks against Black bodies in their lands.Footnote ⁹¹

The debates surrounding when Ghana’s Trade and Goodwill Mission and Nkrumah would visit the USSR or when embassies between the two nations would be established underscored both Soviet attempts to pressure Ghana into hasty deals, Ghanaian bemusement over Soviet efforts to undermine prior agreements and procedures, and illustrate Ghanaian independence and agency. In January 1958, Malik expressed a desire to expedite Ghana–Soviet relations. While the Ghanaian and Soviet governments had agreed to dispatch a Ghanaian Trade and Goodwill Mission to the USSR in July 1958, Malik urged the Mission to visit sooner, between March and April 1958.Footnote ⁹² Sir E. O. Asafu-Adjaye, the Ghanaian high commissioner to London, rebuffed Malik’s request. Asafu-Adjaye reminded Malik that Ghana’s one-year Independence Day celebrations would commence between March and April of 1958 and that it would be highly inappropriate for Ghanaian ministers to miss the festivities and conferences planned. The Ghanaian high commissioner implored the Soviets to uphold the originally scheduled July 1958 date and not to tamper with the carefully planned Mission program.Footnote ⁹³ Malik then invited Nkrumah to visit the USSR in the summer of 1958.Footnote ⁹⁴ Regarding Nkrumah’s visit, Asafu-Adjaye informed Malik that Nkrumah would visit the USSR when he was free, and that a decision would be rendered only after Nkrumah’s independent African states tour.

Alongside financial and personnel reasons, the Ghanaians refused to be bullied and rushed into hastily opening an embassy in the USSR or accepting the USSR’s nomination of Mikhail D. Sytenko as their ambassador to Ghana on May 30, 1958.Footnote ⁹⁵ Sytenko, a career civil servant, was an attaché at the Soviet embassy to the Allied Governments in London in 1943. He served in Prague from 1955 to 1957 and as its ambassador in 1955.Footnote ⁹⁶ The Ghanaians rejected the haste. Despite Soviet incredulity, Ghanaian officials had provided several reasons – from a lack of finances and personnel, and Soviet failure to observe predetermined protocols – for the impossibility of either at that moment.Footnote ⁹⁷ Even the American consul general in Accra during British colonial rule, Donald Lamm, commented in December 1956 that Colonial Ghana’s financial and personnel constraints would make the new state unable to send representatives to the “U.S.S.R. or Communist China … ‘for a considerable time after independence, even if they were inclined to do so.’”Footnote ⁹⁸ While others have framed or used these episodes to deride Ghana’s leaders, to assert that Ghana’s decisions resulted solely from British and American pressure, in effect, denying Africans their agency, or to deride or question Ghana’s leaders’ intentions or political economic philosophies, my archival sources instead paint a different picture. Coupled with financial and personnel constraints, Ghana’s leadership had set a course of action and were determined to implement it. They would not buckle to Soviet pressure even if it did not endear Nkrumah to the Soviets, whose leadership accused him of being a Western lackey.Footnote ⁹⁹

Yet, others refused to hold the Ghanaian government as solely responsible for the sluggishness of Ghana–Soviet affairs. On January 16, 1959, at a meeting in Moscow dedicated to the Conference of the Peoples of Africa held in Accra, an unnamed Ghanaian student lamented that while there were approximately 2,000 Ghanaian students in the UK, there were only 7 in the USSR. The student blamed both governments for the situation.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The student declared that the Soviets were not innocent bystanders and should eschew the role of passive victims in the formation of Ghana–Soviet affairs.

After their initial enthusiasm of quickly joining forces with the newly independent Black state to challenge American and Western European supremacy, the Soviets’ hopes dimmed. Alongside Soviet angst that American and British capital and might were thwarting their attempts to form diplomatic relations with Ghana, they circled George Padmore as a source of obstruction. Soviet analysts argued that Padmore’s prior experience with Stalinism and his close relationship with Nkrumah restricted more robust Ghana–Soviet relations. Their suspicions were correct.

Enter and Exit George Padmore

Padmore’s bitter departure from the Communist Party and his disillusionment with Stalinism profoundly influenced his political outlook and Ghana’s foreign orientation during his lifetime. In November 1957, Ivan Potekhin arrived in Ghana.Footnote ¹⁰¹ He was the deputy director of Moscow’s African department of the Institute of Ethnography,Footnote ¹⁰² a former prominent Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) instructor,Footnote ¹⁰³ and the first Soviet scholar to research in Africa.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ After gathering information in Ghana, Potekhin reported to the Soviet government that Padmore continued to pressure and steer Nkrumah away from the Soviets due to his expulsion from the Communist Party a few decades prior.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ However, Potekhin’s attribution of Padmore’s antagonism toward the Soviets as personal and not ideological was misleading. At the heart of Padmore’s wariness of the USSR was their decision to support fascist Italy against independent Black Africa and their growing coolness toward Black liberation. Scholar P-Kiven Tunteng argued that “Padmore … made sure that Ghanaian policy steered away from close identification with the Socialist bloc, no doubt because he had come to suspect their intentions.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ On June 16, 1958, Orestov concluded that Padmore denounced the USSR as much as he did American and British imperialism.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Padmore believed that the Soviets saw Blacks as pawns to further their interests.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Padmore’s ideas substantially impacted Nkrumah.

As outlined earlier, Nkrumah and Padmore had a very close relationship. After Nkrumah left Britain for Colonial Ghana in 1947, their relationship blossomed further.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Padmore and Nkrumah discussed what forms Ghana’s constitution should take.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Padmore conscripted individuals to spy on anti-Nkrumah factions, enforced CPP party discipline,Footnote ¹¹¹ and alerted Nkrumah to assassination plots against him.Footnote ¹¹² While disagreements arose, a strong bond between them prevailed. Nkrumah placed Padmore’s office right next to his at the Flagstaff House.Footnote ¹¹³ Caribbean Marxist CLR James wrote, “I who knew them both cannot think of Padmore without Nkrumah or Nkrumah without Padmore.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Scholar W. Scott Thompson argued that “only Nkrumah had a greater hand than Padmore in shaping Ghana’s foreign policy during the first two years.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Political scientist David Apter, a keen observer of the Nkrumah era and a contemporary, maintained that “many of his (Padmore’s) ideas … have helped form some of the key ideas of African socialists in Ghana …. Both the racial factor and the ideological find expression” amongst “African freedom fighters” and the Ghanaian state.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Padmore’s political views on the USSR reflect Ghana’s early leaders’ worry about the dangers of white empires – a reality often lost in Cold War analytics.

From Ghana’s infancy, Padmore bemoaned and worried that Nkrumah might become too friendly toward the white empires. During Ghana’s Independence Day celebrations, Padmore lamented to his Caribbean Marxist compatriot CLR James that “the police, the head of the department of education, the magistrates and a lot of white people,” who were responsible for putting “all the Black people into gaols,” were “inside dancing,” enjoying the festivities while the Blacks languished “outside.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Padmore rejected the idea that those white people had Ghana’s best interests at heart and feared that they sought to manipulate Nkrumah and sink Black independence.

A series of events from 1958 to 1959 would substantially modify Ghana–Soviet relations. On September 25, 1959, Padmore died from “‘cirrhosis of the liver’” in London. His death shook Nkrumah, who cried bitterly in his house.Footnote ¹¹⁸ During the spreading of Padmore’s ashes at Fort Christiansborg or also known as Osu Castle in Accra, Nkrumah delivered a somber eulogy. He praised Padmore as a staunch defender of Black liberation.Footnote ¹¹⁹ At the opening of the George Padmore Memorial Library a few years later in Accra, Nkrumah declared that Padmore “sought to break the myth of white supremacy and inspired African nationalism which today has become a militant force in the destruction of imperialism and colonialism.”Footnote ¹²⁰ On October 30, 1959, A. K. Barden, the secretary of the Ghanaian Bureau of African Affairs, wrote about Padmore’s legacy to George Loft, the American Friends Service Committee’s representative in sub-Saharan Africa in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia.Footnote ¹²¹ Barden praised Padmore’s devotion to “African Freedom” and his attempts to eliminate “imperialism, racialism, and oppression” from Africa. Barden informed Loft that Nkrumah would “continue the battle from where Comrade Padmore left it.”Footnote ¹²² Padmore’s death was more than a personal loss for Nkrumah; it also signaled the beginning of a shift in Ghana’s foreign policy toward the USSR. “No factor affected the formulation of policy more during this period,” historian W. Scott Thompson noted, “than the death of George Padmore.”Footnote ¹²³ As Padmore’s ashes lay at Osu Castle,Footnote ¹²⁴ a Ghanaian trade delegation visited the Soviet Union,Footnote ¹²⁵ and Baako, a pro-Soviet minister, stepped into his office.Footnote ¹²⁶ While a progressive foreign policy shift toward the Soviets was in the making, Padmore’s central concerns, white supremacy and Black liberation, would continue to steer the decisions of Ghana’s leaders.

“Solidarity Highlife”: A Different White Empire?

Yet, despite the perception of minimal diplomatic ties between Ghana and the USSR from 1957 to 1959, there were early efforts from Ghana to create connections, the Ghana–Soviet space, between the two countries. In 1957, Nkrumah urged the Soviets to accept a Ghanaian trade mission to the USSR in 1958, which would include high-ranking members from the state trading corporation, the cocoa marketing board, the industrial development corporation, and the agricultural corporation.Footnote ¹²⁷ Furthermore, on October 28, Kwame Jantuah, the youngest member of Nkrumah’s first all-African cabinet, informed Malik that Ghana would send a delegation to the USSR for two weeks in July 1958. The mission was intended to bring goodwill, promote reciprocal trade, attract Soviet foreign investment, and instruct Ghanaians on how to establish small-scale or cottage industries in rural areas.Footnote ¹²⁸ Moreover, Nkrumah hoped that the Soviets would generously send an official to Ghana to discuss “technical details” and grant permission for Ghanaian “trade union officials to visit the U.S.S.R. from China.”Footnote ¹²⁹ The Soviets happily accepted these proposals. The opening salvo of the Ghana–Soviet economic and science-technical space commenced.

In early May 1959, a Soviet trade delegation ventured to Ghana to finalize a trade agreement that would develop and strengthen “commercial relations between the two nations on the basis of equality and mutual benefit.”Footnote ¹³⁰ The contents and terms of the trade agreement mirrored other trade deals Ghana had concluded with socialist countries like Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.Footnote ¹³¹ Soon, Ghana began importing Soviet manufactured goods, such as heavy machinery while the Soviets imported Ghana’s primary commodities.Footnote ¹³² At least five months before the deal was finalized, the Ghanaian government welcomed Soviet scientists and diamond experts to explore how best to streamline and tap into the nation’s natural resources.Footnote ¹³³ In the ensuing few years, the Ghanaian government continued to expand its requests to the Eastern Power. On August 4, 1959, the Ghanaian government requested Soviet aid to construct a semi-large metallurgic plant and hoped that the Soviets could help locate and excavate large iron ore deposits off the Ghanaian coast.Footnote ¹³⁴ This story is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2.

Soon, Ghanaian officials began to differentiate the Soviets from other white empires due to Padmore’s departure, Khrushchev’s support for the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, and Khrushchev’s strong anticolonial stances in personal correspondences with Nkrumah and at the United Nations. The Democratic Republic of Congo signified an important test of Black Africa’s independence and the Global North’s stance on a genuinely independent Africa.Footnote ¹³⁵ The Congo won its independence from Belgium on June 30, 1960. The Congolese people voted the African nationalist Lumumba into power. Disappointed in the results, Western forces sought to remove Lumumba and maintain their access to the Congo’s raw materials.Footnote ¹³⁶ By January 17, 1961, Lumumba had been assassinated. The Congo represented the provinciality of Black freedom. African leaders who sought to dismantle the white supremacist international order were put on notice.

In-between Lumumba’s ascent to the presidency and his assassination, Ghanaian and Soviet ministers met on four separate occasions in 1960 to address the deteriorating situation in the Congo.Footnote ¹³⁷ Alongside these meetings, Nkrumah and Khrushchev exchanged numerous letters about the best measures to avert the Congo’s balkanization, Western attempts both to undermine Lumumba’s leadership and control the Congo’s resources, and the UN’s failure to support Lumumba.Footnote ¹³⁸ In these letters, the Soviet leader often mimicked Nkrumah’s positions on anti-imperialism, neocolonialism, and antiracism, and often pushed for Africans to determine their internal affairs. In Nkrumah’s eyes, the Congo reaffirmed Western white empires’ desire to either exploit, undermine, or dismantle African governments or murder African leaders who sought to dismantle former colonial relationships.Footnote ¹³⁹ Reflecting on Lumumba’s assassination in a February 14, 1961, speech, Nkrumah criticized the UN, the United States, and the colonizing powers but praised the Soviets for their attempts to save Lumumba and his fledgling government. Nkrumah commented that Lumumba’s murder was the first time a “legal ruler of a country” had been killed due to the “open connivance of a world organization in whom that ruler put his trust.” Nkrumah condemned the UN and the West for raising a “howl” when Lumumba’s government received “some aircraft and civilian motor vehicles from the Soviet Union” while standing idly by when Belgian arms and military forces supported the rebels.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ “It baffles many of us,” Nkrumah noted in a November 13, 1964 letter to Charles Howard, the African American UN and foreign correspondent from Howard News Syndicate, “that in this mid-20th century, the imperialists should still want to re-stage a scramble for Africa, as they are actively doing in the Congo and other areas of our continent.” Nkrumah was adamant that “African problems can best be solved by Africans.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Lumumba’s murder and his ghost continued to haunt and influence Ghana’s foreign policy decisions and societal opinions about global international institutions and persons.

In The Ghanaian Times on December 24, 1963, Greek socialist poet Rita Boumi Papa published a poem called “Patrice Lumumba.” Papa wrote:

Papa explicitly employed Christian symbolism in socialist Ghana to attack the moral bankruptcy of white supremacy and the UN. While published on Christmas Eve, the day before Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, Papa referenced not Jesus’ birth but the events after his crucifixion. Papa exhorted Lumumba’s spirit not to forgive the UN leaders or turn the other cheek for being complicit in his murder. Papa called on Lumumba not to wash away his blood, spilled at the hands of the imperialists, but to return to Dag Hammarskjold, the UN secretary general, and the UN body, and forever haunt them. Lumumba’s blood would not save but condemn. Just as the dead Lumumba was urged not to forgive and to remain in the midst of the living, Ghanaians were warned not to forget Lumumba’s fate. White supremacy had spoken and acted. Anti-imperialist Black nations had to be continuously on-guard. Black freedom and life were fragile. As Papa’s poem highlights, socialists around the world turned to Ghana to make sense of, mourn, and decry the stench of Lumumba’s murder and the West’s complicity.

While Ghanaians and those aligned with its state’s socialist ambitions and Black liberationist ethos criticized Western white powers and their supporters for “sacrificing African lives” to maintain white supremacy,Footnote ¹⁴³ they praised the Soviets for their anticolonial efforts. “But for the Soviet Union,” Nkrumah remarked, “the colonial liberation movement in Africa would have suffered a most cruel and brutal suppression.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Nkrumah’s comments represented a break from an earlier position condemning Soviet support for fascism. He was not alone. In August 1960, R. O. Amoako-Atta, Ghana’s minister of Labor and Co-operatives, arrived in the USSR and told Sovetskaya Torgovlya, a Soviet trade correspondent, that Ghana was “thankful to the Soviet Union for rendering assistance to our brothers the Congolese people.” The Soviet Union’s respect of national sovereignty, Amoako-Atta continued, was “a sure way” of developing ties and friendship with Ghana. It was in this sense that Amoako-Atta declared the Soviets Ghana’s “real friends.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ On December 31, 1964, an article called “Whose Finger is in Congo’s Pie?” came out in the Ghanaian socialist and Pan-Africanist magazine, The Spark. It praised the Soviets and other socialist countries for supporting the Congo in “contrast with the intrigues and subterfuges of the Western powers, the flood of the Western mercenaries and the open military intervention of the U.S. and Belgium.” The author reminded the readers that “Neither the U.S.S.R. nor any socialist country has ever opposed the unity of the Congo, interfered in her internal affairs or sent a military mission into the country. Russian action in the Congo has strictly been humanitarian – deliveries of flour and medical supplies.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ These moments endeared the Soviets to their Ghanaian counterparts. Khrushchev’s memorable two-hour speech denouncing colonialism at the UN General Assembly in September 1960,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ and the Soviet representative to the United Nations Security Council’s Vladimir A. Brykin’s call for the Council to “consider the Southern Rhodesian problem” and criticism of Britain for turning Southern Rhodesia’s “independence to a ‘racist government of white settlers’” in 1963 reaffirmed Ghana’s belief.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The Congo and the fight against white minority and supremacist regimes in Africa were pivotal litmus tests on whom radical Black Africa might turn to for international support. Soviet support for African liberation went beyond mere rhetoric.

In 1961, Nkrumah’s government opened secret guerilla warfare camps to overthrow colonial white supremacist and neocolonialist regimes in Africa. Under the direction of the Bureau of African Affairs, government rest-houses in Mankrong, Worobon, Kwahu Adawso, and Mpraeso were converted into liberation training camps. Mankrong was the site of the first guerilla warfare course in December 3, 1961. Two Soviet instructors ran the program and designed eighteen-week courses, teaching the liberation fighters how to use “Russian rifles, pistols, sub-machine guns, light machine guns, heavy machine guns, rocket launchers and mortar[s].”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ While Soviet and Eastern European anti-white supremacist and anticolonial words and sentiments would come under intense scrutiny, as we will see in Chapter 3, it was clear that the Ghanaian leadership began to distinguish the Soviets from other white empires due to their public commitment to the African liberation struggles. In the ensuing years, the Soviets would throw their military, political, and economic support behind the Black Southern and Lusophone African liberation movements.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

In January 1961, the Ghanaian cabinet took the extraordinary step to abolish visa fees on a “reciprocal basis” between the Soviet Union and Ghana. The cabinet amended its 1960 visas and entry permit regulations to issue “‘gratis’” status to Soviet citizens.Footnote ¹⁵¹ That month, Ghana agreed to send five Ghanaian military officers to the USSR by May 1, and hoped that three of the officers could witness the Soviet’s May Day Celebrations.Footnote ¹⁵² To further cement relations, the Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev visited Ghana while touring other West African states.Footnote ¹⁵³ In July 1961, six months after Lumumba’s murder, Nkrumah and several Ghanaian ministers finally made their trip to the USSR.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Nkrumah was emphatic: “We make no apology for the steps … taken to strengthen our trade and economic relations with the Soviet Union” and to secure Ghana’s sovereignty.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ In 1960, in front of “a thousand cheering” members of the CPP’s youth, the Ghanaian political and literary class, and the world, the elderly W. E. B. Du Bois urged Ghana to “join the Soviet Union and China and usher in the New World.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Ghana’s political and literary classes had seemingly accepted this clarion call. It was a change from the Presidential Cabinet bill Nkrumah accepted three years prior that any government body “receiving any request for information emanating from a Communist country should be required to pass it to the Ministry of Defense.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷

From 1960 onward, Ghanaian newspapers featured Soviet scientific and literary successes. On July 6, 1960, The Daily Graphic praised the Soviets for successfully returning the dog, “Courageous,” from a space rocket. The story also mentioned Laika’s unfortunate death in an earlier earth satellite mission in 1957.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Laika, a dog, was one of the first animals to orbit the earth and enter space. The following day, The Daily Graphic noted that the Soviets had sent a rocket about “8,000 miles from the Soviet Union into the Central Pacific.” On August 26, Dr. C. B. Ashanin, a former professor at the University College of Ghana, produced a feature story on Alexander Pushkin, dubbed the father of Russian literature, in The Daily Graphic. Ashanin hailed Pushkin’s career and life as “extraordinary” and wondered whether his “African ancestry ha[d] something to do with it as well.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ In early 1962, the first human to enter space, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, visited Ghana to much fanfare. Historian Jeffrey S. Ahlman notes that Gagarin’s visit “was a national event in Ghana as schoolchildren, workers, party members, diplomats, and others packed the streets of Accra to greet the Soviet space-age hero.” The Ghanaian media became “fixated on the Soviet space program,” covering the “day-to-day activities of Soviet cosmonauts during their orbits around the earth.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Indeed, on July 4, The Ashanti Pioneer noted that the Soviets put “another satellite into the orbit around the earth.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ The reading Ghanaian public were becoming acquainted with Soviet technological-scientific prowess, literary feats, and its history. And through Pushkin’s African heritage, writers in Ghana sought to draw a connection between themselves and the brilliance of Pushkin and the Soviets. Pushkin’s racial genealogy denoted to the Ghanaian reading public that the USSR’s history with Africa, at least in its Russian incarnation, went back centuries. It was not new.

During this moment, Ghanaian officials and professionals ventured to the USSR in growing numbers to study the present Soviet political-economy and particularly its relationship with its non-Russian peoples. On May 10, 1960, Botsio led a Ghanaian parliamentary delegation to Soviet Georgia. The Ghanaian delegation studied the Georgian economy, particularly its collective farms, agricultural machines, how the Georgians priced its agricultural products, and how it organized it agricultural sector.Footnote ¹⁶² In a speech to the Soviet Management Board of the Association for Friendship with the Peoples of Africa after the tour, Botsio thanked the Soviets for receiving them so warmly. Botsio added that their short visit taught them more about the Soviet Union than they could learn from Soviet tourists and books.Footnote ¹⁶³ In July 1962, two of Ghana’s top military brass – Kofi Baako, the minister of Defense, and major general S. Out, the chief of staff of the Ghana Defence Forces – traveled to Moscow and joined the Ghanaian ambassador to the USSR, J. B. Elliott, to meet key players of the Soviet military, including Marshall Malinovsky, the Soviet minister of Defense, Marshall Zakharov, the chief of general staff of the USSR Armed Forces, and Yakov Malik, deputy minister of Foreign Affairs.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ In the middle of 1963, Victor Adegbite, the chief architect of Ghana’s National Construction Corporation, went to the Soviet Union “to study” housing.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Fourteen Soviet teachers, comprising ten women and four men, came to Ghana to teach mathematics and science at Ghana’s secondary schools (Figure 1.1).Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Soviet professor Valentin Postnikov, a rector at the Voronezh University in the USSR, arrived in Ghana to give a lecture on the “organisation of higher education in the Soviet Union in the field of natural and technical sciences.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ These talks were part of broader efforts to internationalize Ghana’s educational system.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

Figure 1.1

“14 Soviets will teach here,” The Ghanaian Times, November 9, 1963.

On December 15, 1960, Regina Asamany, a member of the Ghanaian parliament, wrote to Khrushchev asking whether five Ghanaian police officers, four Ghanaian poultry farmers, three sculptors, and three co-operative society leaders from Ghana could visit the USSR for two to three months in the spring of 1961.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Asmany was one of the few Ghanaian women parliamentarians.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ She hailed from Kpandu in the Volta Region,Footnote ¹⁷¹ and was, according to historian Kate Skinner, “the only woman to make it into the first rank of the Togoland Congress leadership in the 1950s.”Footnote ¹⁷² After British Togoland joined Ghana, Asmany joined the CPP.Footnote ¹⁷³ Now, as a key member of parliament, Asamany hoped that the aforementioned Ghanaians would be able to study how the Soviets organized their police force and how they used scientific methods to rear birds on poultry farms. Furthermore, Asamany hoped that this would be the beginning of personal and professional connections between the two camps. In closing her letter to Khrushchev, the Ghanaian parliamentarian admitted that she was in awe of the Soviet state and was “convinced that Africa and the Soviet Union” needed to “co-operate more and more with each other.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Asamany called for a more expansive vision of what future Ghana–Soviet relations might entail. Importantly, Asamany was not the only Ghanaian urging further cooperation between the two states and noting the importance of the Soviet example for Black independence. Once Ghana’s leaders had determined that the Soviets were allies in the quest for Black liberation, others from Ghana and the Soviet Union started initiating their own encounters.

Just like Asamany, Nina Popov and Iryna Yastribova sent a friendly congratulatory telegraph to the Ghana–USSR Friendship Society urging the two nations to strengthen their “economies, friendship, cultures, and cooperation.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Popov was the former president of the Union of Soviet Socialists Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations on Foreign Countries and Yastribova was the vice-chairman of the Board of the Soviet Association for Friends with the people of Africa. Popov had made a real impression on the Ghanaians. The Ghanaians had wished for both to attend their Republic Day festivities on July 4, 1960 and 1961, respectively. In March 1960, Nkrumah had personally informed the Soviet Foreign Affairs Ministry to pass along his deep appreciation and good will to Popov and Potekhin.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ The archival record is silent on whether Popov attended. Despite Popov’s absence, the Soviets agreed to export industrial items to GhanaFootnote ¹⁷⁷ and provide £G15 million pounds in credit at a rate of 2.5 percent interest per year to support Nkrumah’s vision. The Ghanaians negotiated all payments to be done in Ghanaian pounds to maintain its foreign cash reserves.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ This tactic allowed the newly independent state to continue to engage in foreign trade activities with other nations.

Just as Ghanaians were venturing to the USSR to study their society, Soviet delegations were traveling to Ghana to learn about the “bourgeoning postcolonial … socialist state” and its peoples.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ In 1963, an eleven-person Soviet Parliamentary delegation team toured Ghana. They were led by Madam Yadgar Sodykovna Nasriddinova, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Uzbek Socialist Republic and Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Soviet (Figure 1.2). Chairperson Nasriddinova’s image, movements, and words filled the Ghanaian newspapers. An image of a smiling Nasriddinova receiving “palm wine,” a welcoming alcoholic lubricant provided to strangers, guests, and friends, circulated around the new nation. Another image of her “clink[ing] glasses” with Nkrumah at the State House in Accra made headlines. A “Toast of Ghana–Soviet Friendship,” The Ghanaian Times declared (Figure 1.3).Footnote ¹⁸⁰

Figure 1.2

“USSR Team in Tomorrow,” Evening News, October 24, 1963.

Figure 1.3

“Toast of Ghana-Soviet Friendship,” The Ghanaian Times, November 6, 1963.

Figure 1.3 Long description

In the top image, Ghana's president Kwame Nkrumah and Yadgar Sadykovna Nasriddinova, the chairwoman of the Presidium of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and deputy chairwoman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, clink glasses after a toast of friendship. In the middle image, Ghana's defense minister, Kofi Baako, shakes Nasriddinova's hand at Accra airport as the Ghanaians bid farewell to the Soviet delegates. In the bottom image, an unknown Ghanaian man is serving a smiling Nasriddinova palm wine - there are numerous onlookers including the S.W. Yeboah, the Ashanti regional commissioner.

The paper then posted an image of a glowing and happy Nkrumah and Nasriddinova dancing together to a Ghanaian highlife tune at the Osu Castle in Accra (Figure 1.4). It was a “demonstration of Ghana–Soviet solidarity” – it was “solidarity highlife.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ Even the Asantehene Nana Sir Osei Agyeman Prempeh II, the leader of the Ashantis, whose followers generally held Nkrumah’s regime and Nkrumah himself with deep contempt, was present at the dinner festivities (Figure 1.5). His presence projected a broader Ghanaian societal project to garner national support for Ghana’s increasing warmness toward the Soviets.Footnote ¹⁸² These military delegations, lectures, dinner receptions, and gifts certainly lubricated the Ghana–Soviet relationship, demonstrating Ghana’s independence (Figures 1.6 and 1.7). If certain commentators were so enthralled by Nkrumah’s dances with British royalty, then, watching Nkrumah dance with a Soviet woman perhaps elicited new geopolitical fears. While historian Elizabeth Banks shows that other leading Soviet women like Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman cosmonaut and general secretary of the Committee of Soviet women, repeatedly ignored requests from the Organization for the Mozambican Women for slightly over a decade to travel to Mozambique,Footnote ¹⁸³ prominent Soviet women like Nasriddinova did make their way to Africa.

Figure 1.4

“Solidarity highlife,” The Ghanaian Times, November 5, 1963.

Figure 1.5

“Soviet MPs entertained,” The Ghanaian Times, November 5, 1963.

Figure 1.6

“She Receives an Album Gift” & “Soviet Woman M.P. Praises Kwame,” The Ghanaian Times, November 6, 1963.

Figure 1.7

“Soviet Party,” Daily Graphic, July 13, 1963.

Figure 1.7 Long description

The photo shows three women talking at a party held at the Soviet Embassy at Nima, Accra. The woman on the left is G. M. Rodionov, the partner of the Soviet ambassador to Ghana. In the middle is Ruth Adjorlolo, a Shell Company Limited Public Relations officer. And, on the right is, Ellen Kekessie, the partner of Ghana's assistant director of Information Services.

The Soviet party traveled “extensive[ly] across the country to see developments.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴ They even visited the Ashanti Region, the heart of Nkrumah’s opposition. There, they visited “the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, the Fibre Bag Manufacturing Corporation and the National Cultural Centre.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ This was not a one-off incident. Soviet experts toured other Ghanaian industrial facilities, like the Pioneer Tobacco Factory in Takoradi. This is an important reminder and corrective that it was not only Ghanaian specialists who toured the USSR to learn about production.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ The Soviets toured Ghanaian technological and industrial sites as well. Ghanaians taught the Soviets about their own technical-scientific and educational methods. Knowledge sharing and production were reciprocal. It was not solely unidirectional from Eastern Europe and the USSR to Ghana (Figure 1.8).

Figure 1.8

“They Hear Talk on Soviet Traditions,” The Ghanaian Times, December 4, 1963.

Graham and Kislev’s early visions on strengthening cultural ties between Ghana and the USSR had gained traction. Cultural and educational ties between the two states gathered momentum and exhibitions were held in both countries to promote knowledge exchanges. In July 1962, twenty-six Soviet acrobatic artists performed in Kumasi in front of Ghanaian dignitaries and toured Ghana.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ That same month, the Ghana–Soviet Friendship Society had been establishedFootnote ¹⁸⁸ and a Soviet industrial exhibition was held in Accra. During the showcase of Soviet socialist industrial might, the Soviets hosted a dinner reception at the Ambassador Hotel in Accra – diplomats, businesspersons, and the Soviet deputy minister of Foreign Trade and Ghanaian cabinet ministers attended.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ In February 1963, the Soviets gave Cape Coast University College about 100 science books and booklets.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ The Ghana Institute of Languages added Russian to its repertoire alongside French, Hausa, German, Arabic, and English.Footnote ¹⁹¹ That same month, Ghana Airways commenced direct flights from Accra to Moscow (Figure 1.9).Footnote ¹⁹² In December, geographical maps and atlases of Ghana and other African countries were featured at an exhibition hosted and curated by the Soviet Academy of Sciences Library in Moscow.Footnote ¹⁹³

Figure 1.9

“Ghana’s Airways service to Moscow,” Daily Graphic, February 3, 1963.

Ghana was not simply a site of geopolitical assistance and relations, but a new destination for and of Soviet leisure and entertainment. In November, six Soviet tourists – men and women – ventured to Ghana.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Their happy faces alongside Ghanaians were captured and reproduced in the Ghanaian papers. By January 8, 1965, the Third Soviet Film Festival in Ghana had been completed. Free admissions permitted anyone in Ghana to enjoy the new Soviet screenings like “Optimistic Tragedy,” “My Friends and Me,” “Your Own Blood,” “The Word about Mother,” and “Hamlet.”Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Ghana–Soviet spaces were not only diplomatic but cultural and leisurely as well. Moreover, people could and did move in and out of and in-between multiple Ghana–Soviet spaces. Most people were not stuck in a solitary Ghana–Soviet space. Nonetheless, at the diplomatic level, Ghana–Soviet spaces were lubricated through words.

Ghanaians and Soviets expressed solidarity and support to each other through honorific praise words. On October 2, 1962, while dining with the Moscow City Soviet members in Moscow, the leader of the Accra City Delegation and head of the Ghana Council for Nuclear Disarmament, C. F. Hughes, dressed in kente, enthusiastically thanked his hosts for a wonderful trip and the “warm heartedness and genuine friendliness” exhibited toward them.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ The Ghanaians reciprocated. After his February 1963 tour of Ghana, Gamid Yelechiyv, the chairman of the Azerbaijan Republican Committee of the Building and Industrial Building Materials Workers’ Union and Head of the Soviet Trade Union delegation, apparently declared in Moscow that “Wherever we went in the country (Ghana), we felt the warmth of friendship.” Moreover, he pledged that the Soviets would “substantially contribute to the economic development of the new Ghana.”Footnote ¹⁹⁷

The Soviets continued to lavish praise upon and fuel Nkrumah’s anticolonial positions with the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962. After receiving the award at the Ghanaian State House in July, Nkrumah noted that the “medal … represented a moral force generated by the burning desire of people of all nations for peace.” Dmitirij Skobeltzyn, the chairman of the International Committee of the Lenin Peace Prize, praised Nkrumah’s liberation and anticolonial efforts: “Osagyefo is a man who had devoted all of his life to the liberation of peoples from colonial oppression.” Moreover, Skobeltzyn called Nkrumah “one of the most prominent leaders of the new Africa” and quoted several of Nkrumah’s most memorable ideas, such as “the liberation of Ghana will be meaningless unless it is linked with the total liberation of the African continent,” that colonialism was one of the “greatest of evils of our times,” and the need to “abolish colonialism” and that world peace, and lasting peace, was inextricably tied to the abolishment of colonialism on the African continent.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ G. M. Rodionov, the Soviet ambassador to Ghana, on Nkrumah’s birthday on September 21, 1964, penned a piece in The Spark, insisting that “every Soviet citizen” knew Nkrumah “as an outstanding leader of [the] national-liberation movement in Africa, an implacable opponent of colonialism and neo-colonialism, devoted and tireless advocate of the consolidation of peace and friendship among all the nations.” Rodionov informed Ghanaians that the Soviets “appreciated” Nkrumah for seeking to “strengthen relations between Ghana and the USSR,” that all three of Nkrumah’s books had been translated into Russian and were “in wide circulation” in the USSR. They could be “found on the shelves of all public libraries, reading rooms, as well as in the many personal libraries of Soviet workers, peasants and intellectuals.”Footnote ¹⁹⁹

Nasriddinova praised the warm and friendly attitude Ghanaians accorded her and her touring party. She also lauded Nkrumah, Ghana’s socialist project, and Ghana’s quest for African liberation. She praised Ghana for choosing “the road to socialism” and for its “efforts towards the unity and freedom of the entire continent of Africa.” Moreover, Nasriddinova toasted the “talented and hard-working people of Ghana, to the strong and unbreakable friendship between the peoples of the Soviet Union and the Republic of Ghana, to the outstanding statesman of our time and our sincere friend, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, and to universal peace.” In response to Nasriddinova, Nkrumah noted that Ghana “was pleased to associate herself with the highly advanced countries of which the Soviet Union is one.”Footnote ²⁰⁰

Despite the effervescent adulation showered by both parties to one another, Nkrumah’s response to Nasriddinova underscored that Ghana continued to view the Soviets as one of its partners, and not its sole partner. Yet, what was apparent was the key role high-ranking Ghanaian and Soviet women played in strengthening and urging further ties between the two states. In addition, whether or not Rodionov’s claims about the widespread distribution and knowledge of Nkrumah’s books in the USSR were entirely accurate, his and Nasriddinova’s statements do perhaps speak to the Soviets’ need to acknowledge Nkrumah as both a statesman and an intellectual, and Ghana as a key conduit of global anticolonialist and anti-imperialist struggles and as a radical site of decolonization theories.

Gift exchanges between the two sides further served to cement the relationship. In the USSR, an “Armenia-born Soviet sculptor” created a “sculpture” of Nkrumah and “handed” it to Ghana’s ambassador to the USSR, J. B. Elliott.Footnote ²⁰¹ In February 1963, an eight-person Soviet trade and economic mission was “honoured” at the Ambassador hotel in Accra.Footnote ²⁰² Nkrumah followed moments of Soviet scientific prowess by congratulating Khrushchev.Footnote ²⁰³ The two leaders exchanged New Year pleasantriesFootnote ²⁰⁴ and happy birthday wishes.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Nkrumah’s wife, Madam Fathia Nkrumah, their two children, and their entourage vacationed in the Soviet Union in 1961.Footnote ²⁰⁶ As a token of goodwill, the Soviets bequeathed Nkrumah’s son, Gamal Kwame Nkrumah, a pair of “special shoes” and two more upon request, as the child loved the shoes.Footnote ²⁰⁷ In an October 1963 Ghanaian National Assembly Parliamentary session, the Ghanaian speaker placed a vase gifted to him by the Soviet delegation on the center table for everyone in parliament to witness.Footnote ²⁰⁸ Both the small gift and its placement at the center of the Ghanaian parliament were indicative of a broader shift in Ghana’s attitudes toward the Eastern power and the Soviet Union’s growing prominence in Ghana’s foreign policies.

Just as geopolitical concerns over Western efforts to destabilize the Congo and undermine Black freedom bolstered Nkrumah and Khrushchev’s relationship, so too did Western attempts to sow division, fear, and to destabilize Black freedom in Ghana through violence and assassination attempts on Nkrumah’s life. In August 1962, a young girl presented a bouquet of flowers to Nkrumah at Kulungugu, northern Ghana. Unbeknownst to the child, a bomb was placed in the flowers and it exploded.Footnote ²⁰⁹ While Nkrumah suffered minor injuries from the incident, four people, including the child, were killed and another fifty-six were injured.Footnote ²¹⁰ Subsequently, Nkrumah postponed his vacation plans to the Soviet Union later that year.Footnote ²¹¹ On September 9, while 2,000 people gathered around the Flagstaff House to support Nkrumah, another bomb exploded, killing 3 children, and injuring another 63. A few weeks later, two explosions rocked Accra “during a torchlight parade … honoring” Nkrumah’s “53rd birthday.” Six people, “mostly young supporters of Nkrumah,” died from the attacks.Footnote ²¹² These attacks on the eve of Queen Elizabeth II’s highly anticipated visit to Ghana nearly derailed it. After the British monarch’s very celebrated visit, bomb attacks in Ghana continued. In the beginning of 1963, a grenade exploded in Accra “shortly after” Nkrumah’s speech. While Nkrumah was unharmed, another four were killed and eighty-five were hurt. Many more would suffer emotional and psychological trauma. Not all was merry in Ghana. Scribbled on buildings in Ghana’s capital were the words: “NKRUMAH ABDICATE OR MORE BOMBS.”Footnote ²¹³ A wave of terror had descended upon the nation – and Nkrumah. Some in the African-American media landscape wondered publicly whether the Kulungugu attack “was a full-scale Russian plot to gain their long-wanted foothold in Africa.”Footnote ²¹⁴ George Padmore, who had alerted Nkrumah to assassination plots against him during the colonial days, was no longer alive. New confidants were needed. Whether or not the attacks were US, Soviet, or Ghanaian-inspired, Nkrumah turned toward the USSR to bolster his security arrangements.

Nkrumah’s health became a subject of deep concern for Khrushchev. Khrushchev sent Nkrumah a personal security guard and encouraged Nkrumah to stay the course against Western imperialism: “We (the Soviets) are quite sure that the people of Ghana will under your leadership overcome all the difficulties and will defeat all intrigues of imperialists and internal reactionaries.” Khrushchev continued, “Ghana is not alone in Her (sic) just fight, She (sic) has true and reliable friends.”Footnote ²¹⁵ Soon, Soviet security personnel occupied essential positions in Nkrumah’s presidential guard.Footnote ²¹⁶ From delegations to birthday wishes, a new attitude of friendliness expressed from Cape Coast to Moscow underlined a new reckoning between Ghanaians and the Soviets. Ghanaians increasingly identified with the Soviet socialist experiment as an intellectual, ideological, and economic barometer and mirror of what Ghana could follow and learn from. The closer Ghana–Soviet relations became at the state level, the more anxiety and overblown reports emanated from the West.

Like the Soviets who thought Ghana’s increasingly friendly policies and relations with the West were due to Western pressure, some American lawmakers and British officials and scholars framed Ghana’s bourgeoning relationship with the Soviets as a result of Soviet cunning and African stupidity. In a May 16, 1962, letter to C. T. E. Ewart-Biggs in the British Foreign Office, R. W. H. du Boulay noted that

Political Scientist Thompson argued that the Soviet ambassador to Ghana, Georgi Rodinov, from 1962 to 1966, completely “dominated the diplomatic scene in Accra” and had a “great influence” on Nkrumah.Footnote ²¹⁸ Quite astonishingly, Thompson claimed that the Soviets “encouraged him [Nkrumah] to speak out on precisely the issues where Russia did (and Ghana did not) have interests; out of vanity he did speak out.”Footnote ²¹⁹ In Britain’s “1965 Annual Information Review” about British propaganda efforts in Accra, P. R. Spendlove, the director of Britain’s Information Services in Ghana, bemoaned that the “Russians have it all their own way in Ghana.” Playing to the idea that Nkrumah’s government and Ghanaians were communist stooges, Spendlove alleged that Ghana “unhesitating(ly) accept(ed) Government, Party, Press and radio of communist postures on almost every conceivable question and their automatic rejection of the British case.” Spendlove complained that the Ghanaian Times and Evening News simply copied and pasted “news items and features” from the Soviet embassy’s daily bulletins. Spendlove concluded that Soviet officials frequented and yielded tremendous influence over Ghana’s “press, radio and information apparatus.” Furthermore, he alleged that Russians distributed “reading material in English on a prodigious scale, gratis and for sale.” While Spendlove was delighted that the Ghana–Soviet Friendship Societies, which brought Soviet speakers and showcased and discussed Soviet film and literature, had been shut down, he noted that the two states had “a generous two-way visitors’ programme, a vigorous scholarship scheme, readily accepted training facilities for journalists and radio people and regular book presentations.”Footnote ²²⁰

However, the US State Department rubbished claims that Ghana was a Soviet puppet (Figure 1.10). “In our judgement,” the US State Department noted in July 1963,

Indeed, it is undeniable that Ghana’s trade with every country, including the Soviets, bar the UK, increased, and in some cases, quite dramatically so, from its conception on March 6, 1957. This was deliberate and did not mean Ghana’s early leaders had become beholden to the Eastern Bloc. To secure Black state sovereignty and blunt the white supremacist geopolitical structures and powers, the new state had to diversify its economy and foreign relations.

Figure 1.10

“Ghana is No Satellite of Russia,” Daily Graphic, July 16, 1963.

Indeed, Ghana’s leaders actively mediated conflicts between and within the Afro-Asian Bloc and the Communist world. While Khrushchev campaigned for “peaceful co-existence between capitalism and socialism,” China’s leader, Mao Zedong, pushed for a violent confrontation, a revolution, against imperialism and capitalism.Footnote ²²² Addressing the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference in 1963, Nkrumah called on “China and the Soviet Union” to “eliminate their differences.”Footnote ²²³ While that fight was brewing, another between China and India was breaking at the seams. This battle was not ideological, per se, but territorial.Footnote ²²⁴

Ghana employed the spirit of Bandung to soothe tensions between China and India. Ghana joined Burma, Cambodia, Egypt, and Indonesia at the Colombo Conference in Sri Lanka in December 1962 to try and stop the clash between the Asian powers. A few years later, in January 1964, Nkrumah employed the spirit of Bandung to make present and future claims for peace in front of the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai and a party of Chinese state officials. Nkrumah commented that “we adhere so steadfastly to the five principles of co-existence established at Bandung, namely, respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in each other’s affairs, equality and mutual benefit and co-existence.”Footnote ²²⁵ During their bilateral discussions with China, Ghana brought up the “state of the Sino-Indian border since the Colombo Conference.” In response, China thanked “the peaceful efforts made by Ghana and other Colombo powers” on the issue.Footnote ²²⁶

Ghana feared that discord, particularly military collisions, within the Afro-Asian Bloc would destabilize projections of Afro-Asian geopolitical solidarity, undercutting Black sovereignty. Ghana’s efforts to navigate the split between the Chinese and the Soviets and the Chinese and the Indians highlight the Black state’s continued attempts to carve out their own independent space within a neocolonial global order and the fracturing Communist and the Afro-Asian blocs. Despite their internal beliefs and policy decisions, Ghana avoided the appearance of favoring either the Chinese, Indians, or Soviets. Instead, Ghanaian policymakers urged state and party officials to adopt a strict policy of neutrality.Footnote ²²⁷ Neutrality did not imply standing on the sidelines, however. Far from being a puppet state or bullied into relations or non-relations with foreign powers by other powers, Ghana followed a foreign policy of Black sovereignty.

Conclusion

This chapter has re-historicized Ghana’s relationship with the USSR through the prisms of race, white supremacy, and African agency. Discourses of race and neocolonialism were more central to defining the terms of Ghana’s geopolitical positioning than the capitalist and communist ideological framework of the Cold War. Once viewed as a bastion of anti-racial and anticolonial support, the Soviet alliance with Germany, its refusal to support Ethiopia, and its treatment of Black dissidents in the USSR in the 1930s underscored to Blacks that they were on their own. In the minds of Ghana’s early leaders, there was no serious distinction between white imperial empires where Black independence was concerned. From this vantage point, swapping one set of white masters for another was a central concern and would not happen. A contemporary of the period, David E. Apter wrote: “Nkrumah never had any intention of jeopardizing [Ghana’s] autonomy by allowing Ghana to fall into the Soviet Union’s crocodile jaws.”Footnote ²²⁸

Rather than rush into foreign policy and economic deals with white empires, at independence, Ghana sought to restructure its economy away from its colonial and neocolonial trappings. As Ghana increasingly saw the Soviets as necessary and amenable to achieving this goal, it expedited its relations with the Eastern empire. Anxieties over another “white” imperial power manipulating Ghana’s leaders reverberated in London, Moscow, and Washington, DC. These concerns were underlined and motivated by two overlapping ideas. First, a conscious or unconscious racist worldview that Black people were feebleminded, naïve, and susceptible to seductive white rhetoric. This assumption and presumption shaped the imperial white powers’ geopolitical conclusions and discourses about Ghana’s actions. That is, white supremacist thinking was deeply embedded within their geopolitical considerations. Second, if each white power claimed that the other white power controlled Ghana’s actions, then, it actually demonstrates that Ghana dictated its own actions and policies despite public and private pronouncements to the contrary. Subsequently, there was an ironic cognitive (perhaps unironic) dissonance at play amongst the white imperial powers and certain scholars.

After Padmore’s death and the Soviet Union’s support for the murdered Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba and African liberation, a shift in Ghana’s foreign policy attitudes toward the Soviets commenced and Ghana increasingly considered the Soviets as sympathetic to Black liberation. Consequently, a new geopolitical reality and set of attitudes between the Ghanaians and Soviets were being expressed from Cape Coast to Moscow. This was underlined through a series of cultural, diplomatic, economic, personal, and social exchanges. What had hitherto been absent in the history of Ghana–Soviet relations had become a reality. Exchanges in the spheres of culture, economics, education, military, politics, science, sports, and tourism commenced. In the public glare and domain, Ghana–Soviet leaders and officials toasted each other, published photographs with each other, bestowed awards and titles to each other, and celebrated each other’s successes and birthdays. Visa fees between the two were abolished. Individual travel between the two nations was now possible and further enhanced by the establishment of flights between Accra and Moscow. As Nasriddinova’s and Yelechiyv’s visits to Ghana and Ghanaian visits to non-Soviet Russia demonstrated, Ghanaians encountered and studied people and places from the vast Soviet empire. Present-day “Russia” was neither the sole nor the only image people in Ghana had or knew about the Soviets despite at times labeling entire Soviet spaces and people, “Russian.” The events outlined in this chapter represented a radical break from Ghana’s political history. Hitherto, there had been minimal to no political connections with the Soviet Union. Consequently, taken together, these moments outlined a new geopolitical awakening. The Ghana–Soviet space was being forged within and parallel to Black freedom.

Chapter 2 moves from the diplomatic and political to the technoscientific and social Ghana–Soviet space. It zooms into two sites: a cotton textile mill Soviet technicians were supposed to construct in Tamale, northern Ghana, and the Soviet Geological Survey Team (SGST). As we will read, these Ghana–Soviet spaces were hijacked by everyday Ghanaians seeking to make citizenship claims. In effect, they became zones of contested liberation.

Introduction

On October 15, 1966, nearly ten months after the National Liberation Council (NLC) instigated a Western-inspired coup d’état against the Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah while he was on route to China,Footnote ¹ the London-based West Africa newspaper published a story about the impending arrival in Ghana of a Texan cotton ginning specialist from the Murray Company to Ghana. The Texan was slated to supervise the construction of a £60,000 cotton textile manufacturing factory in Tamale, Northern Ghana, and to “train Ghanaians” in the processes of cotton ginning. The Americans had an ambitious remit – to initially hire twenty people to produce about 4 million yards “of ginned cotton annually,” and then rapidly scale up its operations to support a larger workforce. The West Africa claimed that the textile factory was the first of its kind.Footnote ² Yet, contrary to the West Africa’s claims, the imminent American-assisted cotton mill factory in Tamale was not the first attempted in Ghana. An earlier Soviet-sponsored cotton mill factory conceived under Nkrumah’s government had been initiated, stagnated, and then never completed. On this front, this chapter builds on historian Maxim Matusevich’s insightful analysis and rebuke of Soviet construction projects in 1970s and 1980s postcolonial Nigeria – “From Never-ending Surveys to Never-beginning Construction.”Footnote ³

The two Ghana–Soviet projects and spaces, the cotton textile mill and the Soviet Geological Survey Team (SGST), were meant to represent the literal and metaphorical rupture from the past and reflect a newly imagined socialist decolony and future. As anthropologist Andrew Apter notes, these scientific-technical projects were part of a broader intellectual effort to reject a “return to [African] origins,” an Africa that existed prior to European contact, as “the only way toward final [African] emancipation and self-determination.”Footnote ⁴ While the Soviet-sponsored cotton mill and other economic initiatives in Ghana were supposed to embody Ghana’s new postcolonial socialist modernity and highlight the benefits, opportunities, and possibilities of Soviet partnership, these dreams never fully materialized due to contestations over environmental and worker safety concerns, questions over financial sourcing, and political will. Consequently, in some sense, the mill represented what I call phantom second–third world collaboration and the failure to unite postcolonial optimism and rhetoric with action. They represent and characterize unfulfilled Soviet economic policy in Africa and the tragic optimism and suspended dreams of decolonization’s early years in Africa.Footnote ⁵

While those spaces created new forms of knowledge and permitted the social, cultural, political, and economic architects of Ghana to fashion a new socialist society and achieve lasting African liberation, working-poor Ghanaians employed Ghana–Soviet spaces and the idioms of Ghana’s socialist project to orchestrate, highlight, lambast, and challenge ethnic discrimination and favoritism, to contest who had power over their bodies, and to challenge abuse and who could financially benefit from these sites. Indeed, these Ghana–Soviet spaces were sites of contested liberation, Black freedom. These stories – at times converging, tangential, and parallel to each other – go perhaps toward answering historian Asif Siddiqi’s call to determine “whose visions” recovering Africa–Soviet technoscience unveils and permits,Footnote ⁶ how “Africans instrumentalize[d] their agency in these collaborative arrangements,” and how “scientific work – especially the kind that relied on the production and placement of infrastructure into the African landscape – shape[d] the contours of Soviet and African entanglements during the Cold War” and decolonization.Footnote ⁷ These untold stories are as much technical and economic as they are social and political. They offer a window into the vertical and horizontal relations of power and communication between and within Nkrumah’s government and its technical planners, who were caught unawares by the American project. This chapter then uncovers the intimate contacts between African and Soviet personnel and their impact on the literal and metaphorical African landscape within the multifocal lenses and entangled struggles of African and Black freedom, domestic citizenship rights, and a socialist present and future.

* * *

Nkrumah was determined to demonstrate that Africans could govern themselves and establish progressive states. Four months before Ghana’s independence in November 1956, the then prime minister of Colonial Ghana told the colonial Legislative Assembly that “we (Africans) must show that it is possible for Africans to rule themselves, to establish a progressive and independent state and to preserve their national unity.”Footnote ⁸ On Independence Day, March 6, 1957, Nkrumah echoed his earlier sentiments. He roared: “Today from now on, there is a new African in the world! … That new African” was ready to “show that after all, the Black man is capable of managing his own affairs.”Footnote ⁹ This was not just idle rhetoric. Significant financial, emotional, physical, and intellectual capital and resources were devoted to these goals. Because Ghana lacked the financial capital and “technical knowledge and staff” to pursue industrialization independently, it looked to other countries for additional financing and expertise.Footnote ¹⁰ It was from this vantage point that Ghana identified the Soviets as a vital wellspring to quench its industrial and socialist thirst and ambitions. As historian Abena Dove Osseo-Asare masterfully argued, Nkrumah sought “scientific equity” and fought for Ghanaians’ “access” to “global science” and technology.Footnote ¹¹

Despite the economic and infrastructural challenges, the Ghanaian government was determined to establish industries throughout the nation to ensure that the benefits of development were widely distributed, particularly in the British-neglected North. Although the British sought to develop the South, their development projects were poorly constructed and rushed. The Takoradi Harbor – one of Britain’s most celebrated West African colonial constructions from 1919 to 1930 – underscores this reality. Nevertheless, Muslim inhabitants constituted the largest percentage of Ghana’s Northern population. Some of the earliest recordings of Islam’s spread into present-day Ghana can be traced to the present-day Brong Ahafo region around the 1400s, predating Christianity’s arrival. According to Ghana’s 1960 census, Muslims made up to 10–15 percent of the nation’s inhabitants.Footnote ¹² In 1900, the British had forcibly brought the Northern Territories within the orbit of its Gold Coast colony and did not invest in significant industrial or infrastructure projects there.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, the British had relied heavily upon the labor of the enslaved, the incarcerated, and the extremely low paying wage labor of children and adults in the North to prop up industrial projects in the South.Footnote ¹⁴ These migratory patterns mirrored earlier trans-Atlantic slave traffic routes, where Northerners were enslaved and sent to the coast,Footnote ¹⁵ with depopulation occurring in certain Northern areas due to the insecurity wrought by the slave raids.Footnote ¹⁶ By focusing on industrialization “beyond the main centres,”Footnote ¹⁷ Ghana sought to disrupt the legacies of British colonial economic logic and local ontologies – buttressed through centuries of the slave trade and a century of colonialism – that relegated Northerners to second-class status. However, the Soviet-turn to realize this vision was neither apparent nor inevitable.

The Soviet-Turn

After the Caribbean Marxist and close Nkrumah associate and confidant George Padmore died in 1959, and the assassination of the Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba in 1960, with American, Belgian, and UN support, a public project commenced in Ghana to reorient and (re)introduce its population to the wonders of the Soviet experiment and what lessons the new state might draw from it.Footnote ¹⁸ Ghanaian newspapers praised the quality of Soviet goods, industrial development, and technical expertise. In November 1960, the Evening News maintained that Soviet goods were “prepared of high-quality products” due to “strict” Soviet “technical and sanitary control of the quality of food supplies.”Footnote ¹⁹ The papers highlighted the quality and variety of Soviet vehicles: “lorries, tractors, farming and road-building machines, and aircrafts.”Footnote ²⁰ The Ghanaian papers informed the reading public that the Soviets had the “greatest number of skilled engineers and other technical specialists” in the world. Whereas the United States granted 35,000 engineering degrees in 1959, the Soviets had given 106,000. The Ghanaian press noted with amazement how the Soviet government had focused on expanding educational access, particularly in the science and math sectors, and “consolidated and enlarged” their technical colleges, and that 40 percent of its students were studying engineering.Footnote ²¹ They marveled that the USSR had produced as much steel as Britain, France, and West Germany combined after being decimated by World War II.Footnote ²² It was not simply that the Soviets produced scientific and technical advancements, but that they were willing to share it with the formerly colonized peoples. The press praised the Soviets for providing “scientific and technical assistance in the peaceful uses of atomic energy to the U.A.R., Iraq and Indonesia.”Footnote ²³ The Ghanaian press demanded its readers carefully scrutinize the Soviets’ exploits and adopt the Soviet educational method, which favored “production practice” over the American system, which favored “theoretical subjects.”Footnote ²⁴

One article in The Ashanti Pioneer noted in 1962 that “long before the East came into popularity in scientific and technical education, the western world had achieved laurels. But surprisingly, within this era of space exploration, the whole world was taken unaware by the Red’s sudden supremacy through the first conquest of space by Gagarin, the Columbus of space.”Footnote ²⁵ Furthermore, in the Convention People’s Party’s socialist magazine, The Spark, Jack Woddis argued that the “phenomenal advances” and successes of Soviet industrialization undercut the conceptions of the “world economist circles” that states had to pursue light industry before “ending with heavy industry.” Instead, Woddis argued to Ghanaians that “all the socialist countries have demonstrated brilliantly in practice that a drive for basic industrialisation is the quickest way to advance the whole economy and to raise living standards.” In conclusion, Woddis urged African leaders to follow the Soviet economic path.Footnote ²⁶ Africans could skip the steps of modernization. The Soviet model illustrated that Africans could achieve industrialization quickly. In a welcome address on January 16, 1962, to Anastas Mikoyan, the first deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union, John E. Hagan, the regional commissioner of the Central Region, informed his audience that Ghana took with great encouragement the “rapid progress and development in trade, science, and technology that” had taken place in the Soviet Union and hoped that Ghana would encounter similar success within “the next two decades.”Footnote ²⁷

Pro-Soviet and Eastern Bloc stories were not simply intended to offer hagiographic praise or to support Nkrumah’s commitment to geopolitical nonalignment. Instead, they were part of a concentrated movement to dismantle and deconstruct the myth of Western scientific and cultural superiority and anti-Soviet bias, which were introduced and reinforced by Western colonial education and rule. “Our indoctrination in Colonial days has induced … a wary attitude towards Soviet blandishments,” A. W. Snelling, the UK High commissioner in Ghana, admitted to the British secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations on July 8, 1960.Footnote ²⁸ Thus, the Ghanaian press engaged in a deliberate attempt to undo years of British “indoctrination.” Centering Soviet success undercut narratives that situated the West as the sole harbingers and inheritors of modernity and science. The logic was simple. If the Soviets could achieve such industrial success, Africans could also. Unlike the West, which had undergone industrialization through slavery and colonial plunder, the Ghanaian press informed the reading public that the Soviet industrial miracle had occurred while fighting two world wars and without slavery and colonialism.Footnote ²⁹ This narrative glossed over the atrocities committed during Stalin’s tenure and the widespread famines in the Ukraine and Steppe region.Footnote ³⁰ While Nkrumah had denounced Stalin as an imperialist – partly due to those revelations and the USSR’s failure to intervene in Ethiopia in 1935, the Ghanaian media and state divorced Soviet industrialization from the sufferings of Black and African bodies. Thus, while touring the USSR in 1961, Nkrumah could praise the Soviet Union unironically for “welding many Republics and nationalists together into one great country.”Footnote ³¹ It was a task he was trying to accomplish in Ghana and in Africa through his Pan-African ambitions.

Despite the Ghanaian press lauding Soviet technoscience, it was not inevitable that Ghana would accept the Soviet offer to build the cotton textile mill. Numerous foreign companies and investors offered deals to establish a cotton textile mill in Ghana. In 1956, a year before Ghana’s independence, Rickson Fenton of the Jamaican Solomon Armstrong Company wrote to Nkrumah’s office and other British ministries about building a textile mill in Ghana.Footnote ³² Inquiries into building a cotton mill in Ghana accelerated after independence. Companies from Britain, Israel, India, and Germany argued to Ghanaian officials that Ghana possessed a lucrative internal market for cloth, that constructing a cotton mill, with their support, would address local demand and be a boom for the nascent country’s economy.Footnote ³³ In August 1957, a few months after independence, an Israeli firm, Heros Textile Factory, wrote to the Ghanaian Ministry of Commerce and Industry about “establish[ing] a textile and knitting factory in [Ghana] … for the production of cotton piece-goods and all kinds of underwear.” The company “belie[ved], that executing” the mill “will contribute tremendously for the welfare of the citizens of Ghana,” provide jobs, “develop” Ghana’s local “textile … industry,” along with “strengthening … friendly and commercial relations between” Israel and Ghana.Footnote ³⁴ While Ghana’s leadership publicly positioned and projected itself as vital to international affairs, it never lost sight of the local. It knew its credibility simultaneously rested on improving the material conditions of its citizens, including providing jobs to the unemployed. Companies across the world and countries like Israel knew that, and framed their proposals to Ghana in such idioms. The Ghanaian leadership was acutely aware that their domestic and international goals could only be buttressed by reorientating its economy and wealth to provide for its marginalized subjects. In addition, these technical-scientific projects were not simply designed to bolster capital relations between two nations or provide employment to the unemployed, but were integral to reconstructing new geopolitical blocs. The acts of offering, considering, accepting, or rejecting technical economic projects were part and parcel of (re)shaping global geopolitics. They had the capacity to concretely reimagine and bring to life new non-Western and Afro-Asian constellations of power, relations, and politics.Footnote ³⁵ Ultimately, Ghana accepted the Soviets’ proposal because it aligned with Ghana’s domestic and geopolitical ambitions and needs, including training Ghanaians for leadership and technical roles, the Soviet’s commitment to Black freedom, and the Soviet’s willingness to substantially finance the project. It would not solely come from Ghana’s coffers.

While some Ghanaians placed much significance, expectation, and confidence in the Soviets to propel and realize their socialist and industrial ambitions and to dislodge the West’s economic monopoly from its political economy, according to historian Siddiqi, the Soviets framed their scientific missions to Africa “as part of socialism’s march for modernization in the newly decolonized world.”Footnote ³⁶ Yet, both parties needed the other to fulfill their prophecies – whether as an advertisement of Soviet industrial muscle or as a testament of Black liberation and the state as a socialist utopia. Without exaggeration or irony, the minister of Industries informed the regional commissioner of Ghana’s Northern Region about the USSR’s “importance” to Ghana’s economy.Footnote ³⁷ While it is a gross exaggeration to assert that Ghanaians believed “that Ghana could be developed by the Soviet Union alone” and “that there was no further need to pay attention to the West,” Ghana did seek more assistance from the Soviets at this point than at any other moment in its history.Footnote ³⁸ Nkrumah’s frequent demonization of Western imperialism and neocolonialism, Ghana–Soviet economic contracts, and Ghanaian press reports were all part of a campaign to assure an Anglophone-orientated public that an economic and cultural reorientation toward the Soviets was desirable and profitable. It was under this aegis and crusade in 1962 that the Ghanaian government selected Tamale as the site to host the Soviet geological specialists and to build the Soviet cotton textile mill.

Whether or not these Soviet scientists to Ghana considered themselves as such, they were key cogs of Soviet imperial and global ambition. It was a tall and lofty orderFootnote ³⁹ for individuals perhaps traveling to West Africa for the first time and, at times, juggling familial responsibilities.Footnote ⁴⁰ For the Soviet cotton textile team, the task was simple yet difficult – construct a mill in Tamale that could produce 20 million square yards annually.Footnote ⁴¹ The Soviet geologists had to uncover large quantities of water and minerals for the new nation’s development. The Ghanaians inevitably hoped that the Soviet cotton experience would significantly contrast with the violent history of cotton production across Africa.Footnote ⁴²

Cotton Independence: The Soviet Textile Cotton Mill

In 1962 the Ghanaian government eagerly awaited the arrival of five Soviet technicians – chief engineer V. G. Ivliev; the senior engineer on technology, Priklonskya; the senior engineer on electricity, Gzouzdev; the senior engineer on sanitary and sewage; and the interpreter, Menshova – to survey Tamale, in Northern Ghana, for two months to collect information to build the textile mill.Footnote ⁴³ It “was a privilege” for Soviet personnel to travel abroad, even to West Africa, for “assignments.”Footnote ⁴⁴ While Soviet men dominated travel to Ghana during the Nkrumah-era, Ghana–Soviet spaces were not entirely male or single male arenas. Soviet women traveled to Ghana as engineers, politicians, typists, secretaries, teachers, spouses, and mothers.Footnote ⁴⁵ For instance, out of the five Soviet cotton textile specialists who arrived in Accra from Moscow in June 1962, two were women, including the interpreter.Footnote ⁴⁶ While we know little about these figures charged with spearheading Ghana’s cotton independence dreams and creating economic opportunities for its citizens, the progress of history stood behind them. Their success would highlight the transferability of Soviet technical and economic success to Black Africa and the world.

In the 1960s, the Soviets advertised the industrial and social transformations of Soviet Central Asia to formerly colonized countries, particularly its “cotton growing” and “infrastructural large-scale projects,” as signifiers of the wonders of the Soviet economic model.Footnote ⁴⁷ Through cotton production and ideologies of “cotton autonomy,” the Russian Empire and its Soviet incarnation, in part, framed their march to modernity and legitimatized its colonial conquest and civilizational superiority over the local nomadic Turkestan and Central Asian populations.Footnote ⁴⁸ In some measure, the Ghanaians bought into the Soviet developmentalist imperial and colonial myth. The Ghanaian press had also “presented Central Asia as a colonial territory of tsarist Russia that had been liberated by the Soviet Union”Footnote ⁴⁹ and reported on the transformation of Siberia “as a ‘wonderland of technological construction and human progress.’”Footnote ⁵⁰ The seeming technological-scientific transformation of Asiatic USSR provided a blueprint for Ghanaians.

The Ghanaian government selected Tamale as the preferred site for cotton production because it sat comfortably within Nkrumah’s government’s amalgamated liberational, modernist, and socialist lexicons and vision. Situating the mill in Tamale would simultaneously readdress British underdevelopment in the region, provide at least 420 jobs to an area suffering from unemployment (of which women were expected to comprise of at least 20 percent of the workforce),Footnote ⁵¹ “considerably” assist “in opening up the area … to attract more industries,” provide electrical and water supplies for people there, and serve as somewhat of a “blank” canvas on which to paint their vision(s) of socialist modernity.Footnote ⁵²

Unlike the Second World Black and African Festival in Nigeria in 1977, “which rejected the opposition between civilization and barbarism,” according to anthropologist Andrew Apter, and “celebrated themes and objectives … of a distinctive Black and African modernity,” the Ghanaian state mapped the colonial logics of modernity within its internal boundaries while projecting a Black and African socialist modernity internationally.Footnote ⁵³ In the intertwining cosmologies of modernization theory, colonial economics, and doctrinal Marxism, Tamale and Northern Ghana occupied a backward place that could be brought to the fore of modernity. The mill’s construction was part of Ghana’s broader vision to transform its economy from an agriculture-centered one to an industrialized one. As Chapter 4 will point out, the mill was just one of the approximately fifty state industries the new Ghanaian government was constructing or had proposed to build in order to shift economic power away from the West and toward itself.

However, Tamale was not a uniformly popular site to host the mill. Soviet scientists remained unconvinced. The reasons the Ghanaians provided for the necessity of the mill’s construction in Tamale – insufficient electrical power and water supplies – were the same excuses why the Soviets balked at the idea. They pushed their Ghanaian counterparts to explain how Tamale could “augment” its current electrical and water generating capacities to satisfy the factory’s needs.Footnote ⁵⁴ Tamale’s town planners and its electrical engineering division were tasked with solving these concerns. Ghanaian technocrats tied the mill’s fate to the completion of the Volta River Project, also known as the Akosombo Dam, in 1966. Tamale’s planners were confident that the dam would solve electrical capacity and water supply shortages.Footnote ⁵⁵ While scholars like Ali A. Mazrui and Adu Boahen have argued forcefully that the Volta River Project’s terms with Kaiser were neocolonial, Ghanaian technicians and planners tied the success of other state industrial projects to it. Without the dam, Ghana’s socialist industrial dream would evaporate. The dam was both Nkrumah’s “baby” and foundational to creating the state’s energy capacity to “transform the country” and achieve the socialist modernity Nkrumah envisioned.Footnote ⁵⁶

Yet, officials unconvinced by the mill’s necessity or the state’s broader Soviet turn criticized the Soviet engineers’ construction plans.Footnote ⁵⁷ They voiced their concerns in the vernacular of neocolonialism – a term that held much currency and circulation within Ghana.Footnote ⁵⁸ Critics remarked that Ghana would need to import 2,100 tons of cotton annually to produce 20 million square yards. To bleach, print, or finish the gray cloth, the Ghanaian-operated mill would need to send the materials to a British firm in the newly constructed coastal and industrial city of Tema, in southern Ghana.Footnote ⁵⁹ Tying the production and distribution of cotton to British and Western firms and markets was antithetical to the new state’s aspirations and conceptions of itself. These steps increased the possibility that Ghana would further subsume itself within a neocolonial economy before it could break free – realizing Nkrumah’s greatest fear.Footnote ⁶⁰ Ghanaian officials noted that immediate provisions had to be made to ensure that the “utilization … of local raw cotton” was secured to prevent the necessity of importing “the yarn needed at the mill even though cotton will be grown in the Country.”Footnote ⁶¹ Outside of neocolonial concerns, debates over worker safety stalled the project.

After the 1961 workers’ strikes that paralyzed the Ghanaian state and, according to some critics, almost toppled Nkrumah’s government, concerns over the workers’ support for the political regime – which could ebb and flow on issues ranging from pay to safety – could not be dismissed easily. The astute and outspoken British medical doctor, C. S. Hoffman, who served as Ghana’s principal medical officer during this moment, played upon the state’s vulnerability to workers’ concerns in an attempt to halt the mill’s creation – bringing him into direct confrontation with the Soviet chief engineer, Ivliev. Hoffman’s role in Ghana was a curious one. After Nkrumah’s fall in 1966, he was demoted as Ghana’s chief medical officer and appointed as the Central Region’s chief medical officer. Hoffman then became embroiled in a public scandal for distributing “fishing nets received as gifts from foreign donors” in 1969.Footnote ⁶² Ivliev, on the other hand, lacked a sophisticated grasp of Ghana’s domestic political scene, underestimating the Ghanaian state’s vulnerability to mutinous workers and the political sensitivity around worker safety. Hoffman leveraged insider knowledge – the internal contradictions and dialogical relationship between the state and its workers – and contemporary medical data to blunt Ivliev’s offensive and dash Soviet hopes of replicating in Ghana the “industrial success” they had fomented in Central Asia.

Hoffman denounced the Soviet plan for failing to protect workers from byssinosis – a lung disease causing asthma or “chronic bronchitis and emphysema” from the inhaling of cotton dust, particles, flax, and hemp.Footnote ⁶³ Contemporaneous medical knowledge supported and underpinned Hoffman’s assessments. By 1962, the Western medical establishment linked cotton production in factories to byssinosis, dispelling prior beliefs that it was a Lancashire problem and not one endemic to cotton production.Footnote ⁶⁴ Researchers had reached a broad consensus that byssinosis led to “fever(s), headache(s), nausea, vomiting,” a dry cough, “disablement, and death.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Ivliev disagreed with this medical data, arguing that the chances of contracting byssinosis in a factory were “very small.” He remained unconvinced that it was a serious health concern.Footnote ⁶⁶ Byssinosis was not the only health-related dispute the pair clashed over. Ivliev’s analysis often existed in direct opposition to contemporary Western medical theories, suggesting that worker health and safety concerns were exaggerated.

Ivliev dismissed concerns over workers’ mental well-being as overblown – sparking another sharp exchange with Hoffman. Ivliev’s proposed mill lacked daylight and favored luminescent light and air-conditioners to ensure greater worker productivity in the Tamale heat. He justified the plan by referencing the factories in the USSR, Japan, the United States, and India that lacked sunlight provisions. Therefore, Ivliev “saw no objection to the establishment of the factory without daylight.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Hoffman scoffed at Ivliev’s ideas, arguing that fluorescent lamps would create more problems than they would solve. It was “medically unsound … particularly in view of labour accustomed to open-air-life, and with a rustic background” to undergo “8 hours” of “monotonous work in an artificially illuminated ‘tunnel.’” Besides, if the workers adapted to artificial light, Hoffman pointed to recent studies from the UK’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment that radioactive fallout from fluorescent lamps was dangerous. Air-conditioners would also exacerbate, not alleviate, health risks.Footnote ⁶⁸

Multiple health and environmental concerns remained unresolved and hotly contested. Hoffman expressed deep skepticism that air-conditioners would solve heat problems during the dry season. He feared that the workers would contract tuberculosis – a contagious bacterial disease that attacked the lungs. Moreover, Hoffman dismissed the possibility of workers working during the night, using fluorescent lamps, to avoid the brunt of the heat, and remained skeptical that the workers could overcome this issue with mental fortitude, as though it was “Matter Over Mind,” as Ivliev had wryly suggested. Hoffman cited the work of leading Western industrial psychologists who declared that “every effort should be made to provide the worker with a congenial [work] environment.” Hoffman concluded that it was only through this means that workers would become optimally efficient and alert, resulting in fewer work accidents (and fewer workers’ compensation claims!). The Ghanaian chief medical doctor urged the Northern Regional minister to contact R. S. P. Schilling, a leading professor of Industrial Medicine and Occupational Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, to substantiate his claims.Footnote ⁶⁹ The issue of environmental waste was also left unresolved.

Initial discussions in 1962 called for the factory’s waste to be mixed with “the domestic wastes, and treated by a suitable sized septic tank followed by oxidation ponds.” A Ghanaian technician, R. Quist-Arcton, was adamant that the Mill’s “proprietors” bear the “responsibility” for the “proper treatment of the waste water.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Yet, toward the end of 1963, C. K. Annan, the chief Ghanaian engineer in Tamale, remained concerned about how and where the factory’s waste would be disposed, amplifying calls for the creation “a proper … disposal system.” Annan hoped that addressing this matter could actually be the “basis of a future sewage disposal system for Tamale.”Footnote ⁷¹

The local government faced competing opinions on the mill’s potential health impacts on workers, the need to increase the economic viability of Ghana’s Northern Region, and the local government’s ability to spearhead, shepherd, and construct a functioning, developmentalist factory with international partners. While engaged in strong debates, Ghanaian technocrats, survey and land specialists, engineers, the regional commissioner of the Northern Region, and the Soviet specialists concluded that the factory’s need to provide “employment to the people in the Northern Region” should take precedence over the potential health risks.Footnote ⁷² The factory had to be built. Ivliev’s position had won.

As the end of 1965 approached, three years after the Hoffman–Ivliev debates, the mill’s fate and location remained opaque, however. On December 18, 1963, Annan informed Kodjo Tsikata that “we still do not know where this factory would be built in Tamale.”Footnote ⁷³ Annan was informed, however, that the factory would no longer be built in 1965 but in 1966. Annan wrote that the new date of 1966 was desirable as it gave them “time to plan and provide the necessary service by the due date.” On January 21, 1964, G. Aidoo, the new secretary to the regional commissioner of the Northern Region, suspected that the mill would be built in Tamale’s burgeoning industrial area, but needed confirmation from Tamale’s town planning officer.Footnote ⁷⁴ On February 1, almost two years after the Soviets had arrived in Ghana to establish the mill, the Northern and Upper regions’ town planning officer wrote to the principal secretary of the Ministry of Industries that no communication had occurred between his office and the mill planners’ about the mill’s location since July 1962. While the town planning officer was not against building the cotton mill in Tamale, he requested a “copy of the final site plan, or, better still, the proposed layout plan of the Mill” to finalize Tamale’s industrial area, where the mill would feature prominently.Footnote ⁷⁵ On August 31, 1965, a year after the last letter, the new secretary of the regional commissioner, A. Okyere-Twum, begged the Ministry of Industries to “be kind enough to let me [them] know what the position” of building the mill in Tamale continued to be.Footnote ⁷⁶ After three years of negotiation, surveys, and discussions between the Ghanaians and Soviets to build the mill, the factory remained little more than a fanciful blueprint.

The mill’s financing also remained murky. Annan noted that the planning remained conditional “of course that necessary funds bec[a]me available for work required.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Two years into the proposed project, it was unclear whether the factory would be funded and why a definite answer to the question had remained elusive. The Soviet leadership began to question deep financial commitments in West Africa. “By the time of Khrushchev’s demise as First Secretary of the CPSU in October 1964,” historian Alessandro Iandolo argued, “the Soviet presence in Guinea and Ghana was reduced to some advisers and a few uncompleted projects.”Footnote ⁷⁸ As October 11, 1965, approached, Okyere-Twum felt weary and anxious about the sluggishness of the mill’s development and the continued silence from the Ministry of Industries, prompting a further letter to Imoru Egala, the minister of Industries’ principal secretary, insisting that he would “be grateful … to learn what progress has so far been made” on the Soviet-led textile mill in Tamale.Footnote ⁷⁹

Okyere-Twum’s exasperation juxtaposed with the initial optimism that attended the mill’s beginnings. Perhaps the Ghanaian leadership had wished they had signed a deal for the mill with a different entity. After a long hiatus, the principal secretary finally responded on October 18, indicating to the regional commissioner that the Ministry was still deliberating the mill’s feasibility. Thus, it came as a huge a surprise to everyone when, a year after the coup, the West Africa announced the impending American mill in Tamale. Perhaps the Soviet Geological Survey Team had found better fortune.

Mineral Independence: The Soviet Geological Survey Team

Ghana had an “expressed policy … to vigorously exploit all mineral resources of the country to bolster rapid industrialisation.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Locating copious amounts of precious minerals and metals that could be exported to overseas markets in exchange for precious foreign cash reserves was crucial to furthering the state’s domestic agenda. At that moment, the Ghanaian government was overly reliant on cocoa exports for foreign capital. However, the price of cocoa was dwindling. Like its dreams of cotton independence, Ghana linked the Soviets to its vision of mineral independence.

In December 1958, Ghana welcomed Soviet scientists and diamond experts to explore how best to streamline and tap into the nation’s natural resources.Footnote ⁸¹ On August 4, 1959, Ghana requested Soviet aid to construct a semi-large metallurgic plant and hoped that the Soviets could help locate and excavate large iron ore deposits off the Ghanaian coast.Footnote ⁸² Western geologists had previously surveyed Ghana’s iron ore deposits and concluded that Ghana was “unsuitable and uneconomic for [ore] exploitation.” Nkrumah hoped that Khrushchev’s geologists might find a more favorable answer. He was not disappointed. Three Soviet geologists arrived in Ghana and provided a more encouraging response within the first two months of 1960.Footnote ⁸³ Nkrumah thanked Khrushchev for the reports and wondered whether the Soviets would assist in constructing an iron and steel plant in Ghana in light of their findings.Footnote ⁸⁴ Ghana soon signed “an agreement with the U.S.S.R. Government for technical assistance for geological survey and mapping, revision prospecting and hydrogeological survey through the entire country.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Other African states had followed Ghana’s lead in bringing Soviet geological specialists to their countries. Throughout the 1960s, Soviet scientists surveyed other African countries’ mineral deposits.Footnote ⁸⁶ Despite having twelve vacancies, fifty-five Soviet geological specialists would arrive in Ghana to undertake one of the most important surveys in the new nation’s history. Their number was significantly larger than the team sent to build the cotton textile mill.Footnote ⁸⁷ While Tamale would headquarter the SGST’s operations, the Soviet specialists resided and operated in numerous cities and towns across the country, particularly in the North.Footnote ⁸⁸

The Soviets insisted they were going “to Ghana to find the minerals ‘which the Imperialists have missed.’”Footnote ⁸⁹ Indeed, they had also been particularly interested in doing a deep geological exploration of Ghana’s known manganese ore, gold, cement, and salt deposits in addition to Nkrumah’s requests.Footnote ⁹⁰ Historian Siddiqi notes that the Soviets used “scientific research” as a “euphemism” for prospecting the “natural resources of the locale.”Footnote ⁹¹ Moreover, as historian Robyn d’Avignon argues, such “work” was predicated on the prior geological knowledge of local African interlocutors and prospectors.Footnote ⁹² Soloviev, the Soviet’s geological chief specialist, admitted as much, noting the Soviets would be exploring “already known” deposits in Yakow-Himakrom Kalimbi, Dokurupe, and Yoyo “to find out the expediency of detailed prospecting there.”Footnote ⁹³

On May 13, 1962, in Tamale, K. Amoa-Awuah, Ghana’s deputy minister of Industries, at the official launch of the Soviet Geological Survey project, acknowledged that Africans and Europeans had conducted prior geological surveying and speculating in Ghana. “Over the past few years,” Amoa-Awuah noted, “our Geological Survey Department has completed a reconnaissance survey over the whole country. In the course of this reconnaissance survey, all rocks that outcrop have been examined and the manganese ores, the bauxite and the diamond fields that were discovered are now being worked.” Amoa-Awuah continued, “Although the Department has also discovered more gold d[e]posits, the greater part of our known gold deposits were discovered by African prospectors long before the Europeans first came to our shores. In the North, the Survey has discovered Iron deposits at Shievi, gold in Nangodu and Banda, and limestone in Daboya.” Indeed, the deputy minister pointed out that while Africans and Europeans had found surface-level mineral deposits, he hoped that the Soviets’ much vaunted technical prowess and skills, which had been echoed and outlined in the Ghanaian press, could locate “those minerals which do not reveal themselves by surface indications.” Amoa-Awuah reminded the remaining skeptics that if Ghana’s own Geological Survey department could undertake this enormous expenditure and task, the Ghanaian state would not be seeking Soviet assistance. However, this work was necessary and “clearly beyond the present capacity of our [Ghanaian] geological Survey Department, and that is why the Government decided to seek technical assistance in this field from various countries, particularly the Soviet Union.”Footnote ⁹⁴ As with the case with most Ghana–Soviet projects, the USSR was one of many countries or firms Ghana discussed terms with before accepting the Soviet’s proposal. Besides minerals, the Soviets were also searching for water deposits that would help alleviate water shortages in the area.

Historian Iandolo argues that geological experts in Ghana, whose knowledge of the area the Soviets needed to tap into, were less than enthused with the Soviets’ impending arrival. Iandolo noted that local geologists “resented” Soviet geologists “meddling in their area of competence.” They complained to the government that their geological surveys would be “greatly impaired if the Soviet team, for the next three years, is allowed to hop about all over the country checking the work of the rightful local geological Survey.” They warned that “Two cooks in one kitchen have many problems, but to ask them to cook in the same pot at the same time brings chaos.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Even after political independence, former British colonial officials and technicians were still employed in the Ghana Geological Survey Department.Footnote ⁹⁶ It is possible that the continued presence of British officials and technicians in Ghana’s geological survey department spurred some of the initial resentment against the incoming Soviet geologists. It would have been part of a broader British effort to limit or stifle the increasing Soviet presence in Ghana and arrest Britain’s diminishing power in their former colony.

But, there were already more than two cooks in the proverbial pot. Before the Soviets, Yugoslav and Rumanian geologists were already operating in Ghana. Furthermore, Polish engineers assisted Ghana’s geological survey team to conduct a “geological investigation” of Ghana’s iron ore deposits in the Shieni area in the Northern Region. Ghanaian officials also expected a team of eleven Polish geological specialists to conduct further investigations into those deposits concurrently with the Soviet geological specialists.Footnote ⁹⁷ Consequently, the Ghanaian principal secretary was worried about the duplication of teams and that the Ghanaian team, which was already understaffed by 50 percent, would be stretched even thinner.Footnote ⁹⁸

Despite the misgivings of some Ghanaian technocrats, cabinet officials stressed the importance of collaboration between all Ghanaian stakeholders and the Soviets to make the Soviet Geological Survey Team, this Ghana–Soviet space, a success. “The importance which Osagyefo the President and the Government attach to this project cannot be over-emphasised,” noted Amoa-Awuah. “Such is the importance of the task,” Amoa-Awuah spoke, “that we [Ghana] trust that only the experts of the highest professional calibre may be deputed by the Government of the Soviet Union to the Republic of Ghana, so as to enable us to accomplish it in the shortest possible time.”Footnote ⁹⁹ “I am counting on you,” Edusei pressed upon Bawumia, “to seek co-operation of your District Commissioners, Chiefs and the people in your Region to facilitate the assignment of the Soviet team of Geologists.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

While some technocrats found the surveys unnecessary or redundant, other high officials in less economically developed areas pushed for their regions to be included in the survey. They believed that Soviet intervention would procure active benefits to their constituents. A. Asumda, the regional commissioner of the Upper Region, wrote to the minister of Industries on May 16, 1962, begging for the Soviet hydrological survey to include the Upper Region and not just the Northern Region. “I consider that the Upper Region,” he wrote, “deserves consideration for inclusion in the programme especially for a hydrological survey in view of its dense population and the recurrent incident of water shortages.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ The commissioner then went on to offer concrete ways localities in the Upper Region could be incorporated into the SGST’s survey plans. Asumda believed that the Soviets’ work would bring concrete development to the area and lobbied for their involvement. Egala agreed. He assured Asumda that the survey would include the Upper Region, writing “… there should be no apprehension about part of the Upper Region not being covered.”Footnote ¹⁰² Moreover, Krobo Edusei informed A. M. Bibochkin, the Soviet chief of the Ministry of Geology, that hydrogeological work was necessary in “supplying the most needy towns and villages with drinking water.” Thus, it was important the Soviets pay considerable “attention” to the “Northern and Upper Regions.”Footnote ¹⁰³ While some officials believed the impending Soviet geological program would benefit their community, farmers operating in or around SGST designated areas were going to lose their crops and potentially their livelihoods. The state placed the burden on those affected to “collect all claims and pass them on to Lands Secretariat for verification” and hopefully compensation.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ While there was a compelling government and local incentive to locate additional water reservoirs to alleviate chronic water shortages in certain parts of the country, livelihood and crop destruction and displacement were guaranteed.

The pace at which the Soviet Geological Survey Team was formed meant that no funds had been allocated to it. Consequently, the minister of Industries wrote to the budget secretariat to manipulate the budget or raise an extra £G639,200 to finance the SGST’s first year, or else the SGST’s efforts would be protracted or halted.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As Krobo Edusei noted, “No sacrifice on the part of any Ghanaian would be too great, in view of the ultimate benefit of the results of the geological work being undertaken by the Soviet team.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Thus, it was important for government officials to manipulate the annual state budget to finance the SGST operations. In addition, Ghanaian officials tasked their subjects with providing free food,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ renting or selling their guest and rest houses, chalets, or properties,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ procuring household items such as wardrobes, table lamps, writing desks, or releasing funds immediately for the “erection” of bungalows, and other furniture for the incoming Soviets. They also pushed citizens to construct water tankers for the Soviets due to the “heavy shortage of Water.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ All these tasks were urgent, and the government wanted its impacted citizens to know that there was no sacrifice or gesture too small or large to realize its socialist project through Soviet assistance. The Ghanaian geologists and locals accepted the mandate to provide Soviet experts with “maximum co-operation” and “provision.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ With those directives from above, Ghana’s leading geologist, J. E. Cudjoe, ignored his colleagues’ earlier concerns and swallowed his pride and toured the Northern Region with his Soviet counterparts in February 1962.

As the cotton mill’s progress was stalling, the Ghanaian government pushed the Soviet geologists to follow their timelines and guidelines. This was part of a larger attempt by Ghanaian officials to extract the maximum work and benefit from Soviet cooperation. While the Soviet geologists wished to provide preliminary reports after the end of their three-year term, the Ghanaians believed that this was “not enough work.” Instead, the Ghanaians wanted a detailed report after twelve months showing: (1) a “Geological map of the whole area to be surveyed”; (2) a “mineral map showing the distribution of minerals in the area; (3) a “Hydro-Geological map showing the occurrence of underground water; and (4) “Other minor information.” In short, the Ghanaian state wanted a report on the “most promising areas for further work” and “an indication of the amount of our [Ghana’s] reserves of the mineral deposits they may discover.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Ghana was in a rush. It was in a hurry to untap and unleash the economic potential of Black liberation and delink itself from foreign capital and its constraints. Moreover, its concurring experience in another Ghana–Soviet space, the mill, propelled them to closely monitor the Soviets in the geological sphere if they wanted to reach their nirvana quickly.

Contested Liberation and Freedom Zones: Discrimination and Citizenship Claims

As unemployment persisted in Ghana, word about job opportunities within this Ghana–Soviet space spread quickly among the population.Footnote ¹¹² Ghanaians from across the country sent handwritten letters to Imoru Egala, the principal secretary for the Ministry of Industries, offering their services to the SGST. For instance, on May 29, 1962, twenty-four-year-old Japhet R. K. Dzebu from the Ho District, Volta Region, expressed a desire “to apply for the vacancy existing in the Soviet Geological Team as a Motor Mechanic.” Twenty-one-year-old Stephen Darkey from Koforidua, Eastern Region, sought employment as a “Pupil Laboratory Assistant.” On May 30, twenty-five-year-old Samuel K. Aidoo from Agona Nyakrom, Ashanti Region, requested employment as a “Draughtsman or an Assistant Surveyor.” Aidoo continued: “I beg to offer myself for employment with the Soviet Geological Team or in any of your Departments.” To support their case, all of the applicants referenced their positionality to the state, particularly that they were Ghanaian citizens. For instance, Dzebu wrote that he possessed “a Ghanaian nationality,” while Darkey conveyed that he was a “Ghanaian by birth.” As the following chapter will highlight, claims to citizenship by birth were dubious since anyone older than three was too old to have been born a Ghanaian. Instead, they were born as British colonial subjects. Besides attempting to prove their subjectivity and loyalty to the new state, the writers included their educational and professional qualifications in their letters. They hoped that the totality of these markers would make them suitable for employment in the new Ghana–Soviet space.Footnote ¹¹³

Not only were there immediate employment opportunities in the Ghana–Soviet space, but the Ghanaian government included a provision in their agreement with the Soviets to train Ghanaian geological assistants. Amoa-Awuah outlined the government’s Africanization goals in relation to the SGST team: “Our Ghanaian experts will, no doubt, give their fullest co-operation and support, and we expect that by the end of the contract, many of our own men would have benefited [sic] through their association with, or training in Soviet techniques, so that they will be able to continue where the Soviet team leaves off.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Thus, this Ghana–Soviet space fit within the Ghanaian government’s larger Africanization and decolonization goals of signing contracts with countries and companies that were willing to train Ghanaians to ultimately replace the foreign experts and workers.

Ultimately, this Ghana–Soviet space created 547 Ghanaian jobs. These positions included artisans, language interpreters, security guards, learner field assistants, accounting officers, cooks, typists, store men, pupil geological assistants, pupil laboratory technicians, and camp laborers. These jobs drew from the working class and sought to create a bureaucratic and technical class.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The Ghanaian government intended these jobs to provide opportunities to Northern Ghanaians and alleviate generational anti-Northern biases. Indeed, from 1957 to 1966, historian Benjamin Talton has argued that Nkrumah’s government had “placed many northerners in positions of power … [and] increased the number of Ghana’s districts to reduce … tribalism.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Yet, despite these attempts, the fissures of Ghanaian society (re-)appeared or, rather, were inflamed, within Ghana–Soviet spaces.

In June 1962, Abudulai Moshie, an SGST guard, argued that he was dismissed because he was a Northerner. In his complaint against F. E. Darko, the senior executive officer at the SGST, Moshie charged that Darko slapped his mouth, called him a fool, and stated that he was not a good man because he was a Northerner. Darko had lived in the Northern and Upper Regions for twenty years and had previously occupied a wide range of positions, including as a “Clerk, Chief Commissioner’s Office at Tamale, District Clerk at Navrongo, Assistant Accountant, Postal Clerk, Senior Health Inspector at Gambaga,” and as a local council member at Nalerigu for the British colonial government and Ghana.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Darko’s wife was also employed at the SGST. Darko had only been appointed as the senior executive officer in May 1962, a month prior to these allegations.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Moshie wrote that Darko lamented the fact that Northerners “got … free work to do” because “better people” were “ready with money to apply.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Anti-Northerner allegations would worsen over the years.

On September 24, 1964, Stephen Fianoo, a Northerner and an SGST employee, sought a pass to leave the SGST compound to transfer to Kintampo, another Northern town. The guard denied Fianoo’s request and grabbed Fianoo’s bicycle and keys. A physical altercation between the two ensued. The police intervened, sending both to court. The court fined Fianoo £G8 and the guard £G1. Fianoo paid the fine and transferred to Kintampo. A few days later, J. B. Baryen, the A. G. principal personnel officer, informed Fianoo that he had “been suspended because of the fine” he “paid.” On October 10, Fianoo wrote a scathing letter to the minister of Industries protesting his suspension and highlighting discrimination against Northerners. Referencing an SGST executive officer Ossei Kusi’s case, an Ashanti convicted of physically assaulting a subordinate, Fianoo furiously questioned why an individual fined £G8 could “not work in this Department,” but an “Ex. Convict” could hold an “important” post in the “Department?” Fianoo continued, “It appears now that Ashantis are the only people given fair deal in this Department and I am therefore appealing to you for your kind consideration.”Footnote ¹²⁰ In another incident, the Northern regional secretariat claimed that an SGST executive officer “received a bribe from a driver and during the investigation” into the bribe “brutally assaulted (sic) the driver Adam Mahama,” a Northerner. The Tamale Magistrate Court fined the executive £25. The Northern regional secretariat claimed that the executive was simply fined rather than dismissed because “he is an Ashanti.” In contrast, the secretariat noted that Sandow, “a Northerner,” who “was merely reported” for not carrying “out an alleged instructions (sic) has been earmarked for being redundant.”Footnote ¹²¹

At the SGST Damongo site, Mumuni, a lorry driver from the North, wrote a lengthy complaint entitled, “Corrupt Practices,” to the heads of the SGST team, the regional commissioners, and the Ghanaian Trade Union Congress officers. Mumuni attributed his firing as retaliation for his protests against anti-Northern bias. Mumuni highlighted a larger pattern of anti-Northern discrimination and sentiments within this Ghana–Soviet space, lamenting that Northerners were dismissed for minor offenses while Southerners, committing more ostentatious offences, went unpunished. He argued that Darko, who “took the Department Boards and an expensive Wardrobe,” which was “built for him by the Carpenters of the Department,” faced no sanctions because “he is a Southerner.” Furthermore, Mumuni bemoaned the case of a Southern carpenter who went unpunished after taking “away 25 lbs. of wire nails.” Hasford informed Mumuni that he could take his complaints and “could go and see our Northerners (sic) Ministers,” and that he had “a better superior officer than our Northern Ministers to see, and that nothing will happen to him.”Footnote ¹²² Officers from the South played upon anti-Northern sentiments and boldly projected impunity vis-à-vis the Northern ministers.

In 1955, two years before Ghana’s political independence from the UK, J. A. Braimah, “a minor chief” among a Northern ethnic group, the Dagomba, and a “member of the Legislative Assembly,” proclaimed – “Down with Black Imperialism in the North,” regarding Southern ministers working in the North. From these stories above, it appears that Northern pre-independence fears that Southern officers in the North represented “‘Black Imperialism’” seemed to hold some currency, and a premonition perhaps.Footnote ¹²³ Mumuni concluded his letter with an urgent appeal “for a thorough investigation into the affairs of the Soviet Geological Survey Team in Tamale as far as Staff are concerned, with a view of wiping out the favouritism, tribalism or discrimination.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Mumuni was not the only individual requesting a thorough investigation into the logic and practices of anti-Northern discrimination in the socialist de-colony. In April 1963, Charles C. Yorrah complained about anti-Northern discrimination to Egala and Nkrumah’s office. Yorrah wrote:

Yorrah continued: “The few Northerners that are in the Establishment; he is working all possible ways and means to get rid of them and to get people of the same origin with him.” Further in the letter, Yorrah accused Donkor of simply transferring a Southerner who had “mishandle[ed]” a Soviet “interpreter.” Yorrah also complained that Donkor’s wife was listed as an executive officer, being paid a handsome salary, and had been given the contract to sew the “door,” “window blinds, cushions, etc., for the new Russian bungalows.” The writer wondered how, “With this Socialist country of Ghana it would be possible for her to discharge her duties as an Executive Officer and a Seamstress Contractor at the same time.” Moreover, Yorrah noted that an accountant named Anderson tried to forcibly “have sexual intercourse with the telephonist,” “a wife of a co-worker … in the office during office hours,” and suffered no serious repercussions. Donkor not only “sheltered” Anderson from disciplinary action but transferred the woman’s husband “out of Tamale.” Yorrah found it quite distressing and appalling that individuals with these “major offences” should still work for the SGST while Northerners with “lame and personal excuses” should be terminated.Footnote ¹²⁵

Widespread disillusionment among Northern Ghanaians about the Ghana–Soviet space was crystalizing. Northerners were initially buoyed by its economic potential but deeply frustrated by its stark limitations. Yorrah’s account portrayed a Ghana–Soviet space where sexual assault and sexual violence transpired without punishment. The attack did not occur in the shadows but during broad-daylight at the office. The impunity with which the perpetrator acted underscored how corrosive this particular Ghana–Soviet space was or had become. Moreover, these letters highlighted the contradictions between Nkrumah’s message and the present state of affairs at the SGST. An anonymous petitioner noted that while Nkrumah was “fighting hard” to “stop nepotism” in “our Socialist Ghana,” the A. G. principal personnel officer was firing Northerners who worked diligently at their station. The anonymous petitioner maintained that the officer sat “in the main office doing thing” and “has no interest in any Northerner and in-fact, he has no pity on any human being,” and dismissed them. The author begged the minister to assist the Northern Region’s regional commissioner to fix this unfortunate situation.Footnote ¹²⁶ Thus, a contradiction and schism appeared between state policy and local actions. Simultaneously, Nkrumah’s policies had created a channel and state-sanctioned idioms for Northerners to vent their frustrations. Like other sophisticated actors, these individuals used the promise, hope, and language of Nkrumah’s socialist vision to claim equal treatment in this Ghana–Soviet space. They applied global and universal ideas to their particular, local situations to garner expedited and favorable responses. Against the socialist vision state officials imagined and projected, the SGST site simultaneously recast and hardened the lines of ethnicity while providing a space for Northerners to deconstruct and construct the new state as one explicitly against ethnic chauvinism – a state where the indignities and humiliations of ethnic discrimination should be trapped and put into a bottle and deposed in the sea.

Unfortunately, rather than punish the perpetrators, these accounts suggest that those who complained about horrific acts faced retaliation. They were transferred or fired. Physical violence was not absent within the Ghana–Soviet space and Soviet personnel were not spared from it. An unnamed Soviet interpreter, who probably was a woman, was also manhandled. Soviet personnel were also part of the complaint ecosystem; they helped craft and initiate petitions to Ghanaian authorities. For instance, in a May 1, 1963, letter, Kojo Balantyne, an SGST fitter, acknowledged to Egala, that “The Soviet Engineer” had urged him to “write to the Ministry about” reversing his suspension and eventual sacking for driving without a license and crashing one of the SGST’s jeeps with the aforementioned Soviet engineer onboard.Footnote ¹²⁷ Fortunately for the SGST workers, the Ghanaian Trade Union Congress (TUC) took a keen interest in their affairs.

The TUC strongly backed some of the SGST employees’ demand for the minister of Mines and Mineral Resources to set up a commission “into the termination of [Ghanaian] Soviet employees,”Footnote ¹²⁸ leading to open hostility between the TUC and the SGST administration. The SGST accused the TUC of intentionally sabotaging its operations. The TUC countered that their only mission was to ensure that the most important component of Ghana’s socialist project – the workers – were treated fairly. TUC officials noted that they had “an important role in our (Ghana’s) economic development” because they were “helping the workers” and that any investigation into worker mistreatment or discrimination “should not be taken that they were interfering with … or sabotaging” SGST operations.Footnote ¹²⁹ These letters and accusations prompted a series of meetings within the SGST leadership team. While investigating the “Reduction of Labour,” the leadership team noticed that “eight out of the ten drivers declared redundant were Northerners.” They were horrified that Northerners were being replaced with “Ashanti home boys” while Tamale faced acute unemployment issues. The Tamale district commissioner was so “shocked” by “this discrimination” that he was “eager to persue (sic) the issue when the time is due.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Eventually, the SGST leadership responded to the overwhelming amount of evidence of malpractice on its doorstep. Importantly, these accusations had struck at the heart of the state’s modernizing vision to bring industry to the North and undermined its domestic and global projections of itself as a site of Black freedom and socialist modernity.

While many complaints were ignored, the sheer magnitude of discrimination claims provoked the state into action. Hasford was replaced.Footnote ¹³¹ Hasford’s downfall was swift. He had only been appointed two years prior.Footnote ¹³² Furthermore, Imoru Egala, the minister of Industries, felt that only someone from the North could deal with the complex problems emanating in Tamale. Soon, a “Clerk to the local Gonja Traditional Council in Damongo” was hired to alleviate the ongoing tensions.Footnote ¹³³

Scrutinizing Soviet Quality and Goods

While earlier Ghanaian newspaper reports celebrated the quality of Soviet technology and marked the Communist power as a symbol of non-Western modernity, Ghanaian technicians and officers had approached Soviet technology cautiously. Ghanaians who interacted with Soviet equipment became increasingly frustrated by their poor quality. From the onset of their relationship, Ghanaian officials had sought, “at length,” official guarantees from the Soviets about the quality of their equipment and materials, pushing their Soviet counterparts to submit “a Guarantee of Quality for [Soviet] equipment and materials” and “certificate of Quality” with all goods sent to Ghana.Footnote ¹³⁴ Despite these assurances, M. A. Donkor, the principal personnel officer of the Soviet Geological Survey Team, complained to Ghana’s chief transport officer and the Soviet director about the substandard quality of Soviet vehicles imported into Ghana.Footnote ¹³⁵ Donkor reported that Soviet vehicles which had only been in service for less than eight weeks constantly broke down and consumed too much fuel and worried that it would ultimately cause their “field operations” to “come to a standstill.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Donkor noted that six Soviet trucks “have broken down completely.”Footnote ¹³⁷ He urged the Ghanaian government to examine immediately the “condition of the Soviet vehicles sold to” the country “as soon as possible.”Footnote ¹³⁸ In a 1965 investigation, the committee overseeing the SGST team noted that they needed about £G9,000 in “spare parts to overhaul most of the organisation’s vehicles,” indicating that they failed in Ghanaian conditions.Footnote ¹³⁹ Similarly, Appeadu, the principal secretary of Ghana’s Ministry of Industries, complained that industrial projects from the Eastern Bloc in Ghana “have been falling down.” He suspected “secondhand” goods were being “painted to look new.” Appeadu bemoaned that both “vital parts [were] missing” and that service maintenance was “very poor.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Ghanaian drivers had suffered numerous accidents – no doubt in part caused by the unreliability of some of the vehicles.

Ghanaian suspicions that Soviet equipment was secondhand or sub-quality undercut an overarching framework of trust that had turned Ghana’s leaders to the Soviets in the first place. The Ghanaian government had spurned numerous overtures of a West German firm to build a secondhand cotton and spun-rayon spinning and weaving mill in Ghana on the grounds that it did not want to “purchase” “second-hand equipment, only new” ones.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The Ghanaian state did not want to purchase secondhand machinery unless absolutely necessary. Ghanaians wanted and deserved the latest and newest gadgets. What was good for the Europeans in Europe was equally good for people in Ghana. This underlay Ghanaian officials’ heightened sense of vigilance regarding the quality of goods and personnel entering its shores. Ghana’s leaders’ visions of Black independence did not include Ghana as a dumping ground of barely functioning goods, goods with a short shelf-life, or barely qualified foreign specialists. Ghanaians were seeking to achieve historian Abena Dove Asare-Osseo’s “scientific” and technological “equity.” Moreover, Ghanaians were interested in firms that were “interested in [the] technical, management, training of Ghanaians,” and committed to discharging “substantial financial investment” into the nation.Footnote ¹⁴² Thus, the Ghanaians chose the Soviets not because they were socialist but because they proposed new equipment and to train Ghanaians. And, in this, the reports suggested that the Soviets were failing.

Other Soviet-sponsored projects in Ghana came in for severe criticism. A. W. Osei, a United Party parliamentarian from Ahafo, lamented that the “Russian”-run state farm at Adidome was “a failure” and insisted that if Ghana continued to let “Russians” operate these state farms, they would “waste our money for nothing.” Conversely, Osei noted that the Ghanaian manned Nkwakubew state farm was “100 percent better than the Russian manned state farm at Adidome.”Footnote ¹⁴³ From as early as 1961, as historian Keri Lambert noted, Nkrumah’s government had wanted Soviet assistance in mechanizing and modernizing Ghana’s farms, particularly rubber farms in the Western Region. However, Ghanaian and Soviet officials and technicians clashed. What equipment the Soviets gave to the Ghanaians, who thought it was a gift, came at a cost. Like their Geological counterparts, the Ministry of Agriculture lamented that the Soviets were “selling obsolete equipment – sometimes repainted to look new – for exorbitant prices, and then refusing to provide service or spare parts.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Ironically, the Israeli-managed state farms in Ghana did not receive the same criticisms.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ While other parliamentarians criticized Osei’s analysis as insufficiently grounded in reality,Footnote ¹⁴⁶ his rebukes were simultaneously pro-Ghanaian and anti-Soviet. Osei’s detractors noted that Osei’s words conveniently overlooked other factors, such as the weather, that could have contributed to the alleged production failures.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Conclusion

While many of Ghana’s writers, politicians, and leaders had placed great expectations and expended tremendous political, literary, and financial capital into the success of Ghana–Soviet projects, they had always been wary of the Soviets’ ability to deliver. They had always suspected that if the projects failed, the Soviets would blame them. In internal communications, Ghanaian experts and politicians planned to structure and divide labor between themselves and the Soviets in a clear manner that hindered the potential for the Soviets to blame the Ghanaians for any of their own failings. “It is realised that the Russians will be held solely responsible for the success of their own work,” the director of the Ghana Geological Survey team wrote to the principal secretary of the Ministry of Industries on June 15, 1962: “Occasional visits will be paid to … discuss any Technical [sic] problems; but the actual on-the-spot – supervision may amount to interference. They [the Soviets] might not hesitate then to blame us [the Ghanaians] for their shortcomings.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The Ghanaians’ premonition became a reality. As Ghana–Soviet projects came to a standstill toward 1965 and 1966, historian Iandolo notes that the Soviets insisted that Ghanaian “incompetence” lay behind the projects’ inability to translate themselves from an idea to reality.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ From the onset, however, the Ghanaians had anticipated this criticism. They had always been wary that the Soviets would shift the blame toward them.

Other African states had turned to the Ghana–Soviet SGST example as a warning about dealing with the Soviets. Historian Maxim Matusevich notes that in the early 1970s, Nigerians, frustrated by the Soviets’ “slow progress” in building the Ajaokutu steel mill, noted that they had “to profit from the Ghanaian experience and subject Soviet experts to rigid control and supervision.” The Nigerians remarked that it was “only after such measures had been taken … did the Soviet survey of Ghana begin to produce results.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Furthermore, the Nigerians had concluded that collaborating with the Soviets meant economic and “political invoices.” If one did not settle their “invoices” with the Soviets, Olujimi Jolaoso, a Nigerian diplomat noted, the Soviets would ensure that “spare parts and repairs” would be “difficult to secure.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ Thus, the Ghanaian–Soviet space both foreshadowed future Africa–Soviet technoscientific relations and became emblematic of the Soviets’ modus operandi with other African nations.

Toward the last year of Nkrumah’s presidency, the two Ghana–Soviet projects under discussion faced bleak and uncertain futures. The SGST faced severe problems. Thirty-eighty percent of the executive officers and many others were made redundant.Footnote ¹⁵² Under the National Liberation Council, the new regime post-Nkrumah, the SGST’s troubles were expedited. In July 1966, the SGST collapsed into the Geological Survey Department and transferred from Tamale to Saltpond in Southern Ghana, which was, ironically, the birthplace of Nkrumah’s political party during the colonial days. The SGST ceased to be an autonomous entity and was submerged under Ghana’s Geological Survey Department.Footnote ¹⁵³ Within five years, the Soviet geologists had been repatriated.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The Ghanaian geologists who had complained earlier about two cooks operating in the same pot had gotten their way. As for the mill, as the chapter’s introduction revealed, the Ghana–Soviet contract had been sidelined for a new deal with the American cotton-ginning company. The factory’s American links signaled the new government’s break from Ghana’s socialist philosophy and relations with the Communist world.

From a material standpoint, the Ghana–Soviet space stopped existing. Phantom Nigerian–Soviet projects, historian Matusevich noted,

It is easy to read these “ghost projects” as markers of failure, indications of Soviet or African incompetence or inability to realize the dreams they envisioned. Yet, Elizabeth Banks, Robyn d’Avignon, and Asif Siddiqi urge us to resist “the temptation to read the Africa-Soviet modern as a failure” but to “redirect our attention … to an aspirational world – a space of possibility – and through it, its material outcomes.” They maintain that the incompleteness of “the African-Soviet Modern represent[s] a kind of theatre of unbounded aspiration where its principal actors – students, planners, scientists, activists, and diplomats – could play out their ‘small’ roles in a grand and iconoclastic desire for futurity.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ In fact, it is these small figures – the town planners, lorry drivers, district commissioners, etc. – who were the engines or perhaps the drivers of the state’s foreign policies and socialist agenda.

Development projects were contested at the local level. Moving between local and global scales unpacks how parochial issues, and not simply international geopolitical concerns, drove and shaped the success or failures of Cold War and postcolonial socialist projects. Top-level cabinet officials often remained absent in these complex webs of discussions, negotiations, and counteroffers. In fact, the Ghanaian cabinet was ever-changing. Ministries frequently had different leaders.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Government ministries were also changed, added, deleted, or merged; cabinet officials had their portfolios chopped and changed almost yearly, so new leaders had to learn new roles afresh and quickly. It underscores, perhaps, why many projects were never finished. These changes reflected a new government coming to terms with the limits of its power, an acknowledgment of its evolving priorities, and how best to implement and streamline its programs better. It also meant that development projects were left to the figures on “the periphery,” the technocrats, who became key interlocutors and cogs in thinking about, developing, and implementing the contours of the relationship and socialist dreams of the newly independent African state and the world’s biggest communist power.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

Chapter 3 continues to unpack Ghana–Soviet and Ghana–socialist bloc spaces as sites of contested liberation. Whereas Chapter 1 examined Ghana–Soviet relations from a diplomatic vantage point and Chapter 2 unpacked Ghana–Soviet relations from a scientific-technical lens, Chapter 3 looks at the Ghana–Soviet, Ghana–Eastern bloc, and Ghana–global spaces through a cultural and social historical vantage point. Chapter 3 also looks at the concept of “racial citizenship,” of how anti-Black racism in Ghana, Bulgaria, Romania, the United States, and the USSR helped redefine what it meant to be a Ghanaian and what it meant for a Black socialist state to think about the welfare of its subjects domestically and globally.

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.