On February 24, 1966, the Western-backed National Liberation Council (NLC) instigated a coup d’état against Nkrumah’s government while he flew to Asia to participate in talks to stop the war in Vietnam. The political-economic and social experiment that the Black Caribbean Marxist C. L. R. James described as “one of the most significant revolutions of the century,” on par with the Soviet revolution, had ended. While the first African nation-state socialist project had collapsed through a barrel of a gun roughly sixty years ago, a reappraisal of that moment is important. James rightly noted nearly half a century ago that “there was still much of great importance to past and future history to be said about it.”Footnote ¹ From Ghana’s inception, the historical record has been sufficiently obscured. Fiction and myths have passed as historical truths. Through a deep and wide excavation of the archival record and an Afro- and Ghana-centric rereading of published materials, Socialist De-Colony has attempted to shatter some of these misconceptions, offer a corrective to the historical record, and be but one attempt to rethink Black socialist freedom and statecraft and the global Cold War.

Nkrumah’s Ghana and the idea of Ghana sat at the crux of and personified global debates on African and Black freedom and socialist economic and social political and cultural transformations and development. The socialists who adorn this book, from the president to the cabinet ministers to the writers to the technicians to the workers to the students, were engaged in a herculean effort to build the first African socialist state from the ashes of colonial rule and centuries of Black degradation and subjugation. They were demonstrating to many that Black people and Africans could govern themselves, fashion inclusive societies, and navigate a 20th-century geopolitical world order underpinned by white supremacy. Their task was made even more daunting by both the lack of developmental infrastructure the British bequeathed them and historical cohesion among the new nation’s inhabitants.

While deeply critical of the extractive colonial capitalist economic system, Socialist De-Colony argues that Ghana’s leaders still hunted for private capital and foreign investment across the world to create the socialist de-colony. Through the pot of socialism, socialists in Ghana believed that they could harness and control the fire that was capitalism and create a more just and equitable society for their people (see Chapter 4). While accepting that capitalism would help propel the nation into freedom, Ghana engaged in a colossal project of creating socialists and introducing socialist theories to a society where it was once demonized and criminalized (see Chapters 1 and 5). These figures were doing something that had never been done before, constructing a Black socialist utopia on earth. Yet, we would be remiss to assume that their pursuit of private capital and capitalism was in contradiction with their socialist goals. Socialist De-Colony maintains that, in some measure, these Black figures were instrumental in realizing Leninist political-economic principles on earth – the combination of capitalism and socialism. If Stalinism has come to represent the Soviet political-economic system in the popular and academic imagination, this book argues that the socialists in Ghana embraced the path not taken. It was in Nkrumah’s Ghana that Lenin’s socialist state capitalist vision was becoming a reality (see Chapter 4).

Despite a strong affinity for socialist ideas originating from the USSR and Eastern Europe, Ghana’s early leaders divorced racial and political-economic ideologies (see Chapters 1 and 3). Black Marxists would come to conclude that white supremacy as a geopolitical project was dangerous to Black freedom and socialism (see Chapters 1 and 3). Anti-Black racist incidents abroad and domestically spurred political activism and propelled Black Ghanaians to make citizenship and humanity claims through the very words and acts that dehumanized them (see Chapters 3 and 6). It was through these racial citizenship moments that a unique global Ghanaian national consciousness was being formed (see Chapter 3).

Ultimately, the Ghana–Soviet space, which undergirds this book, was a mobile place that represented and encapsulated many things to different people. Socialist De-Colony shows that for some, the Ghana–Soviet space opened an avenue to illustrate Black freedom, to others, it was a site of intense discrimination; for others, it was a place where they could seek redress and assert citizenship and receive rights. Yet, for some, the Ghana–Soviet space demonstrated that the forces against African and Black freedom were not necessarily capitalism and socialism, the West or East, but white supremacy masquerading within different totalizing pan-European ideologies (see Chapter 3). And, yet, for others, the Ghana–Soviet space was an arena for economic, educational, and personal development and social advancement. It was a site of a two-way cultural, social, political, and knowledge production and exchange. It was place of pleasure and pain; a place of theatrics, family, and love (see Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4). It was a site of historicization, myth-making, and deconstruction. It represented, to some, a shared mission and vision to displace the Western imperial global order. At the global, national, regional, and local level, the Ghana–Soviet space was a site of contested and negotiated liberation – a site of alternative futures and possibilities, a symbol of paths not taken and taken and an arena of socialist national and world (re-)construction.

From the 1980s to Today

Nkrumah’s fall in 1966 marked a geopolitical realignment for Ghana. The new military regime strongly rekindled the Western-dominated relationship people in Ghana were once subjected to, turning away from the multipolar socialist world-visions Nkrumah’s government had. Ghana’s relationship with the USSR hit rock bottom. Socialist, Eastern European, and Communist-bloc literature were confiscated and burned. Immediately after they seized power, the military government rejected educational degrees from the USSR. Sites like the Ghana Fishing Corporation and the African liberation military training camps, where Soviet involvement was assumed or apparent, came under state investigation. The CPP as a political party and socialism as a national ideology and political economic project were sidelined. Since 1966, Ghana and the USSR’s political and economic ties, including that of former Soviet republics in the post-1992 era, have failed to scale the heights reached during the Nkrumah years.

After quietly battling cancer for a few years, Nkrumah succumbed to its deathly call. He died in Romania on April 27, 1972. The child from a small understated fishing village in Colonial Ghana, who had grown up to inspire generations of people, was no more. Nkrumah perished in exile, far from the continent and people he had once led and who once sang his name and his country’s exploits in adulation.

Yet, for Ghana’s now marginalized but underground socialist groups, the Soviet Union continued to be a reference point for a future still unrealized. Ghana’s current president, John Dramani Mahama, “belong[ed] to a socialist cell” in the 1980s while studying history at the University of Ghana, Legon.Footnote ² After completing his bachelor’s degree, Mahama went to the Soviet Union to study at the Institute of Social Sciences in 1986, earning a postgraduate degree there in 1988. Despite the near collapse of Ghana–Soviet relations post-Nkrumah, Ghanaian students have still ventured to the USSR and its former Soviet Republics, particularly Russia and Ukraine, to study medicine, engineering, finance, social studies, and other subjects. Mahama was excited to go to the Communist power because he enjoyed Russian and Soviet philosophy, history, and literature while tossing the word “tovarisch (comrade)” around with his peers. “In our estimation,” Mahama wrote, “the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was the best model for the sort of society that all countries should aim to become, one that supported the equality of its citizens and ensured them access to the basic services and necessitates for a productive and dignified life.”Footnote ³ Even after socialism as an explicit state ideology had collapsed twenty years prior, Ghanaians have returned to the Soviet political experiment and its history and have continued to imagine the USSR as a futuristic blueprint, a barometer perhaps, of where their country could go – or should have gone had Nkrumah and the socialists remained in power.

Yet, despite his initial enthusiasm of being selected alongside five other Ghanaians to receive a postgraduate degree in the USSR, Mahama’s experiences there were complicated. Mahama and his five classmates marveled at the trappings of modernity and futurity that the Soviet Union represented. Although they found the bitter cold horrid, they were in awe of the Soviet transit system – its trams, mega-highways, architecture, and manicured gardens. Yet, for Mahama, Soviet society resembled Ghana in startling ways. Long queues for bread, meat, and other necessities were ubiquitous. The 1980s were a tortuous period for both nations. The USSR was crumbling and Ghana was exiting its most challenging economic decade.Footnote ⁴

Yet, like previous generations of male African students in the USSR, Mahama’s first experience with anti-Black racism in the USSR involved his proximity to a white Soviet woman, Maria. Mahama, Maria, and his friend, Longi, from the Upper West Region in Ghana, were “hanging out at the park in front of the school” when three young Soviet men walked past them and told Maria in Russian that she was a “whore” and “hoped she was enjoying having sex with her Black monkeys.” Maria did not take too kindly to the comments and rose angrily from the bench to confront them. Upon hearing Maria’s comments, the men started returning to the friends. However, Mahama and Longi (neither understood the conversation until after the fact) noticed one of the men brandishing a pocket knife, pulled Maria away, and escaped.Footnote ⁵ Mahama and his friends escaped before events turned violent and perhaps deadly. Mahama and Longi were fortunate. Others, like Yaw Ampofo Twimasi, a twenty-nine-year-old Ghanaian student, were less so.

Four years after Mahama’s experience, in 1992, the Ghanaian Embassy feared that three Russian men had killed Twimasi in his “hostel room at the Moscow Veterinary Academy” while he was with his girlfriend.Footnote ⁶ Mahama’s and Twimasi’s stories represent a longer and tragic history of Soviet and Russian anxieties over the intimacies (or perceived intimacies) of Black men and Soviet women. As Socialist De-Colony demonstrated, Soviet anxieties over Black masculinity, the Black Peril, were ever-present in encounters with Africans. Unfortunately, the anti-Black racism and violence against Ghanaians in the USSR that punctured the Ghana–Soviet bubble in the 1960s have persisted into the post–Soviet era.

In 1992, Ghana and the Soviet Union underwent severe political changes. Ghana’s military leader Flight Lt John Jerry Rawlings restored Ghana from a military regime to a democratic country. The USSR collapsed and Russia became an independent country. In March, robbers “gagged and blindfolded” Samuel Ganyo, a third-year Ghanaian student, at the Moscow Civil Engineering Institute, and killed him. The Russian police and Ghanaian authorities found Ganyo with “torn strips of cloth” and his hands and feet tied with “shoelaces and bound … together behind his back.” The “intruders left an empty can of tear gas in the room.”Footnote ⁷ Rather than a robbery gone awry at a higher educational institution, the scene resembled a war and torture room, indicating that the Russian attackers felt that they were literally at war with the Africans studying in their country. They had to overcome them. In April 2006, two Russian students assaulted a Ghanaian student in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city. Ghana’s then ambassador to Russia, vice marshall Edward Apau Mantey, warned the Ghanaian community to be vigilant and to “adopt extra security measures while in” Russia.Footnote ⁸ The following month, Mantey urged the Russian authorities to “take concerted efforts to halt physical attacks on Africans living and studying throughout the Russian Federation.”Footnote ⁹ His words were nearly identical to the Ghanaian embassy’s letters to the Soviet authorities in the 1960s, complaining about unprovoked assaults against its citizens with the Soviet authorities and citizens standing idly by. Like the 1960s, Mantey’s calls seemingly fell on fallow ground (see Chapter 3). In March 2008, attackers stabbed a twenty-one-year-old Ghanaian in St. Petersburg.Footnote ¹⁰ The following year, Russian Neo-Nazis stabbed a twenty-five-year-old Ghanaian, Solomon Attengo Gwa-Jio, to death in St. PetersburgFootnote ¹¹ and posted an online video boasting about the murder.Footnote ¹² These attacks were part of a larger wave of Neo-Nazi terror that engulfed Russia in the 2000s.Footnote ¹³ Putin’s murdered political rival, Alexey Navalny, who symbolized a democratic alternative in Russia to the West, was part of the Neo-Nazi, anti-immigrant, marches during this period.Footnote ¹⁴ He never distanced himself from those sentiments.

Nonetheless, in 2006, drawing from older legacies of protests in the 1960s, African students in Russia marched in St. Petersburg to protest the violence against them, and their poor living conditions. They criticized the Russian state’s unwillingness to arrest and prosecute the offending parties. Offering an identical response as it did in the 1960s, Russian authorities dismissed the xenophobic and racist attacks as isolated acts of “hooliganism”Footnote ¹⁵ and not reflective of Russian society writ large. Then and now, those responses have infuriated the Africans. With Russian authorities rarely prosecuting perpetrators of violence, Ghanaians and Africans have contacted their embassies and look toward each other for support (see Chapter 3). Unfortunately, like in the 1960s, Ghanaian embassy officials can only offer private and public denunciations, encouragement, or advice, such as to “avoid moving around the city alone; in buses, trams and trains to sit [sic]close to the driver.”Footnote ¹⁶ Like yesteryear, Ghana lacks the geopolitical, military, or economic ability to seriously threaten Russia for failing to protect its citizens.

Like the 1960s, even Ghanaian embassy officials have been subjected to physical assaults in Russia. On November 3, 2002, Ghana’s then ambassador to Russia, general Francis Y. Mahama, and his driver were walking around Victory Park (Park Probedy) in Moscow when seven men beat them up while “shout[ing] racial epithets” at them. Mahama sustained a black eye and needed several stitches. With shock, Mahama noted that bystanders failed to intervene. Mahama recalled that he had traversed Victory Park before. On one occasion, the police stopped him “Three times” to check his “documents…. But yesterday there was no police to be seen.”Footnote ¹⁷ Like the events from yesteryear, embassy officials had contacted the Russian Foreign Ministry for an explanation into assaults against them and lambasted the Russian police for looking away.

While Ghanaian embassy officials have criticized the Russian state for failing to deal with their complaints, Ghanaian citizens have criticized their embassy and ambassador for not only failing to protect them, but in actively harming them. In 2013, Ghanaian women in Russia complained bitterly to Ghana’s then president, John D. Mahama, to sack immediately Ghana’s then ambassador to Russia, Seth Koranteng, for permitting Inusah Abdul Bassit, Ghana’s consular officer, to sexually harass and exploit them. One woman said: “he (Bassit) tried to take advantage of me; Bassit was touching me and wanted to sleep with me there … apart from church service, I no longer go to the embassy.” Rather than a refuge, the Ghanaian embassy became a site of torment and avoidance for its citizens. Not only did Ghanaian women complain about Bassit’s unwanted sexually advances, he also allegedly lied in a Russian court to convict a Ghanaian woman, Gifty, and her partner, Peter, because the former declined his sexual advances. Moreover, Gifty claimed that Bassit forced her to change her menstrual pads in front of him.Footnote ¹⁸ To discredit the women, the Ghanaian embassy in Russia purportedly leaked false stories accusing the women of prostitution and of defaming Ghana to the Ghanaian press. However, Ghanaians across the world – in Russia, the UK, Germany, Canada, Belgium, Korea, and Ghana – were repulsed by the embassy’s actions and sided with the women. They expressed deep concern over Koranteng’s actions and the embassy’s failure to protect the women. Through social media, letters to the state, and on a “popular radio Political talk show on Amansan FM in London,” England, Ghanaians demanded state accountability and protection of its citizens in distant, foreign lands.Footnote ¹⁹ This Ghana–Soviet space, like the Soviet Geological Survey Team in Chapter 2, became a site of sexual exploitation, meriting the strongest condemnation of Ghanaians in both spaces and periods.

In response to and in conjunction with persistent problems between the embassy and its student nationals and between Ghanaians and East European authorities, Ghanaian students abroad have formed vibrant organizations outside of state channels to protect each other in foreign lands.Footnote ²⁰ In Russia and Ukraine, Ghanaian students have formed their own branches of the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS-Russia and NUGS-Ukraine), respectively. According to its website and bylaws, the NUGS-Russia branch’s primary aim is “to protect and safeguard the rights and interests of all Ghanaian students in the Russian Federation.” And to “offer a common platform” to discuss issues that impact “all students.” The group also seeks to promote “co-operation, understanding and friendship between students of Ghana in Russia and other students in Russia.”Footnote ²¹ The NUGS-Russia has branches in several Russian cities – Moscow, Tomsk, Stavropol, and St. Petersburg, highlighting the continued presence of Ghanaian students across the vast Russian state. Each local union has its own president, vice president, financial secretary, organizing secretary, and general secretary.Footnote ²² Similarly, the NUGS–Ukraine chapter has branches in various Ukrainian cities. The Ukraine branch also has a welfare chairperson who assists individuals without food or with other necessities. These groups host soccer matches, cultural or national celebrations, lectures, and seminars, and they speak in Ghanaian languages among themselves. They (re)produce and maintain Ghanaian cultural traditions away from home, and the national chapters communicate to each other via social media.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, catapulted the NUGS–Ukraine branch into the international spotlight and underscored their importance in safeguarding Ghanaians abroad.Footnote ²³ As the American government issued numerous warnings about an impending Russian invasion of Ukraine in late 2021 and early 2022,Footnote ²⁴ the NUGS–Ukraine chapter began, with foresightedness, to collect its members’ whereabouts and contact information. The NUGS–Ukraine leadership wrote two letters to the Ghanaian consulate in Switzerland. One letter included a list of their 959 registered members. After sending the letter, the NUGS–Ukraine president, Phillip Bobbie-Ansah, noted that they had just learnt of thousands more Ghanaians in Kyiv. The letters sought a plan of action in case the American intelligence reports were accurate.Footnote ²⁵ The Ghanaian embassy only responded after Russia’s first bombs landed on Ukraine. Through a Facebook Live post on February 24, 2022, Bobbie-Ansah publicly announced the number of Ghanaians in each Ukrainian city. He did heroic work organizing and gathering data about the state of Ghanaian students caught up in the war. Bobbie-Ansah constantly communicated with foreign airlines about getting Ghanaian students out of Ukraine. He encouraged Ghanaians to know the location of nearby bomb shelters, to go there immediately if they heard warning sirens, to stock up on food and essentials, to get their school transcripts, to stick together, and to share goods. Last, he implored them repeatedly to download the Bridgefy App to ensure that they could communicate with each other if they lost data or Wi-Fi.Footnote ²⁶

Ghanaians in Ghana and Ukraine urged their government, under its previous president, Nana Akufo-Addo, to act immediately to protect Ghanaian citizens and students. On February 23, 2022, the NUGS posted a message on X (then Twitter), calling for the Ghanaian government to “accelerate efforts in ensuring the safety of all Ghanaian students within the region.” The NUGS concluded that “We are thus asking for the evacuation of students from the Eastern Provinces of Ukraine which is the present nucleus of the conflict, and out of Russia, as the country may pose an overall hostile environment to our students.”Footnote ²⁷ Araba Maame Arkoah, a Ghanaian in Ukraine, wrote: “We are asking ourselves if the government of Ghana has not heard what is happening here [in Ukraine]? We keep getting scared, we really need the help of the government. As it stands now, we need to come home. I’m scared, very scared, everybody around me is scared.” Another Ghanaian in Ukraine, Kwasi Mintah, stated: “For this morning we’ve heard a number of explosions. There about 900 students and in total, we have about 1500 Ghanaians in Ukraine. The Ghanaians here are panicking, they are afraid.”Footnote ²⁸

Fear and anxiety over the government’s supposed inaction were heightened when reports and videos circulated in Ghana and around the world of Ukrainians removing Ghanaians and Africans from trains leaving Ukraine, of Ghanaians and Africans denied permission to board vehicles heading toward the border, and a story about Ghanaian students coming under attack on an outward-bound train from Ukraine. Samuel Okudzeto Abalakwa – now Ghana’s foreign minister and parliamentary member of the North Tongu constituency, who was then the ranking member of Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and member of the oppositional National Democratic Congress (NDC) – gave credence to the story about Ghanaians being subjected to physical assaults on an outward-bound train on JoyNews, a local and popular Ghanaian television station.Footnote ²⁹ Ablakwa demanded that the Ghanaian government “evacuate Ghanaian students from Ukraine.”Footnote ³⁰ However, Ghana’s then minister for Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, insisted that the allegations were “unconfirmed” and “sensationalis[t].”Footnote ³¹ Yet, those images and videos were quite jarring when juxtaposed to the reality that the Ghanaian government was one of the few African countries that sided with Ukraine vis-à-vis Russia.

Despite the growing fear and claims and counterclaims, Bobbie-Ansah, the NGUS-Ukraine president, called for calm because the Ghanaian government was “working tirelessly” and that he was “100 percent sure” that the state was not going to “leave the members or … its citizens, its nationals to … die on a foreign land.”Footnote ³² In his concluding remarks, Bobbie-Ansah insisted that this was “the time that we had need to stay together as Ghanaians” and that Ghanaians “have always been known to be people of unity, wherever we go, it is our hallmark, so we should make it our hallmark even here in Ukraine.” Bobbie-Ansah told his fellow compatriots to stay “unified as one people.”Footnote ³³ Under intense pressure, the Ghanaian government responded. On March 1, seventeen Ghanaian students in Ukraine were airlifted to Ghana. According to Ghana’s then deputy minister for Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Kwaku Ampratwum-Sarpong, Ghana was the first nation to evacuate “her compatriots.”Footnote ³⁴

* * *

Unlike many other African countries, Ghana publicly condemned Russia for invading Ukraine. On February 23, 2022, Ghana – a member of the United Nations (UN) Security Council – voted in favor of the UN Resolution calling for Russia to “Immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders, and calls for a cessation of hostilities.”Footnote ³⁵ The following day, Botchwey posted on X: “Today, the world woke up to the bombardment and invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation. Ghana condemns unreservedly this unprovoked attack on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a United Nations Member State and calls on Russia to withdraw and end the war.”Footnote ³⁶ At the UN Security Council, Ghana’s representative, Harold Adlai Agyeman, said: “Ghana unreservedly stands by the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine ….”Footnote ³⁷ Furthermore, as a leading member of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Ghana helped craft a statement condemning “the military invasion of the Republic of Ukraine by Russia.”Footnote ³⁸ Speaking at a special UN Security Council meeting on the “maintenance of the peace and security of Ukraine” in September, Ghana’s foreign minister declared that Ghana would “not recognize any territory” that Russia annexed from Ukraine and called on Russia to abide by Ghana’s call “on the Russian Federation, to immediately and unconditionally seize its operations, withdraw its troops from the internationally recognized borders of Ukraine.”Footnote ³⁹ Russia would respond to Ghana. On March 6, 2022, on Ghana’s sixty-fifth year Independence Anniversary from the UK, Russian president Vladimir Putin sent Ghana’s president Nana Akufo-Addo a congratulatory letter. “The relations between Russia and Ghana are traditionally of a friendly nature.” Putin continued, “I am convinced that further development of a constructive bilateral dialogue and partnership meets the interests of our peoples, contributing to the peace and security on the African continent.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Putin did not reference Ghana’s comments on Ukraine. Instead, Putin was more preoccupied with peace in Africa and attempting to draw upon the Soviet Union’s history with Nkrumah’s government to build friendly relations with Ghana. Putin’s diplomatic overtures to Ghana and other African states is nothing new, however.

Over the last decade, Putin has pursued a charmed offensive on African leaders and states, touting Russia’s long-standing support of African independence and liberation movements and its fight against Western imperialism. Initially, African states were eager to support Russia’s attempts to create a multipolar world order. In 2019, forty-seven African heads of state attended the Russia–Africa Summit in Sochi.Footnote ⁴¹ However, African states have slowed down these steps. A second Russia–Africa Summit, scheduled to take place in St. Petersburg in July 2023 to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the African Union,Footnote ⁴² was poorly attended due to Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dampening its foreign policy objectives in Africa, Russian officials continue to pursue positive relations with African states through the linguistical currency of anti-imperialism and Western hegemony. Russia continues to attack Western imperialism, colonialism, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. For instance, on December 2, 2022, Russia’s embassy in South Africa tweeted: “Russia was among the few world powers that neither had colonies in Africa or elsewhere nor participated in [the] slave trade throughout its history. Russia helped, in every possible way, the peoples of the African continent to attain their freedom and sovereignty.” The tweet had an image of a Black man, representing Africa, breaking their chains of oppression. On the bottom right-hand corner of the image, four Russian words appear: “Африка Борется, Африка Победит (Africa is fighting, Africa will win!).”Footnote ⁴³

Through a recantation of the sins of Western imperialism, which the formerly colonized know all too well, Russia seeks to distinguish itself and win a public relations war with the West while being held to a stalemate on the battlefield in Ukraine. However, as Socialist De-Colony has shown, Black Marxists concluded in the first half of the 20th century that the Soviets were another white empire intent on its own survival and expansion. As the Black Marxists who studied the USSR and Russian history acknowledged, imperial Russia and the USSR had engaged in colonization campaigns (see Chapters 1 and 2). Yet, as Putin’s comments and the Russian embassy in South Africa’s tweet reveal, Russia, in some measure, is seeking to rewrite and hide its own history and bolster its anti-imperial bona fides. Yet, while the West scoffs at Russia’s anticolonial language and discourse,Footnote ⁴⁴ it resonates with many Africans frustrated by Western attempts to dictate their foreign policy, particularly with Russia and China.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, for countries like Ghana, despite their historical ties to the USSR, they are not swayed by Russia’s anti-imperialist and anticolonial rhetoric. In fact, Russia’s attack on Ukraine has solidified its image as an imperial force.

On the economic front, the USSR and its incarnation as Russia have never been one of Ghana’s key trading partners. From 1995 to 2003, a few years after Ghana’s return to democratic elections, Ghana–Russia trade was barely negligible. In 1995, Ghanaian exports to Russia totaled about $29.7 million. In 1996, Russia’s exports to Ghana were a mere $5.09 million. From 2003 to 2010, Russian exports to Ghana increased slightly but exploded under John Mahama’s first term in office, starting in July 2012. Yet, underscoring the paltry nature of the trade volume between the two, in 2015, high-level bilateral talks in Moscow between Ghanaian and Russian officials were held to explore “new and ingenious ways to effectively collaborate and bolster business partnerships.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Since 2012, the value of Russia’s exports to Ghana have been consistently above the $50 million mark. They nearly hit $200 million in 2016, the final year of Mahama’s first presidential term. In the Akufo-Addo era (January 2017–January 2025), Russia’s exports to Ghana have not dropped below the $100 million annual mark. And in 2021, Russia exported about $166 million worth of goods to Ghana. Similarly, Ghana’s exports to Russia have seen a noticeable upward trend since 1995. In 2021, the value was roughly $76.7 million. Currently, the value of Ghana’s exports to Russia double its imports, showing a severe trade in-balance. Russia primarily sends wheat, nitrogenous fertilizers, and hot-rolled iron bars to Ghana. Like in the middle of the 20th century, cocoa remains Ghana’s largest export commodity to the Eastern power.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, Ghana’s trade with Russia remains inconsequential when posited alongside its trade with other powerful nations.

In 2019, before COVID-19 brought most of the globe to a halt, the value of Ghana’s exports to South Africa was around $1.97 billion.Footnote ⁴⁸ Meanwhile, the value of South Africa’s exports to Ghana was nearly $350 million. In 2021, Nigeria exported $358 million to Ghana, and Ghana exported $48.3 million worth of goods to Nigeria.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 2022, the total trade in goods and services between the UK and Ghana was £2.2 billion.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 2021, Ghana exported $1.27 billion worth of goods to China and imported $8.1 billion worth of goods from China.Footnote ⁵¹ In a March 3, 2021, interview, the then Chinese ambassador to Ghana, H. E. Lu Kun, informed the Ghanaian media that China was Ghana’s “biggest trading partner” and source of “foreign investment.” The Chinese ambassador noted that “the bilateral trade [between Ghana and China] had increased, not reduced despite of the [COVID-19] pandemic in the first half of 2020.”Footnote ⁵² Thus, like during the Nkrumah years, Russia has not been Ghana’s main economic partner.

* * *

The CPP, which led the people in Colonial Ghana to independence under Nkrumah, has become politically obsolete – despite Samia Nkrumah’s attempts to resuscitate her father’s political party. In the 2020 and 2024 Ghanaian presidential elections, the CPP won 0 out of 275 constituencies, no parliamentary seats, and 0.1 percent of the popular vote.Footnote ⁵³ Despite the CPP’s fall into near oblivion, Nkrumah’s political-economic legacy haunts contemporary Ghanaian politics. For instance, the NPP, the center-right ruling political party from 2017 to 2025, and genealogical heirs to Nkrumah’s foes, pushed a one-factory, one-district policy. The policy harkened back to Nkrumah’s attempts to build numerous state enterprises, to bring industrialization to each corner of Ghana, and to secure foreign investment, partnership, and aid for the new nation (see Chapters 2 and 4).

The NPP stressed the importance of the state and private capital in (re)launching Ghana’s development dreams. At the sod-cutting ceremony of the Kumasi Shoe Factory, a joint venture with a Czech company, on April 12, 2022, Ghana’s then vice-president, Mahamudu Bawumia, along with Ghana’s first woman chief-of-staff, Frema Osei-Opare, said that the “collaboration” between the “state and private sector … was crucial in Ghana’s quest to enhance its economy” (see Chapter 4). The Kumasi Shoe Factory’s CEO noted that the company’s earlier iteration had received strong backing from Nkrumah, who tasked the company with producing “sandals for school children.”Footnote ⁵⁴ These were not the only policy links between the two governments. Like Nkrumah, who made pre-university education free and believed wholeheartedly in education, one of the NPP’s signature policies was to make secondary school education free and thus accessible to all Ghanaians.

Despite this monumental social achievement (and its growing pains), the NPP has not labeled this policy or their visions as socialist. Neither did their critics nor supporters charge them with restoring socialism to Ghana. While Mahama admitted that he was “still a socialist” during the 2012 Ghanaian presidential elections, he has neither used it explicitly as a governing structure nor as a political-intellectual ideology.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, since the heydays of Nkrumah, socialism as an economic ideology or as a mobilizing force justifying domestic actions has been limited. Unlike the 1960s, when socialist debates and discussions and societies pursuing socialist utopias were heavily featured in the Ghanaian media and institutions, they are sidelined today (see Chapter 5).

Yet, an explicit socialist faction within Ghanaian society remains, even if small. An “activist Think Tank” called the Socialist Forum of Ghana (SFG) is reclaiming the socialist ideological mantle in Ghana. They are “committed to supporting the intellectual struggles of working people against imperialist exploitation and local repression.” Its offshoot, the Socialist Movement of Ghana (SMG), “held its first Congress” in July 2021 at the coastal town of Winneba. As Chapter 5 noted, Winneba continues to be the symbolic site of socialist ideas and gatherings in West Africa. Like the socialists in Nkrumah’s era, members of the SMG are abreast of global affairs, situate themselves within a broader anti-imperialist global movement and network, and advocate for marginalized groups domestically and abroad.

Alongside Muslim and Palestinian affiliated groups in Ghana, particularly the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, the SMG has held marches and car parade demonstrations while holding up Palestinian flags to protest Israel’s massive military bombardment and destruction of life and infrastructure in Gaza especially post October 7, 2023. As of writing, Israel’s actions have resulted in at least 57,000 Palestinians killed, many of them children, and a million displaced, actions amounting to what the UN and the human rights watch group Amnesty International have called a genocide.Footnote ⁵⁶ To highlight their support for Palestinians, in the morning of June 15, 2024, an SMG Palestinian solidarity car parade in Accra took place, drawing “over fifty vehicles draped in Palestinian flags.”Footnote ⁵⁷ More recently, in 2025, they criticized the Akufo-Addo and Mahama administrations for their friendly relations with Israel and organized readings in Accra on “the Israeli genocide in Gaza.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Their global activism is not limited to events in Palestine, however.

In late November 2024, members of SMG attended the “Conference in Solidarity with the Peoples of the Sahel” in Niamey, Niger, alongside more than 2,000 activists and groups expressing anti-imperialist sympathies from around the world.Footnote ⁵⁹ Unlike the Akufo-Addo–led government that denounced the military coups in Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali, the SMG has strongly backed the West African military regimes, insisting that they are leading the vanguard toward African emancipation. All three military governments ousted democratically elected leaders. They charged their predecessors as Western neocolonial puppets, insisting that they failed to solve security challenges from armed Islamist groups and permitted Western companies to profit at their people’s expense.Footnote ⁶⁰ Referencing Kwame Nkrumah’s Independence Day speech of March 6, 1957, that Ghana’s “independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with total liberation of the African continent,” the general secretary of SMG, Kwesi Pratt Junior, declared at the conference that “The patriotic revolutions in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali will be meaningless unless they are linked with the total liberation of the African continent.”Footnote ⁶¹ On the SMG’s Instagram page, a picture of five individuals – two of them wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh, which has come to symbolize worldwide solidarity with Palestinians – appears. The caption of the picture stated: “Powerful moments from the Solidarity with the Sahel conference in Niamey. Our Comrades on the ground standing united for justice, peace, and liberation. Together, we rise for the Sahel and for Palestine.”Footnote ⁶²

While a distinct minority, today’s socialists in Ghana continue to tackle and frame issues not simply within the geographic borders of Ghana, but within an internationalist framework. In its various forms, they continue to take up the struggle of anti-imperialism. Another group, labor, continues its quest to hold the government accountable and push for rights vis-à-vis the state and private capital.

* * *

On April 27, 2023, the Ghanaian public intellectual Edmund Agyemang Boateng lamented the loss of strikes as political and social mobilizing forces in contemporary Ghana as it once was in the colonial era. Yet, strikes and protests have not lost their luster in independent Ghana.Footnote ⁶³ Even during the Nkrumah era (see Chapters 3 and 6), while some claimed that strikes and protests had been curtailed, worker stoppages, protests, and strikes were one of the hallmarks of labor under Nkrumah. This legacy of protest has not been lost in present-day Ghana. Petitions, protests, and strikes have continued to be integral to Ghana’s political, economic, and social discourses and culture. Since the 2010s, various sectors of Ghana’s labor force have threatened to and have gone on strike over insufficient salaries or salaries in arrears, disillusionment about Ghana’s economic and political direction and condition, and objections to certain appointments. For instance, in October 2022, public universities’ staff went on strike over poor working conditions.Footnote ⁶⁴ That month, workers at Abossey Okai Parts Market, the highly trafficked spare car parts market in Accra, closed their shops for a “six-day industrial action to protest the deteriorating economic situation in the country” and to “‘pinch’ on government to urgently address the depreciating cedi (Ghana’s currency), high interest and inflation.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In November, the Pre-Tertiary Teachers Union declared their intention to strike unless the newly appointed director general for the Ghana Education Service, previously a banker, was replaced by a professional educator.Footnote ⁶⁶

After ridiculing the Mahama-led NDC government for getting an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan in 2015, the NPP government was forced to put its tail behind its legs in 2022 and go to the IMF and other nations to restructure its existing debts.Footnote ⁶⁷ In order to receive the $300 million loan, the IMF demanded the NPP-government review all their social policies: including scrapping its signature free high school program and to restructure its debt to local bondholders, including putting its citizens’ pension funds in a debt restructuring plan.Footnote ⁶⁸ The NPP government refused to eliminate the free high school program. However, the then deeply unpopular minister of Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta, proposed restructuring pensions, drawing widespread backlash and condemnation among the citizenry. Pensioners marched with signs, some inscribed with the words: “Don’t Turn Pensioners into Destitutes” and “Don’t Push Pensioners into Early Graves.” Their actions forced the government to offer some pensioners exemptions.Footnote ⁶⁹ In December 2022, the head of the TUC informed the government that organized labor, including teachers, nurses, midwives, and civil servants, would go on strike on December 27 if their pensions were exchanged or gutted for the government to secure IMF funds.Footnote ⁷⁰

Finally, in October and November 2024, drinking water coming through some people’s pipes in Ghana stopped. After years of systematic illegal mining, known locally as galamsey, from domestic and foreign actors, 60 percent of the nation’s water bodies have been polluted.Footnote ⁷¹ It is believed that if nothing changes, Ghana will have to import its drinking water by 2030.Footnote ⁷² Ghanaians from across the political spectrum have taken to the streets to protest actions that have resulted in widespread environmental degradation and the huge sums of unaccounted for wealth. It is estimated that the state loses roughly $2 billion a year due to illegal mining and smuggling. On October 7, 2024, powerful trade union groups, such as the Trade Union Congress, Organised Labour, and the Ghana Employers Association, threatened a national strike on October 10 unless the government offered concrete measures to address galamsey. After government assurances, they called off the strike.Footnote ⁷³ While those groups stopped their actions, others proceeded with demonstrations with signs such as: “Save Our Land,” “Save Our Future,” “End Galamsey Now,” “Free The Citizen,” and “Destroy Galamsey Not Our Future.”Footnote ⁷⁴

As the Ghanaian economy has suffered tremendously due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia–Ukraine war, the destruction of the environment, the pollution of drinking water, and unaccounted gold proceeds and other monies fleeing the country, Ghanaians have continued to protest and demand accountability and rights from their government, continuing a legacy from the colonial era to today (see Chapter 6). Whether in Ghana or Eastern Europe, as Socialist De-Colony has shown, Ghanaian citizens have continuously fought for a better present and future, for better economic and physical protections, for increased pay, and for equity.

Despite the political and economic uncertainties and challenges Ghana has faced from independence until now, Socialist De-Colony has demonstrated that Ghanaian leaders, intellectuals, and workers have offered radical utopias and visions of freedom. People in Ghana have pushed the Ghanaian hierarchy to stay true to the dreams and possibilities offered during the Nkrumah era. They still posit Ghana as a site of global Black culture and liberation. While the use of socialism as a liberationist and governing discourse has faded, the Ghanaian state is still fighting for sovereignty at the international and domestic level. Its people are clamoring for individual sovereignty and racial, sexual, and economic rights and protections.Footnote ⁷⁵

Roughly sixty years since the end of the socialist de-colony and seventy years since Ghana’s political independence from the UK, Ghana and Ghanaians are still grappling with the “provinciality of freedom” and continue to chant: “Forward Ever, Backward Never!”