A Fresh Lens for Ghanian Political-Economic History

From 1957 to 1966, Kwame Nkrumah served as the President of Ghana, bringing with him to office a socialist political-economic philosophy. After the U.S.-led coup d'état in 1966, historical researchers and political commentators have primarily categorized his efforts as a failure attributed to him being either too socialist or not socialist enough. 

In a 2023 article titled “Ghana and Nkrumah Revisited: Lenin, State Capitalism, and Black Marxists Orbits”—which was named a finalist for the 2024 Outstanding Article Prize from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora—Nana Osei-Opare, Member (2022–23) in the School of Historical Studies, revisits the Ghanian political economy under Nkrumah. He argues that the political-economic philosophies and policies employed were not contradictory Marxian policies, but rather showcased Black Marxists’ deep understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas.

Tracing conceptual ideas through Black Marxists’ correspondences, newspaper and magazine articles, British and American espionage files, and archival state and inter-state departmental documents from Ghana, the U.S., Britain, and Russia, Osei-Opare demonstrates how Black Marxists’ combinations of socialist and capitalist development paths were key sites of ideological interrogation and experimentation. 

This, in turn, shows Black thinkers as active interpreters and agents of historical and contemporaneous global political, economic, and ideological struggles, rejecting ideas that African political ideologies solely originate from a romanticized Afrocentric origin.