Anticolonial Capitalism: Ghana, Jerry Rawlings, and UNCTAD, 1981–92

This paper analyses how Jerry Rawlings’ structural adjustment program between 1981 and 1992 engaged UNCTAD. Together with advisers, such as J.H. Frimpong Ansah, economic reforms with an emphasis on the market and austerity were cast as a revolutionary undertaking. ‘Anticolonial capitalism’ had to chart a new route to liberation and replace Nkrumah’s failed African Socialist project. At UNCTAD meetings Ghanaian market liberation served as an example that was adopted and adapted by others in the Global South who were also looking for ways to reduce international trade inequality and domestic poverty. UNCTAD became a forum for the exchange of different development doctrines in the 1980s.