Domesticating and Globalizing Socialism in Ghana

This paper exhumes the ideas and ambitions of the figures who participated in the project of transforming Ghana, a formerly colonial society and the first independent Sub-Saharan African country, into a paragon of Black freedom and socialist modernity. Although these figures were arrested, vilified, and some killed sixty years ago for their visions, this project takes seriously the utopias and desires they articulated and implemented. To make sense of and historicize these possibilities, the paper unpacks, rethinks, and ties Ghana’s Cold War and political-economic projects within larger socialist and Marxist debates from multiple ideological and geographic vantage points. In this way and amidst this adventure, the Soviet Union, as a physical space and an intellectual construction, helped shape discourses on what could and might be. While intellectuals and leftist circles in Ghana looked at the Soviet Union as an ideological and economic mirror of what was possible, the socialists in Ghana also understood their project, as what Christopher Lee and Adom Getachew argue, as “worldmaking” or what CLR James defined as “revolutionary.” Unlike the Soviet, Yugoslavian, and Chinese socialist projects and visions, this paper argues that the Ghanaian project’s explicit attempts to decolonize and delink its economy and its political formation away from white supremacist structures and the imperial and colonial powers and not the vague world capitalist economy made it unique. Racial and political-economic decolonization were intertwined and could not be easily disentangled.