UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations

UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Red Star State: State-Capitalism, Socialism, and Black Internationalism in Ghana, 1957- 1966 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0qt1k4q3 Author Osei-Opare, Kwadwo Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles The Red Star State: State-Capitalism, Socialism, and Black Internationalism in Ghana, 1957-1966 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History by Kwadwo Osei-Opare © Copyright by Kwadwo Osei-Opare The Red Star State: State-Capitalism, Socialism, and Black Internationalism in Ghana, 1957-1966 by Kwadwo Osei-Opare Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Los Angeles, 2019 Professor Andrew Apter, Chair The Red Star State charts a new history of global capitalism and socialism in relation to Ghana and Ghana’s first postcolonial leader, Kwame Nkrumah. By tracing how Soviet connections shaped Ghana’s post-colonial economic ideologies, its Pan-African program, and its modalities of citizenship, this dissertation contradicts literature that portrays African leaders as misguided political-economic theorists, ideologically inconsistent, or ignorant Marxist-Leninists. Rather, I argue that Nkrumah and Ghana’s postcolonial government actively formed new political economic ideologies by drawing from Lenin’s state-capitalist framework and the Soviet Economic Policy (NEP) to reconcile capitalist policies under a decolonial socialist umbrella. Moreover, I investigate how ordinary Africans—the working poor, party members, local and cabinet-level government officials, economic planners, and the informal sector—grappled with ii and reshaped the state’s role and duty to its citizens, conceptions of race, Ghana’s place within the Cold War, state-capitalism, and the functions of state-corporations. Consequently, The Red Star State attends both to the intricacies of local politics while tracing how global ideas and conceptions of socialism, citizenship, governmentality, capitalism, and decolonization impacted the first independent sub-Saharan African state. The dissertation remaps and reimagines the global circuits of Africans, the African diaspora, and nationalism, and merges the intellectual and geographic circuits of Paul Gilroy’s “black Atlantic” and Maxim Matusevich’s “Africa and the Iron Curtain” and illustrates how they transformed each other. The dissertation draws on two to three years of English and Russian archival research in multiple sites and sources in Ghana, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. iii The dissertation of Kwadwo Osei-Opare is approved. Robin D.G. Kelley Stephan F. Miescher William H. Worger Andrew Apter, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2019 iv To my family v TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ii Acknowledgments iii Vita xii Introduction: Subjectivity and Positionality in Historical Writing 1 Part I: Red & Black Connections Chapter 1: Towards A Global African Intellectual History 31 Chapter 2: Rethinking the Cold War Typology & Postcolonial Ghanaian Citizenship 89 Part II: Black State Capitalism Chapter 3: “A Different Brand of Socialism Peculiar to Ghana:” The State-Capitalist Project 144 Chapter 4: “We Too Know How to Drink Whiskey and Educate Our Children:” Workers in the State-Capitalist Project 194 Epilogue: The Legacy of the Black Star 241 Bibliography 262 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Nkrumah in the West African Students Union in London, June 15, 1951 51 Figure 2 Nkrumah at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958 51 Figure 3 Nkrumah Receiving his honorary doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958 52 Figure 4 Nkrumah, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev at the Kremlin, USSR, August 1961 89 Figure 5 Nkrumah and Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan visit the wine factory in the Crimea, September 1961 124 Figure 6 Madam Fathia Nkrumah, Kwame Nkrumah, A.I. Mikoyan, and others at the Crimea, September 1961 124 Figure 7 Nkrumah and Mikoyan at a Crimean Beach in September 1961 125 Figure 8 Nkrumah, Mikoyan, and others visit Vorontsov Palace in Crimea, September 1961 125 Figure 9 “The Empty Threatre From An Empty Barrel” 244 Figure 10 “The Storm of Economic Crisis” 245 Figure 11 “Nkrumah: The Vicious Octopus” 245 Figure 12 “The Big Thief” 246 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I dedicate my dissertation to all the people who came before me and suffered, toiled, and died to allow me to write this. It was the multitude of struggles of people in colonial Ghana, apartheid- South Africa, and America that has allowed me to sit here now on a train from Samara, Russia, to Kazan, Russia, to write this acknowledgment section and to ultimately write this dissertation. When I wrote my undergraduate senior honor’s thesis, which was where I started to make connections between Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana, Patrice Lumumba, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Vladimir Lenin, and the Soviet Union, I never got the opportunity to thank Robert Crews, Carol F. McKibben, and Sean Hanretta for their support in shaping the questions that I asked and the research that I did. They profoundly molded my intellectual interests and helped me get through college and into graduate school. I remember running into Crews’ office as a senior and notifying him that Nkrumah’s works and ideas sounded similarly to Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP). After respectfully hearing me out, he proceeded to ask me a few questions, which had me convinced that he saw the connections as well! While Crews might not remember or know this, my first year at Stanford was very challenging. During the fall quarter of my second year, I had enrolled in his Russian Empire class and had turned in a writing assignment. Sometime afterward, he walked downstairs in the History department, bumped into and recognized me, and told me that we had “a writer on our hands.” After undergoing writing struggles during my first year of college, those words provided me with an entirely renewed sense of confidence and belief that I did belong at Stanford. For the last 11 years, he has been a constant mentor, and I am genuinely grateful to him for the amount of time he has generously expended on me. Hanretta was also instrumental in helping me select which African history iii graduate schools to apply to and how to navigate the graduate experience. I am thankful to him for taking me under his wing late in my undergraduate career. I am deeply indebted to thank Laura Hubbard, John Pearson, Chad McClymonds, Nancy McClymonds, and Karen Fung for their constant support, friendship, and intellectual and sporting encouragement and companionship over the years. They supported me as an undergraduate student, in-between graduate school and college, and have continued to aid me in multiple ways during my tenure at UCLA. I hope that they know that their consistent support and friendship has helped me overcome and learn so much during the last decade. They have always made Stanford a home away from home. I am genuinely grateful for that. The research and writing experience can be a very lonely affair. However, throughout my extended stays in Ghana, England, and Russia, I have met and was re-acquainted with some great people and scholars such as Robert Kabera, Alina Lapushkina, Ahmed Hammady, Kamila Kociałkowska, Mariam Goshadze, Alessandro Iandolo, Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, Gabby Cornish, Janice Levi, Sergey Mazov, Hilary Lynd, Rebecca Johnston, Elisa Prosperetti, Brandon Schechter, Tony Wood, Emily Elliot, Claire Thornton, Kat Hill Reischl, Osei Boakye, Merel van’t Wout, Mike Loader, Joy Neumeyer, Andrei Tcacenco, Thom Loyd, and Nick Levy. They have all in their unique ways made the dissertation, research, and writing process a less lonely and far more enjoyable experience. Some of them introduced me to archival holdings, books, insights, and aided my access to differing archives, which in their totality have played a vital role in the writing of this dissertation, while others have also pushed me to visit sites and places that I would not have done by myself. I want to thank Denis Kolesnikov, Alina Lapushkina, Ann Kolesnikova, and Victor Kurilov dearly for opening their homes and families to me during my stay in Russia. In unique iv ways, each of you significantly made my research experience in Russia better and made it a new home away from home. A historian is inevitably indebted to the archivists who make their research and career possible. I want to thank the Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD)-Cape Coast archivists, especially William J.A. Otoo, for their generous assistance. I would also like to thank the archivists at PRAAD-Tamale, particularly Abdullah Abu-Bakari for his support during my archival stint in Tamale. That trip fundamentally changed the way I thought about state-corporations and the Ghana-Soviet relationship. I want to thank Lydia A., Priscilla Gyimah, Theophilus Hinson, Thoras Bremansu, and Sophia Solomon at PRAAD- Takoradi-Sekondi archive for their help. Moreover, I would like to acknowledge the archival staff and national service volunteers at PRAAD-Accra for all of their effort and assistance. Furthermore, I am especially grateful to Bright at PRAAD-Accra for permitting me to get into the bottom of the archive to not only help them sort out Nkrumah’s books but also to see the types of books Nkrumah had and the hand-written mark-ups within those texts. I would also like to thank the Russian archivists at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI), the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), and the Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE), who took the time out of their day and had the patience to sit with me and go through their bureaucratic structures and catalogs.

Load more