Nana Osei-Opare, "Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana's Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Summary

Led by the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana won its political independence from the United Kingdom in 1957. It precipitated both the dying spiral of colonialism across the African continent and the world's first Black socialist state. Utilising materials from Ghanaian, Russian, English, and American archives, Nana Osei-Opare offers a provocative and new reading of this defining moment in world history through the eyes of workers, writers, students, technical-experts, ministers, and diplomats. Osei-Opare shows how race and Ghana-Soviet spaces influenced, enabled, and disrupted Ghana's transformational socialist, Cold War, and decolonization projects to achieve Black freedom. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore.

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Elisa Prosperetti

Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor (History) at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her first book, An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa, will be published by Cambridge University Press in May 2026.
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