¹ Lt. General J. A. Ankrah, J.W.K. Harlley, and Brigadier A. A. Afrifa led the NLC; Stockwell, John, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (New York, 1984), 201 Google Scholar.

² This event poured substantial gas on the flames of Afro-pessimism. See Rieff, David, “In Defense of Afro-Pessimism,” World Policy Journal 15, 4 (1998): 10–22 Google Scholar.

³ James, C.L.R., Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (London, 1977)Google Scholar.

⁴ Some of this critique took on a personal, nasty tenor and twist. Nkrumah’s critics assailed his lucidity, personality, and ambitions. For instance, Russell Warren Howe, a journalist of the British Daily Telegraph, wrote that Nkrumah developed “Hitlerlike fits of fisticuffs” and had “psychotic periods” and that his cabinet had requested a Canadian psychiatrist to examine his mental health in 1958. See “Did Nkrumah Favour Pan-Africanism?” Transition 27 (1966): 128–34, 133. The NLC’s Commission to examine Nkrumah’s financial dealings concluded that the deposed president had a “split personality,” and was a hypocrite and “schizophrenic.” See Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD)-Accra, ADM5/3/115, 19 Jan. 1967, “White Paper on the Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Kwame Nkrumah Properties,” 1.

⁵ Soviet scholar Ivan I. Potekhin argued that it was utopian to believe that “private capitalist enterprises” could exist “under socialism”; see “On African Socialism: A Soviet View,” in William H. Friedland and Carl G. Rosberg, Jr., eds., African Socialism (Stanford, 1964), 106–7. Marina Ottaway asserted, “While development is possible both through capitalism and socialism, developing countries cannot choose the latter as a path of development in the immediate future, because the conditions are not right.” See “Soviet Marxism and African Socialism,” Journal of Modern African Studies 16, 3 (1978): 477–85.

⁶ For earlier and parallel debates about state capitalism, see Howard, M. C. and King, J. E., “‘State Capitalism’ in the Soviet Union,” History of Economic Review 34, 1 (2001): 110–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Marcel van der Linden’s Western Marxism and the Soviet Union (Leiden, 2007).

⁷ Walter Rodney’s 1975 speech, “Marxism and African Liberation,” at Queen’s College, New York City, at: https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/works/marxismandafrica.htm.

⁸ James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, 192.

⁹ Prashad, Vijay, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York, 2007)Google Scholar; Getachow, Adom, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, 2019)Google Scholar; Lewis, Su Lin and Stolte, Carolien, “Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Internationalisms in the Early Cold War,” Journal of World History 30, 1–2 (2019): 1–19 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Kelley, Robin D. G., “How the West Was One: On the Uses and Limitations of Diaspora,” Black Scholar 30, 3/4 (2001): 31–35, 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Jeffrey, S. Ahlman’s fantastic inquest into what he dubs “Living with Nkrumahism” discusses not only the promises of socialism, but Nkrumah’s and Ghana’s Pan-African aspirations: Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism (Athens, 2017);Google Scholar Biney, Ama, The Political and Social Thought of Kwame Nkrumah (London, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Darkwah, Kofi, “Nationalism and Independence,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 15 (2013): 71–89 Google Scholar, 85; Osseo-Asare, Abena Dove, Atomic Junction: Nuclear Power in Africa after Independence (Cambridge, 2019): 1–106 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marika Sherwood, Kwame Nkrumah and the Dawn of the Cold War: The West African National Secretariat (1945–48) (London, 2019); Grilli, Matteo, “Nkrumah, Nationalism, and Pan-Africanism: The Bureau of African Affairs,” History in Africa 44 (2017): 295–307 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gerits, Frank, “‘When the Bull Elephants Fight’: Kwame Nkrumah, Non-Alignment, and Pan-Africanism as an Interventionist Ideology in the Global Cold War (1957–66),” International History Review 37, 5 (2015): 951–69,CrossRefGoogle Scholar 964; Allman, Jean, Nkrumah, Kwame, “African Studies, and the Politics of Knowledge Production in the Black Star of Africa,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 46, 2 (2013): 181–203 Google Scholar; Jemima Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago, 2012), 46; Jeffrey S. Ahlman, Kwame Nkrumah: Visions of Liberation (Athens, 2021); Ahlman, Jeffrey S., “Road to Ghana: Nkrumah, Southern Africa, and the Eclipse of a Decolonizing Africa,” Kronos: Southern African Histories 37 (2011): 23–40 Google Scholar; Osseo-Asare, Abena Dove, “Kwame Nkrumah’s Suits: Sartorial Politics in Ghana at Independence,” Fashion Theory 25, 5 (2021): 597–632 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ahlman, Jeffrey S., “The Algerian Question in Nkrumah’s Ghana, 1958–1960: Debating ‘Violence’ and ‘Nonviolence’ in African Decolonization,” Africa Today 57, 2 (2010): 67–84 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries (RBML), C.L.R. James Papers, box 9, folder 9, series II. 2. Nkrumah, Kwame—Various 1966–1967, 1072, annotated, p. 1, draft, “Kwame Nkrumah: Founder of African Emancipation”; James Boggs to Nkrumah.

¹² P. Kiven Tunteng, “Kwame Nkrumah and the African Revolution,” Civilisations 23/24, 3/4 (1973/1974): 233–47; Metz, Steve, “In Lieu of Orthodoxy: The Socialist Theories of Nkrumah and Nyerere,” Journal of Modern African Studies 20, 3 (1982): 377–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohen, Robin, “Marxism in Africa: The Grounding of a Tradition,” in Munslow, Barry, ed., Africa: Problems in the Transition to Socialism (London, 1986), 41, 44 Google Scholar; Thomas Lionel Hodgkin, “Nkrumah’s Radicalism,” Présence Africaine 85 (1er trimestre 1973): 62–72, 65, 70.

¹³ Mazrui, Ali A., “Nkrumah: The Leninist Czar,” Transition 26 (1966): 106–26Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Hodgkin, “Nkrumah’s Radicalism,” 65, 70.

¹⁵ Tunteng, “Kwame Nkrumah and the African Revolution,” 233–47.

¹⁶ Rhoda Howard, Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Ghana (New York, 1978). For more works on the Ghanaian economy via a development, underdevelopment, neocolonial framework, see Grundy, Kenneth W., “Nkrumah’s Theory of Underdevelopment: An Analysis of Recurrent Themes,” World Politics 15, 3 (1963): 438–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Andrzej Krassowski, Development and the Debt Trap: Economic Planning and External Borrowing in Ghana (London, 1974); T. E. Amin argues that Ghana only became indebted because Nkrumah invested too much, too quickly, on industrialization rather than in agricultural production: An Economic Blueprint for Ghana (Accra, 2003).

¹⁷ Hill, Polly, The Migrant Cocoa Farmers of Southern Ghana (Cambridge, 1963)Google Scholar; Margaret Peil, The Ghanaian Factory Worker: Industrial Man in Africa (Cambridge, 1972); Jeff Crisp, The Story of an African Working Class (London, 1984); Ahlman, Living with Nkrumahism; Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch, “The Ghana Trade Union Congress and the Politics of International Labor Alliances, 1957–1971,” International Review of Social History 62, 2 (2017): 191–213; Kunkel, Sarah, “Modernising the village: State farms, agricultural development, and nation-building in 1960s Ghana,” Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte 67, 2 (2022): 219–244 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I have also discussed the Ghanaian political economy and its relationship to labor, in: “‘If You Trouble a Hungry Snake, You Will Force It to Bite You’: Rethinking Archival Pessimism, Worker Discontent, and Petition Writing in Ghana, 1957–66,” Journal of African History 62, 1 (2021): 59–78.

¹⁸ Murillo, Bianca, Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Athens, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clark, Gracia, Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women (Chicago, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hart, Jennifer, Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation (Bloomington, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Miescher, Stephan F., “‘Nkrumah’s Baby’: The Akosombo Dam and the Dream of Development in Ghana, 1952–1966,” Water History 6 (2014): 341–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tony Killick, Development Economics in Action: A Study of Economic Policies in Ghana, 2d ed. (New York, 2010); Miescher, Stephan F., A Dam for Africa: Akosombo Stories from Ghana (Bloomington, 2022).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁰ Botchway, Francis N., “The State, Governance and the Energy Industry in Ghana,” Law and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America 33, 2 (2000): 176–211, 180Google Scholar.

²¹ Ninsin, Kwame A., “Introduction: Thirty-Seven Years of Development Experience,” in Hansen, Emmanuel and Ninsin, Kwame A., eds., The State Development and Politics in Ghana (London, 1989), 5Google Scholar; Ninsin, Kwame A., “State, Capital and Labour Relations, 1961–1987,” in Hansen, Emmanuel and Ninsin, Kwame A., eds., The State, Development and Politics in Ghana (London, 1989), 19 Google Scholar.

²² Clark, Nancy, Manufacturing Apartheid: State Corporations in South Africa (New Haven, 1994 CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Pitcher, M. Anne, Transforming Mozambique: The Politics of Privatization, 1975–2000 (New York, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chalfin, Brenda, Shea Butter Republic: State Power, Global Markets, and the Making of an Indigenous Commodity (New York, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Andrew Apter, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago, 2005); Murillo, Market Encounters; Young, Alden, Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development and State Formation (New York, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miescher, Stephan F., “Building the City of the Future: Visions and Experiences of Modernity in Ghana’s Akosombo Township,” Journal of African History 53, 3 (2012): 367–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Appel, Hannah, The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea (Durham, 2019)Google Scholar.

²³ Huat, Chua Beng, Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore (Ithaca, 2017), 98–122 Google Scholar; Raul A. Fernandez and Jose F. Ocampo, “The Andean Pact and State Capitalism in Colombia,” Latin American Perspectives 2, 3 (1975): 19–35; Huang, Philip C. C., “‘State Capitalism’ or ‘Socialist Market Economy?’” Modern China 38, 6 (2012): 587–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alex Dupuy and Barry Truchil, “Problems in the Theory of State Capitalism,” Theory and Society 8, 1 (1979): 1–38; Musacchio, Aldo and Lazzarini, Sergio G., Reinventing State Capitalism: Leviathan in Business, Brazil and Beyond (Cambridge, 2014), 24–43 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ See Karen Farsoun, “State Capitalism in Algeria,” MERIP Reports 35 (1975): 3–30; Turok, Ben, “State Capitalism: The Role of Parastatals in Zambia,” Africa Development/Afrique et Développement 4, 2/3 (1979): 44–67 Google Scholar; Wolpin, Miles D., “Legitimising State Capitalism: Malian Militarism in Third-World Perspective,” Journal of Modern African Studies 18, 2 (1980): 281–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aldo Musacchio and Sergio G. Lazzarini, Reinventing State Capitalism: Leviathan in Business, Brazil and Beyond (Cambridge, 2014): 24–43; Kraus, Jon, “Capital, Power and Business Associations in the African Political Economy: A Tale of Two Countries, Ghana and Nigeria,” Journal of Modern African Studies 40, 3 (2002): 395–436 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ I do not distinguish between African socialism and socialism in Africa. Emma Hunter writes an excellent overview of the various contours of African socialism—its history, the debates within it, and why the term “African socialism” drew both supporters and critics: “African Socialism,” in Marcel van der Linden, ed., The Cambridge History of Socialism (Cambridge, 2022).

²⁶ Tom Mboya, “African Socialism,” Transition 8 (1963): 17–18; George Bennett, “African Socialism,” International Journal 20, 1 (1964/1965): 97–101; Gregor, A. James, “African Socialism, Socialism, and Fascism: An Appraisal,” Review of Politics 29, 3 (1967): 324–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walter A. E. Skurnik, “Leopold Sedar Senghor and African Socialism,” Journal of Modern African Studies 3, 3 (1965): 349–69; Clark, Ralph, “Does African Socialism Make Economic Sense?” Transition 26 (1966): 47–49 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lal, Priya, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World (Cambridge, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Benedito Machava, “Reeducation Camps, Austerity, and the Carceral Regime in Socialist Mozambique (1974–79),” Journal of African History 60, 3 (2019): 429–55; Carl G. Rosberg and Thomas M. Callaghy, eds., Socialism in Sub-Saharan Africa (Berkeley, 1979); Friedland, William H. and Rosberg, Carl G. Jr. eds., African Socialism (Stanford, 1964)Google Scholar; Tomáš František Žák, “Applying the Weapon of Theory: Comparing the Philosophy of Julius Kambarage Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 28, 2 (2016): 147–60; Akyeampong, Emmanuel, “African Socialism; or, the Search for an Indigenous Model of Economic Development,” Economic History of Developing Regions 33, 1 (2018): 69–87 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Basil Davidson, Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah (New York, 1973), 105; Laqueur, Walter Z., “Communism and Nationalism in Tropical Africa,” Foreign Affairs 39, 4 (1961): 610–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 612.

²⁸ I do not address here the scholarship that tackles the precolonial and colonial Ghanaian economy from slavery, to forced labor, to local markets, to merchants, to British trading firms, and so forth, but see: Austin, Gareth, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana: From Slavery to Free Labour in Asante, 1807–1956 (Rochester, 2005)Google Scholar; Dumett, Raymond E., El Dorado in West Africa: The Gold Mining Frontier, African Labor and Colonial Capitalism in the Gold Coast, 1875–1900 (Athens, 1998); Hill, Migrant Cocoa Farmers Google Scholar; Silver, Jim, “The Failure of European Mining Companies in the Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast,” Journal of African History 22, 4, (1981): 511–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Adu-Boahen, Kwabena, “The Impact of European Presence on Slavery in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 14 (2012): 165–99Google Scholar.

²⁹ Weiss, Holger, Framing a Radical African Atlantic: African American Agency, West African Intellectuals and the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (Leiden, 2013)Google Scholar; Matera, Marc, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Oakland, 2015)Google Scholar; Margaret Stevens, Red International and Black Caribbean: Communists in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919–1939 (London, 2017); Makalani, Minkah, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, 2008).

³⁰ Green, Nile, “The Waves of Heterotopia: Toward a Vernacular Intellectual History of the Indian Ocean,” American Historical Review 123, 3 (2018): 846–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 847–48.

³¹ McCann, Gerard, “Where Was the Afro in Afro-Asian Solidarity? Africa’s ‘Bandung Moment’ in 1950s Asia,” Journal of World History 30, 1–2 (2019): 89–123 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 92, 93.

³² Ahlman, Living with Nkrumahism, 31.

³³ Popescu, Monica, “On the Margins of the Black Atlantic: Angola, the Eastern Bloc, and the Cold War,” Research in African Literatures 45, 3 (2014): 91–109 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Matusevich, Maxim, “Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic: African Students as Soviet Moderns,” Ab Imperio 2 (2012): 325–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 329. More recently, Steffi Marung has also called for a more triangulated arena of intellectual inquiry between Africa, the USSR, and Black Atlantic to make sense “of postcolonial socialist modernities.” See “Out of Empire into Socialist Modernity: Soviet-African (Dis)Connections and Global Intellectual Geographies,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 41, 1 (2021): 56–70.

³⁵ Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,” African Studies Review 43, 1 (2000): 11–45; Marika Sherwood, “The Comintern, the CPGB, Colonies and Black Britons, 1920–1938,” Science & Society 60, 2 (1996): 137–63; Susan Campbell, “‘Black Bolsheviks’ and Recognition of African-America’s Right to Self-Determination by the Communist Party USA,” Science & Society 58, 4 (1994/1995): 440–70; James, Leslie E., George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire (New York, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schwarz, Bill, ed., West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ Carina Ray, “Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast,” American Historical Review 119, 1 (2014): 78–110, 85.

³⁷ Gordon, Peter E., “Contextualism and Criticism in the History of Ideas,” in McMahon, Darrin M. and Moyn, Samuel, eds., Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Oxford, 2014), 33 Google Scholar.

³⁸ Quayson, Ato, “Protocols of Representation and the Problems of Constituting an African ‘Gnosis’: Achebe and Okri,” Yearbook of English Studies 27 (1997): 137–49, 140CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ Ibid., 149.

⁴⁰ RBML, CLR James Papers, box 4, folder 3, series II. 1. For instance, as Italy invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935, one of the few non-colonized African spaces, James, like other Black anti-colonialist figures, joined efforts to defeat the Italian army. He subsequently joined and helped organize the International African Friends of Abyssinia group.

⁴¹ RBML, CLR James Papers, box 4, folder 4, series II, 1.

⁴² RBML, CLR James Papers, box 5, folder 2, series II, 6.

⁴³ While a classic, Alexander Erlich’s three volumes still provide one of the best treatments on the internal Soviet and Bolshevik debates about the New Economic Policy and the importance of capitalism to the Soviet experiment: The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–1928 (Harvard, 1960).

⁴⁴ James, State Capitalism, 25.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 26.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 27.

⁴⁷ Vladimir Lenin, “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It,” in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 25, June-Sept. 1917 (Moscow, 1964), 357–58.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 359.

⁴⁹ Vladimir Lenin, “The Present-Day Economy of Russia,” in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 32, Dec. 1920–Aug. 1921 (Moscow, 1965), 330.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 332, 333.

⁵¹ James, State Capitalism, 25, 28.

⁵² There is a rich historiographical debate as to how to define state capitalism and whether it can be considered socialist. Pfeifer, Karen, “Three Worlds or Three Worldviews? State Capitalism and Development,” MERIP Reports 78 (1979): 3–11 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 26; Paranjape, H. K., “‘Socialism’ or ‘State Capitalism?’” Economic and Political Weekly 8, 4/6, annual number (1973): 319–24Google Scholar; Dupuy and Truchil, “Problems in the Theory of State Capitalism,” 1–38; Musacchio and Lazzarini, Reinventing State Capitalism, 7–9.

⁵³ James, State Capitalism, 93.

⁵⁴ James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution.

⁵⁵ “Philadelphia Kingfish in West Africa,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 30 May 1949.

⁵⁶ The British National Archives (TNA), FCO141/4933, 1 Apr. 1949, R. Thistlethwaite to the Director-General of the Security Service.

⁵⁷ Nkrumah, Kwame, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York, 1957), 33 Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ PRAAD-Accra, SC21/4/6, The Lincoln University Bulletin, Prizes Awarded at Commencement, 12 May 1942.

⁵⁹ Nkrumah, Ghana, 33, 34.

⁶⁰ RBML, C.L.R. James Papers, box 10. folder 25, series II, 3, 14. James and Nkrumah remained amicable until Nkrumah dismissed Sir Isaac Korsah from the Ghanaian judiciary in 1963 for acquitting the alleged plotters on Nkrumah’s life. See James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, 180–81.

⁶¹ RBML, C.L.R. James Papers, box 9, folder 9, series II.2, 1966–1967, 1072, C.L.R. James, “Kwame Nkrumah: Founder of African Emancipation,” Black World, July 1972.

⁶² C.L.R. James Papers, box 10, folder 25, series II. 3, James giving a talk, “George Padmore: Black Marxist Revolutionary: A Memoir by CLR James,” in North London, 1976.

⁶³ Howard University, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Dabu Gizenga Collection on Kwame Nkrumah, 128-19, from Du Bois to Fanon: C.L.R. James.

⁶⁴ PRAAD-Accra, SC21/4/8.

⁶⁵ TNA, FCO141/4933, 18 Apr. 1949, E. H. Roach to the Honorable Colonial Secretary.

⁶⁶ Sherwood, Marika, Kwame Nkrumah: The Years Abroad 1935–1947 (Accra, 1996), 64 Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Nkrumah stuck to this principle as Ghana’s head of state. During the last years of World War II, he sought to further his Marxist, Communist, and Russian education. See PRAAD-Accra, SC21/1/97-112 (SC21/1/79), Kwame Nkrumah, “The Philosophy of Property.”

⁶⁸ PRAAD-Accra, SC1/40/96, 23 June 1944, Ernest J. Simmons to Nkrumah; Nana Osei-Opare, “Uneasy Comrades: Postcolonial Statecraft, Race, and Citizenship, Ghana-Soviet Relations, 1957–1966,” Journal of West African History 5, 2 (2019): 85–111, 89.

⁶⁹ TNA, FCO141/4933, 9 Dec. 1947, “Francis Nwia-Kofie Nkrumah alias F. B. Kwame Nkrumah,” by R.W.H. Ballantine; TNA, FCO141/4933, 21 Dec. 1947, “Note on F. N. Kwame Nkrumah (alias Francis Nwia-Kofie Nkrumah),” by K. Bradley.

⁷⁰ PRAAD-Accra, SC21/4/8, 6 Oct. 1944, Robert M. Laboll (name illegible) to Nkrumah.

⁷¹ TNA, FCO141/4933, 1 Apr. 1949, R. Thistlethwaite to Director-General of the Security Service.

⁷² TNA, FCO141/4933, 9 Dec. 1947, “Francis Nwia-Kofie Nkrumah alias F. N. Kwame Nkrumah,” written by Commissioner of the Gold Coast Police R.W.H. Ballantine.

⁷³ RBML, C.L.R. James Papers, box 10, folder 25, series II. 3, 14.

⁷⁴ Sherwood, Marika, “Kwame Nkrumah: The London Years, 1945–47,” Immigrants & Minorities 12, 3 (1993): 164–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 187.

⁷⁵ Padmore had an extensive network of alliances. See James, Leslie E., “‘Playing the Russian Game’: Black Radicalism, the Press, and Colonial Attempts to Control Anti-Colonialism in the Early Cold War, 1946–50,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43, 3 (2015): 509–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 523.

⁷⁶ Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Kwame Nkrumah, 128–19, from Du Bois to Fanon: C.L.R. James.

⁷⁷ Weiss, Framing a Radical African Atlantic, 38.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 8.

⁷⁹ McClellan, Woodford, “Africans and Black Americans in the Comintern Schools, 1925–1934,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 26, 2 (1993): 371–90 and in Maxim Matusevich, ed., Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters (Trenton, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸⁰ Weiss, Framing a Radical African Atlantic, 455–570.

⁸¹ RBML, C.L.R. James Papers, box 10, folder 25, series II 3, 7.

⁸² RBML, C.L.R. James Papers, box 10, folder 25, series II, 3, 18; Black women’s intellectual history is a growing and exciting field. See Bay, Mia, Griffin, Farah Jasmin, Jones, Martha S., and Savage, Barbara, eds., Towards an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill, 2015)Google Scholar; McDuffie, Erik S., Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, 2011)Google Scholar; Farmer, Ashley, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (Chapel Hill, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Merve Fejzula, “Gendered Labour, Negritude, and the Black Public Sphere,” Historical Research 95, 269 (2022): 423–46.

⁸³ Sherwood, “Kwame Nkrumah,” 183.

⁸⁴ TNA, KV2/1840, “Personality Note.”

⁸⁵ Weiss, Framing a Radical African Atlantic, 69.

⁸⁶ TNA, KV2/1840, “Personality Note.”

⁸⁷ Weiss, Framing a Radical African Atlantic, 69.

⁸⁸ TNA, KV2/1840, 1 Jan. 1949, written by R.A.A. Badham.

⁸⁹ Weiss, Framing a Radical African Atlantic, 72, 73.

⁹⁰ Ibid., 69.

⁹¹ TNA, KV2/1840, “Personality Note.”

⁹² Hanretta, Sean, “‘Kaffir’ Renner’s Conversion: Being Muslim in Public in Colonial Ghana,” Past & Present 210 (Feb. 2011): 187–220 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 189; TNA, KV2/1840, “Personality Note.”

⁹³ TNA, KV2/1840, 2 Nov. 1942, Gold Coast Governor to Secretary of State for the Colonies, London.

⁹⁴ TNA, KV2/1840, “Personality Note.”

⁹⁵ TNA, KV2/1840, 5 Dec. 1942, Colonial Office to L. W. Clayton.

⁹⁶ TNA, KV2/1840, 8 Dec.1942, British Home Office to P. Kennedy.

⁹⁷ TNA, KV2/1840, 1 Jan. 1949, written by R.A.A. Badham.

⁹⁸ TNA, KV2/1840, 24 July 1948, written by P. F. Hancock-Kratky. The Commercial Secretary at the Czechoslovakia Embassy, informed the British Board of Trade that he believed Awooner-Renner was a “secret agent,” and was conducting business with his communist subordinates such as Miss Ruppertova, her brother, Dr. Ruppert, and Goldstuecker, a communist counsellor. See TNA, KV2/1840, 28 Sept. 1948, T.A.K. Elliot to Mr. Joy; TNA, KV2/1840, 22 Oct. 1948, Sir Percy Sillitoe to W.L.B. Monson, Chief Secretary of the West African Council.

⁹⁹ They were immersed in Black Communist and Pan-African circles and participated in the 1945 Pan-African Manchester Conference together, alongside Du Bois. For more information on the Black anti-colonial circles in Britain from the 1920s to the 1940s, see Matera, Black London; Adi, Hakim, “Pan-Africanism and West African Nationalism in Britain,” African Studies Review 43, 1 (2000): 69–82 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and West Africans in Britain, 1900–1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism (London, 1998); Rich, Paul, “The Black Diaspora in Britain: Afro-Caribbean Students and the Struggle for a Political Identity, 1900–1950,” Immigrants & Minorities 6, 2 (1987): 151–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Olusanya, Gabriel, The West African Students’ Union and the Politics of Decolonisation, 1925–1958 (Ibadan, 1982)Google Scholar; Killingray, David, ed., Africans in Britain (London, 1994)Google Scholar; Sherwood, Kwame Nkrumah.

¹⁰⁰ Davidson, Black Star, 48.

¹⁰¹ TNA, KV2/1840, “Extract from ‘Comments on the Secretary of State’s Despatch No.7’ of March 31, 1948; and Cohen, Dennis L., “The Convention People’s Party of Ghana Representational or Solidarity Party?,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 4, 2 (Spring 1970): 173–194 Google Scholar, 176.

¹⁰² TNA, KV 2/1847/2, 7 Apr. 1948, R. Thistlethwaite to the Director General of the Security Service.

¹⁰³ TNA, FCO141/4933, 12 Dec. 1947, “Extract from Enclosure B to Gold Coast Secret Dispatch Dated 12th December 1947.”

¹⁰⁴ TNA, KV2/1848/1, 14 Oct. 1949, “Comments of the Secretary of State’s Dispatch No. 7.”

¹⁰⁵ TNA, KV2/1850/3, 3 Aug. 1951, H. L. Brown to Director General.

¹⁰⁶ TNA, KV2/1847/3, “Temple Bar 2151—Communist Party Headquarters,” Nkrumah on the phone with Maud Rogerson [wiretap].

¹⁰⁷ TNA, FCO141/4993, 21 Dec. 1947, K. Bradley to Y. E.

¹⁰⁸ TNA, FCO141/4993, 12 Dec. 1947, “Extract from Enclosure B. to Gold Coast Secret Dispatch dated 12th December 1947.”

¹⁰⁹ Ibid.

¹¹⁰ The Commission was created to address the ex-servicemen protests and march in Accra in February 1948, which resulted in the British colonial apparatus killing several ex-servicemen. See Hargrove, Jarvis L., “ Ashanti Pioneer: Coverage of Growing Political Developments in the Gold Coast, 1946–1949,” Journal of West African History 5, 2 (2019): 29–56, 44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹¹ TNA, KV2/1916, 30 Aug. 1954, M.J.E. Bagot to Barton.

¹¹² TNA, KV2/1916, 28 Aug. 1954, W.M.T. Megan to M.J.E. Bagot.

¹¹³ Osei-Opare, “Uneasy Comrades,” 91.

¹¹⁴ PRAAD-Accra, RG17/1/5D, 9 July 1956, Rita Hinden to Nkrumah.

¹¹⁵ PRAAD-Accra, RG17/1/5D, 15 Aug. 1956, Nkrumah to Rita Hinden.

¹¹⁶ Nkrumah, Ghana, 13.

¹¹⁷ PRAAD-Accra, in the basement.

¹¹⁸ Stalin, Joseph, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York, 1939), 256–57Google Scholar.

¹¹⁹ “Our Civic Duty”: Speech by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah at the Opening of the Unilever Soap Factory at Tema on Saturday, 24 Aug. 1963.

¹²⁰ Nkrumah, Kwame, Africa Must Unite (New York, 1963), 101 Google Scholar.

¹²¹ PRAAD-Accra, RG17/1/5D, 30 Dec. 1957, Hector Hughes to Nkrumah.

¹²² TNA, DO166/12, 10 Oct. 1963, S. J. Gross to V. E. Davies.

¹²³ While Ghana lacked a huge surplus, it had £200 million locked up in England’s security exchanges. From 1957–1958, its Minister of Finance Komla Agbeli Gbedemah and Chief Economic Advisor Sir W. Arthur Lewis traveled to England to retrieve Ghana’s £200 million foreign reserves from Britain’s security exchanges. British Crown Agents had mismanaged these funds. Robert, L. Tignor, W. Arthur Lewis and the Birth of Development Economics (Princeton, 2006), 154–59Google Scholar; PRAAD-Accra, RG17/1/98, 18 Dec. 1957, Sir W. Arthur Lewis to Nkrumah.

¹²⁴ Hill, Migrant Cocoa Farmers.

¹²⁵ A. W. Osei, Ghana National Assembly Parliamentary Debates, 28 Oct. 1963. This process was very similar to the Soviet Union’s taxation of its kulak class. See Lewin, Moshe, “Who Was the Soviet Kulak?” Soviet Studies 18, 2 (1966): 189–212, 195CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²⁶ Anglin, Douglas G., “Ghana, the West, and the Soviet Union,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 24, 2 (1958): 152–65, 157CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²⁷ PRAAD-Accra, RG17/1/5B, 13 Mar. 1957, A. E. Fellowes to Nkrumah.

¹²⁸ Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, 115; Noer, Thomas J., “The New Frontier and African Neutralism: Kennedy, Nkrumah, and the Volta River Project,” Diplomatic History 8, 1 (1984): 61–79 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hilton, T. E., “Akosombo Dam and the Volta River Project,” Geography 51, 3 (1966): 251–54Google Scholar; Miescher, “‘Nkrumah’s Baby,’” 341–66; Dzodzi Tsikata, Living in the Shadow of the Large Dams: Long Term Responses of Downstream and Lakeside Communities of Ghana’s Volta River Project (Leiden, 2006), 37–84; Miescher, A Dam for Africa; Russian Foreign Ministry Archive (AVP RF), d. 250, op. 4, por. 25, p. 5, 23 Mar. 1960.

¹²⁹ PRAAD-Accra, RG17/1/5B, 25 Jan. 1958, Portia D. Spencer to Nkrumah.

¹³⁰ Anglin, “Ghana, the West, and the Soviet Union,” 158.

¹³¹ PRAAD-Accra, RG17/1/5B, 1957/1958 (date unclear), Bob Fleming to Nkrumah.

¹³² Edmund G. Hutchinson, the Assistant Administrator for Africa Bureau Aid, noted in a 29 April 1964 report, “American Congressional Hearing for the Foreign Operations Appropriations for 1965,” that African Americans showed a “very significant interest in employment in Africa.” See PRAAD-Accra RG17/1/420.

¹³³ PRAAD-Accra, RG17/1/5B, 2 Mar. 1958, John M. Scott to Nkrumah. Furthermore, Sir W. Arthur Lewis wrote to Nkrumah that while he was pleased to have Scott’s factory in Ghana, that he could not “offer any special privileges to Mr. Scott.” See Ibid., 17 Mar. 1958, Sir W. Arthur Lewis to Nkrumah. For a more detailed account of African Americans in Ghana during the Nkrumah era, see Gaines, Kevin, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³⁴ Lambert, Keri, “‘It’s All Work and Happiness on the Farms’: Agricultural Development Between the Blocs in Nkrumah’s Ghana,” Journal of African History 60, 1 (2018): 25–44 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I have also written elsewhere about Ghana’s attempts to secure funding from the USSR. See Osei-Opare, “Uneasy Comrades.” Alessandro Iandolo also examines economic development schemes between Ghana and the Soviet Union. See Alessandro Iandolo, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955–1968 (Ithaca, 2022).

¹³⁵ James, Nkrumah and the Ghanaian Revolution, 170.

¹³⁶ Tignor, W. Arthur Lewis, 159.

¹³⁷ TNA, LAB13/1409, 19 Apr. 1960, inward telegram to Commonwealth Relations Office.

¹³⁸ TNA, DO166/12, 16–18 Oct. 1963, Acting High Commissioner in Accra to Ghana Fortnight Summary Distribution.

¹³⁹ “Ghana’s President Reviews Progress in Ghana,” The African Chronicler: A Diary of Weekly Events in Africa 1, 21 (3–9 Oct. 1963): 278.

¹⁴⁰ “Flexibility for Companies,” Daily Telegraph, 16 Oct. 1963.

¹⁴¹ “Ghana Concession to Foreign Investors,” Financial Times, 16 Oct. 1963.

¹⁴² Hoover Archives Institution Library & Archives (Hoover Archives), Jay Lovestone Papers, box 73.18, “Aims of Dr. K. A. Busia’s United Party,” 19 Sept. 1962.

¹⁴³ Hoover Archives, Jay Lovestone Papers, box 73.18, Ghana Students’ Association of the Americas, “Democracy at the Crossroad: The Ghana Scene,” 1 Oct. 1962.

¹⁴⁴ “Ghana Is Viewed as Going Marxist; Regime Proclaiming ‘Total War’ on Capitalism,” New York Times, 8 Jan. 1964.

¹⁴⁵ Hoover Archives, Karl August Wittfogel Papers, box 203, folder 203.4, cited in Senator Thomas J. Dodd’s introduction in “Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and other Internal Security Laws,” “Ghana Students in United States Oppose U.S. Aid to Nkrumah,” 19 Aug. 1963, and 11 Jan. 1964, 3.

¹⁴⁶ “Ghana Invites Investment,” Daily Telegraph, 16 Oct. 1963.

¹⁴⁷ Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, 101.

¹⁴⁸ Ibid., 102.

¹⁴⁹ Ibid., 120.

¹⁵⁰ Howard University, MSRC, Kwame Nkrumah papers, series B, Conakry Correspondence, box 3 file 56, Shirley DuBois, 1967 (154-3- file folder 56), Shirley Graham Du Bois, “A Careful Look at Ghana,” 3.

¹⁵¹ Ibid., 5.

¹⁵² “We Are all Socialists,” West Africa, 30 Apr. 1979.

¹⁵³ George Kwaku Duah, “Letter to the Editor,” Nkrumaist, Jan./Feb. 1965 42.

¹⁵⁴ J. Ofosu Appiah, “From Colonialism to Socialism,” Nkrumaist, Jan./Feb. 1965, 26.

¹⁵⁵ AVP RF, d. 142, op. 5, por. 16, p. 7, 16 July 1961.

¹⁵⁶ See David Rooney, Kwame Nkrumah: Vision and Tragedy (Accra, 2007), 236; and Metz, “In Lieu of Orthodoxy,” 386.

¹⁵⁷ Mamadou Diouf’s and Jinny Prais’s compelling call to insert Black intellectuals’ interventions into global intellectual history is situated within the corners of the Atlantic Ocean’s corners; see their “‘Casting the Badge of Inferiority Beneath Black Peoples’ Feet’: Archiving and Reading the African Past, Present, and Future in World History,” in Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York, 2013).