Under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana won its independence from Britain on March 6, 1957, and embarked on a socialist economic, political, and cultural program. After some hesitation, they began forging ties with the Soviet Union and asked the Eastern power to construct a cotton textile mill in Tamale, Northern Ghana, and explore its rich geological resources. Ultimately, the factory was never constructed and the geological survey team encountered several problems. I dive into the debates and ideas surrounding the mill’s attempted construction and geological survey team, and the political and international fallout from it. By scrutinizing these local events and moment – this Ghana-Soviet space, I take seriously historian David Engerman’s claim that the most illuminating global histories are intimately tied to local conditions and its specificities. Through a serious engagement with archives outside of Africa and African capitols, I unearth the dialectics and discontents of global socialist ideological, scientific-technical, political-economic, individual, and state-to-state connections and ideas between West Africa and the global in the twentieth century. 

Nana Osei-Opare is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History & the Center for Africa and African American Studies at Rice University. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities and Ford Foundation Fellow at the Schomburg Center (2023-2024) and an Andrew Mellon Fellow for Assistant Professors at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton (2022-2023). He is working on his first monograph, Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War, currently contracted to Cambridge University Press. He coedited Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World (Bloomsburg, 2024) and is coediting the Cambridge History of African Political Thought and a special issue on blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian societies for the Slavic Review. He has published articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of African History, and the Journal of West African History, and public facing pieces in the Washington Post and Foreign Policy Magazine. He received his Bachelor of Arts with honors and Master of Arts degrees in History from Stanford University in 2011. 

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