School of Social and Political Science

Description

The Centre of African Studies and the Edinburgh Centre for Global History are delighted to welcome you to come and hear about the following new book, followed by Q&A with the author:

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 event is co-hosted by the Centre of African Studies and the Edinburgh Centre for Global History.

Keynote Speaker: Dr Nana Osei-Opare

Nana Osei-Opare is a historian of African, international, and Cold War histories. His first book, Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War (Cambridge, Nov. 2025), through the words of everyday people and the intellectual and political elite, tells a new history of Ghana’s Cold War, political-economic, and decolonization projects during the Kwame Nkrumah era by situating Ghana within larger Marxist, racial, and socialist debates and geographies.