Venue: Koserstraße 20, 14195 Berlin, A336

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. 

Nana Osei-Opare is an Assistant Professor at Rice University. He is the author of Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War Projects (Cambridge, 2025) and co-edited Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World (Bloomsburg, 2024) with Su Lin Lewis. In addition, with Sunnie Rucker-Chang, he coedited a recently published journal special issue on “Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies,” in the Slavic Review.  

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