Chapter 1 begins by broadly sketching how the movement of the masses of African peoples towards armed struggle can be understood within the framework of Robinson’s Black Radical Tradition. Within this context, the First All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) of 1958 takes centre stage as it brought a number of soon-to-be liberation movement figures together with older veterans of the post-WWII anti-colonial struggle on African soil to deliberate on the direction the decolonization process would take. During the conference, a debate emerged among conference participants on Kwame Nkrumah’s non-violent positive action versus Frantz Fanon’s armed struggle. After exploring how this was resolved, the chapter moves on chronologically to a broad examination of the Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition as it in consistent patterns fuelled non-violent insurgencies, dreams of freedom and decisions to return to armed struggle. The second half of the chapter follows Stokely Carmichael in Tanzania. This section is less about Carmichael or Tanzania, but more about tracking how Black Power ideas, concepts and praxis interacted with and within various liberation movements and continental African peoples. Carmichael saw Black Power as important for emerging states which were majority African/Black but was met with resistance by the ANC.

As empires fragmented after the second world war, politicians in the Global South finally had the opportunity to determine the economic policies of their newly independent states. As many of these countries were relatively poor, developmental ideas came to the fore once more. This is true both in sub-Saharan Africa as well as in Asia. Nationalist movements in these regions combined their nationalist economic ideas with a variety of complementary ideologies. In sub-Saharan Africa, politicians such as Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere turned to socialism, which they interpreted as a developmental system. In Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, governments espoused free market economics, which they supplemented with an activist state that promoted exports. Argentina and Egypt, on the other hand, saw the rise of populist regimes. These provide another important type of economic nationalism. Populists such as Juan Perón and Gamal Abdel Nasser associated international integration with enrichment by domestic elites Because they opposed these elites, populists sought to cut links with the world economy and espouse isolationist economic systems.

This chapter shows how Ghanaian scientists tapped resources from different countries in their quest for a nuclear reactor, from the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, to Canada, the United Arab Republic, India, and China. While many people living near Ghana’s Atomic Energy Commission believe the site has hosted a reactor since around 1966, it actually took several more decades to install the first low power research reactor, the GHARR-1, at Kwabenya. Nkrumah’s bid to obtain a reactor provoked the wrath of France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, all of whom backed the coup d’état against him. It then considers how subsequent governments tried to rekindle the Soviet nuclear reactor initiative and explored other possible reactors from Western powers, but finally settled on a Chinese offer. The chapter relies on a variety of sources including GAEC records, British spy reports, and correspondence between Nkrumah and Khrushchev of the Soviet Union. The chapter provides critical insights, including difficulties the Ghanaian government had in maintaining payments to the Soviets, problems with the storage of the unfinished reactor components while post-Nkrumah regimes mothballed the nuclear program, and several subsequent contracts for reactors that fell apart due to political instability.

The introduction begins with Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah (1957-1966) laying the foundation stone of the first reactor building at the new Ghana Atomic Energy Commission in Kwabenya. He promoted “scientific equity” and access to science for all citizens. The nuclear energy project, headed by the engineering professor R.P. Baffour, topped Nkrumah’s plans for scientific development. Nkrumah sent Baffour to the Soviet Union to negotiate with Prime Minister Khrushchev to see what resources Ghana might provide in exchange for technical assistance and a reactor. Nkrumah and his closest advisors asserted a new African vision for nuclear power, predicated on the idea that all countries had citizens with equal intellectual capabilities. Nkrumah expressed, “no country has monopoly of ability.” Ghana was among several independent African nations interested in nuclear energy and the peaceful uses of the atom including Tanzania, Libya, and Nigeria. Julius Nyere and Kenya’s Ali Mazuri stressed that Africans would be more capable of managing nuclear energy than Europeans. The introduction interrogates this assertion through a discussion of scientific equity, manpower and human capacity, and urban dynamics at Atomic Junction. It locates Ghana’s story within scholarship on the rise of nuclear power elsewhere, especially in India and South Africa.

This chapter locates Ghana’s quest for nuclear power within the context of French bomb tests in the Sahara that sent radioactive materials across West Africa. In 1959, French scientists announced plans to detonate a series of bombs in their colony of Algeria, where resistance fighters sought to remove the French occupation. The French bomb tests further exacerbated tensions between the European nation and African leaders like Nkrumah, who supported the Algerian independence struggle. The prospect of French nuclear weapons extended the terror of Western atomic bomb activity from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the South Pacific test fields to the African continent. Once fallout from the French detonations reached Ghanaian towns, the outrage from Nkrumah’s government and his international supports was tremendous. The French bombs helped to mobilize interest in fallout monitoring at the University of Ghana and led to Ghana’s bid to join the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Ghana’s efforts to eliminate bomb testing across Africa through the United Nations.

This chapter considers how Ghanaian scientists gleaned information on nuclear physics from different sources, most notably Soviet universities, and shared information with subsequent generations of Ghanaian students. To acquire nuclear power, Ghanaian scientists needed to become experts in nuclear physics. For many of them, that quest began in the Soviet Union. This chapter relies heavily on reminiscences of Ghana’s first generation of nuclear physicists, detailing their trials learning physics in Russian, the rejection of their Soviet training in Ghana after the overthrow of Nkrumah, and their ongoing efforts to secure further training abroad and employment abroad, whether in Gaddafi’s Libya, or for the IAEA in Vienna. These scientists sustained their knowledge and interest in nuclear physics by offering extensive training courses, first at GAEC and later at the Ghana School of Nuclear and Allied Sciences. Scientists from Ghana and visitors from other African countries who enrolled in these courses in turn shared their knowledge within a growing community of African nuclear physicists. Central to my analysis is the question of language, or what Michael Gordin has termed the “scientific Babel” of the early Cold War period, and the challenges of integrating different training experiences into a unified Ghanaian approach.