Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana (Professor Jeffrey Ahlman)

Jeffrey Ahlman is an associate professor of history and the director of the African Studies Program. He specializes in African political, social and cultural history. He earned his bachelor's in history from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and his master's and doctorate in history from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from organizations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Johns Hopkins University Center for Africana Studies, the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the American Historical Association and the West African Research Association. His first book, Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana can be accessed on https:/www.ohioswallow.com/book Living+with+Nkrumahism In the 1950s, Ghana, under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party, drew the world’s attention as anticolonial activists, intellectuals, and politicians looked to it as a model for Africa’s postcolonial future. Nkrumah was a visionary, a statesman, and one of the key makers of contemporary Africa. In Living with Nkrumahism, Jeffrey S. Ahlman reexamines the infrastructure that organized and consolidated Nkrumah’s philosophy into a political program. Ahlman draws on newly available source material to portray an organizational and cultural history of Nkrumahism. Taking us inside bureaucracies, offices, salary structures, and working routines, he painstakingly reconstructs the political and social milieu of the time and portrays a range of Ghanaians’ relationships to their country’s unique position in the decolonization process. Through fine attunement to the nuances of statecraft, he demonstrates how political and philosophical ideas shape lived experience. Living with Nkrumahism stands at the crossroads of the rapidly growing fields of African decolonization, postcolonial history, and Cold War studies. It provides a much-needed scholarly model through which to reflect on the changing nature of citizenship and political and social participation in Africa and the broader postcolonial world.