Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch

This book traces how Ghanaians in the post-independence era came to embrace a vibrant form of African internationalism. This was a strategy to realize specific nation building goals but it also enabled the newly independent state to engage and influence global debates facing the wider world in the 1950s and 1960s. This period saw the admission of an independent Ghana into a range of international bodies such as the United Nations. The involvement of Ghanaians in the deliberations of international bodies demonstrated their engagement with many of the key transnational and internationalist struggles of the mid-twentieth century. Among these were debates about anticolonialism, human rights and an emerging peace movement. Ghana’s internationalism was not only Pan-Africanist; it sought to build alliances with decolonizing countries in Asia and other anticolonial areas, and was labor-based, gender-based and pacifist in orientation. This project offers generative insights into the global dimensions of post-colonial nation building.