"Ghana’s Long 1970s: Reconsidering the Lost Decade (1966–1981)"

Co-edited by Claire Nicolas (SOAS) and Elisa Prosperetti (NIE), to be published in 2024

There has been a surge of scholarly interest in the Ghana of the 1950s and 1960s, under its charismatic independence era leader Kwame Nkrumah. These works tell a new story of that era, focusing on the possibilities of independence by looking anew at Pan-Africanism, socialism, new histories of the Cold War and Black internationalism (Alhman 2017; Getachew 2019; Iandolo 2022; Osei-Opare 2023).  

In contrast, Ghana’s 1970s are often reduced to an afterthought. Military coups dominate the narrative. Indeed, the 1970s are a decade characterized by military rule, economic decline, emigration, and hardship (Hutchful 1979; Pellow & Chazan 1986). 

This hardship is reflected in the relative lack of scholarship on the period. The body of work that does exist tends to reinforce a top-down narrative, with a strong focus on the state. It is only after 1981, when J.J. Rawlings comes to power and stays, that Ghana again attracts significant scholarly interest (Herbst 1993; Nugent 1995; Brydon & Legge 1996). 

Forty years on, it is high time to return to the 1970s. Inspired by the interest in the Nkrumah years, and motivated by the availability of new archives in Ghana and elsewhere, we invite historians to reconsider the 1970s with us. Building on recent scholarship that begins to probe the 1970s anew (Hart 2016; Murillo 2017; Wiemers 2021), we seek contributions that engage with the following questions: 

• How might our understanding of this decade change if instead of focusing on disjuncture, we looked for continuity? 
•  How did this period of transition between two defining political regimes (between Nkrumah and Rawlings) shape contemporary Ghana?  
• How did ordinary Ghanaians navigate this tumultuous decade?
• What does a focus on everyday lives, rather than a state-centric approach, reveal about these years? 
• What new methods and sources might we turn to, to recover histories of a decade when state institutions supposedly collapsed? 
• To what extent can the framing of “Ghana’s long 1970s” (1966–1981) help us reconsider the history of postcolonial Ghana?

For more information, and to read our Call for Papers, click here!