A comprehensive review of major political events in Ghana, with critical comments, during the past 50 years. The book takes off where its predecessor The New Ghana, the international best seller published in 1958, Ghana’s first independence anniversary, ended. Absorbing, balanced and detailed, it is nevertheless controversial and challenging. Unique for its vignettes on all the major personalities of the five decades that the author has been privileged to interact with. The book challenges certain myths about the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The slow rate of development in Ghana in particular and Africa in general: the reasons why Ghana, despite its vast natural and mineral resources, is still a developing country. Traditions and customs which negate the rapid development of Ghana and robustly reviewed. What killed Nkrumah? Was Nkrumah anti-white? These are only a few of the interesting questions that the book attempts to answer. The book, which is unique in many ways, ends on a note of hope and expectation – that the next 5 years would be better than the last half century. Only time can tell.

This is a transnational history of the activist and intellectual network that connected the Black freedom struggle in the United States to liberation movements across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. John Munro charts the emergence of an anticolonial front within the postwar Black liberation movement comprising organisations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Council on African Affairs and the American Society for African Culture and leading figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Alphaeus Hunton, George Padmore, Richard Wright, Esther Cooper Jackson, Jack O'Dell and C. L. R. James. Drawing on a diverse array of personal papers, organisational records, novels, newspapers and scholarly literatures, the book follows the fortunes of this political formation, recasting the Cold War in light of decolonisation and racial capitalism and the postwar history of the United States in light of global developments.

Fifty years ago, David Wedd was a young army officer in West Africas Gold Coast, when that country became Ghana, the first black African colony to gain independence from British rule. In an account that is by turns exciting, funny and poignant, he depicts the changeover from the inside. His lively portrait of the emerging nation introduces us to a whole gallery of characters: the European and African soldiers in his Battalion; traders and market women; religious leaders and witch-doctors; sportsmen, teachers and musicians; and political leaders, including Ghanas first Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah. He tells of his work as an intelligence officer in the new nation and his exploration of the rain forest with its exotic scenery and wildlife, and he shares with us his journey north, through Burkina Faso and Mali to the Sahara Desert and the old town of Timbuktu. Throughout these pages his love of West Africa, with its varied landscapes and above all its exuberant people, is inescapable.