Investigating the educational journey of the Ghanaian trade unionist Jahn A. Osei to East Ger-many, this article explores how mobile African labor functionaries initiated and maintained ties between the global South and the Cold War East....
moreInvestigating the educational journey of the Ghanaian trade unionist Jahn A. Osei to East Ger-many, this article explores how mobile African labor functionaries initiated and maintained ties between the global South and the Cold War East. The article first examines the relations of Osei’s sending institu-tion, the Ghana Trades Union Congress, with the East German national trade union federation (Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund—FDGB), which ran the trade union college in Bernau where Osei studied. It then interrogates the personal correspondence between the institute’s director and Osei after his return to Ghana, which reveals a productive and mutually beneficial exchange of books, periodicals and newspa-pers between Accra and Bernau. The third part, by drawing on Osei’s correspondence as well as on a re-port he wrote for the college’s bulletin, unveils a shared language of global, anti-imperialist socialism be-tween Ghana and the GDR that was key to produce and maintain these South-East ties. Utilizing classic as well as recent scholarship on Nkrumah’s Ghana and African trade unions during the Cold War as well as archival material from the FDGB, the article places Osei’s determined anti-capitalist rhetoric and enthusi-asm for a socialist modernity within both Nkrumah’s socialist modernization project in Ghana and the political-ideological education Osei had received at the trade union college in East Germany
