Few African countries have attracted the international attention that Ghana has. In the
late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the then-colonial Gold Coast emerged as a key
political and intellectual hub for British West Africa. Half a century later when Ghana became
the first sub-Saharan state to emerge from European colonial rule it became a key site for a
burgeoning transnational African anticolonial politics that drew activists freedom fighters
and intellectuals from around the world. As the twentieth century came to a close Ghana also
became an international symbol of the putative successes of post-Cold-War African
liberalization and democratization projects. Here Jeffrey Ahlman narrates this rich political
history stretching from the beginnings of the very idea of the Gold Coast to the country's 1992
democratization which paved the way for the Fourth Republic. At the same time he offers a
rich social history stretching that examines the sometimes overlapping sometimes divergent
nature of what it means to be Ghanaian through discussions of marriage ethnicity and
migration of cocoa as a cultural system of the multiple meanings of chieftaincy and of other
contemporary markers of identity. Throughout it all Ahlman distills decades of work by other
scholars while also drawing on a wide array of archival oral journalistic and governmental
sources in order to provide his own fresh insights. For its clear comprehensive coverage not
only of Ghanaian history but also of the major debates shaping nineteenth- and
twentieth-century African politics and society more broadly Ghana: A Political and Social
History is a must-read for students and scholars of African Studies.
