A rebuttal to Ahiakpor's criticisms and a reflection on the historical craft

Abstract

I want to thank Professor Ahiakpor for engaging with my work. A historian rarely experiences the “subjects” of his research talking back to him because we mainly deal with the archival traces that they left. Whereas my first book, The Ideological Scramble for Africa, focused on the 1950s and 1960s, my article in the previous issue of the Southern Journal for Contemporary History is my first foray into the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, I now have the opportunity to enter into a dialogue with Professor Ahiakpor, who claims my article, “contains several misrepresentations and false claims”. He disagrees with my interpretation of people’s motivations as well as my thesis that many classical economists in Ghana supported the “anticolonial capitalism” project: the embrace of the market to further the political project of liberation in the 1970s and 1980s.