It is July 1961. The man being received with great honor at the Warsaw airport is Kwame Nkrumah, the President of Ghana. On his arrival, he is welcomed by the highest officials of the Polish government – the Chairman of the State Council of the Polish People’s Republic Aleksander Zawadzki, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party Władysław Gomułka, Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz, as well as foreign students and ordinary Polish citizens. Accompanied by Zawadzki, Nkrumah drives through the capital in an open limousine, and people crowd on both sides of the street. The situation is similar in Krakow, where the Ghanaian president visits not only Nowa Huta but also the Old Town and the Wawel Royal Castle. He then lays a wreath at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, which makes him the first representative of the African continent there, as it is emphasized by the speaker of the Polish Film Chronicle. It is no coincidence that the visit paid by the President of Ghana takes place a few months after the watershed year 1960, known as the Year of Africa, when seventeen independent countries emerged on the continent. This is not only the first such visit of an independent African country’s president to Poland, as the Polish Film Chronicle also emphasizes, but also another step in building new political relations. In order to understand the importance of those meetings and gestures, one has to take a look at the visit paid by Nkrumah and the beginning of the collaboration between the Polish People’s Republic and Ghana from a slightly different perspective than the one we share today.

In March 1953, eight years after the end of World War II, Joseph Stalin dies. In 1955, the 5th World Festival of Youth and Students is organized in Warsaw and it is attended by young people with inclinations for socialism from all over the world, including over 900 people from African countries. The two-week international event, which would later be associated with the colorful decorations created by Wojciech Fangor and Henryk Tomaszewski, turns out to be a harbinger of the upcoming socio-political changes. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union announces the opening of the Soviet Bloc’s politics to the Global South. In the same year, Władysław Gomułka is vindicated, released from prison, and brought back to the position of the party’s chairman, and Warsaw escapes the Soviet coup. On the capital’s Parade Square, almost a million people gather with hope for changes, for the new ‘socialism with a human face.’ After years of Stalinism, full of repressions and post-war poverty, the thaw is about to begin. Polish intellectuals look forward to the restoration of culture, but these dreams are to be shattered by the closedown of the progressive magazine Po prostu in October 1957. Nevertheless, the time that Tadeusz Różewicz describes as a ‘little stabilization’ begins. Living conditions are becoming better than in the previous decade. New schools are being opened and new apartments are being built – even if they are smaller and smaller and are still difficult to get. People are buying washing machines, motorbikes, and their first TV sets. Cinemas finally start screening Western films, rock’n’roll is played on the radio, and books that used to be censored appear in bookshops.

In 1953, just before Joseph Stalin’s death, Kwame Nkrumah makes it onto the cover of the American magazine Time. In a biting and overtly racist article, the author describes the Gold Coast’s quest for independence as a straight path to communism, but between the lines looms an image of a country in the process of socio-economic transformation driven by money from cocoa farming, which at the time satisfied a third of global demand. Black planters are getting wealthier, they buy sewing machines, radios, and bicycles. Independent Ghana is established in 1957 on the territories of the colonies of the Gold Coast, Ashanti, British Togoland, and the Northern Territories that have a different legal status but are still administered by the British Empire. The newly established state remains a constitutional monarchy under the rule of Queen Elizabeth II, represented by the British Governor General. Nkrumah who has been performing the duties of a minister for several years, becomes the president of Ghana only in 1960, when the country becomes a fully-fledged republic and loses the status of a dominion within the British Commonwealth.

In the second half of the 1950s, the ideology of Pan-Africanism developed by Nkrumah, which strives for the self-determination of the African people, seems to be a prognosis for progress for the entire continent. In 1955, a conference in Bandung, Indonesia, takes place. It becomes a platform for collaboration between Asian and African countries –  and thus countries of the so-called ‘Third World’ – understood as a movement of states seeking an ideological alternative to the East-West dynamics. Decolonization, which brings about the involvement of more than a dozen new African states in 1960, marks the beginning of a new political force that wants to break from the Cold War dichotomy. The capstone of these efforts would be the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement at the Belgrade Conference in September 1961. Two months after his visit to Poland, Nkrumah, together with President of Yugoslavia Josip Broz Tito, President of India Jawaharlal Nehru, President of Indonesia Sukarno, and President of the United Arab Republic Gamal Abdel Nasser, as well as representatives of twenty countries of the Global South would begin the debates within the first conference of the Non-Aligned Movement. From this perspective, Nkrumah’s visit to Poland as a politician representing this part of the world, which seems to be an opportunity to counterbalance the Cold War relations, can be considered a turning point for both parties.

In 1962, the Polish-African Friendship Society is founded and Deputy Prime Minister Eugeniusz Szyr becomes its president. ‘Neo-colonialism is primarily about the support for backward, reactionary forces, the corruption of staff, the interpenetration of monopolies and concerns, the entanglement of supposedly independent countries in the web of various forms of political and economic dependency […] We are not looking at Africa through the lens of hostile competition between the East and the West. It is not us, it is the capitalist countries that either have opened or are planning to open military bases on the territories of young African countries,’ he emphasizes in the inauguration speech, although this is not entirely true. Already for two years, the Soviets have been providing military support to Congo, which has been going through a serious crisis. New deals on the continent attract both the East and the West. In this political chess game, each party is trying to win something.

The first Polish trade delegation left for Ghana in 1959. Soon afterward, the Polish embassy was opened in the capital city of Accra. As it was written by Jacek Knopek, Poland became one of the first countries to establish official diplomatic relations with the independent country. At the same time, the first agreements were concluded and a trade office opened in the country. In May 1961, a few months before Nkrumah’s visit to Poland, the first agreement was signed in Accra and it included a clause that favored trade and shipping. Poland granted Ghana a loan, which was repaid in the form of imports. The direct result of Nkrumah’s arrival to Poland was the visit paid by a Ghanaian government delegation and the signing of yet another agreement, this time for five years. In 1965, Ghana was among the top five countries of the Global South in terms of trade turnover which amounted to 14 million US dollars at the time. As part of the loan granted by Poland to Ghana, it was agreed that a sugar factory would be built in Akuse, and the men photographed by Tadeusz Sumiński during his trip to Ghana in 1962 are standing under the advertisement of that very factory.

The photographs taken by Danuta Rago during the reception of Nkrumah at the airport show a Ghana Airways plane with a red, yellow, and green triband flag with a black star in the center. Ghanaians are proud of their national airline, which was launched in 1958. First developed with the use of British, and then with Soviet capital, it is perceived as a symbol of modernization. The arrival of the political leader on a Ghanaian plane is a sign of the young country’s independence and is captured by the Polish photographer in the photographs commissioned by the daily newspaper Sztandar Młodych. Taking into consideration the commissioning party and the diplomatic importance of the visit, it is not surprising that the images maintain the propaganda character. It is pointless to look for situations in them that would exceed the official theater of gestures. Nevertheless, they show a certain amount of spontaneity. Although Nkrumah’s smile, practiced during public appearances for years, can be considered studied, the joy visible on the faces of Black students seems to be a sincere reaction to meeting a man considered by many the leader who would lead the entire African continent towards full decolonization.

In 1961, the aforementioned photographer Tadeusz Sumiński begins to work for the ‘Polonia’ publishing house which issues Polska – a magazine intended for export. A year later, the publisher creates a special edition of the periodical – The Polish Review – with the aim of distributing it in African countries. It is supposed to be a Polish showcase there. The trace of the magazine’s circulation in Ghana are letters from readers published on its pages. The editors publish requests and thanks for interesting content about Poland. Polish People’s Republic through Sumiński’s lens is a story about various colors of socialist modernity. Photoreportages about iron and steel works, factories, and machinery are printed next to the images of Warsaw by night, winking with colorful neon lights, or autumn leaves on the yellow rectangles of the Mondrian façade of modernist apartment blocks, and chairs produced by the ‘Ład’ cooperative on the background of clouds. Socialist Poland in Sumiński’s photos is quite charming, and at times, even romantic.

Due to his employment in the ‘Polonia’, in 1962, Sumiński travels to North and West Africa, and in his photographs, modernity mixes with tradition and poverty. In Ghana, he photographs the harbor city of Tema, which is located right next to the capital, and a street market with pictures and paintings, where next to chromolithographs with Jesus Christ, familiar for their common presence at Polish homes, there are portraits of the British Queen Elizabeth II. In his photographs, there are also children braiding their hair or the minimalist solid block of a church with a gabled roof and a geometric bell tower with openwork decorations.

In 1963, the Polish sculptor Alina Ślesińska travels to Ghana to work on assignment. She is commissioned to create a huge monument to Kwame Nkrumah on the grounds of the National Institute of Economy and Political Science in the harbor city of Winneba, two hours away from Accra. She is not the only Pole in Ghana. A group of over thirty Polish specialists in various fields arrived in the country in 1962. Warsaw-based architects Stanisław Rymaszewski and Jacek Chyrosz began to work on the design of the exposition halls of the Accra International Trade Fair, which they did on the commission of the Ghanaian government. The chief architect was Victor Adegbite who would recall years later that it must have been ‘the first and the last time that a white man had an African boss in Ghana.’ The monument designed by Ślesińska was completed in 1965, and at the official unveiling, crowds cheered for the Polish sculptor.

That year, Ryszard Kapuściński visits Ghana for a brief period. He has been a keen supporter of Nkrumah’s ideas since the late 1950s, when he traveled to the country for the first time. In his eyes, the Ghanaian president is an outstanding leader and thinker. He also becomes the protagonist of an unfinished book, fragments of which are included in the collection of essays Czarne gwiazdy [Black Stars] published in 1963. In his letters to Poland, the reporter complains that Ghana is in crisis – people spend hours standing in queues to buy bread and margarine, and the shops are running out of paper – the writer has to borrow sheets from the embassy. The shortage of food supplies turns out to be a harbinger of a greater crisis. A year later, Kwame Nkrumah is overthrown in a coup d’état carried out by General Joseph Ankrah and the new government adopts a pro-Western orientation. Information that Osagyefo (an honorary title adopted by Nkrumah, meaning ‘redeemer’ in the Akan language) granted asylum to Horst Schumann, the German pseudo-doctor from Auschwitz, who now was involved in building a hospital in the country and a year before the coup, received Ghanaian citizenship is made public. Kapuściński describes the events in Biuletyn specjalny do użytku wewnętrznego [Special Bulletin for Internal Use] which is aimed at Polish authorities. Today, the large monument in the shape of a sword with a hilt crowned with the president’s head is no longer to be found in Ghana – it was destroyed by bulldozers. The seizure of power was also to have a symbolic dimension.

The political shift slightly weakened economic relations between Poland and Ghana. The new government viewed money from the West more favorably and tried to distance itself from relations with the Eastern Bloc. The significance of the Polish embassy in Ghana decreased, but Poland would still send specialists there, and Ghanaian students would continue to study at Polish universities – in 1973, eighteen students earned their diplomas.

In the 1960s and 1970s, there were still Polonia clubs operating in Accra – the Polish Club at the Embassy of the Polish People’s Republic and the Club of Polish Specialist, financed by the ‘Polservice’ Foreign Trade Enterprise. Alongside expats, the Club was attended by Polish women who got married to Ghanaians. Over forty children took part in the events organized on the occasion of St. Andrew’s Day, Nativity plays, or St. Nicolas’ Day, and Polish toys were sent for them. In the mid-1970s, the Club was expanded to include the Polish-Ghanaian Friendship Society.

Today, the Polish embassy in Accra no longer exists; it was closed in 1993, but the Polish diaspora of over a hundred people still lives in the country. Some of them are people of mixed Polish-Ghanaian origin. The once impressive buildings of the Accra Trade Fair co-designed by Polish architects have deteriorated and are being partially modernized. However, Ghanaian students are still eager to choose Polish universities, and in 2024, trains produced by the Polish company PESA were purchased by the country. In February, a train with the red-yellow-green flag with a black star in its center, located just below the train driver’s window, ran on the route from Bydgoszcz to Solec Kujawski, and the Ghanaian Minister for Railways Development, John Peter Amewu, met with the Polish Deputy Minister of Infrastructure, Piotr Malepszak. A few months later, the exhibition ‘One Man Does Not Rule a Nation’ curated by Maks Cegielski and Janek Simon and dedicated to Kwame Nkrumah and Alina Ślesińska opened at the TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin. The history of diplomatic relations between the Polish People’s Republic and Ghana along with their social consequences, are becoming the subject of interest of a growing number of researchers and artists. The world-famous artist Ibrahim Mahama collects material traces of the Nkrumah era in Ghana. Quoting after George Orwell: ‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’