Imagining, building and living Nkrumaism'

consider three of the most important recent contributions to the historiographical debate on Nkrumah’s political thought and the impact of Nkrumaism in Ghana and Africa. Each of these monographs has successfully added new insights to the study of Nkrumah’s Ghana, examining how his ideology was born, how it developed, how it was used to build Ghana and finally how it was perceived, contested and lived by Ghanaians. Common to all these studies is the will of the authors to provide a wellinformed yet detached analysis of Nkrumah’s ideas and the ways he translated them into his government. Their main aim is not to provide the reader with a trenchant judgement on Nkrumah but instead illuminate him/her on the aspects that made the Nkrumaist experiment distinct from other political experiences in Africa and beyond.