“My research is trying to unlock our history and how white supremacy and racism have shaped U.S. foreign policy in Africa, in addition to how Africans themselves have understood their own policies,” said Osei-Opare, an assistant professor of history at Fordham who is originally from Ghana. 

A historian who focuses on African and Cold War history, Osei-Opare studies the history of his native Ghana, particularly the Ghanian political economy, Black Marxists, and Africa-Soviet relations. He has written about race and foreign policy in several media outlets, including a recent opinion piece about anti-Black racism in Ukraine for The Washington Post—and in many academic journals. 

Two Prestigious Research Positions

Osei-Opare was recently awarded two research positions that will help him to complete his first book, Socialist De-Colony: Soviet & Black Entanglements in Ghana’s Decolonization and Cold War Projects, which will explore Ghana’s relationship with the Cold War. Starting this August, he will begin a two-year research leave from Fordham. During the first year, he will serve as a Mellon Fellow for Assistant Professors at the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Historical Studies. In the following academic year, he will serve as a scholar-in-residence at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He plans on returning to teaching at Fordham in August 2024, after he finishes his book, which he called “one of the first history books to examine archival resources from West Africa, Russia, North America, and England.” 

An Unusual Perspective on the Cold War

The roots of his research began with his childhood in South Africa. He met two doctors from the former Soviet Union who often mentioned Vladimir Lenin, the founding leader of Soviet Russia, the world’s first communist state, and Osei-Opare grew curious about him. In college, he enrolled in courses that focused on Eastern European history. At the same time, he studied the life of Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister and president of Ghana—and eventually, he reached a surprising conclusion. 

“Nkrumah’s ideologies sounded very similar to Lenin’s economic policy and Soviet philosophies. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on that, and it just spiraled from there,” said Osei-Opare, who earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in history from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Over the past decade, he has continued to study how Ghana sought to refashion its political economy out of colonialism’s extractive model, along with the nation’s relationship with the Soviet Union.

“Now my research has broadened to look at the Cold War in general and Africa’s role in shaping the Cold War. People in the West think of the Cold War as something solely between the U.S. and Soviet Union. But in fact, Africa was one of the big players. I’m trying to push Americans to think about the role that Africans have played in shaping what we know as the Cold War, in addition to the relationship between U.S. foreign policy and race,” he said.  

A Shift in Student Understanding of African History

Since he joined Fordham in 2019, Osei-Opare has taught six courses related to his expertise and today’s world, including slavery’s long-lasting impacts and racism in the American educational system. 

His course Understanding Historical Change: Africa, which is a requirement for all students, has improved many students’ knowledge of African history, said Osei-Opare. 

“Many students come into the class without the best understanding of what Africa is,” he said. “Through this course, I have shown them how the idea of Africa as a wild, barbaric place is pervasive. I show them where these ideas come from, how Africans have fought back against these ideas, and why they still persist.” 

In 2020, the United Student Government at Rose Hill awarded him the Beacon Exemplar Award for his excellent work as an educator. In 2022, he also served as the keynote speaker at Fordham’s Diversity Graduation ceremony for Black students.

But for all the recognition he’s received for inspiring students, he says that his students are often the ones who inspire him. 

“I’ve come across some wonderful students at Fordham who have helped me think about my research and African history through insightful analysis and questions and whose own research interests have expanded my own expertise,” said Osei-Opare. “They have also challenged me to think about what it means to be a Black male faculty member at a predominantly white instituion higher ed institution and encouraged me to continue to push for an anti-racist institution.” 

He recalled some of his most rewarding moments as an educator at Fordham. After the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, several students wrote to him, thanking him for helping them to see things differently and discuss issues with a more educated perspective. And at the end of his course UHC: Africa, he said he saw a shift in his students, too. 

“Before class began, I asked students to send me three words that come to mind when they think of Africa. At first, they submitted words like ‘dark continent,’ ‘safari,’ and ‘animals.’ At the end of the semester, new words popped up: ‘socialism,’ ‘Pan-Africanism,’ ‘Black consciousness,’ ‘colonialism,’” he said. “There was a shift in seeing Africa as a place where you go and see animals to a place where humans with ideas live and exist.” 

Tom Dunne, vice president of administration at Fordham, said that the event took place through Fordham’s association with the African People Alliance, which has established ties between Fordham and African countries such as Togo and Ghana, both of which have substantial communities near the Rose Hill campus in the Bronx. The former first lady of Ghana, Nana Lordina Dramani Mahama, spoke at Fordham’s 2015 Commencement. 

“Ghanaians really are a wonderful, family-oriented, and entrepreneurial group that we always will welcome back to Fordham,” said Dunne. “I’ve talked at various Ghanaian gatherings and I always stress how important it is to continue to honor their culture and their religion, just as the Fordham family has. We started as immigrants not unlike them.”

Nana Lordina—wife of H. E. John Dramani Mahama, President of Ghana—is national president of the Lordina Foundation, a nongovernmental organization that works with partner companies and agencies to make health care more accessible in Ghana and to expand educational opportunities. In addition to working on behalf of the disadvantaged, she strives to advance the cause of educating women and girls as a way to improve communities worldwide.

“In conferring an honorary degree upon Mrs. Mahama, it is we who are honored,” said Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham. “Her work with women and children in Ghana and across Africa reminds us of persistence of kindness and the will to make a difference in the world.”

Nana Lordina’s work embraces many pressing public health and educational issues. The Lordina Foundation has provided medical supplies—including, in one instance, an ambulance—to hospitals and health facilities in Ghana, worked to prevent breast and cervical cancer and HIV infection in Africa, and helped provide shelter and vocational training in northern Ghana for women accused of witchcraft who were shunned by their communities.

The Foundation also provides food, clothing, and cash for seven orphanages across Ghana, and offered scholarships to 21 Ghanaian students to study in China, with support from the Chinese government.

Among her many advocacy efforts, Lordina helped secure the Ghanaian government’s approval of a World Bank program to provide secondary school scholarships to 10,400 Ghanaian children—half of them girls—who come from deprived communities.

“Today, women are accelerating economic growth and improving conditions in their communities across the world,” she said last year in an address at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C. “Perhaps if there were more women in decision-making roles around the world, we would create fairer and better societies. Women’s education brings positive changes not just for women but for communities and future generations too.”

She applauded her husband’s appointment of many more women to be cabinet ministers or to hold other public posts.

Mrs. Mahama was born and educated in Ghana, earning a bachelor’s degree in hospitality management and a master’s in governance and leadership from the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration. She became First Lady of Ghana in July 2012, when her husband—then vice president—ascended to the presidency upon the death of his predecessor, John Atta Mills.

She is a first vice president of the Organization of African First Ladies against HIV and AIDS (OAFLA) for West Africa, and is premier ambassador of the UNAIDS Global Plan on the Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission.

Last year, she was honored with a Global Inspiration Leadership Award and inducted into the Global Women Leaders Hall of Fame at the second Africa-Middle East-Asia Women Summit in Dubai, organized by the Centre for Economic and Leadership Development and the CEO Clubs Network worldwide. Among her other honors, she was awarded the key to the city by the City of Newark, N.J., and given awards for her anti-cervical cancer advocacy in Namibia and Mozambique.

Nana Lordina Dramani Mahama will be awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters at the commencement ceremony.

More Honorary Degrees

Fordham will also present honorary degrees to nine other accomplished individuals:

Douglas M. Brooks is director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy. A licensed clinical social worker, he has held many high-level policy positions related to the AIDS epidemic including board chairman of AIDS United in Washington, D.C., and member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. He has advised governments and nongovernmental organizations on addressing AIDS and directly managed many federally funded programs aimed at treating and preventing the disease.

Matthew Goldstein oversaw the transformation of the City University ofNewYork as its chancellor from 1999 to 2013. Once dubbed an “institution adrift” by a mayoral task force, the university added schools and colleges, built up its faculty, increased graduation rates, achieved record enrollments, and raised its academic profile. He is a nationally recognized education expert who has served on the U.S. Teaching Commission and the New York State Commission on Higher Education, in addition to leading national summits on public higher education.

William Loschert, GABELLI ’61 is a retired chairman of ACE Global Markets who served for six years on the Fordham University Board of Trustees. He is a generous Fordham supporter who has funded scholarships, an endowed chair in entrepreneurship, a lecture series at the Fordham University London Centre, and other enhancements while also giving generously of his time to advance the University’s mission. A residence hall on the Rose Hill campus is named in his honor.

Thomas A. Moore, LAW ’72, is a widely respected trial lawyer who has twice been named Lawyer of the Year by The National Law Journal, and who was the most frequently mentioned attorney in New York Law Journal‘s Verdicts and Settlements Hall of Fame for medical malpractice cases from New York, published last year. He and his wife, Judith Livingston, funded the Brendan Moore Chair in Advocacy and the Moore Advocacy Center at Fordham Law School, named for Moore’s late brother.

Judith Livingston, also a distinguished attorney, was deemed “a legal legend” by Lawdragon and is the youngest person and first woman to be admitted to the Inner Circle of Advocates, an elite group of the country’s top 100 trial lawyers. She has been recognized twice by Best Lawyers as the New York Medical Malpractice Lawyer of the Year; in other pursuits, she has been active with Judges and Lawyers Breast Cancer Alert. She and her husband, Thomas A. Moore, received the Fordham Founders Award for 2014.

Admiral Michael Mullen retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2011. He led the military through the end of combat in Iraq and a new strategy in Afghanistan, and also promoted the new technologies, international partnerships, and new antiterrorism methods that led to the elimination of Osama bin Laden in 2011. He advocated for shorter combat tours, more attention to veterans’ posttraumatic stress, and more public support for service members, and played a key role in dismantling “don’t ask, don’t tell” so gay service members could serve openly.

His Eminence, Jaime Lucas Cardinal Ortega y Alamino, Archbishop of Havana played an important part in sustaining the Catholic Church in Cuba under communist rule. Under his leadership, the church in Cuba has become an effective mediator between the government and dissidents, and in 2010 Cardinal Ortega worked with the government of Raul Castro to secure the release of 126 political prisoners. He also had a key role in Pope Francis’ successful efforts to bring about dialogue between the governments of Cuba and the United States.

Mary Anne Sullivan, TMC ’73, is one of the top energy lawyers in the country and a partner at the global firm of Hogan Lovells. She served as general counsel for the U.S. Department of Energy in the Clinton administration, and before that as the department’s deputy general counsel for environment and nuclear programs. She provided critical legal support for the world’s first deep geologic disposal facility for radioactive waste and negotiated the first agreements with electric utilities on voluntarily reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Dennis Walcott, GSS ’80, served as chancellor of New York City’s public schools from 2011 to 2013, ushering them through major changes. Under his leadership, the city’s education department replaced large low-performing high schools with smaller schools, resulting in higher graduation rates and more college enrollments, particularly for disadvantaged students of color. In addition, he launched a major effort to improve the quantity and quality of the city’s middle schools and led a $13 million expansion of after-school programs.

He is serving as a pro bono consultant for the joint program developed by the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration and Ghana’s Mountcrest University College. The program is under review by Ghana’s National Accreditation Board.

With Fordham, Galizzi also runs several programs in Ghana, including a soon-to-be-launched clerkship for the judicial system that will be open to Fordham graduates. Through the Leitner Center he directs two clinics: Sustainable Development Legal Initiative (SDLI) and the International Law and Development in Africa (ILDA). He also directs the Law School’s Ghana summer program.

“I believe there is a significant market for Fordham and its graduates in Africa,” Galizzi said. “It is an often overlooked continent, too often known only for negative reasons. There is a lot that is positive happening in Ghana and I believe Fordham should be at the forefront of it.”

While there are good law doctoral programs elsewhere in Africa, there are none in Ghana, he said—even though most Ghanaian law schools require a PhD to teach, forcing candidates to emigrate. Besides the personal burden of requiring law students to leave their professional and personal relationships behind, their research also gets exported.

“The idea of having a local PhD insures that there is local research and local supervision to develop the expertise,” he said. “For example there is no way to study environmental law in Ghana right now. You can do it here in the United States, but that’s not going to help them.”

The country’s stability and technological innovations make Ghana a place to take advantage of now, he said. And the legal system in Ghana is as good on paper as in the United States, with a very strong constitution that provides for the separation of powers and guarantees human rights.

“The problem is the implementation of the laws, but that’s a challenge we face here as well,” he said.

He compared the overcrowding at Rikers Island caused by a backlog of unheard cases to problems in Ghanaian prisons.

“The backlog problem in the U.S. is clearly resource-constrained, but they’re nothing compared to the challenges in Ghana,” said Galizzi, where there are 3,000 to 5,000 cases awaiting trial, sometimes for up to 10 to 15 years.

Through ILDA, Galizzi and Fordham law students have intervened on behalf of prisoners in through the Access to Justice Project. Fordham students work with Ghanaian lawyers to help to reconstruct prisoners’ case files and work with the judicial system to get the cased heard and those with expired warrants released.

Galizzi acknowledged an increased interest in Africa’s development by several nations. However, efforts by schools like Fordham to get involved still have an edge.

“In the educational sphere, American universities have a terrific reputation,” he said. “That bears heavily on the types of relationships that African universities want to establish.”

He said that Americans should remember the scars of Africa’s colonial past.

“If you go in and say what is good and what is bad, you usually get rejection because they know the problems they have,” he said. “It’s more of an exchange to see how we can assist.”

“Rather than the idea of exporting values, I prefer to say we share common ideals that can enrich both of us.”

Working through the Friends of Ghana, a non-profit organization, the department donated a collection of vintage science books and magazines, including the Journal of Science, to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). KNUST services 23,000 undergraduate and graduate students in Agriculture And Natural Resources, Architecture & Planning, Arts And Social Sciences, Engineering, Health Sciences and Science.

The Journal of Science is one of the nation’s longest-running journals covering developments in earth science. The collection will help strengthen the university’s science curriculum and research, according to Friends of Ghana CEO Joseph Johnson.

The donation was arranged with the help of student Kojo Amphah and the department’s chair Allen S. Gilbert, Ph.D., professor of sociology and anthropology. Much of the material comes from Gilbert’s personal collection of science publications.

“This is a sizeable collection,” said Gilbert. “Now that everything is digital in the west, this top U.S. science journal is on JSTOR and on line. But in a developing country, institutions often don’t have the instrumentation or the subscription money to access this material digitally. Bound, hard copies are the cheapest and easiest for them.”

Friends of Ghana is sponsoring the shipping and delivery of the books and magazines to the university, located in Kumasi.

I arrived in Ghana where I lived for 15 years (1974-83 at the University of Ghana, Legon; 1990-96 at the University of Cape Coast) on the evening of Dec. 28. Friends from those days met me at the airport and I stayed in Accra until New Year’s Day. I always take any opportunity when I am in Accra to visit Stella Ansah, the widow of a good friend, the late Professor Paul Ansah (who died at the age of 55 in 1993). Paul was both a professor of journalism as well as a talented and acerbic political commentator. Several different military dictatorships in Ghana hated him as a result, and they were not entirely unhappy when he died of complications from diabetes nearly 17 years ago.

During the first four years I was in Ghana, I was the only Jesuit in the country, and my best friends were Paul and Stella. I did not own a television at the time but I would come to their house on certain evenings to watch the news with Paul and get his live commentary on what was going on. Together with Paul and a few others, I was an editorial consultant during those years for the weekly Catholic newspaper, the Standard. It was the only newspaper that would tell the truth about what was going on under the military dictatorship of Ignatius Kutu Acheampong and his colleagues (1972-79) and the so-called “revolutionary” governance of Jerry John Rawlings (15 weeks in 1979 and the whole of 1982-1992), and Rawlings’s subsequent elected civilian administration (1992-2000). When fewer restrictions were placed on journalism in Ghana–after a period when the Standard had been suppressed by the government–other newspapers took up the truth-telling function of the Standard and it went back to reporting weddings, funerals and confirmations.

I had hoped to travel 500 miles north for the “final funeral” of an old man who died last February, the aged father of my former student, Samuel Atarah, who is now a professor in the University of the West of Scotland. But transportation within Ghana at this dry, dusty and hot time of the year is difficult, and I am reluctantly reaching the conclusion that I will not be able to travel to the village of Kongo in the Upper East Region of Ghana for the final funeral on Jan. 9. Meanwhile, the lecturer in chemistry at the University of Cape Coast, who is a good friend of mine and of Sam Atarah’s since their student days, John Prosper Adotey, with whom I had hoped to travel to Kongo, has lost his own wife, Felicia (aged 43) of a sudden heart attack on Dec 29. I went and sat in condolence with him and some of his relatives and friends on Saturday, Jan. 2. Felicia and John Prosper have two bright children, a 12-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy. Arrangements for Felicia’s funeral are not finalized, as yet, but it seems likely to be on Feb. 5. Why the long delay? Many Ghanaian funerals take place a month or more after death. For better or for worse, funerals are the most important social events in Ghana, and there are many complications to be ironed out with Felicia’s family, given the unexpected nature of her death.

So the New Year has begun on a solemn and sad note.

I went by air from Lagos in Nigeria to Accra in Ghana on the night of Dec. 28. The plane, only one-third full, left two and a half hours late but the flight only took 35 minutes. In its flight path we flew over two other countries, the republics of Benin and Togo. The map is rather crowded in this part of coastal West Africa.

I was expecting heightened security at the Lagos airport, but found it efficient but relaxed. My baggage was not opened. At Accra, however, a large plane coming from Amsterdam arrived at the same time and some of its passengers had their luggage inspected on arrival.

Many people greeted me as “Pastor”–my black clerical shirt and collar are still regarded as more Protestant than Catholic here in West Africa.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon visiting old friends, including a 95-year-old man, Dominic Attigah, and his wife Anna, 88 (“Pa Dominic” and “Maame Anna”), whom I have known since 1974. He is fairly deaf now and she is blind.

They were finally married “in Church” (actually, the priest celebrated the wedding for them at home) last August. Togolese by origin, the Attigahs came to Ghana in 1951. Pa Dominic remembers it was the year that Kwame Nkrumah was transformed from independence agitator to leader of government business in the colonial regime.

At night I met and had supper with George Atta-Boateng (FCLS ’07, GSAS ‘09), who is now a key figure in the computerization of the Ministry of Education.

Over the years, many Nigerians have studied at Fordham, most notably in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, but also in nearly every other School as well. What few people now realize is the connection between Fordham and the original coming of Jesuits to Nigeria.

The Catholic Bishops of Nigeria asked for Jesuit professors to help in the foundation of the state-run University of Lagos at its inception in 1962. UNESCO asked NYU and Fordham for academic staff as well. The first Jesuit to come, who had a Ph.D. from Fordham in biology but was teaching at St Peter’s College in Jersey City, was Father Joseph Schuh. A year later two other Jesuits came: Father Joseph Schuyler, who had a Fordham Ph.D. in sociology and was teaching atFordham’s seminary campus in Shrub Oak, N.Y.; and Father JosephMcKenna, who had a Ph.D. From Yale and was the head of the political science department at Fordham.

Schuh returned to St. Peter’s in 1965 but Schuyler remained atUnilag, as it is called, until his retirement in 1986. He stayed another nine years beyond that in pastoral work in Lagos until health reasons mandated his return to the U.S. in 1995. McKenna never actually taught at Unilag –many Nigerians have Ph.D.s in political science–but fulfilled many roles for the bishops and the Jesuits in Nigeriauntil 1984, when he retired back to other Jesuit assignments aroundFordham. In 1997, Fordham University Press published a study he did on varieties of Marxism in Africa and the response of the Catholic Church to that phase in recent African history.

All three Joes did Fordham proud over the years. McKenna’s 1969essay in Foreign Affairs on prospects for peace after the Nigerian civil war, published when the war was still ongoing, drew praise from the federal government of Nigeria at the time.

I arrived in Nigeria with three other Jesuits in 1964, just after I had finished an M.A. in English at Fordham; the degree was awarded in February 1965 while I was in Nigeria. I taught English in a Catholic but non-Jesuit high school in Nigeria in 1964-65. On this trip, I found myself sleeping on Christmas Eve in the same house where I slept on Christmas Eve of 1964. On Christmas Day, I had lunch in a Chinese restaurant with the best student I taught back then, AnthonyAkingbade, now a 61-year-old medical doctor who eventually did his undergraduate studies at Harvard and his medical formation atAlbert Einstein College of Medicine, our Bronx neighbor.

A good friend of mine, Nicholas Ojehomon, was married on Saturday, Dec. 19 to a young woman, Amaka, whom I only knew slightly when I was president of Loyola Jesuit College from 1999 to 2005.

Like all church services in West Africa, the wedding ceremony was long–about two hours. Father Gerald W. Aman, S.J (FCRH ’69), the executive assistant to the Jesuit Provincial here, presided and preached.

He made a great deal in his homily about a passage from the Epistle to the Ephesians that doesn’t go over very weill in America:: “Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord” (Eph 5:22). Then the couple acted it out: she gathered her wedding dress around her and knelt before her seated husband, placing her hands between his and promised due submission.

I was feeling uncomfortable about this (I was concelebrating) when suddenly Fr. Aman dramatically reversed the situation. The Epistle goes on to say, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water and the word” (Eph 5:25-26). Fr. Aman seated Amaka and Nicholas knelt before her, removed one of her shoes, and washed her foot as Christ did at the Last Supper (John 13).

Somehow it transformed my understanding of that scriptural passage. I thought partucularly of a good friend in America who has recently lost his wife to cancer, and how he cared for her so tenderly to the end. Marriage, as the same Epistle says, “is a great mystery.”

I would like to send some pictures of this wedding taken by another friend who works at Loyola Jesuit College, but I don’t have them to forward just yet.

It is hot and dry in Abuja while it has been snowing in New York.

When I arrived in Abuja, Emmanuel Dyeltong, a driver for Loyola Jesuit College, remarked that “NEPA is really trying these days.” That sentence, not perhaps immediately intelligible to the stranger, means that, in his opinion, the Nigerian Electric Power Authority is delivering the goods more regularly in Abuja lately.

Thursday night, I found this generalization somewhat challenged. During supper with the Jesuit community, NEPA went off three times. Michael, the man in charge of the 500 kV generator for the school compound, can be heard on his motor scooter heading for the generator. The roar of the generator begins. Then NEPA returns, and the roar stops. Five minutes later the same scenario is repeated. And again, ten minutes later.

Cell phones prove very useful at these sudden onsets of darkness. Several of the Jesuits at table use them for illumination as supper continues. Much easier to find the salt and pepper.

“Let there be light.” I felt I was back in Nigeria last summer at Rose Hill when part of the campus was without power for a few days. What struck me at the time was how quiet the much larger generators hired in at Fordham were.

I arrived in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, at noon today, Dec. 17, after a 12-hour journey on Delta that included a 90-minute stopover in Dakar, Senegal. Many Nigerians and Senegalese on the flight were traveling with young children. I had forgotten how hard it is for the ears of small children to take the process of landing.

I arrived at our Jesuit high school, Loyola Jesuit College, where I was president from 1999 to 2005, an hour or so later, after dropping off Tony Akande (FCRH ’07) who is visiting family at Christmas.

The students have gone home for Christmas since last Saturday. The nearby village is now electrified, which means there are competing charismatic churches making a joyful noise to the Lord. I hope they won’t go all night.

Karl Marx wrote that religion “is the opium of the people,” but more interestingly, just before that, wrote that religion “is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” I feel that the people of Gidan Mangoro –“home of mangoes” — are finding the heart of a heartless world tonight, even if I am jet-lagged and would like to go to bed.

I offered mass this evening for legendary Graduate School of Social Service Dean Mary-Ann Quaranta. May she receive the reward of her labors!