Stephan F. Miescher. A dam for Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2022. 598 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $50. Paper. ISBN: 9780253059956.

Part of review forum on "A dam for Africa"In this masterful study of society, science, and technology, Stephan Miescher scours the evidence for a rich, multivocal account of Kwame Nkrumah's dream to bring a hydroelectric dam to West Africa.Miescher brings forward the accounts of all those caught up in this drama, what we might call the Big Men, the little people, the modern citizens, and the electric citizens.First, Miescher tells a fine-grained story of how Kwame Nkrumah negotiated a lot of money with a collection of "Big Men" to create a dam to flood a vast area of land to make the largest lake people have ever created anywhere on earth.Miescher humanizes and dramatizes so many of these moments where powerful people casually negotiated massive deals.At one point, the Minister of Finance, Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, was hoping to catch the ear of the president of the United States.While traveling in Maryland with African American friends, he decided to purposedly go to a typical restaurant where he was refused even juice, to create a media frenzy.Embarrassed, President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon invited him to the White House where he discussed the plans for the Akosombo Dam over breakfast.Jealous of his rival's proximity to the US President and Vice President, Nkrumah eventually sacked Gbedemah.Another key moment, after the Kulungugu bomb attempt in August 1962 on Nkrumah's life, he was surprisingly home alone on his birthday and also his selfproclaimed national holiday.With no one he could trust, the only guest he and his wife Fatima invited was Chad Calhoun, a representative from Kaiser, the American corporation that ended up negotiating the contract to use electricity from the Akosombo Dam to manufacture aluminum.Miescher describes how such interactions solidified the arrangement with Kaiser and shored up US support despite the deteriorating political situation in Ghana.Miescher continues this semi-tragic retelling up to the point where Nkrumah appeared to kneel at the feet of his new imperialist overlords at a groundbreaking ceremony for the Valco project in 1964, a contrast to the image of Gbedemah with Eisenhower and Nixon in 1962.Then in 1966, Nkrumah opened the dam with Calhoun by his side, one month before losing political power in a coup d'tat orchestrated in part with CIA alliances.Stephan argues how the terms of the original master plan for the Akosombo Dam were completely not in Ghana's best interest and a classic example of the very neocolonialism that Nkrumah fought against.