1966 coup, when the new military government destroyed or confiscated many of the country’s CPP-era files, particularly in Accra.55 The result is a postcolonial archive in Ghana that is fragmentary and dispersed. However, it is also one that, despite the best efforts of the highly skilled and dedicated archivists who oversee its various sites throughout the country, regularly offers occasion to reflect upon the realities of postcolonial governance and the near-continuous budget shortfalls that have plagued this and other Ghanaian governmental institutions over much of the last half century.
At the heart of this book, then, is a struggle to make sense of this fragmentary archival record and put it into conversation with the changing political and ideological framework of Nkrumahist thought, the mechanisms of CPP governance, and the lived experiences of Ghanaians during the period. State- and party-run newspapers and magazines—most notably including the Evening News, the Ghanaian Times, and the Ghanaian—serve as another key resource in this endeavor, augmenting the formal archive with other, public expressions of the institutionalized worldview of the Nkrumah-led government. Moreover, the party- and state-run press was not static. It also was not necessarily Gramscian in its quest for discursive hegemony, but it did continually seek to set the terms of political and social debate in the country through a consistently shifting discursive practice operating under the rubric of Nkrumahism. In contrast to a scholarship that has limited the prominence of Nkrumah-era ideology in midcentury Ghanaian life, I argue that an evolving Nkrumahism served as the backdrop to many Ghanaians’ experiences, as they had little choice but to operate in a political and social sphere in which the CPP increasingly sought to intrude into their political, social, cultural, and economic lives.56 On a day-to-day level, the result was an environment in which many had to gain familiarity not only with the language and vocabulary of Ghanaian pan-Africanism and socialism, but also with its hidden assumptions, values, and norms. In many ways, it was in the press that these assumptions and values were most clearly articulated. In fact, it could be argued that the press—via most newspapers’ daily coverage and editorials—often better exemplifies the moving target that was Nkrumahism during the decade and a half of CPP rule than do the speeches and writings of Nkrumah and other prominent CPP figures themselves. In these party and government publications we find the CPP’s in-the-moment readings of and adaptations to a changing array of local, continental, and international phenomena, including strikes, attempts on Nkrumah’s life, and Cold War intervention in Ghana and elsewhere on the continent.
Juxtaposed with my analysis of the Ghanaian state- and party-run press are a collection of forty-four oral interviews with Ghanaians who were both inside and outside the CPP’s formal party apparatus. Among the most prominent figures interviewed were J. K. Tettegah (d. 2009), who for much of the Nkrumah years served as the general secretary of the TUC, K. B. Asante, K. S. P. (formerly J. E.) Jantuah (d. 2011), Kofi Duku, and Dr. M. N. Tetteh. Among these figures, only K. B. Asante remained an active and prominent presence in Ghanaian public life throughout the duration of this book’s research and writing, while most others had retired and/or were still sidelined from any serious political work in the country. The majority of the book’s interviews, however, are with an array of nonelite Ghanaian men and women who participated in either the CPP or opposition politics of the first decade of self-rule. Most notably, these interviews include oral narratives from and focused life histories of individuals associated with such Nkrumah-era organizations as the Ghana Young Pioneers, the Builders Brigade, and other political and social appendages of the CPP and its opposition. Most of these interviews took place in the particular individual’s home or workplace and were conducted in English, Twi, or a mixture thereof. In some cases, interviewees generously took the time to sit for more than one interview. Meanwhile, a research assistant, who had been integral in locating potential interviewees, was present for most interviews and another aided in the translation and transcription of many of the non-English interviews.
Lower-profile regional archives and those of institutions like the George Padmore Research Library on African Affairs in Accra further reinforced the project’s emphasis on the interactive relationship between the ideological and lived experiences of African decolonization and Ghanaian postcoloniality. The Padmore Library’s Bureau of African Affairs collection (GPRL, BAA/RLAA/-), for instance, not only helped outline the Nkrumah government’s pan-African agenda inside and outside the country, but also—through the personnel files it contained—provided a view into the day-to-day work life of those employed in the institution.
PRAAD’s regional archives in Sekondi, Kumasi, Sunyani, and Cape Coast—all of which contain a rich array of material on Nkrumah-era Ghana—offered similar snapshots of life under Nkrumah and the CPP. For, in these often overlooked archives, at least in terms of understanding the national political scene, we find much more than the correspondence of a set of sycophantic bureaucrats attempting to carry out the orders of the central government in Accra. Rather, the records, correspondence, and minutes of the party’s district and regional branches provide the intellectual and bureaucratic artifacts for understanding how the Accra government’s policies, orders, and ideology were both interpreted at the local level and, in many cases, haphazardly implemented. They thus offer a complicated view of both local governments’ and the populace’s day-to-day engagement with the often-changing face of Nkrumahism, as each tried to make sense of local issues, including chieftaincy, labor, land ownership, development, political representation, and state loyalty, in the context of the emergent Nkrumahist state. As a result, in combination with the amorphous set of transnational “shadow archives,” as Jean Allman refers to them—in the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere—these regional archives represent some of the most valuable repositories for understanding the contradictions and complexities of Ghanaian political life in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly outside of Accra.57 Even with these institutions, however, the types of questions one can usefully answer necessarily face a range of constraints connected to the contemporary realities and current state of a postcolonial archive that was originally constructed within the increasingly tightening political and social arena of the Nkrumahist state, and that subsequently, over nearly sixty years, has suffered periods of governmental and structural neglect.
ORGANIZATION
The methodological challenges faced in engaging the postcolonial archive inform the organization of this book, for each of its chapters engages both the possibilities and the frustrations elicited by the archive. As a result, the book’s first two chapters reconstruct the mutually interacting local and global contexts framing both Nkrumah’s political and intellectual development and the Gold Coast’s transition to self-rule. In doing so, they place the anticolonial politics of Nkrumah and the CPP at the center of a growing set of transnational debates at the time over the structure and meaning of African self-rule. Central to this discussion is a rereading of the narratives and debates surrounding postwar pan-African anticolonial politics in relation to both the rise of the CPP and the resistance to it. These debates, however, were not just about institutional formations or territorial control. Rather, they were part of a process of contestation that integrated questions concerning everything from the ideological, civic, and moral makeup of the new Ghana to its physical and infrastructural landscape. Chapter 2, in particular, provides a framework for understanding the political, social, and institutional changes to an emergent Nkrumahism in relation to the wide array of expectations and allegiances that comprised the midcentury Gold Coast/Ghanaian political, social, and cultural scene. In doing so, it details the process by which Nkrumah and a range of other local and transnational actors set out to sketch a path for Ghana’s future and its role in an anticipated soon-to-be liberated Africa alongside a competing set of alternative visions for the new country—local, regional, and national—that challenged the young but maturing CPP.
The following four chapters detail the process by which the evolving CPP-led state aimed to instill into the Ghanaian populace the pan-African and socialist consciousness that it saw as at the heart of a truly independent Ghana and Africa. Each in turn examines aspects of the variety of paths differing groups of Ghanaians took as they navigated this emerging political and social reality. Chapter
