as the postcolonial government sought (ultimately unsuccessfully) to turn the country’s educational system on its head by attempting to transform the classroom into a site of experiential, hands-on learning.32
The CPP’s attention to the Gold Coast’s/Ghana’s educational system had direct links to its broader and much more visible plan for the colony’s/country’s architectural and infrastructural landscape, especially in its urban centers. In many of the colony’s cities and towns, the urban population boom of the early and mid-twentieth century had accentuated existing social and economic tensions, particularly over issues of land. In Accra, which witnessed its population triple in the first third of the twentieth century and then double again by 1949, the effects of nineteenth-century land reforms designed to commoditize land collided with the rapid migration of the interwar and postwar periods.33 As a result, land values in the city ballooned in the decade following the war. By 1955, for instance, some areas of the city were seeing a more than 350 percent increase in land values over their 1947 levels. The commercial sector endured even more drastic increases as land values nearly quintupled over the eight-year period.34 For the city’s traditional Ga residents, often priced out of this new land market, frustrations with the city’s changing urban landscape mounted throughout much of the 1940s and early 1950s as migration to the urban center intensified.35
The CPP aimed to transcend the local concerns driving Accra’s urban politics with a vision of a new, international Accra replete with modern infrastructure, architecture, housing, offices, and industry. By the time of the country’s independence celebrations, new venues such as the famed Ambassador Hotel, the Accra Library, and the State House dotted the city’s modernizing landscape.36 Also, as architectural historian Mark Crinson has detailed, during the buildup to independence, the Gold Coast Public Works Department commissioned the British architectural firm Fry, Drew, Drake & Lasdun for the planning of a national museum, which opened in 1957. Moreover, the museum itself was part of a broader planned cultural district outside the city’s established commercial and residential neighborhoods that included the newly developed Accra Technical Institute, the YWCA, and the National Archives as well as an anticipated science museum.37 Meanwhile, planning for the architecturally modernist Accra Community Centre, which in 1958 would house the first All-African Peoples’ Conference, and, in later years, the administrative offices of the Ghana Young Pioneers, also began in the mid-1950s.38
Similar, but often smaller-scale projects were undertaken in other major cities as well, including Kumasi, which saw the construction and expansion of a new bank, a post office, and a hospital during the period.39 Likewise, east of Accra in the small fishing town of Tema and just north of the Volta River town of Atimpoku, the promise of planned cities complemented the modernist re-envisioning of the Gold Coast’s more established urban centers. Tema, for its part, largely represented a blank slate for the CPP and its allies. Constructed to house the country’s planned industrial harbor and serve as the burgeoning country’s industrial center, it was to be the city of the future. Housing and commerce were to develop in carefully defined neighborhood units with envisioned populations of between three and five thousand people. According to Keith Jopp, writing in a 1961 pamphlet promoting the government’s plans for the city, the size and structure of these neighborhood units were to be a reflection of “a typical Ghanaian village.” Groups of four neighborhood units were in turn to make up individual “communities”—each with a population of twelve to fifteen thousand residents—within the larger city. Each community was to have its own banks, schools, churches, shops, and services, including clinics, nurseries, and entertainment.40 Through its structure and layout, Tema was thus to be the living embodiment of the emerging Nkrumahist worldview, as it provided the new Ghana an ordered, disciplined, and methodically planned urban center through which not only the nation’s industrial development could flow, but also its civic productivity. Even more importantly, the city’s new industrial harbor, which began operations in 1962, was to be Ghana’s and, more broadly, West Africa’s connection to the broader global economy via a newly established, African-controlled production and export network.41
At least in terms of its growth rate, Tema did not disappoint in the 1950s and 1960s. Transforming from a small fishing town of approximately two thousand residents in 1948, the city and surrounding area had a population of more than twenty-five thousand by the country’s 1960 census and just under one hundred thousand by 1970.42 Jopp even went so far as to predict a potential population of more than two hundred thousand for the new city.43 Catalyzing Tema’s growth, geographer David Hilling notes, was the establishment of the city as “Ghana’s foremost industrial region, with an aluminium smelter, steel works, shipyard, oil refinery and a wide range of consumer goods industries (cigarettes, textiles, radios, soap, paints, footwear, motor vehicles, [and] foodstuffs).”44 Meanwhile, in Akosombo Township—Ghana’s other major planned city—the growth rate never rivaled that of its coastal and industrial neighbor, yet the ambitions for the township were no less lofty. The CPP envisioned a city with a population of between thirty and fifty thousand residents replete with such urban conveniences as a cinema, a hospital, an international hotel, and a community center.45 By 1963, though, the township had only one school, which, as historian Stephan Miescher relates, was primarily open only to the administering Volta River Authority’s expatriate staff and senior Ghanaian officials.46 Additional concerns over sanitation, unemployment, stray animals, squatting, and the growth of neighboring slums came to plague not just Akosombo but also Tema in the second half of the twentieth century.47 Regardless, together with Accra, both Tema and Akosombo were to help form what the CPP envisioned as Ghana’s “new Industrial Triangle.”48
With their focus on clean lines and utilitarian spaces, these new and renewed cities were to provide the physical manifestation of the Nkrumahist worldview in the construction of the new Ghana, blending what architect Jane Drew described as “a loose westernized pattern, perhaps more like that of California than Europe,” with the organic and localized ambitions of a burgeoning independent Africa.49 As art historian Janet Hess has argued, for the CPP, the Gold Coast’s urban transformation was to serve as a visible, permanent showcase of the broader social and cultural revolution of the CPP-led nation-building project.50 Ghanaian urban spaces—through their modern amenities, the designs of their buildings, their grids in the case of the planned cities, and their inclusiveness—were thus to emerge not only as icons of an emerging African modernity, but also as the transnational hubs of a burgeoning postcolonial African cosmopolitanism. These cities were very much ideological projects. As such, they were to be the sites of Ghanaian pan-Africanism, welcoming and catering to everyone from ethnically and religiously diverse groups of Ghanaians and other Africans to international dignitaries, tourists, activists, and expatriates. It was in these settings that Ghanaians and others were to create, as described by Nate Plageman, the “new shared experiences of belonging” required for independence.51
FIGURE 2.1. Marching with the times. Source: Evening News, 6 March 1957.
NKRUMAHIST MODERNIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
The rising economic fortunes of the colony during the 1950s helped drive the CPP’s massive investment in educational and infrastructural development. What in the 1940s had been an economy constrained by stagnating wages and runaway inflation had, by the mid-1950s, become one reinvigorated by skyrocketing cocoa prices, which in turn injected unprecedented levels of new revenue into the late-colonial economy. By the 1954–55 fiscal year, for instance, the government-run Cocoa Marketing Board, which oversaw the colony’s cocoa sales, enjoyed export proceeds that had nearly doubled their 1947–48 levels, topping out at £G77.5 million.52 Additional contributions to the Gold Coast coffers came from the colony’s mining industry. From the 1950–51 to the 1951–52 fiscal year alone, the colony’s mining exports increased by nearly £6.5 million to a total value of £23 million.53 Moreover, as historian Robert Tignor
