Nigerian counterparts—were among the wealthiest Africans on the continent.54 As a result, by the early 1950s many inside and outside of Africa had begun to argue that nowhere on the continent was there a better testing ground for the prospects of African modernization than in the Gold Coast. More importantly, such arguments, as part of the flourishing anticolonial politics of the period, not only had a receptive audience among the various stakeholders on the colony’s political scene, they also directly connected a still nascent Nkrumahist worldview to a broader transnational discourse of large-scale development, with strands connecting Afro-Asian anticolonialism, American and Soviet Cold War interests, United Nations planning schemes, and imperial decolonization politics.55 As such, for Nkrumah and many within the CPP, large-scale industrial development stood at the core of the postcolonial society they envisioned, providing the bedrock upon which all else was to be built.
However, even as the CPP-led government enjoyed this period of economic growth, concerns over the increasingly central role of foreign capital and technical expertise in the Gold Coast’s modernization agenda increasingly worked their way into segments of the party infrastructure and especially Nkrumah’s cadre of expatriate advisors. In the case of Tema, for instance, George Padmore, who had recently completed a short trip to the Gold Coast, wrote to Nkrumah in November 1951 in order to strongly caution him against putting too much faith in the British firm—Halcrow and Partners—commissioned to advance the harbor project. In doing so, Padmore resurrected the specters of the multilayered states of political and economic dependency that had marked the Gold Coast’s colonial history and, just as importantly, of the postwar economic struggles and imperial neglect for their basic needs (namely in terms of housing and water) that many Gold Coasters believed had caused them hardship. Padmore thus counseled the CPP leader that his immediate attention foremost should be in resolving these issues before embarking upon the potentially foolhardy plan to construct—via British (imperialist) assistance—something as ambitious as an industrial harbor.56 In another instance, Padmore emphasized the need for an indigenous Gold Coast production source of its own for the colony’s urban development, namely in terms of the construction and maintenance of the colony’s many new schools, dispensaries, post offices, community centers, and housing options. The “real opposition” to the CPP, Padmore advised a Nkrumah still recovering from the colony’s recent electoral battles was “not the Danquahs, who are helpless.” Rather, he proclaimed, it was “the white officials,” who he believed were constantly devising new ways to continue to exert their will on the decolonizing colony.57
The political realities that Nkrumah and the CPP government faced in the late-colonial Gold Coast were, however, much more complicated than the abstractions outlined by Padmore suggested. In practical terms, the Gold Coast simply did not have the economic and technical resources necessary to independently pursue the government’s grandiose development agenda. Just in terms of labor, the government’s development plans required a complicated mix of skilled and unskilled labor to undertake the construction phase of any particular project. Even before construction began, though, the government also required the labor, know-how, and resources of specialized architectural and engineering firms to research and design the project. No such firms with the capabilities of working at the scale demanded by the CPP’s development projects existed in the Gold Coast.58 Additionally, the CPP had to negotiate its own tenuous position within the context of the late-colonial political system. As a radical, African-led government ultimately operating within the British-run colonial state, both Nkrumah and the CPP had to balance their own anticolonial desires with their need to be seen as legitimate and responsible political actors by a colonial apparatus that, prior to the CPP’s electoral victory, had—among other things—portrayed the Nkrumah-led party as an “extreme Nationalist group” engaged in acts of “lawlessness.”59 Even more significantly, the CPP had to face a populace with often widely divergent ideas of what Nkrumahist modernization could and should mean for them, especially when its transformations encroached upon their daily lives and belief systems.
It was in Tema where the CPP faced its first major challenge to its modernization agenda following the CPP government’s proposal to relocate the current fishing town to make way for the new harbor and industrial city. As noted earlier, the Tema project was intended to be a cornerstone of the CPP’s developmentalist agenda, only rivalled by the nearly contemporaneous Volta River Project. From the perspective of the CPP, the result of the project was not simply to be the material construction of a harbor and city. It was also to embody the procedural nature of the decolonization process itself for the emergent country. At one level, it was to represent one of the colony’s pathways toward the economic self-determination demanded by Nkrumahist conceptions of national and continental independence, as it promised a future driven by economic self-sufficiency and national and international interconnection. Moreover, in its order, newness, and grandiosity, the Tema project also represented for many in the CPP a Ghanaian future liberated from the baggage of history that many saw as afflicting other parts of the colony. Through Tema, the government thus envisioned the creation of a living embodiment of the new Ghana, forged out of what many viewed as relative nothingness. For, as one group of social surveyors explained in 1966, prior to the government’s 1952 announcement of its plans to build in Tema, the ethnically Ga town was for all intents and purposes “an almost forgotten and insignificant fishing village.”60
As a community, however, Tema’s residents understood the town as having a deep and important history, one that dated back to the sixteenth century. As with the communities that came to comprise Accra and other nearby towns like Teshie and Nungua, Tema represented one of the original seven Ga coastal communities, which oral tradition held were established after a Ga migration from the east.61 In the centuries that followed, Tema and its fellow Ga towns periodically served as coastal trading ports for nearby Akwamu before their nineteenth-century integration into the British colonial state.62 By the twentieth century, most of Tema’s residents were engaged in the fishing industry in some fashion. In most cases, men took their chances in the canoes, while women generally smoked the fish and sold it in the markets or inland.63 Small-scale farming supplemented the livelihoods of many of the town’s residents. However, in contrast to those working the agriculturally richer land further inland, the Tema Ga never directly reaped the benefits of the Gold Coast cocoa revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead, the area became known foremost for the production of local crops, initially calabash. By the early 1950s, tomatoes would bring the greatest profits into the area aside from fishing.64 Meanwhile, in terms of population, the interwar and postwar years proved to be periods of growth in the town, with the population nearly doubling between 1937 and 1948 and doubling again over the next four years. As a result, by 1952 the town had grown to nearly four thousand residents.65
As the CPP proceeded with the planned Tema project in the early 1950s, the government entered into a complicated political and cultural environment, particularly as it related to questions of land and land ownership. Not unlike elsewhere in the Gold Coast, individuals rarely had direct rights of ownership over Ga lands. Instead, they usually only possessed a range of usufructuary rights over the lands to which they gained access. Even then, the types of social and productive activities in which they could engage on the land were also often circumscribed.66 However, what tended to distinguish Ga notions of land ownership from those of many of their Akan neighbors inland were the limitations placed upon even a chieftaincy’s, or stool’s, authority over the land. In contrast with many Akan, Tema stool holders’ authority over the land was largely indirect, with much of it being filtered through the broader local Ga power structure. Most importantly, this included the town’s priests, who in many ways served as custodians of the land for the gods.67 As a result, at least at the abstract level, it was the community’s gods who maintained direct ownership rights over the land. As delineated by colonial anthropologist Margaret Field, these gods foundationally inhabited the land and the various topographical features that dotted it. The gods in turn could not be dislocated or alienated from the land, therefore making it impossible to permanently and irrevocably transfer ownership to another entity, as would be required by the Tema project. As such, the use and maintenance of the land carried with it a meaning that transcended
