the logistical and bureaucratic constraints put on them by the British and the realities of administering a modern government. Most importantly, these included an acceptance of the liberal democratic institutions celebrated by Apter, along with a slowed Africanization of the Gold Coast/Ghanaian civil service and the maintenance of a postcolonial British governor-general in the newly independent country. Outside the formal mechanisms of government, the concern over how best to prepare for self-rule moved to the qualities of the citizenry itself. Here, the CPP promoted not only a continued “mobilizing of the masses,” to borrow Elizabeth Schmidt’s phrasing, but, more importantly, the coalescence of the citizenry around a very specific CPP-defined idea of the Ghanaian nation.43 In this regard, the party press, exemplified by the Nkrumah-founded Ghana Evening News (previously the Accra Evening News and later the Evening News), sought to cultivate a sense of nationhood that civically centered on the party itself. Party rallies and public awareness campaigns further promoted such a party-centered idea of the Ghanaian nation, while, along with the press, mapping for the nation the envisioned centralization of political power in the Accra-based, CPP-run government.
Independence and, even more so, the 1960 inauguration of the republican constitution only intensified the process of CPP centralization. Even more importantly, the freedoms manifested in independence provided the CPP with the room necessary to test and invest in new forms of institutions designed to cultivate the type of citizenry it believed was required for meeting the needs of the postcolonial world. Here, ideals of discipline, order, political and civic awareness, and collective national and continental development combined with a socialist and pan-African ethos rooted in a transnational anti-imperialism. As in the 1950s, the party press—the Evening News, the Ghanaian Times, the Ghanaian, the Spark, and other publications—took the lead in articulating and theorizing this envisioned citizenry. Moreover, as the CPP consolidated its influence over the press in the early 1960s—taking over or shuttering most newspapers that deviated from the party line—the party- and state-run press largely became the only publications in which interpretations of the postcolonial citizenry and nation could be publicly debated.44 Journalists, authors, editors, letter writers, politicians, petitioners, and others had little choice but to write within the epistemological constraints imposed on them by what was increasingly emerging, from within the party itself, as an attempt to create a sense of orthodoxy around the eclectic set of ideas broadly comprising “Nkrumahism” in the postcolonial state.
Meanwhile, on the ground, party and governmental institutions such as the Ghana Young Pioneers, the Ghana Builders Brigade (later renamed as the Ghana Workers Brigade), the Trades Union Congress, the National Council of Ghana Women (NCGW), the Young Farmers’ League, and others set out to embed within the citizenry an emergent Nkrumahist way of life. Both the party and state were central to this envisioned way of life and to how interpretations of it were disseminated throughout the populace. Together, these institutions were thus to provide the discipline, regimentation, and foresight needed to embark upon not only the complicated infrastructural task of nation-building, but, more foundationally, the much deeper, ontological burden of creating new, decolonized citizens. As a result, those involved in institutions such as the Ghana Young Pioneers and the Builders Brigade engaged in a range of activities including drill instruction, athletic competitions and displays, marching in public parades and rallies, self-help projects, and citizenship classes and lectures. From the late 1950s on, nearly all of these activities—either overtly or covertly—aimed to position the individual, through his or her performance of Nkrumahism’s pan-African and socialist anti-imperial ideal, as the embodiment of the new Ghana and Africa. Moreover, together with the time investments required of their members and the relationships forged through participation, the practices and programs put forward by the Young Pioneers, Builders Brigade, and similar organizations pressured, if not challenged, longstanding notions of belonging in midcentury Ghana—including family, chieftaincy, community, gender, and generation—as the CPP sought to reorient the populace’s worldview toward the mission of the state.
Through the enactments of the Nkrumahist way of life exhibited in the formal and informal rituals of the CPP’s various wings and institutions, the Nkrumahist state therefore emerged as much as a performative enterprise as a conventional instrument of governance. Moreover, the Nkrumahist state was not alone in such a construction, for the rituals and expectations of what postcolonial life should be in Ghana shared many similarities with several other midcentury socialist and postcolonial states, including those of the Guinean state as studied by Mike McGovern and Jay Straker. Examining the Guinean Demystification Program, McGovern describes a political and cultural initiative specifically and necessarily designed to reach into the most intimate aspects of Guinean forestières’ lives, including family relations, spirituality, and ethnic belonging.45 At least in terms of intention and philosophy, the program would not have looked unfamiliar in Ghana, as Guineans—willingly and semi-willingly—incorporated aspects of Guinean revolutionary ideology into their lives in both the public and private performance of what McGovern describes as a state-sponsored cosmopolitanism. Here, an uncomfortable merging of a pan-African gesture toward Africa’s precolonial past with scientific socialism’s anticapitalist modernism culminated in an iconoclastic program that at once positioned the country’s forestières as “negative examples, stereotypes of savagery” and emergent “modernist national citizens.”46 Straker, also writing on the Guinean forestières, similarly relates that it is impossible to understand “the complexities of life histories, political sentiments, and cultural imaginings” in postcolonial Guinea without centering “the workings of state power in the cultural realm.”47
In Ghana, for the thousands formally integrated into the party apparatus and the many more who had little choice but to live alongside it, party activities and pressures became a key component of their daily lives and relationships. As we will see in the third chapter in the case of the Ghana Young Pioneers, the national organization for school-age children, its time commitments, teaching, and leadership structure severely strained relationships within families and communities. As a result, in certain instances, parents, elders, and other community members came under the suspicion of some of the Young Pioneers in their lives, while many Young Pioneers themselves were similarly held in suspicion by the adults around them. At the same time, the movement also—both in reality and perception—held the potential for opening new pathways to political and social mobility for both its members and possibly their families. The Builders Brigade, with its built-in public employment program, offered even greater potential for mobility for its membership. However, in many cases, it also catalyzed increasingly caustic relationships with the communities that lived alongside the Brigade’s many camps. In such communities, the granting of local lands for Brigade use, the supposed unruliness of brigaders, and the Brigade’s (real and perceived) influence in local and national politics roused significant tensions. Yet, as we will also see, for many of the brigaders and their family members with whom I spoke, their experiences in the Brigade were defining moments in their lives, opening up new avenues for their transition into a socially recognized adulthood.
Similar stories played out in other CPP organizations as well. In the Trades Union Congress (TUC), for instance, workers encountered an institution that, over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, would transform its mission from worker advocacy to the state organization of labor. Guiding the TUC and the CPP’s labor politics more broadly was a calcifying socialist ideology of work that sought to decenter the individual’s personal ambitions in favor of the assumed shared goals of the nation. As a result, ideologically, productivity reigned supreme. This not only alienated many workers from an institution ostensibly established to serve their interests, but also distanced them from the fruits of their labor as they were increasingly asked to do more for less. Likewise, in the Bureau of African Affairs (BAA)—the most important of the CPP government’s pan-African institutions—the party’s expanding ideology of work, with its celebration of productivity and sacrifice, was embedded in the daily work lives of the Bureau’s employees. Among those most affected were the many young female employees who made up the Bureau’s typing, bookbinding, telephony, and clerical staff. The result was the emergence of an often turbulent workspace in which the party’s modernist celebrations of women in the workplace
