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From the Gold Coast to Ghana

Modernization and the Politics of Pan-African Nation-Building

The peoples of the colonies know precisely what they want. They wish to be free and independent, to be able to feel themselves on an equal [footing?] with all other peoples and to work out their own destiny without outside interference and to be unrestricted to attain an advancement that will put them on a par with other technically advanced nations of the world.

—Kwame Nkrumah, Towards Colonial Freedom, 1947¹

IN DECEMBER 1947, Kwame Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast at the invitation of the prominent Gold Coast barrister and nationalist J. B. Danquah. At Danquah’s behest, Nkrumah was to serve as general secretary of the recently formed United Gold Coast Convention. However, even before Nkrumah’s arrival, the Gold Coast press had already begun preaching the Nkroful-born politician’s virtues, with the Gold Coast Independent advising its readers in October that “in him one finds all the qualities that make for greatness.” The newspaper further predicted that in the coming years Nkrumah would “play a great role in the future of West Africa, there can be no doubt.”² The buzz around Nkrumah only intensified following his return. As M. N. Tetteh—who more than a decade later would hold a variety of positions in the Nkrumah government, including in the Ghana Young Pioneers—recalled, few things had a greater influence on his life than the enthusiasm with which people spoke of this man who had come from abroad to bring “freedom” to the Gold Coast. Tetteh explained that, for him and his colleagues, all of whom were just schoolboys at the time, “You may not know the details of it [i.e., what freedom meant], but you were happy,” for the word alone promised a better future. As a result, when Nkrumah came to Tetteh’s hometown of Dodowa shortly after his arrival in the colony, Tetteh was among the students who snuck out of school to see the new general secretary of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC). Following Nkrumah’s speech, Tetteh claims to have declared his allegiance to the Gold Coast politician and, along with many of his fellow young people, undertook the mission of “spreading the gospel of Nkrumah’s message” to anyone who would listen. “[We were] very young,” Tetteh recounted, “without knowing much about, without understanding much about politics, but with enthusiasm, we were following him.”³

Tetteh was far from alone in offering such a reflection on Nkrumah’s impact on the Gold Coast political scene. Ben Nikoi-Oltai, who would join the CPP shortly after its July 1949 formation, presented a similar personal and national narrative. For him, the defining events of the CPP’s early years were the party’s February 1951 electoral victory and, even more importantly, Nkrumah’s subsequent release from prison. As remembered by the longtime Accra resident, the CPP victory drew a crowd of Gold Coasters to James Fort Prison, where the government was holding Nkrumah on charges of sedition and inciting an illegal strike.⁴ Nikoi-Oltai recalled how, after Nkrumah’s release, the crowd shepherded Nkrumah across the colonial capital to the seat of government at Christiansborg Castle, where Nkrumah assumed the newly created position of leader of government business. For Nikoi-Oltai, who would maintain a place in the CPP rank and file until the 1966 coup, this procession across Accra was a defining moment both in his life and for the nation. “That day,” the Accra shopkeeper proclaimed, “I saw whites running away for the first time.”⁵ Another longtime party member, Kofi Duku, echoed Nikoi-Oltai in a 2008 interview as he recounted how within “less than . . . an hour, [the courtyard in front of] James Fort Prison . . . a big space, was filled to capacity.” Upon Nkrumah’s release, Duku continued, “Men and women, children and children yet to be born, that means women carrying babies with cloth tied around their waists, [were] singing various songs [of] joy and happiness.”⁶

The victory that swept Nkrumah and the CPP to power was nothing short of profound. In the Legislative Assembly, the CPP won thirty-four of the body’s thirty-eight contested seats, while the imprisoned CPP leader officially received more than fourteen times as many votes as his nearest rival in his Accra electoral district.⁷ Following the election, control over the Gold Coast would officially remain in British hands for the next six years. However, as the leader of government business and, from 1952 on, prime minister, Nkrumah, along with the young CPP, gained wide-reaching powers over the colony’s internal affairs. This included the establishment of their own cabinet and the relative freedom to pursue a legislative agenda seen as ushering in a broader program of political, social, economic, and infrastructural modernization. At its most foundational, this program aimed to incorporate key aspects of the Manchester radicalism Nkrumah and others brought from abroad in an attempted re-envisioning of the social, cultural, and even physical makeup of the Gold Coast itself. Governmental and constitutional affairs, the CPP argued, even including self-government, could only go so far. The real issue now was how to transform the colonial Gold Coast and the people who populated it into a modern nation.

This chapter details the construction of the burgeoning Nkrumahist vision for an emergent postcolonial Ghana in the context of the 1950s independence negotiations. This was a period in which, for many Gold Coasters and especially those aligned with the CPP, eventual independence appeared a foregone conclusion. At the same time, the actual path to it remained unclear, and, by the mid-1950s, looked increasingly messy as a number of formal and informal resistance movements emerged within the colony. Key to this period, then, was a complex set of local and national negotiations in which Nkrumah, the CPP, and the British each sought to balance their own interests and ambitions for the future Ghana with those of the many competing constituencies that composed the Gold Coast more broadly. For the CPP itself, the liminal nature of this period of shared governance offered an opportunity for the new government as it sought to securely begin building its future Ghana along the lines of the modern, ordered, urban, industrial, and cosmopolitan society that would serve as the idealized hallmark of official Nkrumahism for much of the next decade and a half. As a result, on the governmental level, the early and mid-1950s were a period of near-unprecedented investment and experimentation in fields ranging from education and healthcare to architecture and urban planning as the CPP set out to define the social and infrastructural parameters of modern African life.

As this chapter also shows, the responses to the CPP’s actions were far from uniform. Rather, the CPP’s efforts ushered in a variety of complicated local and regional reactions as diverse groups of soon-to-be Ghanaians negotiated their own desires and expectations for decolonization-era modernization in relation to all that was lost in the often all-encompassing nature of the CPP’s plans and paths toward implementation. More than the remnants of an antiquated politics that most in the CPP and many outside observers presented them as, the localized and regional opposition movements (formal and informal) that arose against the CPP during the 1950s often countered the CPP’s modernist imagination with their own alternative visions for the Gold Coast’s/Ghana’s future. In doing so, they frequently drew upon a range of historical, intellectual, and cultural traditions with much deeper roots than anything the CPP could provide. Writing on the Asante-led National Liberation Movement, for instance, historian Jean Allman has argued that many of these movements could even be read as nationalisms unto themselves.⁸ However, even more may be seen as going on within these movements when they are juxtaposed with the CPP’s developing Nkrumahist worldview. Not only did they compete with the dominant visions for the future put forward by the CPP, but they also often embedded within their own historically and culturally specific visions divergent strands of nationalism, internationalism, and modernization that at times resembled Nkrumahism, yet adapted to local realities. In this respect, the debates and often bitter and violent conflicts that emerged in the Gold Coast politics of the 1950s both challenged the CPP’s increasingly centralized vision of Ghana’s postcolonial future and represented a political eclecticism that, during the first decade of self-rule, an ever more orthodox Nkrumahism would long struggle to weed out.

MODERNIZATION AND PRE-INDEPENDENCE NKRUMAHIST COSMOPOLITANISM

From its founding, the CPP’s agenda for the Gold Coast/Ghana was by definition ambitious. As Nkrumah detailed in his 1947 pamphlet Towards Colonial Freedom, he believed that, for any colonial territory, self-government was only part of the equation. At most, it opened the path for the more fundamental emancipation that would come with economic liberation and the quest for a form of self-determination that freed the colonized from the grips of capitalist imperialism. At an even more foundational level for a party still in formation, the emotion embedded within the call for self-government offered an unprecedented tool for mobilization. For the more measured politicians of the UGCC and its successor parties in the early 1950s, the CPP’s appeals to emotion regularly proved a source of substantial frustration.⁹ Nkrumah and the CPP, however, saw strength in their ability to envelop themselves in the anger, enthusiasm, and anticipation of the populace as they employed the message of self-government in the task of political organization. For them, the language of self-government became a mechanism through which to channel the party’s ambitions through an array of popular aspirations and frustrations connected to Gold Coasters’ everyday struggles. In the party press as well as in rallies, meetings, and other political and social events, the CPP in turn peppered its abstract anticolonial rhetoric with reflections on the daily plights of Gold Coasters seeking such forms of relief as access to schooling, employment, and pathways out of an economic reality defined by stagnating wages and hyperinflation.¹⁰

Not dissimilar to the model employed by the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) in Guinea, the CPP of the late 1940s and early 1950s sought to create an overarching multiethnic and socially diverse umbrella under which to organize the populace.¹¹ Again, as with the Guinean RDA and, in East Africa, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), women and especially market women stood at the heart of the CPP’s mass support, transmitting the party’s message via song, dance, dress, and other popular and socially democratic means of communication.¹² The party, for its part, responded in kind with regular coverage in its rallies and press of issues it deemed of particular concern to women. In doing so, its women writers, especially, used the party press to gin up enthusiasm for the party around issues including market struggles, education and employment for women, and the state and quality of women’s activism within the party infrastructure.¹³ Meanwhile, female-centered spaces like the markets allowed for the further rapid spread of the party’s message. Reflecting back on the early years of the CPP in his Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977), C. L. R. James thus recalled not simply the centrality of women in the CPP’s mobilizing efforts, but, more importantly, the power they held. “The market,” the Trinidadian recounted, “was a great centre of gossip, of news and of discussion. Where in many undeveloped communities the women are a drag upon their menfolk, these women, although to a large extent illiterate, were a dynamic element in the population, active, well-informed, acute, and always at the very centre of events.” To the Marxist James, they, not the educated of the party, drove the CPP’s agenda. As a result, he matter-of-factly asserted, “In the struggle for independence one market-woman in Accra, and there were fifteen thousand of them, was worth any dozen Achimota graduates”—of which Nkrumah was one.¹⁴

Joining the colony’s women in the CPP were similarly significant groups of youth, farmers, and workers. As with M. N. Tetteh, who joined the Nkrumahist wing of the UGCC in 1948 and later the CPP, the Gold Coast’s young people tended to be attracted to the excitement surrounding the new party. In time, they began their own deliberations on what the CPP and its message meant and promised in terms of the prospects for their own futures. As with other constituencies, this included schooling and employment following their education as well as personal and social independence from their elders. Others like Kofi Duku—who, after leaving school in the late 1940s, had bounced from one location to another in the western and central Gold Coast before settling in Accra—spoke in an interview of the sense of community and belonging that the party provided him amidst the din of the postwar colony.¹⁵ Meanwhile, farmers turned to the CPP out of opposition to many of the colonial government’s agricultural policies. For cocoa farmers specifically, the onslaught of swollen shoot disease—a fatal virus infecting cocoa trees—in the colony’s oldest cocoa-growing regions, followed by the government’s decision to cut down blighted trees, threatened the livelihood of thousands.¹⁶ The CPP, for its part, with its vocal opposition to the government’s forced eradication campaign, appeared to be a means by which the affected farmers as well as those who feared the disease’s spread could gain a voice on the national stage. As a result, historian Francis Danquah notes, farmers’ groups had by late 1950 begun sponsoring CPP candidates in preparation for the 1951 election.¹⁷

In seeking to address the concerns of nearly all of its major constituencies, the CPP positioned the colonial government as unable and unwilling to meet its obligations to its subject population. Indirect rule and similar methods of governance, the party contended, were specifically designed to leave Gold Coasters, as with other colonial peoples, in a state of dependence and unprepared for the modern world.¹⁸ The day-to-day mission of the CPP, then, at least from the perspective of the party’s local emissaries, was to establish the social and institutional framework necessary to both meet the needs and expectations of its varying constituencies and prepare these constituencies with the tools required of a modern society. When, for instance, a group of secondary school students in Cape Coast were expelled for striking in opposition to the 1948 arrest of Nkrumah and other UGCC leaders, the Nkrumahist wing of the UGCC began establishing a set of schools of its own, catering to the colony’s politically active youth. The first of these schools opened in Cape Coast in July 1948. Over the next several years, the Nkrumahist wing—over the objections of the UGCC’s broader leadership—and later the CPP would found one to two dozen similar institutions throughout the southern Gold Coast.¹⁹

For the CPP, education served both an ideological and a practical purpose. No other issue more fundamentally represented the hopes and ambitions of both the individual and the nation as a whole than education. To the CPP, though, colonial education was a sphere deeply fraught with contradiction. As articulated in 1949 by the Nkrumah-founded Accra Evening News, it was where “you see Imperialism almost at its worst.” Hailing access to schools as “the greatest liberating force,” the newspaper chastised the colonial government for what it considered to be the rationing of education. The most notable method by which this was done was through the imposition of an array of school fees on students and their families so that only a limited number of students could afford to attend. Relatedly, the Evening News also questioned the government’s decision not to make schooling compulsory for all of the Gold Coast’s children, especially at the primary level. It was these types of decisions, the newspaper insisted, that explained a literacy rate in the colony of only ten percent, and a situation where both parents and children were desperate for greater access to schooling at all levels. “Parents want to send their children to school,” the Evening News argued, “but cannot get admission for them. Children cry to go to school but cry in vain, for there is no accommodation for them. In the face of this the Education Department is absolutely helpless and hopeless in trying to cope with the position. It draws up a Ten Year Educational Development Plan and the whole thing is a complete washout.”²⁰

Following the CPP’s initial electoral victory, the new government thus catapulted education to the top of its legislative agenda, announcing in early 1951 its plans for the implementation of fee-free primary education in the colony beginning in January 1952.²¹ As detailed in the government’s report on educational development, “The aim of the course [primary school education] will be to provide a sound foundation for citizenship with permanent literacy in both English and the vernacular. On completion of such a primary course,” the report continued, “children will be ready to proceed to one of varying types of course in the next stage of their education, according to their aptitudes and abilities.”²² Over the next several years, the CPP’s waiving of (most) school fees led to a rapid increase in enrollments in the colony’s primary schools. In the six years between 1951 and Ghana’s 1957 independence, for instance, enrollments at the primary and middle school levels soared in the colony from approximately 220,000 students to more than 570,000. The number of primary schools also grew, rising from approximately 1,000 in 1951 to over 3,400 in 1957, while the number of middle schools (senior-primary schools pre-1952) went from 600 to 900.²³ Additionally, increases at the primary and middle school levels spilled over to secondary school enrollments, which more than tripled, rising from a modest 2,937 students in 1951 to just under 10,000 in 1957.²⁴

Increased enrollments, however, were not enough for the CPP in the advancement of its educational program. As elsewhere, education carried with it a range of intersecting political and social agendas. Among some in the colony’s local and expatriate anticolonial circles, a two-dimensional picture of the colonial educational system emerged. Writing, for instance, in his 1954 account of his previous year’s travels in the Gold Coast, Richard Wright flattened the complexities of Gold Coast colonial education and the histories of its alumni into little more than a prescribed set of programs designed to “guarantee that the educated young African would side with the British.”²⁵ As exhibited in aspects of the Evening News’s coverage of the colony’s educational system, the party press at times appeared to sympathize with such portrayals of Gold Coast colonial education, praising instead the new opportunities opened by the Nkrumah-linked schools for both social mobility and for the cultivation of new political loyalties.²⁶ Many Ghanaians themselves evoked not entirely dissimilar critiques of the colonial-era educational system during the period and beyond, arguing that it was clear that a change to the colony’s educational system was needed at the time. During a 2008 interview, for instance, longtime Accra resident N. Sifah, who was generally ambivalent about Nkrumah and the CPP’s legacy in Ghana, praised Nkrumah specifically for recognizing the deficiencies of colonial education and seeing that the “traditional schools—Achimota, Mfantsipim, and so on—were not enough.”²⁷

Technological and scientific education was of particular importance to the educational revolution the CPP envisioned for the aspiring country. As the government would argue well into the 1960s, it was only via the attainment of the skills and knowledge embedded within a technically and scientifically oriented curriculum that the decolonizing Gold Coast could produce a citizenry equipped to meet the demands of nation-building.²⁸ As a result, as outlined in its 1951 development plan, the new government emphasized the need for the extension of technical and trade education in the colony, focusing on subjects including “technology, agricultural science, commerce and industry.” Furthermore, opportunities to study in these new programs were to be open to students of both sexes.²⁹ Even in the comparatively resource-poor Northern Territories, the plan also touted a commitment to scientific education in the region, emphasizing the recent installation of “science laboratories” in a new secondary school in Tamale. At the same time, the plan promised the construction of additional secondary schools in the region once more students became available.³⁰ Meanwhile, on the national stage, an emphasis on student scholarships in fields including engineering and medicine would accompany the country’s enrollment numbers in the CPP’s 1957 presentation of its educational achievements.³¹ Four years later, the CPP would further commit to the centrality of technological and scientific learning in Ghanaian schools 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 points out, Gold Coasters themselves—who enjoyed a per capita income double that of their 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 the economic or even the social. Instead, it reflected a necessary negotiation, the purposes of which included the preservation of an equilibrium in the community’s relationships with both the physical and spiritual worlds.⁶⁸

Thus, Tema itself was traditionally defined through its connection to the spiritual beings inhabiting the land in and around the town. Moreover, as with the region’s other Ga communities, the lagoons surrounding the area further provided the town its cultural and spiritual meaning.⁶⁹ Two lagoons—Sakumo to the west and Chemu to the east—bookended the town. As outlined by Field, it was in Sakumo Lagoon that the town’s most influential god (Sakum⊃) resided. As Tema’s “senior god,” Sakum⊃ presided over the village’s annual feast (Kpledzo) in which the community celebrated that it had “lived through another year.”⁷⁰ Through Kpledzo, the intimacy of the bond between the spiritual world and the land further comes to the fore. At its most foundational level, Sakum⊃’s ushering in of Kpledzo marked the arrival of the April and May rains and the beginning of the agricultural season. Just as importantly, though, it also initiated the first of a series of festivities, continuing through August, that would pay tribute to the coming “transfig[uration],” as Field has it, of the earth brought by the rains. This included the new fertility bestowed upon the land by the rains as well as the new resources provided by rising water levels in the lagoons.⁷¹ As a result, for the community’s Ga residents, to be Tema-born meant to be from this specific place between these two lagoons and to be in observance of this cyclical process connecting the land to the town’s spiritual roots and fortunes going forward. As such, the community’s relationship to this particular place was said to be so powerful, one of the government’s social surveyors noted, that Tema-born Ga faced an interdiction against residing outside of the town’s traditional and spiritual lands between the lagoons.⁷²

At its foundation, therefore, the CPP’s planned development of the area surrounding Tema threatened the Tema Ga’s connection to their historical and spiritual roots. In order to make room for the planned harbor and particularly the new industrial city, the government announced a resettlement scheme that would move the town approximately two miles to the east, just beyond the confines of Chemu Lagoon. In Tema, debates immediately began over whether it was even possible for the community to move, as certain residents argued that many deities—especially those tied to specific sites, like Sakum⊃ to his lagoon—could not be dislocated from their homes.⁷³ Others, as detailed by government welfare officer G. W. Amarteifio and anthropologist David Butcher, argued that, even if it were possible to move the gods (those Field calls “place-god[s]”), no one had the ritual knowledge necessary for doing so.⁷⁴ The sheer number of gods in the area further complicated the discussions, with Amarteifio and Butcher estimating that as many as 220 gods were recognized in Tema at the time. Furthermore, the social surveyors reported that, in the eyes of many in the community, all of these deities would have to be relocated from the land as part of the town’s proposed resettlement.⁷⁵

Regardless, the CPP quickly moved to acquire the land. For the government, the project required its full ownership of the Tema land as well as significant parts of the surrounding area. As one February 1952 cabinet memorandum explained, the government sought to obtain “not only the area of the port and the site of the actual township [i.e., the industrial city], but also a surrounding agricultural belt or open space which would be used for market gardening, firewood plantations and the like.” From the perspective of the government, such a move—indicative of the search for order and clearly demarcated spaces pursued in other midcentury planned cities—was central to its vision of an emerging postcolonial society, as the CPP aimed to thwart later, likely inevitable attempts at “uncoordinated development [i.e., slums] immediately adjoining the town.”⁷⁶ As a result, by the middle of the year the CPP would bring before the Legislative Assembly a bill allowing the government to take possession of approximately sixty-three square miles of land in and around Tema, while proposing compensation of £10,000 or 3 percent of the land’s value for the people of Tema.⁷⁷ On 1 July, the bill passed the Legislative Assembly.⁷⁸ Shortly thereafter, the government undertook the first of what would be several social surveys of Tema and the surrounding area, the result of which was a proposed resettlement scheme in which the government would provide twenty new housing units of ninety-five rooms each at the relocation site.⁷⁹ After this scheme proved unworkable, the government altered its plan, proposing instead a new resettlement community (Tema Manhean, or Tema New Town) comprised of large circular and semicircular compounds, with individual housing units. As detailed by architect David Whitham, each compound was to “contain a total of forty to fifty rooms.”⁸⁰

Despite the series of concessions that the Gold Coast government attempted to make in the relocation scheme, persistent protests would plague the government’s actions in Tema. Even as early as the government’s initial land acquisition efforts in 1952, key figures in the Legislative Assembly disputed the fairness of requiring the people of Tema to give up their lands to the Gold Coast government in perpetuity. As William Ofori Atta of the Ghana Congress Party (GCP) maintained, the requirement that any stool cede its lands “absolutely and permanently” did not appear to be “in accordance with Gold Coast customary law.”⁸¹ Ofori Atta, J. B. Danquah’s nephew and the son of the former king of Akyem Abuakwa, did not stop there. Rather, he further suggested that, when considering all of the constituencies with claims on Tema’s lands, Tema’s chiefs and even the people of Tema did not have the authority to sell the land to the government. Instead, he argued that they were simply holding it “in trust” for not only the village’s present residents and future generations but also “their ancestors who are dead.”⁸² Nii Kwabena Bonne II, the Accra chief and businessman who had orchestrated the famed 1948 Accra boycott, echoed Ofori Atta in his own remarks in the Legislative Assembly. For Nii Bonne, though, the key concern was what he interpreted as the shortsightedness of contemporary agreements ceding stool lands to a government that “has been in power only 18 months.” As he pointed out, “generations unborn will depend upon the land,” and such a hasty decision to force a sale of the land had the potential of mistaking and/or neglecting their future needs.⁸³ Still others portrayed the entire Tema project as an elaborate waste of money.⁸⁴

In Tema itself, initial opposition to the CPP government’s plans centered on accusations that the government had defrauded the community. Approximately a week after the Legislative Assembly passed the land acquisition bill, the chiefs of Tema and neighboring Nungua and Kpone complained that the government had not consulted them prior to bringing the bill before the assembly. The Tema mantse (paramount chief) went so far as to accuse the CPP’s minister of housing, A. Ansah Koi, of attempting to “prejudice the Tema Stool and people in their fight to maintain their right to live on their God-given land.” He also rejected claims by certain government ministers that the area’s chiefs had paid off opposition figures like Ofori Atta “in order to champion their cause in the Assembly.”⁸⁵ By early August, though, the Tema mantse would soften his position as he offered his consent to the sale of the harbor land and the leasing of the land necessary for the industrial city.⁸⁶ However, in doing so, he unleashed a wave of popular protests in the town against both the government and the chief, as priests, youth, and market women challenged the authority of the chief to transfer ownership of the land—with all that it entailed culturally, economically, and spiritually—to “strangers.” The protests culminated in an attempted populist destoolment of the chief and assertions from many members of the community that under no circumstances would they leave their homes and traditional lands.⁸⁷ As one longtime Tema resident, Samuel Kofi Kotey, recalled, the Tema mantse had lost his legitimacy among many in the community, as the protesters accused him of “collect[ing] some money from the government” and forsaking his responsibilities to Tema.⁸⁸

The protests in Tema would go on for much of the next seven years. In order to try and assuage the community, the government regularly sought to amend its compensation packages with promises of a new fishing beach, rent-free farm lands with seventy-five-year leases, and, for some, cash payments.⁸⁹ As Peter Du Sautoy—who for much of the period headed the Gold Coast’s Department of Social Welfare—argued, the government believed it was doing everything it could to ensure an orderly, respectful, and mutually beneficial resettlement.⁹⁰ Regardless, suspicions abounded. Meanwhile, over the course of the 1950s new groups continuously arrived in the area in anticipation of the job opportunities associated with the construction of the new harbor and industrial city. The result was a ballooning population that reached approximately ten thousand by the end of the decade, further exacerbating tensions within Tema itself and between the Tema-born Ga and the government.⁹¹ As Du Sautoy contends, these “newcomers” established illegal housing units and shacks that would ultimately have to be removed. Moreover, they also constituted a new population, which did not have clear rights to the compensation programs offered by the government and would thus eventually have to be relocated.⁹²

It was not until 1959 that the CPP completed the resettlement of Tema, much later than anticipated and, finally, only largely via the threat of force. In the end, even the most adamant resisters of relocation took up homes in Tema Manhean. As Kotey (who was born in the old town but grew up in Tema Manhean) recounted, the government’s decision to resort to force offered even the most virulent protesters little choice but to retreat. According to him, “they planned to stay, but when the Caterpillar [bulldozers] came, the machine began breaking the houses before they [the protesters] could run to the town here” and attempt to claim one of the new homes.⁹³ Another longtime Tema resident, Seth Laryea Tettey, recalled the emotions of the move. “So 1952, they prepared to settle the indigenes, our fathers and mothers, from that side [between the lagoons] to this side [Tema Manhean], and so finally in 1959, we were relocated here.” For a people who in his estimation had lived in the area for “four or five hundred years,” such a move was not an easy one. “When you go,” he exclaimed, “you want to come back.”⁹⁴ Meanwhile, priests and families undertook the complicated work of extricating the community from the land. This included attempts to identify graves, the undertaking of an elaborate ceremony presided over by the high priest of Sakum⊃ to dissolve the community’s “great oath not to move,” and the unveiling of additional ceremonies aimed at appeasing the gods of the lagoons as well as the ancestors and other spirits.⁹⁵

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