Harcourt Fuller. Building the Ghanaian Nation-State

As the first sub-Saharan country to attain its independence from colonial rule in 1957, Ghana continues to act as a focal point in wider historical debates about the nature of anticolonial mobilizations, competing visions of political freedom, and the challenges of new nationhood. Ghana’s first prime minister and president, Kwame Nkrumah, has attained iconic status as an anticolonial and Pan-African leader. Harcourt Fuller’s Building the Ghanaian Nation-State: Kwame Nkrumah’s Symbolic Nationalism is thus a recent addition to an already substantial body of scholarship that encompasses hagiography, critical biography, a range of competing assessments of Nkrumah’s challenges and achievements in domestic and foreign policy, “whodunit” investigations of the coup that toppled him in 1966, and speculative commentary on his legacy in contemporary Ghana, the West African sub-region, the African Union, and across the Global South. Fuller set out to analyze “the official ways in which Ghanaian national identity and the new nation-state were symbolically constructed, expressed, and contested in the public domain during the time of [Nkrumah’s] administration and beyond” (2). Like all other researchers who succeed in writing anything new on postcolonial Ghana, Fuller started in the national archives, peered into its holes, and recognized that he would need to cut his own path to the filing cabinets of a range of national institutions in order to hunt for evidentiary treasure. Building the Ghanaian Nation-State thus draws upon published reports and unpublished records of institutions such as the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, the Ghana Post Company, the Bank of Ghana, and the Information Services Department. In some cases these documents can be cross-checked against, or supplemented by, other sources such as correspondence between Ghanaian institutions and their British counterparts held in the UK national archives in Kew, cabinet minutes and newspaper articles held in the Ghana national archives, Nkrumah’s own voluminous writings, and the published memoirs of his ministers and political opponents. This assemblage of evidence permits an exploration that stretches over ten chapters, covering the agendas behind the design and redesign of independent Ghana’s national flag, anthem, postage stamps, bank notes, museums, and monuments.

Colonialism · Independence (probability theory) · Kwame · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science) · African history and culture studies · Anthropology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Public Administration