Ruin and Renewal by Paul Betts

Author:Paul Betts [BETTS, PAUL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 23. President Kwame Nkrumah in Parliament, Accra, Ghana, 1960, with presidential seat designed by Kofi Antubam. Credit: AFP, Getty Images

After 1957 there was a flurry of initiatives to nationalize Ghanaian culture. The former Arts Council of the Gold Coast was renamed as the Arts Council of Ghana, whose aim was to “foster, improve and preserve the traditional arts and culture of Ghana.” The cultural takeover could be seen in film too. In 1948 the British Colonial Film Unit had been established in the Gold Coast “to avail the Gold Coasters of British civilization and also the high standard of civilization that we [the British] ourselves enjoy.” It was the first film school in West Africa designed to train film students in the British colonies. After independence the Colonial Film Unit was repurposed to burnish the image of Nkrumah’s Ghana with similar colonial-era propaganda techniques. In the early 1960s the Arts Council founded a National Theatre Movement as well. Nkrumah was inspired by early Soviet models of taking socialist culture to the countryside after the Russian Revolution, and Ghanaian theater troupes were encouraged to do similar community-building work. Traveling theater troupes staged contemporary skits about the issues facing the country for rural audiences. As such they served as “living magazines” that transmitted urban fashions, highlife music, dance, and ideas to nonliterate sections of the vast countryside, and in so doing helped develop a sense of Ghanaian national culture as an idiom of modern civilization.10

Moving forward was not simply a matter of expunging the stain of imperialism—it was also predicated on reconnecting to the ancient past. In 1942 Nana Sir Ofori Atta I, a leading Gold Coast intellectual, published a book called Chiefancy in Modern Africa, with Special Reference to the Gold Coast. In it Atta I claimed that “I regard it as a great pity for any country which boasts of civilization to have no real foundation in its own tradition or to rely upon no traditional background. The people of such a country become, so to speak, ‘characterless.’” The statesman and historian J. B. Danquah, in his 1944 book, The Akan Doctrine of God: A Fragment of Gold Coast Ethics and Religion, argued that inhabitants of the region were linked to the ancient kingdom of Ghana (Danquah is often credited with giving Ghana its name). While both men later became strong critics of Nkrumah’s authoritarianism, Nkrumah furthered their ideas of grounding the new state in precolonial civilization. At the first Conference of Independent African States on April 19, 1958, he made clear that antiquity must form the basis of any new African identity, an antiquity that had been disregarded or misread by colonizers, European historians, and various indigenous rulers. For him there were “no limits to ways in which we on this African continent can enrich our knowledge of our past civilisations and cultural heritage through our cooperative efforts and the pooling of our scientific and technical resources.”11

Ancient history was identified as an important source of political legitimacy for new nations.

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