“This really is a pleasure to read, in every respect. It presents very distinguished scholarship, the writing is not only clear but stylishly crafted, and the story it tells is about a major aspect of modern Ghanian political history, an aspect which has been surprisingly neglected until now.… The end of independent chieftaincy must be one of the most fundamental changes in the long-term history of Ghana.”
Gareth Austin, Senior Lecturer in the London School of Economics and Political Science
Kwame Nkrumah, who won independence for Ghana in 1957, was the first African statesman to achieve world recognition. Nkrumah and his movement also brought about the end of independent chieftaincy—one of the most fundamental changes in the history of Ghana.
Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples’ Party was committed not only to the rapid termination of British colonial rule but also to the elimination of chiefly power. This book is an account of Kwame Nkrumah and his government’s long struggle to wrest administrative control of the Ghanaian countryside from the chiefs. Based largely upon previously unstudied documentation in Ghana, this study charts the government’s frustrated attempts to democratize local government and the long and bitter campaigns mounted by many southern chiefs to resist their political marginalization.
Between 1951 and the creation of the First Republic in 1960, Ghanaian governments sought to discard the chiefly principle in local government, then to weaken chieftaincy by attrition and eventually, by altering the legal basis of chieftaincy, to incorporate and control a considerably altered chieftaincy. The book demonstrates that chieftaincy was consciously and systematically reconstructed in the decade of the 1950s with implications which can still be felt in modern Ghana.
Richard Rathbone is professor of modern African history at University of London. More info →
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978-0-8214-1306-7
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Release date: June 2000
200 pages
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154 pages
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Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946–1958
By Elizabeth Schmidt
In September 1958, Guinea claimed its independence, rejecting a constitution that would have relegated it to junior partnership in the French Community. In all the French empire, Guinea was the only territory to vote “No.” Orchestrating the “No” vote was the Guinean branch of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), an alliance of political parties with affiliates in French West and Equatorial Africa and the United Nations trusts of Togo and Cameroon.
African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · Nationalism · History | Modern | 20th Century · Cold War · African Studies · Guinea
Smugglers, Secessionists, and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier
The Life of the Borderlands since 1914
By Paul Nugent
The first integrated history of the Ghana-Togo borderlands, Smugglers, Secessionists, and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier challenges the conventional wisdom that the current border is an arbitrary European construct, resisted by Ewe irredentism.Paul Nugent contends that whatever the origins of partition, border peoples quickly became knowing and active participants in the shaping of this international boundary.
