Living with Nkrumahism. Jeffrey S. Ahlman
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