One particular articulation that literally confronts this project is the concept and conception of Ghana as a nation-state. The securing of Ghana’s existence as a nation-state was not something that was guaranteed. It was a particular articulation within a particular conjuncture that brought it into being. African historian Basil Davidson reminds us that the path from colony to nation-state was not a fait accompli. The path that was not taken on the eve of colonial closure was the path of returning to pre-colonial political configurations of chiefdoms and kingdoms.
When the Gold Coast Colony and the Protectorate eventually became independent Ghana in 1957, the celebrations were both vivid and popular. But the king of Asante was not present at them. He refused to attend the great festivities of Independence Day. For him, as for others of his kind, this independence could only be a perverse denial of the old independence, and the new nationalists no more than usurpers of the legacy of Africa’s own development (Davidson 1992, 73).
What this quote reveals is that the struggle to establish Ghana was not just a binary struggle between the Empire and its subjects, but a struggle to articulate a modernist political community on the lines of the European experience on the one hand, and a return to pre-colonial political legacy of kingdoms. In this struggle it was the modern nation-state model that won. Behind this formation of Ghana then, we can identify certain elements and moments that helped to secure the existence of Ghana and not as disparate collection of ethnic kingdoms and polities. Some of these elements include the mood of the international comity of nations at the time, the legacy of colonialism, British political culture of Westminster democracy and especially capitalism. The process of constructing Ghanaian nationhood, and for that matter most of the individual African countries included an articulation of lack of cultural difference between the various communities that came together to constitute the new nation. This articulation was a blatant disregard for the fact of multiple ethnicities in these countries (Rønning 1996, 43). Thus at another level, I argue in view of my discussion on articulation that, the formation of Ghana, as a postcolonial nation-state was a consequence of contingency not necessarily the outcome of a certain structural logic.
Students of African politics are familiar with the political articulation of cultural unanimism of “one people one culture” political community despite the fact that such a conception of African nations was contra the composite character of these countries. A sort of pseudo consensus was arrived at in many African one party states where the fact of their specific country’s multiethnic composition and multiculturalism were blatantly denied or disarticulated. Rather multi-party democracy was articulated as an anathema to African culture. Helge Rønning makes the case that “on the surface there appears no problem in upholding African traditional values as part of promoting African identities, whether ethnic or otherwise. The problem, however, emerges when presumed African values are used as they have been by the ZANU (PF) to restrict the political space of the individual by giving cultural legitimacy to monopoly politics under the cover of ‘national unity’” (Rønning 1996, 43-44).
Paulin Hountondji (1983) has also described the political articulation of a common national culture as a “unanimist illusion.” Today we can look back and map out why such a fraudulent articulation of African countries as single cultural communities successfully held sway as the truths of the moment from the 1960s to the 1980s.
I have already pointed out the fact that this period was characterized by international community’s infantilization of the postcolonial nations in Africa. Thus an authoritarian father figure in the form of the postcolonial state was needed to do the parenting. Using the methodological resources of articulation we can point out this moment of the international community’s attitude to Africa as a conjuncture. It was a conjuncture in which the UN, Western European democracies, the United States and Canada were ready to do business with ruthless
dictatorships on the unique continent of Hegel’s Africa. Thus the conjuncture structured dictatorships as a ‘truth’ of the moment because African countries were considered not yet matured enough to benefit from a democratic culture. Elements within the conjuncture included international class alliances, the imperial requirements of Western countries and the guilt from the colonial past. Contextualizing these elements within the conjuncture we can account for the formation of Ghana, for instance, as a nation-state, first as a dictatorship under various military and civilian types and later as a democracy.
Writing about the English experience, Raymond Williams (1983, 180) observes that many forms of “nationality” in the world are artificial. But what is important is not their artificiality but the fact that they are functional. “Nation” he points out is radically connected with “native” but the idea of a modern nation-state is entirely artificial. Williams (1983, 185) explains that in the case of building nations out of local communities, the main driving force has been the capitalist mode of production. The quest for markets, raw materials, labor and new investment opportunities operated against the self-sustaining logic of small communities.
Through mining, plantation farming and secondary level production (factories etc.) labor is moved about and abandoned at short notice, without respect for existing boundaries of communities of memories. Small community industries are knocked out of operation through competition and local labor is forced to migrate. The introduction of money facilitates this process of de-localization of people, which in turn alters their frame of imagination to go beyond the simple ethno-linguistic boundaries. “Through these large and prolonged dislocations and relocations, which are still in progress in every part of the world, older traditional forms of identity and community were dislocated and relocated, within enforced mobilities and necessary settlements” (Williams 1983, 185). Thus much in the same way like communication technologies, “money” and indeed, the capitalist mode of production all operated to mediate the new wider forms of communities of memories that were to give birth to the postcolonial nation-state. Better still, the postcolonial state is partly constituted by the imperial requirements of capital.
Such a political economic perspective resonates with the Ghanaian experience of nation building. The fact that the Gold Coast was an economic outpost of the British Empire is obvious. Yet the rhetoric of self-determination and independence, articulated on cultural and communal terms, adopted the very system of modernization and commodity production that was the basis of colonialism. Those who champion the rhetoric of nationalism and see no contradiction with the commodification of the nation are, so to speak, reproducing the conditions of colonialism. Given the dominance of neo-liberal economic perspectives in contemporary institutional thinking, this emphasis by Raymond Williams that the nation is a product of the circulation of capital can be rewarding in unearthing the economic logic of nation formation. For Williams (1983, 186-187) a very contradictory nature of the capitalist project of nation formation is its ability to appropriate the very vocabulary of “natural communities” and yet work against the very foundation of these communities to build a new community that serves the requirement of international capital.
In view of this umbilical cord between the postcolonial nation-state and international capital, Williams (1983, 203) is very cautious about the leadership in developing countries.
He cautions that when elite from developing countries speak about development, we have to ask to what extent they are speaking and acting in the general interest of their people, including the poorest parts of their nation-states? “Development”, he reminds us, is inherently an ideological term that tends to account for isolated specific processes of production “while leaving all other effects to a ‘social’ margin beyond its terms”. Thus what is of importance is the origin and motive of any particular development process (ibid. 206). Williams’ articulation of the nation is such a cogent one as it looks at the issue through the lens of political economy.
This approach provides the subtext for my analysis though, as a project in communication studies, the assumption that I build on is that the nation as a political community is a communication problematic.