Jan 10 2009
Ghana’s Nationalist Past Looms in New Election
Elections and natural disasters are the two causes that steer U.S. attention briefly to otherwised overlooked corners of the world. And so Ghana, which on Jan. 7 inaugurated a new president named John Atta Mills, earns some ink this week. Interesting enough was the coverage of the Washington Post , but it stays in the present and contrasts Ghana’s functioning democracy with the breakdown in Kenya and the pathologies of Zimbabwe.
However, as a historian I was more tickled by the New York Times and the fact it looks back into what the reporter Lydia Polgreen called the “iconic” role in Africa’s history that Ghana plays. Ghana, formerly the British-run Gold Coast, pioneered nationalist (anti-colonial) revolution a half-century ago. Here was Polgreen’s well-wrought summary of that role:
AS the first nation in sub-Saharan Africa to win independence, in 1957 from Britain, Ghana was a beacon to black people everywhere. Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s visionary but autocratic post-independence leader, was an icon of anti-imperialism, laying out a Pan-African ideology that reverberates on the continent and beyond to this day.
But his rule did not last. Mr. Nkrumah bankrupted the nation and was overthrown in 1966. Ghana suffered through a decade of chaos until Mr. [Jerry John] Rawlings, then a little-known air force officer, seized power in a coup in 1979.
The bulk of the article is a profile of Mr. Rawlings, who remains a player in Ghana politics by running the party of the new president. Not knowing anything of Mr. Rawlings, I’m ashamed to admit, I was struck by the description of him as a “vast slab” of a man because it reminded me that Idi Amin, the former dictator of Uganda, was also freakishly large.
