Ghana has been held up as an oasis of stability in a highly volatile region of Africa due to its peaceful decolonisation process, absence of serious civil conflict and successful change of governments. However, in Ghana as in parts of postindependence Africa, there are lingering secessionist movements that are a legacy of colonialism. The latest comes from the Homeland Study Group Foundation (HSGF) which declared the former British Togoland, a former United Nations trust territory administered by the United Kingdom, as an independent state called Western Togoland. Through the prism of competing or alternative national imaginaries rather than the weak and dysfunctional state paradigm, this article seeks to explain the roots of a form of Togoland nationalism in Ghana in events of 1956 that remains relevant today. The paper argues that an apparently successful integration can stimulate/give sustenance to alternative nationalist imaginaries.
In recent policy frameworks, traditional authorities have been (re)assigned roles of directly representing civil society and local communities as key actors in development, leading to questions about the relationship between the chieftaincy institution and the state in governance. Using the example of a chieftaincy dispute between the Sokpoe and Tefle, a Tongu-Ewe people of Ghana, at the heart of which are claims to paramountcy status, this article argues that chieftaincy and the state are not always parallel institutions of governance that derive their legitimacy from different sources. Struggles over chieftaincy hierarchies have become struggles for the preferential recognition by and access to the state conveyed by membership in the Houses of Chiefs. In effect, the chieftaincy institution may be both parallel to and dependent on the state. The article draws attention to the importance of hierarchy in explaining state-chieftaincy relationships because an understanding of the nuances of legitimacy in chieftaincy will enrich how chiefs are engaged as key actors in development.
In Ghana, when the NDC government declared September 21, the birthday of Kwame Nkrumah, to be Founder’s Day in 2009, and again in 2017 when the NPP government proposed August 4 the founding of the UGCC as Founders’ Day, a debate was sparked over the placement of the apostrophe in the name—should it be Founder’s or Founders’? An analysis of this debate highlights the importance of the independence history and its production in contemporary Ghana. This article examines how the independence narrative has been shaped by post-independence governments, particularly the NDC and the NPP, through commemorative acts such as holidays to understand the motivations and the influence of political leaders in the production of history. It argues that embedded in this apostrophe war is legitimacy, which party has the pedigree to lead the country in the competition for political power. The article further shows the parochialism of the NDC and NPP narratives on the founding of Ghana.
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