Et in arcadia ego: Politics and learning in Ghana

Austin, Dennis

doi:10.1007/bf01097796

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Austin (1975) defined 'autonomy' as "a guarantee of and the protection of the freedom of thought and of speech, or reading and writing" (p. 244). It was thought that, through autonomy, progress could be made to reverse the influence of colonialism.…”

Section: Sub-saharan African Universities -Historical Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…New governments realized that if they controlled the teaching and activities at the universities, this would help their political cause. This was certainly the case in Ghana (Austin, 1975). Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana, used his position as chancellor and head of the university for political purposes by getting rid of expatriates and any Africans opposed to his political beliefs.…”

Section: Sub-saharan African Universities -Historical Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Van Hook (1994) speaks about Zimbabwe's educational system as "designed to maintain the monopoly of power and resources by the whites" (p. 320). The British educational policies supported the following strategies: 1) control the pace and direction of social change; 2) maintain law and order and not foster social action; 3) discourage talk of racial equality; 4) educate African elites, who were fit, upright, and of good character and ability, to uphold the colonial administration; and 5) keep Africans in subserviant roles (Ashby, 1964;Austin, 1975;Maravanyika, 1990). These strategies helped the colonizers maintain their relationship of power over the local population (AmonooNeizer, 1998).…”

Section: Sub-saharan African Universities -Historical Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Social work in Africa: exploring culturally relevant education and practice in Ghana

Kreitzer

2012

Choice Reviews Online

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Section: Sub-saharan African Universities -Historical Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sub-saharan African Universities -Historical Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sub-saharan African Universities -Historical Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Social work in Africa: exploring culturally relevant education and practice in Ghana

Kreitzer

2012

Choice Reviews Online

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“…Indeed, Dunn has argued that it became a popularly rooted ethos which outlasted the original system.5' Certainly the British switched their emphasis to the need for popular mandate after 1954. 58 To a certain extent it was a commitment which flowed inescapably from earlier pronouncements. The British had always taunted and despised the coastal politicians for being 'unrepresentative' (a view which for Governor Burns had been confirmed by their total failure to get out the vote in the reformed municipal elections of 1943).…”

Section: Legitimacy and The Decolonization Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legitimacy, Authority and the Transfer of Power in Ghana

Crook

1987

Political Studies

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The problems of authority and legitimacy experienced by post‐colonial states are often explained in terms of a ‘colonial legacy’. The validity of this hypothesis is examined, in the case of Ghana, by analysing changes in the kinds of legitimacy claimed by the state from the colonial period through decolonization to independence. It is concluded that, whilst the most enduring legacy of colonialism was the attempt to found legitimacy in particularistic, indigenous systems of law, the decolonization process failed to transfer any one of the new, competing claims to legitimacy which emerged. Nationalism, of its very nature, was precluded from claiming authority on the basis of expertise in being European, and was also led to deny the validity of indigenous cultures. Representative democracy too was contradictory in so far as its results often challenged the nationalists’ conception of a non‐ethnic national identity. Ultimately neither democracy nor ‘being African’ was a sufficient basis for the legitimacy of the new state.

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“…In each, carefully devised conditions to control the outcome of those elections failed. 17 The African politicians who won elected office refused to accept their assigned role as a privileged but subordinate elite. Instead, they called for rapid progress to independence.…”

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confidence: 99%

Voting, Nationhood, and Citizenship in Late-Colonial Africa

2018

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The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. GABRIELLE LYNCH University of Warwick NIC CHEESEMAN University of Birmingham AbstractIn the face of considerable scepticism from some British commentators, elections by secret ballot and adult suffrage emerged as central features of the end of British rule in Africa. This article considers the trajectories of electoral politics in three territories -Ghana (Gold Coast), Kenya and Uganda. It shows that in each of these the ballot box came to provide a point of convergence for the disparate ambitions of nationalist politicians, colonial policy-makers and a hopeful, restive public: performing order, asserting maturity and equality, and staking a claim to prosperity. Late-colonial elections, we argue, constrained political possibility even as they offered citizenship, presenting the developmentalist state as the only possible future and ensuring substantial continuities from latecolonialism to independence. They also established a linkage between nationhood, adulthood and the ballot that was to have enduring political force. Yet at the same time, they established elections as a space for a local politics of clientelism, and for kinds of claims-making and accountability that were to complicate post-independence projects of nation-building.In 1958, Britain's Colonial Office initiated a policy discussion on the role of elections in the end of empire. The discussion ran over the next two years -even as the pace of decolonization quickened across Africa. 2 low standards of living and education'. Nevertheless, the document argued that, since international expectation and African nationalists demanded elections before independence, they must be held. 2The doubts expressed in 'Democracy in backward countries' were not unusual, as we shall show below. Yet British planning, as much as international opinion or nationalist demands, had come to focus on elections by universal adult suffrage and the secret ballot. Critically, these were relative novelties in Europe at the time; and in India, universal suffrage had followed several years after the end of empire, rather than preceding it. So why did they become the norm? Why didAfrican politicians demand such elections? And why did the restive subjects of late-colonial states queue up to register and vote? What part, in short, did elections play in the entangled processes of decolonization and nationalist mobilization?Prominent as they were in the end of empire, late-colonial elections attracted considerable academic attention at the time, 3 but have rarel...

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Et in arcadia ego: Politics and learning in Ghana

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Social work in Africa: exploring culturally relevant education and practice in Ghana

Social work in Africa: exploring culturally relevant education and practice in Ghana

Legitimacy, Authority and the Transfer of Power in Ghana

Voting, Nationhood, and Citizenship in Late-Colonial Africa

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