1 - Ghana’s Grand Narrative

Summary

This chapter explores how academics and textbook authors created Ghana’s foundation story from the heavily politicised narratives of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and his Convention Peoples Party. It argues that empathy for successful political parties exhibited by first generation Africanists bequeathed to the present a grand narrative fraught with teleology because of its emphasis on anti-colonialism as a recurrent and unchanging problematic. The scholars failed to see a calculated engagement with global ideas and a simultaneous choice made by numerous Gold Coast thinkers to chart intellectual and political projects within the context of the possibilities and constraints of their time. The intellectuals are presented in a hierarchy from proto, cultural, conservative, to radical anti-colonial nationalists, thereby affirming the preeminence of tmuch-vaunted radicals. Recalled this way, the intellectuals’ projects remain distorted and misrepresented. Fortunately, a consideration of the intellectuals’ transnational dialogic encounters within a cosmopolitan prism presents a fuller picture.