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.

Chapter I offers the concept of some very large stories -- or narratives, or social myths, or deep stories -- without which people living together cannot understand where they have come from, where they are now, and how they should go forward. In other words, people cannot live without large stories, which this chapter describes as Stories with a capital S. This point is buttressed by reference to writings and ideas of Neil Postman, Hannah Arendt, Yuval Noah Harari, Kwame Appiah, and other thinkers. The problem is that all of those necessary Stories are not entirely true -- are instead false. Later chapter explore the implications of this reality.