I spent 12 days in Ghana, specifically in Accra, Kumasi, Cape Coast, and Mole National Park. These are my notes, though this essay is more like Notes on Saudi Arabia with a bigger emphasis on the history of Ghana than my travel experiences.

Ghana has a reputation for being the “easy mode” of West African travel, in contrast to Nigeria being “hard mode.” Ghana speaks English, is a democracy, has been politically stable for 30+ years, has little ethnic tension, low crime, and is one of wealthiest per capita West African states. Altogether, this makes Ghana the (relative) success story of West Africa and I wanted to find out how that happened. A quick rundown of sources:

First, as mentioned in previous essays, Martin Meredith’s Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence is an amazing overview, and particularly useful for understanding Ghana’s first prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah.

Second, Jeffrey Herbst’s The Politics of Reform in Ghana, 1982-1991 is a lot less dry than it sounds, and is my main source for Ghana’s second key leader, Jerry Rawlings.

Third, I used a pair of interviews: Jerry Rawlings in 2015 and Corporal Matthew Adabuga in 2018, a former Rawlings bodyguard who wrote a tell-all memoir about Rawlings. Both interviews are fascinating and I highly recommend listening to them if you find the history here interesting, especially since Rawlings’s interview is obviously self-serving, and Adabuga’s claims are suspect, to say the least. Highlights include the (excellent) interviewer asking Adabuga, “do you take delight in killing?” and “why did you kill so many people?,” to which Adabuga responds at one point, “I have never killed anybody physically like that without any cause.”

Other smaller sources: The Legacy of J.J. Rawlings in Ghanaian Politics, 1979-2000, The Rawlings’ Factor in Ghana’s Politics: An Appraisal of Some Secondary and Primary Data, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There Is A Better Way for Africa, a 1985 letter from the Ghana Congress of USA and Canada to the CIA, Ghana’s Foreign Policy Under Jerry Rawlings by Lucy Ansah, Kovsie Journals’s “a comment on frank gerits’ incorrect,” along with various Wikipedia entries and random articles I’ll link directly in the essay when relevant.

Overview

Population (2021) – 33 million

Population growth rate (2021) – 2%

Size – 92,000 square miles (about the size of Romania, smaller than Michigan)

GDP (nominal, 2023) – $66 billion (a little less than Montana or Azerbaijan)

GDP growth rate (2021) – 5.4%

GDP per capita (2023) – $2,024

GDP per capita PPP (2022) – $6,974

Inflation rate range (2020-2023) – 9%-55%

Biggest export – Gold

Median age – 20

Life expectancy (2020) – 64

Founded – 1957

Religion (2021) – 71.3% Christian, 19.9% Muslim

Corruption Perceptions Index rank – #72

Heritage Index of Economic Freedom ranking – #89

 

Kwame Nkrumah

There aren’t just monuments to Kwame Nkrumah throughout Ghana, but throughout West Africa (I saw them in Togo, Benin, Mali, and Senegal). He was on the cover of Time Magazine in February 1953 with the caption, “In the dark continent, dawn’s early light?” At Ghana’s independence in 1957, Nkrumah was hailed throughout Africa and Europe as the visionary leader of a new world and no one was considered more suited to lead Africa’s first post-colonial state. He was praised equally by Westerners who hoped he would usher Africa into a glorious new (commodities-exporting) age and by Eastern Blockers who praised his personal brand of socialism. In 1962, he won the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize. At the peak of Nkrumah’s fame, it would not be an exaggeration to say that many Africans considered him to be a semi-divine figure.

But according to Martin Meredith and many others, Kwame Nkrumah was an awful leader, or at least an awful administrator. The only things that saved him from being one of the worst leaders in African history is that he wasn’t bloodthirsty nor (extremely) personally corrupt. But he was, severely, extremely, terribly incompetent, and deserves the lion’s share of the blame for transforming Ghana from the premiere British West African colony into just another failed African state.

But I don’t just want to dump on Nkrumah. He was, by all accounts, an extremely intelligent and interesting person thrust out onto the world’s stage in an unprecedented time and place. He failed terribly in his ambitions, but so did nearly every other African leader at independence. So here is my attempt to give a super summarized, balanced, and as accurate as possible explanation of the rise and fall of Kwame Nkrumah.

Early Years

Kwame Nkrumah was born in 1909 in a small village in what was then called the Gold Coast, one of a handful of British colonies in West Africa. He had a normal childhood until his mother jumped at the opportunity to put Nkrumah in a school run by Catholic missionaries (this being one of the few ways an African might climb the social ranks in colonial territories). He was noticed by teachers for his intelligence and incredible memory, and unlike many other future African leaders, Nkrumah had an academic temperament. He liked learning, he liked school, and he even liked religion.

With support from the local Catholic missionaries, Nkrumah stayed in school throughout his teens, then went to elite religious colleges in Ghana, and worked as a teacher at schools and seminaries in his 20s. He studied under some of the best academics Ghana had to offer, including Jesuit teachers and English-educated leftists. Nkrumah fit right in and couldn’t stop the flow of praise and recommendation letters.

Though an upwardly mobile colonial African, in typical academic fashion, Nkrumah had no idea what he wanted to do with his life when/if he left school. He considered teaching indefinitely, but also considered becoming a Jesuit priest. He loved the religious lifestyle, especially the quiet and austerity. Because though Nkrumah was highly articulate and an excellent debater, he also had a reserved side. Part of him wanted to argue about colonialism and black nationalism with his cool academic friends, while part of him wanted to live in a cloister and pray all day in silence.

In his late 20s, Nkrumah’s social side won out. In even more academic fashion, Nkrumah became a sort of drifting, bohemian, chronic student for twelve more years while he traveled around the United States and then Great Britain. Nkrumah studied at Lincoln University, the University of Pennsylvania, the London School of Economics, the University College London, and Gray’s Inn where he earned bachelor’s degrees in economics, sociology, and theology, Master’s degrees in philosophy and education, and had aborted attempts at a PhD in anthropology and a law degree.

To many who met Nkrumah, he came off as a consummate intellectual. He studied and read on a wide range of subjects, albeit with a lack of STEM. He met, debated, and was influenced by the academic elite who loved that a curious and ambitious African was in their midst. Unsurprisingly for the times, Nkrumah drifted into leftist circles – anti-colonialists, Marxists, and even out-right communists. With ample academic and social backing, Nkrumah’s views began to solidify. He was a self-avowed “Marxist communist” who hated colonial powers, particularly the British Empire which he blamed for Ghana’s poverty, and thus Nkrumah wanted independence for African nations as soon as possible. During these early days, he mostly just talked, but he also joined a few African students societies and made contact with politically-inclined academic figures who would later help his career.

However, Nkrumah did not come from wealth, and so despite his voracious reading habits and stack of degrees, Nkrumah also became a working-class stiff. Over the course of a decade in the US, Nkrumah scraped by through factory labor, serving food in restaurants, and selling fish on the street. He couldn’t afford tuition without hustling for scholarships, and crashing at friends’ apartments. For years he lived in Harlem, hung out at jazz clubs, and gained just as many friends who hadn’t graduated from high school as those with PhDs.

After that decade in the US, Nkrumah moved to London to get a law degree, but was pretty much instantly side-tracked by the allure of politics. This marks the start of a strong trend throughout the rest of Nkrumah’s post-America life: he was undoubtedly a hard worker in general, but not when it came to nitty-gritty boring stuff. He would later embark on staggering schedules jam-packed with conferences, summits, dinners, and meetings where Nkrumah would talk circles around everyone else on the African continent, but he would never be good at paperwork.

Thus, rather than read through boring British legal tomes, Nkrumah spent much of his time lounging around cafes arguing politics with leftists and often literal communists. He lived in abject poverty, but managed to barely scrape together enough money to survive by working in local left-wing political operations and media outlets. At least one professor remarked that Nkrumah seemed to be wasting his life, but he wasn’t. Nkrumah was not only making important contacts, but developing valuable political skills. The young firebrand could argue, talk, speak, and organize shockingly well for someone with little formal political experience. A decade in the US had given him seemingly the perfect balance of book and street smarts.

People took notice; Nkrumah became a big-wig in the Pan-African Congress where he helped craft the organization’s ideological orientation toward what would later be called “African socialism.” Later, he co-founded a vanguard of African independence leaders ominously called “The Circle.” Nkrumah also made contact with the (Soviet-backed) West African National Secretariat, and was surveilled by both MI5 and the US government for his communist sympathies.

Still, after almost two years in London, it wasn’t clear that anything was going to come of Nkrumah’s life. He was almost in his 40s, and despite his many degrees, Nkrumah was just another lefty radical sitting around arguing about events on the other side of the world. And he was unmarried, with no kids, and flat broke.

Then, one day, Nkrumah got a message from the United Gold Coast Convention, the colony’s first and only political party devoted to the Gold Coast’s independence from Britain. It asked Nkrumah to come to the Gold Coast and run its entire electoral operations.

Fight for Independence

Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast in late 1947 for the first time since 1935, during which much had changed in Great Britain’s colonial outlook. By the end of World War II, the Empire was under immense pressure from within and without to loosen colonialism, if not abandon it. The old guard running the Empire wasn’t ready to give up far-flung colonies yet, but it knew concessions needed to be made. Plans were drawn up to start ceding local autonomy while maintaining British sovereignty. But not all colonies could be granted such privileges, not without causing much chaos; only the most “advanced” among the crown’s possessions could be given a taste of freedom.

India was always Britain’s crown jewel, Hong Kong was practically a piece of Britain on the other side of the world, and South Africa was the powerhouse of its continent, but in West Africa, the Gold Coast was the Empire’s most prized possession. Its name came from the massive gold reserves in the Ashanti region, for which the British had fought numerous colonial wars (ex. the War of the Golden Stool).

But the Gold Coast wasn’t just another extractive colonial zone; it was a colony with depth. By the late 1950s, the Gold Coast would be the largest cocoa exporter in the world while global demand for chocolate boomed. The capital, Accra, was one of the most educated cities in West Africa (second probably only to neighboring Abidjan in the Ivory Coast) and contained a host of both British and African lawyers, accountants, teachers, and academics which the colonial government deemed the “intelligentsia.”

In sum, the Gold Coast was the perfect test case for African autonomy, not just for Great Britain, but for all the European colonial powers.

In the early 1940s, the British government formulated concrete plans for Gold Coast autonomy that the colonial authorities thought were pretty damn generous. There would be a national popular election, a majority-black assembly, and a cabinet of ministers with a significant number of Africans. The British governor would still oversee affairs, but there was an informal agreement between the colonial administrators and the African elite to largely remain hands-off. And while eventual independence for the Gold Coast wasn’t explicitly guaranteed, there was a general sense that it would happen. Eventually.

Nkrumah, from his new perch within the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) wasn’t having any of it. He traveled around the country with astounding energy making bombastic speeches about how Ghana, a new name for the Gold Coast selected by the UGCC, needed independence now! He blamed recent economic troubles, the ongoing poverty of Africa, and basically every other problem in Ghana on the British. He rejected condescending temperance from British officials, telling them, “we prefer self-government in danger to servitude in tranquility.” Ghana needed independence now. Not sometime in the vague future, not in a decade, not next year, now!

Nkrumah’s superiors in the UGCC were thrilled by the popularity he was garnering the party as tens of thousands poured into streets and stadiums to watch him speak. Nkrumah became known by the nickname, “show boy” and gained mass appeal by portraying himself as both a lofty genius intellectual with a million degrees and a common man who had sold fish on the streets of Harlem.

The UGCC leaders were also thrilled with Nkrumah’s messaging since they wanted the same thing. Though the party’s upper ranks consisted entirely of the Ghanaian intelligentsia with which the British had formulated the new governing plan, they were the radical wing of this intelligentsia, and they shared Nkrumah’s conviction that getting self-rule as soon as possible was best both for Ghana’s national pride and the practicalities of the nation’s management.

The UGCC leaders were also thrilled with Nkrumah for bringing Western political machinery to Africa. Ghana got its first political party in 1947 and they initially had few experienced political operators, and certainly no one like Nkrumah who had dove head-first into British politics for two years. Nkrumah launched newspapers, printed signs, made banners, and established basic party infrastructure at local levels. Suddenly the UGCC looked and acted like a force to be reckoned with.

But the UGCC leaders were not so thrilled with Nkrumah’s tone which quickly veered toward labor “agitation” with whiffs of violence. Plenty of them were leftists, but Nkrumah was really leftist. He had just spent more than a decade telling European communists that they weren’t hardcore enough and now he seemed willing to put his money where his mouth was.

And the leaders of the UGCC were especially not thrilled about how they no longer seemed to be the leaders of the UGCC. Nkrumah had been recommended to his post by some party officials who heard good things about this firebrand kid with European political experience, but he turned out to be too good. Within less than a year of arriving in the Gold Coast, Nkrumah was practically running the party, and even started appointing people to positions without the official authority to do so. The real party leaders were annoyed by this upstart, but they hesitated for months before acting to reprimand him. What could they do? Nkrumah was bringing in the crowds, raising the money, and spreading the party outside Accra. If they tried to marginalize Nkrumah, he might leave and take most of the party with him.

Which is exactly what happened. In 1949, Nkrumah broke with the UGCC and formed the Convention People’s Party (CPP), which had pretty much the same platform as the UGCC but was far more willing to engage in aggressive activism to achieve it. With the shackles off, Nkrumah rallied his popular support to launch mass protests and strikes against the British government and British firms. Nkrumah wasn’t coy about his goals; within the inner circle of his party, he fully admitted his strategy was to stir up national chaos and then look for an opening to overthrow the colonial administrators.

The colonial government had known about Nkrumah for awhile, but once the agitation started, he became public enemy number one. A literal communist was trying to overthrow the British governor in one of the Empire’s best colonies. At one point, the British governor referred to Nkrumah and his party as Ghana’s “little Hitler and its putsch.”

Within a matter of months of starting the CPP, the agitation had veered uncomfortably into outright violence. Nkrumah didn’t seem to be ordering anyone to attack police officers or blow up buildings, but he didn’t seem to mind it happening as a result of his plans. By January 1950, only nine months after the establishment of the CPP, the British had had enough; Nkrumah and much of the CPP leadership was arrested and thrown in jail. Some of the others got commuted sentences, but Nkrumah was sentenced to three years.

After such a meteoric rise, this really bummed Nkrumah out. He still tried to manage the party by smuggling directions to lieutenants on toilet paper, but he had to watch for a year as the Ghanaian independence movement continued without him, and with significantly less momentum. For awhile, Nkrumah’s austere side returned. He read books and made handicrafts and spent a lot of time in silence wondering if he had overplayed his hand and doomed Ghana to many more years of British servitude. Worse yet, elections were coming up in February 1951 to fill out the assembly under the colonial government’s new constitution, and Nkrumah was going to miss his shot at both organizing the CPP’s probable victory and running for office himself.

But then Nkrumah remembered that he had briefly sort of been a law student, and since he was in jail for breaking the law, he figured he may as well take a gander at British colonial law. As expected, he found it was illegal for a prisoner to run for office if their sentence exceeded one year. Nkrumah’s sentence was for three years. But…

Nkrumah was actually serving three consecutive one-year sentences. So…

That was good enough for Nkrumah. He announced he was running for the new national assembly in a district in Accra. The news unleashed massive enthusiasm throughout the country. The energy rapidly returned to the CPP, and despite Nkrumah sitting in a cell throughout the campaigns, his presence was felt. The CPP absolutely dominated the election, winning 34 out of 38 contested seats against his old party, the UGCC. In his own election, Nkrumah got about 20,000 out of 23,000 votes.

British Governor Charles Arden-Clarke was not happy. Thousands of Ghanaians were storming the streets of Accra and cities throughout the country celebrating the CPP’s victory and calling for Nkrumah’s release from prison. Legally, it wasn’t clear what was to be done about Nkrumah. There was nothing in the law saying that criminals get released from jail if they get elected to office, but the government also couldn’t stop an elected official from taking office. Clarke took a few days to think over his options and ultimately concluded that if he didn’t parlay with Nkrumah, the colony would tear itself apart.

In proto-Nelson Mandela fashion, Nkrumah was released from prison to enormous fanfare a little over a year after his arrest. He met Clarke in an old castle by the sea which used to export slaves, and the two discussed matters of state. Nkrumah demanded immediate independence for Ghana. Clarke said that was impossible, but he was willing to let Nkrumah form a new government under the newly formulated constitution, which was a pretty generous deal for a guy who was in prison two days ago. Nkrumah continually pressed for firm eventual independence guarantees and more direct power in this new government, but Clarke largely stonewalled him. Nkrumah eventually agreed to the deal.

Nkrumah’s popularity in Ghana, Africa, and the rest of the left-leaning world shot to the stratosphere. Nothing like this had ever happened before. A local African leader had led his people in a  political movement against a colonial government and won; it wasn’t entirely peaceful, but there wasn’t a civil war or mass uprising or brutal retaliations or something worse. The Gold Coast was still technically a British colony, but most de facto and de jure control had been ceded to a native son of Ghana and his loyal compatriots. It was one of the greatest political victories of Africans over Europeans in centuries. From Meredith:

“Ordinary people came to regard [Nkrumah] as a messiah capable of performing miracles. He was venerated in hymns and prayers. Supporters recited phrases like, ‘I believe in Kwame Nkrumah.’ From early morning, ques would form outside his home, people asking for advice on anything from marital disputes to sickness, infertility, job recommendations, financial assistance, and settlements of debt. No matter how busy he was, Nkrumah always endeavored to find time for them.”

From his new official position in government, Nkrumah opened the doors to international attention whenever possible. He loved diplomatic events and entertaining dignitaries where he basked in the glow of admiration, even if it was not entirely without condescension from Westerners and Easterners alike. Everyone who met Nkrumah couldn’t stop singing his praises as some sort of ubermensch embodiment of national will. Here’s Meredith relating some insights from an American who knew Nkrumah around this time:

“Nkrumah was wearing national costume, a Roman-like toga in silk kente cloth, with the left arm and shoulder bare. His movements and gestures have power, ease, an almost animal-like magnetism. He neither struts nor shows exaggerated reserve. His whole life was dominated by politics. A bachelor, he took no interest in sport, food, or personal comfort… he did not smoke or drink. When [the American] asked him what he did for relaxation, he replied, ‘work.’”

In 1951, Nkrumah’s official position in the Gold Coast was “leader of government business” (though he later became “Prime Minister”) and he technically served under Governor Clarke. In retrospect, this turned out to be a great boon for Nkrumah because it concealed just how little he knew about actually running a government. That’s because Nkrumah hadn’t worked in government before… actually, he hadn’t really worked anywhere before, except in party politics, street sales, and manual labor. Despite his constant appeals to Clarke to get more authority, for the time being, Nkrumah had relatively little power over administrative, economic, and legal affairs, with most of these issues either being on the rails set by British policy or being determined by the national assembly. So Nkrumah spent much of the next seven years preoccupied with the glorious front-man aspect of politics to which he was well-suited: making speeches, holding press events, entertaining diplomatic guests, etc.

The only time Nkrumah did try his hand at serious policy was his first of many disasters.

The 1950s were boom times for global cocoa demand and Ghana benefited handsomely, with its already bountiful cocoa production reaching all-time highs. As Ghana’s already wealthy cocoa farmers raked in great profits, Nkrumah conjured a plan to extract much of this wealth for government-directed development projects.

Years earlier, the British had created the Cocoa Marketing Board (CMB), an organization that bought all of the cocoa in Ghana to then sell abroad, ostensibly to maintain steady cocoa prices to benefit farmers. By colonial law, all cocoa farmers were required to sell their cocoa to the CMB.

Nkrumah used his influence to push a bill through the assembly to fix the CMB’s cocoa price at a mere one third of global prices for the next four years: the CMB would purchase cocoa from Ghanaian farmers at a low price, and then sell the cocoa abroad at a high price to generate huge profits for the government which could then rapidly accelerate a national development plan already conceived by the British, thereby improving the Ghanaian economy and demonstrating the capability of Ghanaian self-rule so that independence could be achieved sooner.

Unsurprisingly, the Ghanaian cocoa farmers were not thrilled with the policy. Nkrumah’s plan amounted to throwing one of the most important economic pillars of the nation under the bus for vague imperially-designed economic plans. It didn’t help Nkrumah that the bulk of cocoa farmers were based in the Ashanti region, which was relatively cool on Nkrumah to begin with and was the location of the vast majority of Ghana’s gold mines.

Within months, the CPP had lost its invulnerability and a sizable opposition party emerged in the form of the National Liberation Movement (NLM). Nkrumah still had the support of Accra, most of the other cities, the intelligentsia, and the urban poor, but he had lost many of the farmers, and 1950s Ghana had a hell of a lot of farmers. The NLM set up branches both within the Ashanti region and elsewhere. Cocoa farmers began boycotting the CMB and hindering the government’s revenue. As the 1956 elections approached, tensions boiled over into violence on the streets as political mobs attacked each other; CPP offices and the homes of CPP officials were bombed.

The British were eyeing the situation with increasing skepticism, and Nkrumah, long-admired for his coolness under pressure, began to sweat. Nkrumah had been publicly preaching the moral virtue of independence-as-soon-as-possible for a decade, and now it was looking like Ghana had botched halfway independence in only a few years. His only hope was to lead the CPP to another landslide victory in the 1956 elections to show the British that the turmoil was ephemeral and Ghana could be trusted to the able hands of Nkrumah. He leapt back onto the campaign trail, fully in his element, and gave a billion speeches to the Ghanaian people casting the entire cocoa farmer conflict as a fight between a modern, democratic, unified state (the CPP) and a bunch of old-fashioned feudal lords trying to maintain their privileges and horde their wealth (the NLM).

The CPP won the election with 58% of the vote. It wasn’t quite the landslide Nkrumah wanted, but it was a decent victory. The British government, long-suffering under international pressure for maintaining its empire, finally gave up. Ghanaian independence was set for March 6, 1957.

Throughout Fate of Africa, Meredith goes to great lengths to describe the sheer jubilation for newly independent African states. By his telling, it wasn’t just the African people who celebrated the independence of Ghana and the dozens of states to follow, but much of the Western world. Sure, there were hardline Brits who wanted to keep the empire going forever, but most of the British political and economic establishment wished nothing but the best for Ghana, albeit in a condescending manner. They saw independent Ghana as a chance to demonstrate British glory, prestige, and virtue. A primitive chunk of Africa had been ruled by Britain in one form or another for many decades, and now that it had been set up with the right structure, right culture, and right people, it was ready to be free, prosperous, and independent.

And the Europeans weren’t just sending well-wishes to Africa. In 1964 alone, Western Europe and North America gave $1 billion worth of grants and cheap loans to sub-Saharan Africa.

Even from a colder, dollars-and-cents perspective, there was great optimism for independent Africa because colonial Africa was actually going really well: between 1945 and 1960, the average Sub-Saharan African colony’s GDP grew by 4-6% annually. This was mostly propelled by a global commodity boom as a growing global population spurred demand for agricultural and mineral commodities of which Africa had no shortage.

But Africa could still be better. The view promoted by Nkrumah and the UGCC leadership that Africa’s economic prospects were held back by exploitative colonial policies was widely held, not even just among left-leaning observers, but also right-leaning market-oriented commentators who looked forward to an Africa with unburdened economic prospects. Without heavy handed mercantilist policies weighing down the colonies, Western consumers and corporations hoped that free African states would export even more raw materials and create a new class of consumers.

And of these independent African prospects, arguably none were greater than Ghana. From Meredith:

“No other African state launched with so much promise in its future. Ghana embarked on independence as one of the richest tropical countries in the world, with an official civil service, an impartial judiciary, and a prosperous middle class. Its parliament was well established and able politicians in both government and opposition… the country’s economic prospects were equally propitious. Not only was Ghana the world’s leading producer in cocoa, with huge foreign currency reserves built up during the 1950s cocoa boom, but it possessed gold, timber, and bauxite.”

I’m reiterating all of this to really drive home that Kwame Nkrumah took over possibly the most stable and prosperous African country with the best of local administrations and nearly universal international support, and proceeded to utterly run it into the ground within a decade.

(Worth noting – official economic statistics I’ve seen indicate that the neighboring Ivory Coast was wealthier and more educated than Ghana on a per capita basis, so I think Meredith overstates his case. Regardless, the two countries were very similar economically, though one was British and the other French.)

Independent Ghana

In 1957, Kwame Nkrumah became the ruler of the first African nation to gain independence from a colonial power (unless you count Ethiopia). If it was even possible, he became even more beloved, catapulting to an almost mythical figure to many, a sentiment which he eagerly stoked as Prime Minister of Ghana. Nkrumah put himself on Ghana’s coins, bills, and stamps. Statues of him were erected throughout the country. His birthday became a national holiday. One of his first initiatives was to de facto take over the country’s media and turn it into an organ of state and personal propaganda. According to Meredith, a “typical” 1961 news announcement declared:

“When our history is recorded, the man, Kwame Nkrumah, will be written of as the liberator, the messiah, the Christ of our day whose great love for mankind wrought changes in Ghana, in Africa, and in the world at large.”

But now that Nkrumah was running a country, what did he want to do with it?

First, he wanted to make sure that he, and he alone, was really running it. Granted, Nkrumah never really claimed to be that much of a democrat, but foreign observers were still surprised at how quickly he abandoned the democratic institutions that the British had left behind.

In 1958, Nkrumah pushed a bill through Ghana’s Parliament permitting the state to arrest anyone without trial for up to five years. It was opposed by 12 members of Parliament, every single one of whom would be arrested under this law or flee into exile soon after.

In 1960, Nkrumah rewrote the constitution to reduce the Parliament to a rubber-stamping body and permit the executive (ie. Nkrumah) to rule by decree. At first, Parliamentary elections were easily won by his CPP party due to strong-arming and bribery. In 1964, Nkrumah did away with the facade and called for a national election to approve his plans to turn Ghana into a one-party state based around the CPP. His proposal was approved with 99.9% support and 96% voter turnout. (Meredith has an amusing anecdote where the “No” ballot box at a polling station didn’t have a slit to deposit votes.) Henceforth, elections were basically ended. Nkrumah selected people to run for Parliamentary office and read out their unopposed victories on the radio.

Next, Nkrumah unofficially sapped power from the official ministries and delegated authority to a small cohort of loyalists who congregated at his personal estate. Nkrumah himself took over the parts of the government he was most interested in – education, foreign affairs, approving industrial projects, etc. – while dumping the rest on mostly disinterested cronies.

Nkrumah spent much of his life dreaming about having power, then a good decade fighting for power, and then when he finally achieved power and consolidated it into absolute power… he found that he didn’t enjoy it. His reclusive side came back with a vengeance. Nkrumah still made lots of speeches and hosted fancy diplomatic dinners, but privately he became moody, depressive, and paranoid. He whined about being surrounded by “yes men” to confidants (who were always female) while sidelining his most competent and honest advisors. As his reign went on, he spent more-and-more time in Christiansborg Castle, the creepy former slave fort where he had negotiated with the British governor years ago. There, he was far away from Accra and politics, and had time to himself.

Despite the reclusive tendencies, Nkrumah was still a man of tremendous energy and threw himself into building Ghana, especially during the early years. His country was a colony-turned-country, and needed to build itself up. How did Nkrumah approach this problem?

The closest summation of Nkrumah’s ruling principles is that he falls within the bounds of “African socialism,” a concept that Meredith calls “little more than a potpourri of vague and romantic ideals lacking all coherence and subject to varying interpretations.” It can be more charitably described as an attempt to fit Western socialism into an African cultural framework largely born out of inherent skepticism of capitalism that was associated with imperialism.

Meredith finds it hard to track any ideological consistency in Nkrumah’s reign, but Nkrumah didn’t agree, or at least he wouldn’t admit to agreeing. He believed in whatever his ideology was so much that he coined it “Nkrumahism” and spent millions of dollars of state funds to build the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute which employed a massive staff of mostly leftist dissidents and exiles to cobble together leftist theory and random stuff Nkrumah said into an ideology that could be taught to the masses.

While the contents of Nkrumahism would constantly waffle, at first they looked like plain old socialism, or at least state capitalism. Straight from Nkrumah:

“Ghana inherited a colonial economy. We cannot rest until we have demolished this miserable structure and raised in its place an edifice of economic stability, thus creating for ourselves a paradise of veritable abundance and satisfaction. We must go forward with our preparations for planned economic growth to supplant the poverty, ignorance, disease, and illiteracy left in the wake of discredited colonialism and decaying imperialism. Socialism is the only pattern that can within the shortest possible time bring the good life to the people.”

Taking direct inspiration from the USSR, Nkrumah’s first big economic plan was to use the state to launch a massive investment into import-substitution industrialization financed by foreign loans and agricultural exports. On a regulatory level, industrialization was supported by extensive market interventions: wage and price controls were set on basic goods throughout the economy, and dozens of small-scale state-owned enterprises (SOEs) were established.

As many countries around the world learned throughout the 20th century, it’s not easy for a government to brute-force jump-start an industrial economy by picking-and-choosing which industries and factories to invest in. Ghana was no exception, but that’s an understatement. The USSR’s industrialization under Stalin was notoriously haphazard and inefficient, but eventually there were some functional factories that could build something. Ghana’s industrialization was almost pure boondoggle, and the lion’s share of the blame lies with Nkrumah, who personally oversaw the effort.

When I used to play Monopoly, the board game, as a kid, I always wanted Park Place and Boardwalk. I didn’t think about the dynamics of the game, about whether these properties were the best use of money or how they stacked me against other players, I just liked the idea of having the most expensive properties on the board. It was cool.

By Meredith’s account, that’s how Nkrumah ran his industrialization programs: “the more ambitious the project put forward, the more likely it was to gain approval.” He just wanted Ghana to have big, cool shit. Hence:

• Nkrumah commissioned massive steelworks, mining, and manufacturing facilities which were chronically undersupplied due to the lack of available raw materials and understaffed due to lack of local expertise.
• Nkrumah commissioned the construction of Africa’s largest drydock at enormous expense, and then it sat around collecting cobwebs because Ghana barely has a shipbuilding industry.
• Nkrumah commissioned the construction of a single pharmaceutical factory and then cancelled it in favor of a massive pharmaceutical complex that cost 10X more.
• Nkrumah spent 8X more on a shoe factory than recommended by an expat advisor.
• At the behest of some Romanian, Nkrumah commissioned the construction of dozens of 10-story concrete silos to store cocoa at a cost of 8.5 million pounds. Not only is it unclear that cocoa can even be stored in such silos, but every silo was condemned as unsafe upon completion.

Part of the problem was that for all his interpersonal savvy, Nkrumah easily got caught up in good stories. Among his staff, he gained a reputation for saying “yes” to any random project that came across his desk, particularly if it came from foreigners. Meredith relates an anecdote from an advisor who saved the state 1 million pounds by taking a stupid proposal off Nkrumah’s desk moments before it was signed, and Nkrumah promptly forgot about it.

The one arguable success story of Nkrumah’s industrialization was the Volta River dam which, financed by an American company, indeed tremendously increased Ghana’s energy production. The cost was flooding thousands of people out of their homes, destroying local agriculture, and spurring an epidemic of river blindness.

Nkrumah’s industrialization projects quickly became extremely corrupt. This is one area where Nkrumah’s level of blame is present but ambiguous since virtually all African economies are corrupt, especially whenever there is state entanglement. Nkrumah certainly didn’t build the underlying culture of corruption, but he did contribute to it.

Nkrumah was never as corrupt as the most infamously avaricious African leaders, like Congo’s Mobutu or Nigeria’s Abacha. But he went from a penniless quasi-beggar in London to a wealthy man in Accra by liberally blending his personal finances with the state treasury. In the midst of his industrialization projects, Nkrumah established the “National Development Corporation,” a shady state construction company that he personally owned and used to dole out contracts to friends with generous kickbacks to himself. By the end of his reign, he was living in a mansion with its own private zoo that included animals gifted by world leaders like Fidel Castro.

Elsewhere, the government corruption was much worse. Ambitious ministers became rich beyond imagination and openly flaunted mansions and imported cars. The corruption proliferated everywhere and amongst everyone remotely connected to the government. From Meredith:

“Along with the tassels for power and influence, the party was consumed by a rising tide of corruption… ‘a howling monster threatening to wreck the whole nation.’ Party officials, ministers, and Members of Parliament spent their time promoting family, clan, and community interests, and pursuing their own business activities. While ministers routinely collected 10% from government contracts, at a lower level, local party officials developed a variety of techniques for extorting money and favors from businessmen, market women, civil servants, and others, in exchange for ‘protection’ and other benefits.”

Even by the early 1960s, Nkrumah’s industrialization efforts were not looking good. A lot of giant factories were sitting around not doing much at all. Nkrumah’s more sensible economic advisors were trying to show him some rather dour figures, but Nkrumah was preoccupied with other affairs (more on that later) and so instead of pulling back, he doubled down.

After a 1961 tour of the Eastern Bloc, Nkrumaism took a sharp turn into “scientific socialism:” Nkrumah was ok with using foreign money to build Ghana’s factories, but he decided that current industrialization efforts were too haphazard and market-tinged. So he launched a massive economic restructuring that brought much of the economy under the control of 46 large state-owned enterprises (adding to dozens of smaller ones) that covered nearly all of Ghana’s major industries and started some new ones: construction, steel, gold mining, fiber bags, vegetable oil, fishing, most agriculture, a new airline, etc.

The result was what you’d expect; the new companies were monstrously inefficient. Their managers were relatives and friends of Nkrumah and his top lieutenants. Employment was handed out as spoils to lower-level supporters and the staffing exploded with do-nothing bullshit jobs. One expat observer called the SOEs “a high cost way of providing unemployment benefits.” Giant mechanized farms eventually sat idle as huge imported tractors rusted. The new airline made most of its flight routes to politically important cities like Cairo and Moscow and thus flew mostly government officials rather than any relevant business.

(I couldn’t find too many solid numbers on how much of the economy was built on SOEs, but by 1967, over 24% of manufacturing production was done by SOEs, with another 17.5% based on joint public-private companies. In 1962-63, SOEs spent about twice as much on wages as a proportion of total expenditure compared to comparable private companies; in 1969, six industries were entirely controlled by SOEs.)

How was all this useless industrialization financed? Foreign loans and grants picked up a lot of slack, both semi-benevolently given by foreign powers and more selfishly given by foreign corporations. Money printing was also a major factor; Nkrumah had purposefully broken away from the British-run colonial currency in favor of the newly-created cedi, which he quickly inflated by double-digit percentages annually. But Nkrumah expected the lion’s share of industrial funding to come from his favorite source: cocoa farmers.

Once again, Nkrumah extended the artificial price suppression of cocoa through the Cocoa Marketing Board to raise funds for the state. Nkrumah’s initial fig leaf to smooth over tensions was to give generous grants and loans to farms to mechanize production, but mechanized cocoa farming isn’t really a thing (it’s a notoriously difficult crop, ex. it can’t be reliably grown in plantations, only wild forests). So throughout the 1960s, the cocoa farmers went into a low-tier revolt, with most either scaling back production to ship their capital abroad, or smuggling their production across the border to the neighboring Ivory Coast where the country was literally run by a cocoa farmer who paid his cocoa farming buddies better prices through his own version of the Cocoa Marketing Board.

The result – From 1963 to 1965, Ghana’s cocoa official production fell by 50% (unofficially, a substantial portion of that 50% loss was sold in the Ivory Coast). From 1960 to 1965, cocoa farmer revenue fell by 70%. By the mid-60s, the Ivory Coast had surpassed Ghana in cocoa production and remains the global cocoa leader to this day.

By the mid-1960s, Nkrumah’s industrialization plan ground to a halt. There simply wasn’t any money left for it. Government national debt was 184 million pounds in 1963, and reached 349 million pounds a few years later. Cocoa farming was a shadow of its former self and none of the big government-backed companies were making a profit. Despite raising taxes in the early 1960s, Nkrumah certainly wasn’t getting much money from the common people; they were beginning to accept breadlines and shortages in medicine as common facts of life: from 1963 to 1965 alone, food prices increased by 70%.

Here’s Meredith’s summary:

“The overall result of Nkrumah’s handling of the economy was calamitous. From being one of the most prosperous countries in the tropical world at the time of independence in 1957, Ghana by 1965 had become virtually bankrupt. It was saddled with huge debts and beset by rising prices, higher taxes, and food shortages. A spending spree of 430 million pounds between 1959 and 1964 had left it encumbered with scores of loss-making industries and a fast shrinking agricultural sector. Gross national product between 1960 and 1966, despite government spending, actually remained stagnant. Over the same period, the real value of the minimum wage was halved. An official survey in 1963 showed that the standard of living for unskilled workers in towns had fallen in real terms to the levels of 1939.”

It’s not like this came out of nowhere. In 1963, Nkrumah had a cabinet meeting where an advisor told him that the foreign currency reserves, which once stood in the tens of millions of pounds, was down to 500,000 pounds. Nkrumah reportedly sat in silence for 15 minutes and then “broke down and wept.”

(Around that time, there was a 5 million pound naval warship sitting on the government books. It’s not clear whether it ever existed or was just some sort of corrupt accounting phantom.)

What was Nkrumah doing all this time that prevented him from noticing the disastrous effects of his economic policies?

Nkrumah’s policy darling was always foreign affairs. He was in his element when he would dazzle world leaders and diplomats with charm, erudition, and vision. And when he finally became a genuine leader of a country, he launched into it with even more gusto… some would say too much gusto.

Seeing himself as a master negotiator, Nkrumah had a habit of trying to intervene in every possible foreign conflict. He tried to mediate the dispute and eventual split between the USSR and Red China, two countries with populations and GDPs that utterly dwarfed little Ghana. As soon as Ghana had a military, even a paltry one, Nkrumah threw it in every African conflict, starting with the collapse of Congo’s government in 1960. But what got him into more trouble was a penchant for funding and training foreign rebels, particularly in neighboring states, which he did with the casual commitments of a Paradox gamer.

Nkrumah’s ultimate political dream, not just within the domain of foreign policy but across all aspects of politics, was the formation of a United States of Africa. The idea had been kicking around his head ever since his days in the US and Britain, and had solidified over many caffeinated afternoons arguing with anti-colonialists. Africa had been exploited by the West for centuries and could only develop through independence, but the ultimate goal was to bring all former African colonies together into not just a European Union-style federation, but a mega-state modeled after the United States of America which would theoretically wield immense geopolitical and economic power. Nkrumah loved the idea so much that near the end of his reign, he confided that he secretly wished he could resign as de facto dictator of Ghana and focus all of his efforts on uniting Africa.

Nkrumah was so into this idea that he dedicated his marriage to it. After years of telling everyone that he was too busy to get married, he secretly contacted Egyptian dictator Colonel Nasser, a pan-Arabist and ideological ally, who supplied Nkrumah with a young, beautiful Egyptian bride. Nkrumah had three children with her even though she didn’t speak English and Nkrumah didn’t speak Arabic nor French. In my travels in Ghana, I heard three separate incidents of people praising Nkrumah for this display of African unity.

(Allegedly, Ghanaian women were crying in the streets when Nkrumah’s marriage was announced publicly.)

Unfortunately for Nkrumah, most other African leaders weren’t buying into African unification. A chronic sticking point was that whenever Nkrumah brought up his United States of Africa plan, he also boasted that its leader would be… Nkrumah, obviously. Few, if any, of these newly empowered African presidents, prime ministers, and dictators were willing to cede power, even to the legendary Nkrumah, especially when Nkrumah was literally financing rebel operations within their borders. Nkrumah also faced opposition from rival claimants like Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika (soon to be Tanzania) who was trying to set up his own East African Federation.

However, there was great enthusiasm among the leaders of recently-freed African nations for one aspect of Nkrumah’s vision – conferences.

Nkrumah, like many of the emerging post-colonial African leaders, had an obsession with the annual African Unity Conference (AUC), an organization Nkrumah helped set up which heard proposals for international cooperation and pan-national confederations. To host the AUC, Nkrumah ordered the construction of a gigantic conference center at the cost of 10 million pounds (at a time when the median Ghanian made maybe 300-500 pounds annually). The complex had 60 luxury suites and a banquet hall that could seat 2,000 people, and had a general display of extravagance that left advisors scratching their heads and impoverished commoners frustrated. But to Nkrumah’s credit, at least he didn’t blow one third of the national budget on his conference center, like the president of Sierra Leone did at the same time. Or half the national budget, like the president of Togo. (Neither Sierra Leone nor Togo ended up hosting the conference.)

In 1965, Ghana hosted the annual African Unity Conference in what Meredith calls Nkrumah’s “crowning folly.” The massive conference center with its 60 suites and 2,000 person banquet hall was finally in use, while nearby commoners were waiting on bread lines. Nkrumah’s luster had worn off by then, and 14 countries boycotted the conference, including his former ally, the Ivory Coast. Of the 26 countries that attended, only 13 national leaders showed up. Nkrumah put forth a proposal to officially start the formation of a United States of Africa. Only Ghana voted in favor of the motion.

In February 1966, Nkrumah was off in Asia being Nkrumah by trying to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War. Ghana’s military leaders, who by Meredith’s account had actually been quite patient with Nkrumah’s continued blunders, were finally pushed to the edge by low pay and reports of spying on them. They gathered about 600 soldiers, told them lies that Nkrumah was planning on sending Ghanaian soldiers to Vietnam and Rhodesia to fight, and used them to launch a coup. The death toll probably reached into the dozens and would have been worse if Mrs. Nkrumah hadn’t told her husband’s loyalists to surrender. When Nkrumah got off his plane in China, he learned that he was no longer the Prime Minister of Ghana.

(There have always been rumors that the British and/or Americans supported the 1966 coup against Nkrumah. As far as I can tell, the CIA wanted a coup and guessed that one would probably happen to Nkrumah eventually given his increasingly unpopularity and the string of coups across West Africa. This assessment led the US to further cool on relations with Nkrumah, but there is no direct evidence of Western involvement in the coup.)

Nkrumah made some feeble attempts to retake power, but never again set foot in Ghana. He spent the remaining six years of his life living in exile in Guinea where he was named honorary co-president by the more successful megalomaniac dictator, Sekou Toure.

1966 to 1979 –

It Can Always Get Worse

Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown by the Ghanaian military in 1967. In his place the military installed the first of many lofty sounding military juntas: the National Liberation Council (NLC).

By the standards of pre-1981 Ghanaian governments, the NLC was as good as it got. Nkrumah and his top lieutenants were stripped of their power but there were no executions, and no serious retributions. Once in power, the NLC asked the International Monetary Fund what to do and then did as much of it as they could. Which, due to unfortunate political realities, wasn’t much.

What the NLC could do was dramatically slash government spending as part of a managed bankruptcy, and they could put some monetary controls in place to slow spiraling inflation. But when the NLC tried to butcher the sacred corruption cow – the state-owned enterprises – they met dramatic backlash from the civilian government and general population. Too many people were dependent upon these economic monstrosities for salaries, and selling them off would doubtlessly lead to mass unemployment. Plus there was a popular belief in Ghana, and much of Africa, that “privatization” was automatically a conspiracy by ruling elites to sell domestic economic power to imperialists at a discount. In this case, the kernel of truth to that belief was that many of the SOEs were so worthless that they couldn’t really be sold, only liquidated at far-below their massively inflated official values. The NLC ultimately sold off only three of 46 major SOEs.

In 1969, only two years after taking power, the NLC held elections as promised. Unfortunately, the new civilian government was led by Nkrumahites and largely reinstituted his budgetary, monetary, and regulatory policies. Fortunately for them, they caught a stroke of luck with an anomalous bump in cocoa prices that they were able to ride for a few years in combination with some reserves built up by IMF loans.

In 1971, the cocoa prices fell and the government’s bad budget deficit rose to a horrible budget deficit. With bankruptcy looming and the economy collapsing, the government asked the IMF what to do. The IMF told them to massively devalue their currency, which they did. Within days, the civilian government was overthrown in a coup and replaced by yet another military junta.

It’s worth taking an interlude to explain the importance of currency exchange rates in Ghana since they are surprisingly an extremely important part of independent Ghana’s history, and especially if, like me, you don’t perfectly remember how this stuff works from AP Macroeconomics.

Currencies can be exchanged for each other in international markets at exchange rates, ie. right now 1 USD = 0.91 Euro. Most Western countries “float” their exchange rate, meaning they leave the exchange rate to be determined by international market forces that trade currencies all day. But other countries, particularly developing ones, choose to set the exchange rates between their own currency and other currencies manually in order to steer their economies.

Let’s say that China chooses to manually revalue (raise the value) its RMB currency relative to the USD. This would make the RMB relatively more valuable than the USD (ex. going from 1 USD = 7 RMB to 1 USD = 6 RMB). This would benefit Chinese consumers because it would make importing goods from the US cheaper. However, this action would hurt Chinese companies that export goods to the US because it would make it more expensive for Americans to buy Chinese goods. In real life, China has maintained a policy of artificially devaluing the RMB for years because it wants to make Chinese exports cheaper to foreigners to support its manufacturing sector, even at the expense of Chinese consumers.

After independence, Ghana and most other African countries were artificially revaluing their currencies. For one, revaluing made it cheaper for locals to buy imported goods, which was seen as a subsidy for the increasing urban poor population. But also, according to Herbst, keeping a currency’s value high was seen as a matter of national honor:

“This aspect of African politics may seem peculiar to Westerners, who are inclined to see the exchange rate as just another aspect of economic policy, but the psychological importance in the exchange rate should not be underestimated…  in Ghana, the concept of a “strong” currency came to appeal to many elements of the polity. In part, the need to have a “strong” cedi was tied to the desire of many Ghanaians, who had seen their once proud country decline into bankruptcy, to recapture some of the nationalistic spirit of the past by confronting international financial institutions.”

Nkrumah’s government began artificially revaluing its new currency, the cedi, right after independence. As Nkrumah printed lots of cedis to finance his industrialization projects, this devalued or lowered the value of the cedi compared to other currencies in real terms because the supply of the cedi rose relative to the supply of other foreign currencies. But Nkrumah’s government refused to change the state-set exchange rate despite the real devaluation, so the cedi continued to artificially revaluate throughout his regime and into the early 1970s. By 1972, the black market exchange rate (ie. close to the real exchange rate) between the cedi and the dollar was off by 28% compared to the official rate set by the Ghanaian government.

This was massively distortionary to the Ghanaian economy. For well over a decade, Ghana’s government was essentially subsidizing imports and penalizing exports. Not only was this draining Ghana’s foreign currency reserve, but it was hindering the export-based industries (primarily cocoa, but also timber, gold, bauxite, etc.) upon which the Ghanaian economy was based, particularly for rural Ghanaians who made up the bulk of the population. While urban Ghanaians got cheaper import prices, they were also getting increasing unemployment and a terrible economy as Ghana’s main industries and agricultural producers either declined or fell under the sway of inefficient SOEs.

So why didn’t Nkrumah’s government or the National Liberation Council just devalue the currency, bring the exchange rate back in line with international rates, and guide the economy back to a sound footing?

Because doing so was considered so unpopular that it might cause an overthrow, which is exactly what happened to the second civilian government in 1971. Not only was devaluation unpopular with nationalists who thought it made Ghana look weak, but devaluation was also extremely unpopular with the urban poor, particularly labor unions, who would immediately be hit with huge price increases. “Everything will be dramatically more expensive, but don’t worry, the economy should improve in 3-5 years once export-based producers scale up” is not a compelling pitch to chronically impoverished Ghanaians living in urban slums.

So in 1971, the civilian government devalued the cedi by 78%, bringing the official value of the Cedi from 1.02 to 1.82 to the USD. Days later, a military junta that would later call itself the National Redemption Council (NRC) overthrew the government and quickly revaluated the currency to 1.28.

This set the tone for Ghana’s new regime. It quickly determined that real reform was not possible, so it settled into a state of corrupt laziness and inertia. The currency was kept at an artificially high value, the government kept hanging on to the edge of bankruptcy, price and wage controls were maintained, the SOEs continued operating as employment spoils, and corruption intensified. From Herbst:

“Corruption, already endemic in the Nkrumah regime, reached almost unbelievable heights as government decisions on fundamental issues such as import permits were made largely on the basis of personal connections.”

Next door, the Ivory Coast was solidifying its reputation as the miracle of Africa. While literally every one of its neighbors economically collapsed and fell into military dictatorships, Felix Houphouet-Boigny continued running a stable one-party de facto dictatorship with annual economic growth rates that sometimes scraped 12%, and all built on powerhouse domestic agricultural production. Meanwhile in Ghana:

“Cocoa perhaps best demonstrates the dramatic decline of the Ghanaian economy. The 1970s were a time of generally high cocoa prices. Ghana’s policies of overvalued exchange rates and low prices for cocoa farmers, however, caused a decline in the country’s share of the international market from 29 percent in 1970 to 17 percent in 1980.”

Ghanaian cocoa production:

(I’m not sure how to reconcile the seemingly good cocoa production growth numbers during Nkrumah’s early years with Meredith’s account. Either production grew for awhile under Nkrumah and then collapsed during his heavy socialist reforms later in his regime, or a huge portion of real cocoa production was siphoned away to the Ivory Coast.)

By the late 1970s, Ghana was truly an economic basketcase, even by African standards. Today, Ghana is considered a West African success story. Back then, Ghana was on the same tier as Sudan or Niger: a hopelessly confused and distraught tragedy that let millions suffer. From Herbst:

“Between 1976 and 1982, real gross domestic product per capita decreased by 3.4 percent each year, and prices increased at a yearly average of 66.8 percent. Shortages of basic goods and foodstuffs became common while unemployment grew. The government was increasingly encumbered by the necessity of enforcing regulations and price controls that bore less and less relationship to reality.”

Ghanaian per capita GDP:

(Note the bump from 1967 to 1971, after the removal of Nkrumah from power and the implementation of liberal reforms by the National Liberation Council.)

In other words, the late 1960s and 1970s were rough times for Ghana. Little did the Ghanaian people know that both their worst and best times lay ahead largely due to the influence of a single young military officer who would become one of the most important leaders in modern African history.

Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings

Jerry John Rawlings was born in Accra in 1947, the same year Kwame Nkrumah came back to what was then called the Gold Coast after living abroad for 12 years. Rawlings’s father was a Scottish chemist from a place called Kirkcudbrightshire; he lived in Ghana and had a wife, but carried out a six-year affair with Rawlings’s mother, a “caterer at the State House.” Even though Jerry was his father’s only son, the father denied parentage throughout his life for fear of destroying his marriage. Rawlings was raised in a single-parent household under his “perfectionist” and “harsh disciplinarian” mother.

In 1967, amidst much turmoil at the end of Nkrumah’s regime, Rawlings graduated from an elite British secondary school in Accra, and then rather than become a doctor like his mother wanted, Rawlings enrolled in the air force where he distinguished himself as one of its best pilots. During Ghana’s military rule throughout the 1970s, Rawlings rose to the rank of flight lieutenant.

Smart and observant, Rawlings became increasingly disgruntled with the status quo under the Supreme Military Council (the formalized military junta established by the National Redemption Council in 1975), which seemed to be further running the country into the ground. He felt a distinct disconnect between the generals at the top of the regime and the mid-level officers like himself. Rawlings kept coming back to corruption as the focal point of Ghana’s failures. All the generals talked a big game about national unity and growth, but they were getting rich while Ghana continued to deteriorate. The common soldier not only suffered from economic deprivation, but hatred from the public which blamed the entire military for the regime’s failures. In his 2015 interview, Rawlings claimed that at this time, sometimes market women would throw bowls of urine at soldiers (it sounds more plausible when he says it).

Eventually, Rawlings fell in with a group of like-minded young Ghanaian military officers who cavorted with young military officers in other unstable African countries and kicked around wacky ideas like couping all the civilian governments in Africa and forming some sort of grand united military Africa. But Rawlings kept his attention on Ghana. He was, if nothing else, a patriot.

In 1978, the Supreme Military Council declared that it would finally hold long-awaited elections the following year. But Rawlings knew it was bullshit. The generals would never give up real power; the elections would be fraudulent and put civilian lackeys in office to give the generals a façade of legitimacy while they continued looting Ghana. Something had to be done.

In May 1979, Rawlings decided that the military government needed to be removed before the bullshit elections were held. At age 32, he led a bunch of his fellow mid-level officers in a coup against the long-standing Supreme Military Council and… was promptly arrested, tossed in jail, and sentenced to death.

(Note – Nearly all sources say Rawlings was arrested following a failed coup, but if I understand what Rawlings says in his 2015 interview correctly [and it is hard to understand], he actually planned a coup but backed out at the last minute, but someone reported him to the bosses, and so he got arrested for treason anyway. It’s remarkable how hazy even semi-recent African history can be.)

But one of Rawlings’s strengths was having a finger on the pulse of the nation. His anti-corruption message, which he had carefully spread throughout the military ranks in advance of his failed coup, resonated with Ghanaians who had long suffered under a horribly incompetent regime, particularly among other military officers who were sick of the mismanagement. Rawlings messed up the coup, but he had struck at the right time.

Less than a month after his arrest, a group of mid-level officers and soldiers stormed Accra’s government buildings, arrested the generals, and successfully completed Rawlings’s coup. They put him in charge of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), the new government of Ghana. On the radio, Rawlings announced to his people that the old regime was corrupt beyond repair and drastic action needed to be taken; democracy would be restored soon, but first, Ghana needed a “housecleaning.”

Rawlings believed corruption was the root of Ghana’s problems. But like so many other African presidents, prime ministers, and dictators, he found himself confronting an intangible, abstract, societal problem with the brute tools of a low-capacity state. What could a newly enshrined military dictator do to root out corruption at every level of society? The problem wasn’t one person, or ten, or 100 with bad ideas or incentives; the problem was an entire culture that had gotten used to graft as a way of life, and largely expected its leadership to engage in the highest level of graft as a reward for success.

One of the most interesting things about Rawlings’s reign was that he matured as a ruler over time and took the responsibilities of policy decision-making seriously. But in 1979 Rawlings was not yet a sophisticated statesman.

Thus, Rawlings’s “housecleaning” plan to tackle Ghana’s corruption was a brutal purge of Ghana’s leadership, an attempt at cutting the head of the snake. First, Rawlings executed (by firing squad) Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, the general who led the 1971 coup and Ghana for most of the last decade, along with his top lieutenant. Ten days later, Rawlings executed Acheampong’s official successor (who had just been overthrown) as well as the chairman of the National Liberation Council, Ghana’s military dictatorship all the way back in the late 1960s, and four other high-ranking military officers. About a dozen other military officers were arrested and given long prison sentences.

Rawlings’s description of this purge in his 2015 interview is fascinating. He openly admits that some of these eight executed generals were “innocent,” but:

“It was [better] to sacrifice the commanders than to go down the ladder to all the guilty people that the rank-and-file knew about, you know. It was a very difficult thing. At first we thought we could sacrifice only two, ten days later the tension was building up, if we didn’t let go, [there would be even more tension]. Meanwhile, [we] arrested officers in all the units, except, you know, those within the command structure I had named… that period was an expression of rage… but thankfully we managed to contain it within the military, and we paid the price for it, the national price.”

Also (remember this is Rawlings speaking after-the-fact in potentially a self-serving manner):

“The ranks felt that a lot more people should have been executed, but I wouldn’t have it, I wouldn’t have it. Eight was bad enough.”

The “housecleaning” was a shock to Ghana, Africa, and the global community. Ghana had obviously not been a stable place for a good thirty years, during which time it had seen five governments (more if you count British constitutional rewriting) and now three coups. But in all the turmoil, Ghana had never had high-level political violence. Sure, there were riots on the streets sometimes, a few bombings back in the colonial days, and some rank-and-file deaths due to skirmishes during coups, but deposed leaders were always either fired, exiled, or at worst, arrested and later released. Then Rawlings came along and unceremoniously shot eight government leaders, including three former heads of state. No trials, just executions.

But Rawlings had plenty of supporters in Ghana. He had lots of military backing, of course, but also support from the long-suffering business class and idealistic college students. From my readings, it seems like there was a bit of a Young Turk energy (from the Ottoman Empire, not the modern YouTubers) in the air. The Ghanaian people craved reform, and if that meant slaughtering a few blatantly corrupt politicians, then so be it. Rawlings was their man.

With the head of the snake removed, Rawlings announced to Ghana that he was a man of his word, and a democratic government would soon be restored. Sure enough, “to the amazement of most foreign observers,” Rawlings led a haphazardly constructed military government for a grand total of 112 days until the elections scheduled by the previous military government were completed and he handed power over to a new civilian government. Rawlings settled back into a military role, technically still as just a flight lieutenant, but unofficially he was considered by all to be a government watchdog. He would wait and observe the new state, hoping his drastic measures had done enough to curtail the corruption and put Ghana on the right path.

Rawlings handed power to the new president with the ominous advice: “never lose sight of the new consciousness of the Ghanaian people.”

Newly elected President Hila Limann was… some random guy as far as most Ghanaians were concerned. He wasn’t the first choice of his party, but rather a last minute substitute put in place after the first pick was disqualified for obscure reasons. There’s not a lot of info about Limann online except that he went to a bunch of really good schools (London School of Economics, University of London, the Sorbonne, University of Paris) and then served as a diplomat under the previous military regime. The only other notable thing about his background was that he was a northerner Muslim, the first to take power. Like Nigeria, Ghana’s Muslim population is clustered in the north, but unlike Nigeria where the Muslims are more than half the population, Ghana’s Muslims are still less than 20%. Nevertheless, in the midst of the confusion and hastily established election, Limann won the national election with 62% of the vote.

There’s even less info online about what Limann’s government did during its short reign. Herbst summarizes:

“The Limann government that took power in September 1979 may have recognized the fundamental problems of the economy, but it had neither the political will nor the analytic ability to cope with the quickly deteriorating economy. In particular, no fundamental changes were made in the relationship of the state to the economy. As inflation continued at a high rate and the exchange rate became increasingly overvalued, cocoa farmers diverted an ever larger share of their production to [the Ivory Coast]. State enterprises also continued to generate significant losses. Most businessmen found it impossible to conduct commercial operations legally and either closed down their operations or began to operate on the now ubiquitous black market. As Naomi Chazan has noted, “The Limann regime’s proposals [to address economic decline] offered paliatives where more surgical structural moves were required.” International donors, already gravely suspicious of Ghana following Acheampong’s disavowal of external debts, essentially walked away from Ghana. By 1981, Ghana was receiving only $13.3 dollars per capita in net official development assistance compared to an average of $26.3 dollars for all sub-Saharan countries excluding Nigeria.”

Revolutionary Rawlings

Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings had seized power in Ghana, killed the corrupt former leaders, overseen elections fairly, and then given power back to a democratically-elected government while still maintaining and even informally enhancing his old military role. This was a rather successful, if brief career for an African dictator.

But as the civilian regime chugged on for three years, it was obvious to Rawlings and everyone else that Ghana’s problems hadn’t been fixed. Corruption appeared as omnipresent as ever and the economy was somehow getting even worse. Worse than ever, in fact:

Also:

Herbst summarizes:

“Per capita income, which had been approximately 640 cedis in 1971, had declined by the end of 1981 to approximately 460 cedis in constant (1975) terms. Every organization in the country, ranging from the government to the private sector to voluntary organizations in the rural areas such as the churches, had essentially ground to a halt because of a lack of resources. It was estimated that two million Ghanaians had simply left the country because of a lack of economic opportunity. Ghana had completed the transition from a prospering middle-income developing country with great hopes at independence to a nation suffering from Fourth World poverty.”

Rawlings grew more and more anxious. His purge hadn’t worked. The corruption was deeper than eight men at the top of the government. Plus, the new leadership wasn’t cooperative with Rawlings; despite being put in power by the military, the civilian regime arrested numerous officers, and tried to arrest Rawlings himself twice (according to the 2015 Rawlings interview).

While dodging prison and/or death, Rawlings wondered how to really fix Ghana, and in his search for answers, he fell in with the worst people in the world… college leftists:

“According to Ahiakpor (1991), after Rawlings stepped down from his first coup in 1979, he went to study Marxism at the University of Ghana in order to understand how this ideology could help him address Ghana’s economic issues. His interest in Marxism and socialism stemmed from the idea that Marxism would create a just society that would ensure equity in the distribution of income and wealth among Ghanaians, which would ensure good living conditions for every Ghanaian.”

The universities had been an unexpected base of support for Rawlings when he first took power, and he became receptive to their influence after leaving it. Rawlings learned that corruption wasn’t Ghana’s only problem, there were also imperialists. There were shady businessmen, meddling foreign governments, and a legacy of colonialism undermining the foundations of Ghana’s once-prosperous economy. Yes, corruption was still a massive problem, but what if it wasn’t endemic to the Ghanaian people? What if corruption was injected into Ghana by imperialists? Foreign businesses bribed government officials for contracts, they sapped capital from the country (look at all the cocoa farmers leaving!), and they conspired on international markets to mess with the exchange rates to hinder the Ghanaian economy. The British, the French, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank… they were all exploiters. But not the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, those guys were cool. Cool enough that according to Adabuga, Rawlings took a little trip to Cuba shortly after his 1979 coup.

On December 31, 1981, Rawlings launched his second coup. There wasn’t much resistance in the general population, but Limann had some solid support in the military, particularly among northerner Muslims, and I’ve seen estimates that 20-something people died in the struggle. (Rawlings says in his 2015 interview: “I wasn’t brought back in. I came back in,” which I seriously considered captioning this under a Gigachad pic). Once out of power, Limann was irrelevant enough that he was simply stripped of office and sent home to live as a private citizen.

Filled with lofty ambitions, and fully cognizant of the failures of his first brief reign, Rawlings announced a “revolution” under his Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC). The change couldn’t just impact the highest level of the government, it had to sweep across all of Ghanaian society. Rawlings called upon the people to form Workers’ Defense Committees (WDCs) and People’s Defense Committees (PDCs) as quasi-vigilante gangs to root out corruption anywhere and everywhere: government officials, businessmen, bureaucrats, etc. From an early Rawlings radio address:

“Good evening, fellow countrymen. The attempt to justify the action of 31 December, 1981, would not presuppose that we Ghanaians do not know and feel what had been going on since September 24, 1979. Briefly, it has been nothing short of a clear denial of our fundamental rights as a people to enjoy the wealth of our labor. This has been the most disgraceful government in the history of our country. It is the only one in recent times that criminals and such others like them have become respectable in our society. They have turned our hospitals into graveyards and our clinics into death transit camps where men, women and children die daily because of lack of drugs and basic equipment. To many of us, democracy does not just mean paper guarantees of abstract liberties. It involves, above all, food, clothing, and shelter in the absence of which life is not worth living.”

He did not shy away from his intentions; from Herbst:

“…in [Rawlings’s] first speech, he talked about government power, indicating a willingness to use even more force than his previous administration had: “There is no justice in this society and so long as there is not justice, I would dare say that ‘let there be no peace .'”

With help from the college leftists, Rawlings’s economic views had evolved. He knew that the old regimes had built up a giant regulatory state with huge state-owned enterprises, price and wage controls, artificial currency revaluations, etc. And he knew that the IMF and World Bank kept telling Ghana’s governments to do the opposite of all that stuff. But the IMF and World Bank were imperialists and therefore bad guys. And Ghana was super corrupt due to imperialists. So, logically…

Rawlings concluded that the problem with Ghana’s economy was that the giant regulatory state wasn’t being enforced hard enough due to corruption caused by imperialists. Hence, the newly-formed quasi-vigilante bodies wouldn’t just target people for old fashion corruption, like kickbacks on government contracts, but would target people for nefariously deviating from economic regulations, like selling bread at an unauthorized price or trading currencies at world market rates. What changes Rawlings made to the existing regulations were to make them even stricter, like setting a rock-bottom price control on grain and establishing a complete government monopoly over Ghana’s imports and exports. Herbst summarizes:

“The Rawlings government’s response to these perceived malpractices was to continue previous attempts to regulate the economy while adding a level of brutality to enforcement that even the Acheampong government had managed to avoid. In the most spectacular example of its determination that the state would control the market at any price, the Rawlings regime destroyed Makola Number 1 Market, which had been the center of commercial activity in Accra for fifty years. The Rawlings government also declared it would conduct unannounced searches of traders and stated that if any were found with hoarded goods they would be “taken away to be shot by firing squad.” It proclaimed the same fate for those caught smuggling cocoa.^”

(While in Accra I had a long conversation with a local big fan of Rawlings who considered his anti-hoarding policies to be his greatest achievement.)

It’s worth noting that despite the strong left wing strain in his policies, Rawlings was not an explicit socialist or communist, but rather some sort of revolutionary populist. He was sympathetic to Marxism, but tended to couch his reforms in broader terms like raising “social consciousness” and basically restoring integrity to Ghana’s government and economy.

Nevertheless, he courted the global left. The USSR, gleeful at dislodging a long-time Western ally in Africa, sold weapons to Ghana. Various education and military exchanges were also made with Castro’s Cuba, Libya’s Gaddafi, and Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara (nicknamed the “Che Guevara of Africa”). With the monopoly over Ghana’s trade, Rawlings steered economic activity away from the West and made deals with the USSR and numerous Eastern Bloc states. He didn’t completely cut contact with the Western imperialists, but economic aid took a nosedive.

(Funnily enough, at one point, Rawlings asked the USSR for direct economic aid; the crumbling USSR [this was the early 1980s] not only refused, but told Rawlings to go ask the IMF.)

In September 1985, the Ghana Congress of the USA and Canada sent a letter to the CIA describing Rawlings like an African Robespierre running his little Reign of Terror. It’s obvious that the authors are opponents of the Rawlings regime, perhaps even consisting of political exiles, and some parts are almost certainly exaggerations designed to provoke American ire. But other parts are well-corroborated by other sources. For instance, the letter describes universities shutting down and turning into “revolutionary training grounds” that produced armed vigilante gangs. Supposedly, the vigilante presence penetrated every aspect of society and no one was safe, especially in the cities where Rawlings had most of his support. In a hyper-religious society, even the church was not immune; Herbst quotes a letter from Ghana Catholic Bishops:

“In the wake of the “revolution” atrocities of all sorts have been committed against innocent civilians by some members of the armed forces and various groups purporting to support the revolution. The wanton killings, senseless beatings, merciless molestation and general harassment continue without the Government showing any willingness or ability to do anything about them.”

And from the Association of Recognized Professional Bodies:

“The application of the law of the jungle has resulted in the total break down of law and order. There is no accountability. Many who hold guns or are protected by the gun feel they can do anything and get away with it.”

I haven’t seen many estimates on the number of deaths caused by the Rawlings regime and its vigilante squads, though the Ghana Congress letter cites one source that puts it in the hundreds. Plenty more people were arbitrarily assaulted and the Ghana Congress letter claims torture was common. All agree that the most notable act of carnage was the kidnapping and murder of three high court judges and an army officer, though, as far as I can tell, it’s not clear whether Rawlings ordered this or some followers got a little too enthusiastic. (Adabuga says that Rawlings ordered their kidnappings, but isn’t sure about the executions.)

Another notable claim by the Ghana Congress letter was that Rawlings’s government was a secret “Ewe oligarchy.” Rawlings was a member of the Ewe ethnic group (via his mother), the third largest in Ghana constituting around 12% of the population at the time (though one source put them at only 6%). When Rawlings took power in 1981, he fired many of the high government officials and military officers and replaced them with Ewes. The letter calls this “tribal terrorism” and alleges a “Stalin purge” that saw many officials from other ethnic groups tortured and murdered.

Mercifully, ethnic relations in Ghana had been pretty good since independence, which is a rarity for Africa, especially compared to nearby Nigeria. But then a Ewe took power by force and put a bunch of his tribal allies in authority across the country, and suddenly some member of the larger Akan and Mole-Dagbani ethnic groups (both of which are composed of numerous smaller groups) started wondering if Rawlings was in the early stages of a complete Ewe takeover with himself at the head of an unending dictatorship.

Herbst has some interesting discussion of this. By his analysis, Rawlings was not some sort of Ewe nationalist, but rather was a genuine Ghanaian patriot. But Rawlings couldn’t run the government alone; he needed loyal and trusted people in key positions in the bureaucracy and military. And given his Ewe background, naturally he would find a lot of his key allies in the Ewe population.

Given Ghana’s history and Rawlings’s future economic policies (which actually ended up tilted against the Ewe), Herbst seems correct. Rawlings was caught in a trap wherein he had to choose between appointing loyal men in key positions and thereby giving evidence of a Ewe conspiracy, or appointing non-Ewe in key positions and thereby lessening the effectiveness of his revolution and threatening the survival of his regime. Given that serious ethnic conflict never erupted under Rawlings, it seems like he made the right choice.

Economic Recovery Program

Rawlings watched his revolution rage on for over a year. He made some speeches and some radio broadcasts, cultivated a following, and successfully consolidated his rule after surviving a few near-coups. Things were going ok for Rawlings except for one big problem: the economy. It was bad. Worse than ever somehow.

To be fair to Rawlings, it wasn’t all his fault. Ghana was hit by a major drought in 1982 and 1983 that hindered crop production. Then, due to its own drought and mismanagement, the Nigerian government kicked 1 million Ghanaians out of the country and all of a sudden Ghana had to absorb a 10% population increase in the midst of economic calamity. (According to Rawlings in his 2015 interview, the expulsion was done at the behest of the IMF and World Bank to save Nigeria’s regime and “destroy the revolution in Ghana.”)

Still, blame couldn’t be entirely deflected. Despite all his plans and revolutionary spirit, Ghana under Rawlings was in economic shambles with sky-high inflation, low productivity, high unemployment, and borderline famine conditions. Everyone knew it, even Rawlings. Especially Rawlings.

Rawlings sat down with his top lieutenants in the Provisional National Defense Council and candidly admitted that they had fucked up. Whatever they were doing in Ghana wasn’t working, so they had to do something else.

This is where Rawlings gets really interesting. Up until this point, he was just another African dictator, albeit with a bit more flash and definitely more integrity than most. But in standard African dictator fashion, he had mostly continued the failed policies of past regimes while uselessly flailing from one Cold War faction to the other. If Rawlings had dropped dead in 1983, no one outside Ghana would remember him.

Instead, Rawlings made the best move of his political career… he changed his mind.

In April 1983, 15 months after Rawlings had taken power a second time and launched his revolution, the government announced the Economic Recovery Program (ERP). It may very well be one of the most severe and most successful economic policy pivots of all time.

For decades, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank had been begging successive Ghanaian governments to change their economic policies. The ERP was largely based on finally listening to all this advice. Rawlings literally read a bunch of IMF and World Bank reports on Africa and Asia, and was convinced of their merit. He was basically converted into an economic liberal, to the point of talking like one, ex.:

“Foreign exchange is a scarce resource in Ghana and if the official banking system fails to recognize its scarcity premium, an avenue is provided for racketeers to extract rents. Providing foreign exchange at rates well below the actual transaction prices really means that the government is subsidising such racketeering.”

Hence, for the rest of the decade, Rawlings dismantled Ghana’s sluggish, ossified regulatory state with liberal reform after liberal reform.

The ERP’s first big reform was the currency exchange rate. The cedi was a disaster even by African currency standards, with its street value exceeding 20X the official value set by the government. In Notes on Nigeria, I complained that the official exchange rate was 1 USD = 460 Naira, while the street exchange rate was 1 USD = about 750 Naira, or a 63% markup. Imagine if the street exchange rate was 1 USD = 9,200 Naira!

The artificial cedi revaluation had been a massive drag on the economy for decades as it crushed Ghanaian exporters at the heart of the economy – cocoa, timber, bauxite, gold, etc. But it had also been a subsidy for the urban poor who relied on cheap food imports. Devaluating the currency back to reality would be great for the economy in the long run but potentially cause a crisis in the short run. The last major devaluation had led to the overthrow of the 1971 democratic government, and some inside Rawlings’s regime feared the same fate.

Nevertheless, Rawlings bit the bullet – within the year, 1 USD = 2.75 cedi became 1 USD = 25 cedis, a devaluation of over 800%. This was accomplished not by setting the exchange rate like past regimes had done, but through subsidizing exports and taxing imports. The IMF told the Rawlings regime that this was a really stupid way to devalue a currency that causes lots of market distortion. Rawlings was aware of this, but his method got around the all-important sticking point of announcing “currency devaluation.” Recall, a lot of African peoples hated the idea of an openly “weak currency” but apparently could more easily stomach an indirectly weakening currency.

The ERP wasn’t done with its currency reform. As the devaluation gained momentum, the government linked the cedi’s exchange rate to an inflation index between Ghana and other regional states, which is a sensible move in their chronically inflating ecosystem. By 1986, 1 USD = 90 cedis.

Finally, the ERP introduced a currency exchange auction, which was the closest they could feasibly get to floating the cedi on the open market. After the first week of operations, 1 USD = 128 cedis. The government considered the auction such a success that it closed every other avenue for currency exchange in Ghana. By September 1991, 1 USD = 400 cedi. Slowly but surely, the cedi’s exchange rate had returned to reality. For those keeping track, that’s a 14,445% devaluation of the cedi over the course of about eight years.

Next on the ERP’s priority list was the omnipresent price and wage controls. From Herbst:

“Previous governments had established a byzantine system of regulating close to 6,000 prices on nearly 700 producer groups. The PNDC quickly abolished almost all these controls. By the late 1980s, only a handful of price controls still existed, and these regulations had only a minimal effect on the pricing decisions of companies.”

Most controversially, the ERP removed (or at least dramatically raised, I’m not sure) the price control on grain. Combined with the currency devaluation, this imposed a huge cost on the urban poor long accustomed to subsidized food imports, but this was deemed necessary to incentivize basic farmers, who still constituted the vast majority of Ghana’s population, to get back to work and sell their goods within Ghana.

Another ERP priority was finally tackling the giant, useless, bureaucratic, wasteful, stupid state-owned enterprises that dominated much of the economy and served as a de facto jobs program for hundreds of thousands of Ghanaians. At first, as with the National Liberation Council government all the way back in 1967, the SOEs were still a bit too much of a sacred cow for the ERP to thoroughly butcher. But the ERP could at least bite off a few chunks by cutting employment at the edges. For instance, the Cocoa Marketing Board, whose ostensible purpose was to set cocoa prices and set aside cocoa for rainy days, had its staff cut from 100,000 to 50,000. And in this spirit, the ERP cut Ghana’s government bureaucracy from 540,000 to 504,000.

But by 1988, Rawlings and ERP finally had enough political capital to get serious about cutting the SOEs. The state launched a big privatization effort that sold all or part of 212 out of 300 SOEs in a decade. By 2003, only 5% of Ghana’s industrial sector was under SOEs.

Finally, there was cocoa production. What was once the bedrock of the Ghanaian economy had atrophied to just another depressing domestic industry and Rawlings knew it had to be kickstarted. Devaluating the cedi gave cocoa exporters a huge bump on the international market, but just as importantly, the ERP made the Cocoa Marketing Board finally raise internal cocoa prices to internationally competitive levels, which both incentivized cocoa production and discouraged smuggling over the border to the Ivory Coast. In 1992, the government finally got rid of the Cocoa Marketing Board altogether and privatized it into six competing companies which over the next three years cut their collective staffs by 90%.

Those were the big reforms of the ERP, but there were tons of smaller moves with the same general sentiment – eliminating economic distortions, restoring rational prices, etc. For instance, nearly all corporate subsidies were abolished. Hospital fees were introduced in 1983 and raised in 1985. Water utilities fees were raised by 150%, postal fees were raised by 365%, and electricity fees were raised by 1,000%.

What were the results of the ERP? Well, Ghana’s economy didn’t turn around overnight, but it basically did over a decade.

Here’s annual GDP growth % (REMINDER – the ERP started in 1983):

Here’s per capita income:

Here’s inflation:

(Yes, by post-colonial Ghana’s standards, keeping annual inflation under 40% is a success.)

Here’s cocoa production:

Government debt looks bad…

But the increasing debt should be read as a signal of Ghana’s credit worthiness, especially since a lot of this new debt was supplied at cheap rates by the IMF. Note that at the time, the average sub-Saharan African state had an annual budget deficit of 20%.

A critic could say that Rawlings just got lucky. Maybe the ERP was instituted when Ghana really did hit rock-bottom and had nowhere to go but up. Or maybe the ERP coincided with a bunch of fortuitous variables outside the government’s control.

Nope, if anything, it was the opposite. The 1980s were calamitous for most of Africa. It was basically the decade in which the reputation of Africa being a continent of consummate abject poverty and starvation was solidified due to a series of disasters across the land, including most notably, the 1983-1985 Ethiopian famine that left maybe over 1 million dead. For larger statistic evidence, see these stats on productivity growth throughout sub-Saharan Africa:

For a more relevant comparison, we can look next door to the Ivory Coast, the long-time shining success story of all of Africa. Its largest city, Abidjan, was the “Paris of Africa,” and the president’s home village, Yamoussoukro, still holds the largest church on earth (seriously). But in the 1980s, cocoa prices collapsed under a global supply glut, and the Ivorian government bungled its response, leading to near-bankruptcy of the state and a deep economic depression. At the same time, Ghana was lifting itself out of the rock-bottom of African economies with the ERP despite low cocoa prices and would continue to ascend (slowly but steadily) throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Meanwhile, the Ivory Coast would crash and burn into a lost decade and then a decade of civil war and end up poorer than Ghana by the 2010s.

A more valid criticism of the ERP is that its economic numbers were juked by an influx of international aid. Nearly all African countries got economic aid after independence from the West/IMF/World Bank and/or the East, though donors got increasingly skeptical and demanding as African states kept failing in the 1960s and 1970s. Ghana’s successive regimes after Nkrumah were all useless in the eyes of donors and therefore received little aid. The IMF and World Bank repeatedly offered aid in exchange for economic reforms (mainly currency devaluation), but Ghana rarely complied.

That is until Rawlings launched the ERP. Suddenly the IMF and World Bank opened up their coffers. From 1983 to 1986, the two institutions provided $1 billion in grants and low-interest loans to Ghana, mostly to keep the state afloat.

But Herbst notes that this money was not given lightly; the aid was conditional on the government sticking to extremely strict economic benchmarks, which, given Rawlings’s previous economic policies, was an understandable means of demonstrating the ERP’s adherence to liberal economic principles. Herbst describes Rawlings’s regime as showing an “astonishing degree of compliance” with the IMF and World Bank’s demands.

Regardless, foreign aid shouldn’t get too much credit for the ERP’s success. Herbst explained:

“However, the aid Ghana has received is not that impressive when compared with that received by other African countries. Ghana’s aid per capita doubled from approximately $13.3 per person in 1981 to $27.5 per person in 1987. It is this doubling to which so many attribute the success of the ERP. Still, $27.5 of aid per person is substantially below the $35.0 that African countries other than Nigeria averaged.”

To be clear, Rawlings didn’t convert to full-fledged political neoliberalism. Both from his speeches at the time and his later interviews, he maintained a low-level hostility to Western powers. In his 2015 interview, Rawlings was asked what he thought about the US winning the Cold War, and he responded:

“Well the capitalists are Christians and they’ve been touting the values and the culture of democracy, and that’s supposed to be at the core of their struggle, of their fight. You know, so… maybe the world might turn out to be a better place.”

But then he went off on a tirade about how Western countries have always betrayed these ideals and even the Pope (still Francis at the time) had condemned capitalism, and privatization always undermined national sovereignty, etc. At other times, his condemnation of the West was outright conspiratorial as he blamed many of Ghana’s ills before, during, and after his reign on treacherous Western influence and money undermining good, honest Ghanaian virtue.

In a way, this makes it all the more remarkable that Rawlings committed to the ERP. He seemed to simultaneously despise much of the West’s politics while acknowledging that the basis of its economic theory was correct, or at least superior to what post-independence Africa had been doing for 20+ years.

Another interesting question: how did Rawlings successfully implement the ERP? According to liberal economic theory and hindsight, it was a huge success, but many of the ERP’s policies were extremely controversial in Africa at the time and imposed massive short-term costs on Ghana’s population, especially its poorest citizens. The currency devaluation hurt national prestige and raised food prices, ending the price controls raised food prices even more, removing subsidies hurt businesses, slashing the state-owned enterprises hindered political spoils and raised unemployment, increasing water and electricity prices hurt everyone, etc. If the currency devaluations alone had led to the overthrow of the 1971 regime, how did Rawlings pull all this stuff off in just a few years and stay in power?

First, the negative short-term impacts of the ERP were overstated (or rather, overestimated) because Ghana had a massive black market. Many dumb government interventions – like the currency evaluation, the price controls, the artificially low cocoa prices, etc. – were offset by the black market simply ignoring the law. The official cedi-to-USD exchange rate was bonkers, but people could get the unofficial rate from cash brokers on the streets of Accra. The official Cocoa Marketing Board cocoa price was insultingly low, but cocoa farmers could sell cocoa across the border in the Ivory Coast at higher prices. Even the official rise in food prices wasn’t that bad because many people were already paying those prices under-the-table to merchants keenly aware of supply-and-demand. In 1982, Rawlings’s revolution and vigilante gangs probably suppressed the black market for a time and hurt the economy, but once he wound down the revolution in 1983, the black market came back to lessen the pain of the ERP.

Second, people were scared of Rawlings. He had burst on to the national scene by executing eight leading government officials, then he had taken over the country a second time and led a “revolution” with vigilante gangs across the country. Ghana had never experienced this much violence and brutality before. Many people hated the ERP, but they sure as hell weren’t willing to stand against it, let alone publicly.

Third, Rawlings did a good job of consolidating power. As already discussed, Rawlings replaced key government and military figures with loyal Ewes. He was also a military man to begin with, so he had the general support of the army, which always represented the greatest threat to Ghana’s regimes. Despite this, Rawlings fended off quite a few coups, though none ever came to violence. Rawlings was constantly vigilant of threats to the regime, and always kept something of a purge mentality. In 1982, Rawlings’s Provisional National Defense Council had seven members, including himself; by 1984, all six of the other members had either been sentenced to death, sentenced to jail, or forced to resign.

Fourth, according to Herbst and other sources (including many Ghanaians that I talked to), Ghana just isn’t a very political country. Or at least it isn’t a very activist-oriented country. Its national character has a live-and-let-live element to it. So even if millions of urban workers were hurt by Rawlings policies, that’s not enough to make them do something crazy like storm the government. This may sound like a massive generalization, but I do think there’s truth to it. After all, Ghana has had its share of coups, but no wars (except via ECOWAS), no civil wars, no mass uprisings, and even its revolutionary period under Rawlings was brief and killed, like, 100 people. That’s pretty tame for a West African country.

Return to Democracy

By the early 1990s, things were going pretty well for Rawlings. The economy was still recovering under the ERP’s policies, Ghana’s international reputation was solid due to dealings with the IMF and World Bank, and dissent against Rawlings’s authority had largely subsided.

So in April 1992, Rawlings held a referendum on a return to constitutional democracy with political parties, elections, a Parliament, term limits, and all the basics of a modern liberal government. The referendum passed with almost 93% support. Rawlings accepted the result and declared that political parties were immediately legalized and that the first Parliamentary elections would be held in November.

This marked the end of Rawlings’s dictatorship, and he even resigned from the military, but it was not the end of Rawlings. His Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) formed its own party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC; see what he did there?), and Rawlings ran at its head in the 1992 elections. An opposition sprung up as the New Patriotic Party (NPP) which ran a history professor and long-time dissident against Rawlings. Hilla Limann, the democratically elected president Rawlings put in power and then overthrew in 1981, also ran as an also ran.

Rawlings won with over 58% of the vote; the NPP professor got 30% and Limann got under 7%. Given that the election was run and won by a dictator who had seized power twice and ran Ghana for the last decade, there was a lot of skepticism that the voting would be free and fair. When the dust cleared, the consensus from the international community was…

The election was sound; Rawlings really was that popular. The Carter Center’s report on the election said there were “irregularities and inconsistencies” but no consistent biases of evidence of rigging. A summarizing quote:

“Human rights and civil liberties have been fundamentally restored in Ghana after a period of extra-constitutional governance. The “culture of silence” has been dissipated, hopefully forever. The press in Ghana enjoys, and sometimes misuses, its widened freedom. The political parties were all given substantial opportunities to present their views via state-owned and electronic media… All of these achievements and more augur well for the consolidation of a political culture of open debate, tolerance and accountability.”

The NPP disagreed and denounced the election as fraudulent. Allegedly, Rawlings began campaigning before he legalized other parties, he used government structures to support his campaign, he censored opponents in the state-owned press, and he gave a giant pay raise to government employees right before the election.

Thus the NPP announced that they would be boycotting the Parliamentary elections held a few months later, leading Rawlings’s NDC to win 189 out of 200 seats.

Did Rawlings really tilt the election in his favor? I don’t know. It seems plausible, but it also seems plausible that the NPP exaggerated his crimes and boycotted the Parliamentary elections to undermine Rawlings’s legitimacy; it’s a super common tactic in Africa.

Regardless, the 1992 election was seen as yet another triumph by Jerry Rawlings. He had successfully transitioned from dictator to democratic president with a stamp of approval from the international community, an extraordinarily rare feat in history. And for the next four years, Rawlings really did rule like a democratically-elected leader. Even the NPP, after boycotting the elections, settled into an opposition party role, and Rawlings operated merely as a ruling party leader rather than as a dictator who wielded vigilante squads to enforce his will.

In the 2015 interview, Rawlings was asked whether he preferred to rule as a dictator or under a constitution and he had to admit “it was easier” as a dictator. But he refused to concede that there was no democracy before 1992. In classic Roman Caesar fashion, he considered his pre-constitutional reign to be a purer form of democracy in which he ruled by the tacit will of the people. Supposedly, under the pre-1992 regime, Ghanaians never enjoyed so much “freedom and creativity,” “sense of purpose,” and “sense of justice” before or since.

In 1996, Rawlings ran again, but with even more scrutiny and international oversight, so much that the NPP couldn’t whine and throw a fit when Rawlings whooped them again. This time, Rawlings won with 57% of the vote while the NDC carried 134 seats.

How did the eight years of democratic Rawlings rule go? Within Ghana, there was a sense that Rawlings’s government and Ghana itself were stagnating, which Rawlings’s opponents used as the basis of a fairly aggressive anti-Rawlings platform. But from looking at the numbers, things went well. GDP growth still looked pretty good:

Per capita GDP growth looks similar:

Same with inflation:

(Again, yes, by post-colonial Ghana’s standards, keeping annual inflation under 40% is a success.)

Here’s cocoa production:

Yet again, the only macroeconomic black eye was government debt:

In 2001, Rawlings’s second term ended and he couldn’t run for president again under Constitutional term limits. After almost two decades in power, Rawlings voluntarily stepped down from office and became a private citizen. He watched as his chosen successor and former vice president lost the presidential election and the NDC lost control of Parliament. Rawlings didn’t launch another coup and he didn’t denounce the election. He said it was all free-and-fair and Ghana should accept the results.

It’s surprising how little influence Rawlings had over Ghana’s politics over the next 22 years. I mean, his institutional reforms had a tremendous influence on the state, and the culture he cultivated had a huge influence on Ghanaian society, but Rawlings himself did fairly little of importance throughout the 21st century. He took some diplomatic roles in the African Union and elsewhere, and gave lectures and interviews sometimes, but that’s about it.

In November 2020, Jerry Rawlings died due to complications from COVID-19. I know I’ve thrown a lot of charts into this essay already, but here’s one more to summarize Rawlings’s economic legacy (reminder – Ghana got independence in 1957 and the Economic Recovery Platform started in 1983):

Corruption

What about corruption? Fighting corruption was always Jerry Rawlings’s number one priority in Ghana and inspired his initial bloodbath in 1979. Did he ultimately make Ghana less corrupt?

Maybe… it’s hard to tell.

Corruption is a lot more intangible than other economic markers. The Corruption Perceptions Index gives Ghana a score of 43/100 (higher is better) and a ranking of #72 least corruption country in the world. This is the best ranking of any state in West Africa, tied with Senegal, The Gambia, and Benin. Across the continent’s mainland, Ghana only lags behind Rwanda, Namibia, and Botswana.

But, yeah, Ghana is still a very corrupt country. On the ground, it was common for my tour guide to fend off bribes from cops, though he explained that they usually don’t bother foreigners. From numerous conversations, there is a widespread perception that all political leaders are corrupt and get in office just to make money, which, to be fair, is par-for-the-course in Africa.

Personal Corruption

How did I go over the entire life of an African dictator and never once mention his personal corruption? Even Kwame Nkrumah, who most definitely was a true believing Ghanaian patriot, embezzled money from the state, took kickbacks, and set up his very own state-owned enterprise to collect bribes and launder money. So what funny business did Rawlings get up to?

I don’t know. And as far as I can tell, neither does anyone else. I tried to look into Rawlings’s corruption and didn’t find much one way or another. But here are at least some not very good sources on possible Rawlings’s corruption:

• Corporal Matthew Adabuga claimed Rawlings took power to get rich, and that his wife in particular looted the state at every opportunity.
• Some website has a lot of anti-Rawlings articles, like one that claims Rawlings owns houses and businesses in at least 11 countries, but I can’t find its source.
• There’s this random essay I found on Google that has no named author nor source, but it seems comprehensively written. The essay cites a few instances of apparent corruption by high government officials in the Rawlings regime, though not by Rawlings himself.
• In 2016, Buzzfeed Ghana declared Rawlings to be the 9th richest man in Africa with a net worth of $50 million, though no sources are cited, and even for Africa, $50 million seems too low for the 9^th richest person. Rawlings himself denied it in a speech. I tried searching for other sources on Rawlings’s net-worth and found extremely wildly varying estimates with no good sources.

There isn’t a ton of info on Rawlings’s childhood, but he seemed neither poor nor rich by Ghanaian standards. Prior to coming to power, he had only ever worked in the military. So we can assume that any wealth he had after leaving the presidency was made during his time in power, either legitimately or illegitimately.

So I tried looking at Rawlings’s personal life to find evidence of wealth, but couldn’t find much detail. As far as I can tell, Rawlings was decently well-off when he left the presidency, especially by African standards, but I don’t see any showings of extreme wealth. No European chateaux, no sports cars, nothing like that. His children went to good schools (ex. Trinity College in Dublin, Boston University, Aston University, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland), and they all seem prosperous, but mostly as upper-middle class professionals (one is a doctor in Ghana’s Parliament, one’s a lawyer, one works in oil and gas, and the other worked for Rawlings before he died). I’m sure money helped get his kids into these schools and work, but family connections and prestige could have also helped a lot.

Here’s a picture of Rawlings’s house in 2010 after it burned down. It looks pretty big, but not huge. Again, it looks more like the house that an ordinarily prosperous African would own, not like something a hugely corrupt dictator would own.

So, if I had to guess… I’d say Rawlings probably didn’t engage in any substantial corruption while in office. Maybe he paid himself a very good salary for 18 years, but that isn’t necessarily an instance of corruption. I suppose it’s possible that Rawlings stole a ton of money from Ghana and hid it extremely well, but I see no evidence of that. I’d even say that for an African dictator, Rawlings was likely remarkably uncorrupt.

What Made Rawlings So Successful?

My take on Rawlings based on everything I’ve read about him is that he’s one of the best benevolent dictators of at least the modern era. His achievements in Ghana may not quite be at the level of Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, but in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa, Rawlings did a remarkable job of turning a broken country around… after he had broken it some more. And after he had brutalized and killed a bunch of people, which can’t be ignored in his legacy.

Still, what did Rawlings do right?

First, Rawlings was obviously a smart guy. This is a boring answer, but his handling of the two coups, defense of his power in office, and general policy visions indicate that he was more than a cut above the standard African strongman.

Second, Rawlings was willing to change his mind. This may very well be the most remarkable aspect of his entire regime. He went from generic anti-corruption strongman to populist revolutionary to liberal economic reformer in five years, and later he went from a dictator who ruled by decree to an elected president who ruled as the head of an executive in a basically functional Parliamentary democracy. But Rawlings wasn’t fickle; his political changes weren’t arbitrary or based on malign influences or whims, they seem to have been thoughtfully chosen.

Third, most controversially, Rawlings seemed to use just the right amount of force, and even brutality, to be a successful strongman. Plenty of dictators have believed that they needed to spill blood to achieve their ends, and Rawlings was no different; he executed eight regime heads after the 1979 coup and led vigilante squads during the 1982 revolution, and even during the ERP, Rawlings arrested quite a few military rivals for fear of a coup. This use of violence quelled opposition and inculcated a level of fear throughout Ghana that lingers today among Rawlings’s opponents. However, Rawlings was far from the bloody tyrant that so many of his contemporaries became. It feels weird to say something like, “c’mon, he didn’t kill that many people,” but… yeah, the Rawlings regime was far below average in brutality by Sub-Saharan African dictator standards, and perhaps his regime would have never succeeded in achieving its considerable goals if Rawlings hadn’t used a touch of brutality.

Fourth, as far as I can tell, Rawlings was not personally corrupt, or at least was incredibly good at hiding his corruption. African corruption is extremely deep and endemic, but surely some proportion of systematic corruption is driven by top-down behavior, and over twenty years of post-independence government, Ghana finally experienced relatively non-corrupt rule under Rawlings. I don’t have any explanation for this except that Rawlings probably was a true believing patriot who put the needs of Ghana above his personal gain.

Fifth, Rawlings not only knew when to quit, but how to quit. He almost certainly could have continued his dictatorship past 1992, and he probably could have finagled his way into an indefinite pseudo-dictatorship after 2001 with fraudulent elections. But instead, Rawlings stayed in power for long enough to fully implement his reforms and reverse at least some of the institutional corruption, and then he gracefully retired.

Is Ghana Really a Success Story?

40 years after Jerry Rawlings implemented the Economic Recovery Program, Ghana is considered the “success story” of Africa. To put that in proper context:

• Ghana’s GDP per capita is slightly higher than the likes of Haiti, Honduras, and Cambodia. Ghana’s GDP per capita is slightly lower than the likes of Kenya, India, and Nicaragua. Ghana’s GDP per capita is less than half that of Moldova, the poorest country in Europe.
• In 2019, more than half of Ghana’s population made less than $3.85 per day, a higher percentage than any North American country besides Haiti and Belize.
• Ghana’s life expectancy is ranked 162nd in the world, narrowly beating out Yemen.
• While editing this essay, the New York Times published a piece detailing Ghana’s endless financial woes, including the government defaulting on its debt for the 17th time in December 2022.

I also skimmed back over Tom Burgis’s The Looting Machine where he briefly makes the case that Ghana being the success story of West Africa is the ultimate condemnation of West Africa’s governments and their treatment by Western countries and companies.

Sadly, I can’t help but be pessimistic about Ghana. I travelled through almost every country in West Africa, and I honestly couldn’t tell the difference in living standards for the average person. I know that Ghana, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, and Mauritania are technically wealthier than the others, even by more than 2X compared to the likes of Guinea-Bissau, but on the ground, the vast majority of people seem dirty poor everywhere.

The only noticeable difference in wealth between West African countries is seen in the most elite parts of the most elite cities. Lagos, Accra, Ibadan, Cotonou, and Dakar had sections that could be called “nice” by Western standards if you throw in a bunch of qualifiers (like, excepting the broken glass lining the tops of the walls around all the houses). There were mansions, new steel towers, and the occasional clean-swept and well-maintained street. Accra even has a little brand new area near the airport with malls, Western restaurants, and palm trees that looks like it could be in Miami. The other major West African cities and capitals – Conakry, Bissau, Serrekunda, Bamako, Lome, Freetown, Monrovia, and Nouakchott – never reached that level.

So the way I conceptualize “wealthier” African countries is that they have enough natural resource extraction, concentration of wealth in the financial/political center, and basic political order to amass a small middle and upper class. This tiny middle class can live a quality of life approximating something close to the average in Eastern Europe or the more prosperous South American countries, while the tiny upper class entirely consists of politically connected families and foreigners (resource extractors and aid workers, both of whom are extremely well paid).

The rest of the population continues to live in abject poverty with little-to-no difference in quality of life despite what the GDP per capita numbers may say. This is the unfortunate qualifier that should follow any proclamation of a mainland African success story, at least among the countries I’ve seen (I’ve heard very good things about Rwanda, Mauritius, and Botswana, maybe they’re different).

So… Ghana is a success story in some regards – stability, political order, even economically to a small degree – but it still has a long way to go before it becomes a success story by non-West African standards.

Visiting Ghana

With all the history out of the way, I don’t have that much to say about visiting Ghana. Not that it wasn’t interesting, but it wasn’t too different from what I described in Notes on Nigeria, Benin, and The Gambia (though it’s not similar to Mauritania). As expected, Ghana was calmer and generally easier than Nigeria, but the general vibe and energy was as West African as everywhere else. The streets are chaotic, the poverty is omnipresent, the cities are rundown, the nature is pretty, and the people are extremely friendly, sometimes to a fault.

Here are a few interesting things I noticed specifically in Ghana:

African American Tourism

As the “easy mode” of African travel, Ghana is a tourism hot spot… by the standards of a West African country. In 2019 (a pre-pandemic year built around a special tourism campaign), Ghana had a little over 1.1 million tourists, earning the country about $1.5 billion in revenue, or about 2.2% of GDP at the time. Most of these tourists come from surrounding African countries and others were Westerners who want an easy tourist entry into Africa, but somewhere a bit closer (and a bit more hardcore) than super tourist-friendly Kenya.

But unlike almost every other African country, Ghana is a hotspot specifically for African American tourism. The lands of modern-day Ghana were one of the biggest sources of the British slave trade and many African Americans are descendants of Ghana’s tribes. The Ghanaian government has wisely leaned into this and billed the country as a site for heritage-pilgrimage tourism for American blacks who want to go back to their roots. See here, here, here, etc.

The Ghanaian government first tapped into black tourism under – who else!? – Jerry Rawlings, whose government opened up the slave forts as tourist attractions, launched a bunch of heritage festivals and holidays, and tried to breathe a little life into a tourism industry that had been annihilated by decades of economic decline and political instability.

More recently, Ghana launched “Year of Return” in 2019 (the 400^th anniversary of the start of slave exports), to promote tourism targeted at black Americans. I guess it went well enough – a decent bump in tourist numbers and an impressive 38% increase in spending per tourist – to be spun into “Beyond the Return,” a ten year tourism initiative to do even more advertising, develop tourist infrastructure, attract foreign investment, and even get black foreigners to move to Ghana (with waived “survey and registration fees,” and the support of a domestic advertising campaign urging locals to stop calling the new transplants “foreigners”).

What do these tourists see? The main attractions are Emina Castle, Fort Christiansburg, and a dozen other smaller forts where European merchants held slaves before shipping them overseas. There’s also Assin Manso, an inland site where slaves were given their last chance to bathe at an eerily beautiful spot by a river where you can see flecks of gold in the sand. IMO, very unique historical cites, very worth seeing.

Religion

From a five year old Reddit post on Ghana:

People seem to go to church during all of their free time and church there is basically leeches promising wealth and wonders in the future in exchange for donations sucking up all the people’s anxieties, hopes and dreams of a better life to build palaces and buy land cruisers for [the] “reverends”.”

As a standard secular Westerner, it’s hard to grasp the intensity of religion in Ghana. There are churches EVERYWHERE. There are advertisements for churches, preachers, “prophets,” and their shows EVERYWHERE. I swear that at least half the channels on TVs in hotels are dedicated to sermons. And the vast majority of it is of the Evangelical and Charismatic variety, Southern US mega-church type stuff.

Speculation – the modern Catholic Church sucks at missionary work. French West Africa is almost entirely Muslim (the Ivory Coast being the exception at 40% Christian), while the two major West African former British colonies (Ghana and Nigeria) are 70% and 50% Christian. Those Ghanaian and Nigerian Christians aren’t boring Episcopalians, they’re mostly Pentecostals, Presbyterians (non-boring variants), and other smaller hardcore Protestant sects. English-speaking Protestant Churches must be really good at missionary work and thus have cultivated millions of extremely devout Africans.

Window Stickers

Ghanaians are really into putting possibly illegal, often baffling stickers on the rear-windows of their cars:

Slooooooooow

In contrast to Nigerians, Ghanaians talk and walk quite slowly. I admit that I found it a tad annoying. There’s just this general air of relaxation and passivity, kind of like the southeast in the US. People generally aren’t in a rush and they’re rarely on time. And EVERY SINGLE TIME you meet a local, you have to go through these repetitious pleasantries – “hello, how are you,” “good how are you?”, etc. That’s all well and good in specific social situations, but I don’t need to do it ten times per day with random strangers.

Ghanaians seem keenly aware of this slowness. My tour guide warned me of it and a few locals brought it up.

Poison Offer

I went to the Aburi Botanical Gardens, a beautiful hilltop site filled with local flowers, trees, and crops. I took a tour with a few other tourists which was more interesting than expected because we got to eat a bunch of medical plants and flowers straight from the ground. On the last stop, the guide pointed to a tree and told us that the species was formerly used to produce poisoned arrows. The bark could be cut off to access this sap-like substance just underneath, which, if ingested or put in the bloodstream, is fatal.

Then the guide asked us if anyone wanted to try it. Everyone stood silently for a moment of confusion before he clarified that he could cut into the bark, get some of the poison, and we could lick it off his knife. After more silence, he explained that the poison makes you turn extremely red and your whole face swells up to comical proportions in about 15 minutes, and soon after you’ll have trouble breathing, but it’s ok because they have an antidote in that shabby concrete building over there, it’s the garden medical center.

No one in our tourist group took the offer, so I asked if anyone ever did. The guide said yes! Over the years he’s been doing the tour, a British guy, an Italian guy, and two German girls together took the poison. And all turned out fine after taking the antidote.

As with hand-feeding wild monkeys in Monkey Park in The Gambia, this is another one of those things you simply can’t experience in the West. Or the East for that matter, or really anywhere with a normally functioning legal system. For better or worse.

Portrait of a Modern Man

I went on an extensive tour of Ghana with a guide I’ll call Abdul, and he told me a lot about himself and his beliefs. Obviously, we can’t infer too much about an entire country or culture from a single individual, but my sense is that Abdul is a pretty good portrait of an average Ghanaian man, so I’m going to briefly describe his life.

Abdul is a 28 year-old Muslim from a small northern city. He’s tall (northerners are known for their height), thin, boyishly good looking. His father had four wives; Abdul was the eldest child of the second wife though she became the first wife after the prior first wife got divorced. The father, the three current wives, and most of Abdul’s 11 siblings and their spouses and children live together in a single home.

Growing up, the family was provided for entirely by the father who had some sort of professional job that made him relatively wealthy. However, he fell ill a few years ago and can no longer work, so the family is picking up the slack as best they can. As a guide who works for a company in Accra, Abdul is probably the highest earner in his family. Most of his income goes directly to his wife who takes care of their two kids within the father’s household, but virtually all money left over is distributed to the rest of the family on an ad hoc basis. While we were travelling in the north, Abdul made three stops to deliver money to separate brothers and sisters, and I’d estimate each delivery was for around $30-50.

Abdul had a girlfriend in college, a Christian from another region. Both families were accepting of the match despite the cultural and religious differences. They were together for three years until (according to Abdul) she had an affair. When Abdul found out, he broke up with her immediately. A few months later, he met another woman at work, a local northern Muslim girl, and they married within six months.

If Abdul had his own home, his new wife (who I’ll call Amma) would have moved in. Since Abdul lives with his father, Amma moved into his house and was rapidly integrated into the household system. Over a dozen people live together and the household operates like a machine to take care of them. Laundry, cooking, cleaning, repairs, childcare, etc., is all communally worked. Abdul’s father is the patriarch, but management is largely deferred to his three wives who rotate roles and responsibilities, and further delegate tasks to the other women in the family (Abdul’s unmarried sisters and sisters-in-laws).

In other words, for a woman, getting married isn’t just a process of starting a new life with the husband, it’s a massive transition to starting a new life with a family and household machine. Amma gained not only a new husband and in-laws, but new work and bosses.

That’s why Abdul says the single-most-important aspect of selecting a bride is finding someone who gets along with his parents, particularly his birth mother. Fortunately, Abdul’s mother and Amma get along very well, which is part of the reason he married her. Amma became a productive member of the house and rarely causes problems, even if she doesn’t like the other two mother-in-laws as much. Within a few years of the marriage, Amma had two children with Abdul, so her communal household work lessened as she focused more on her own children, though she was still expected to contribute.

After seeing his father beat his wives while growing up, Abdul vowed never to do the same to his wife (or someday wives) and claims to have kept to that promise. He also has no problem with women doing any work, and said that he hopes his daughter would become a doctor or lawyer when she grows up.

But Adbul is no feminist. He is the head of his portion of the household and expects his wife to be fundamentally obedient toward him and take on wifely duties – cooking, cleaning, 95% of childcare, etc. He insists that his wife tells him every time she leaves the house. This holds true even when Abdul isn’t home, which is usually for 3+ weeks per month as he travels around the country for work. I asked Abdul if it would be ok for his wife to visit her parents who live about 30 minutes away without telling him beforehand, and he said “no.”

Abdul believes, and claims it is popularly believed, that if a woman is unmarried by her 30s, she is almost certainly “defective” in some critical manner. She could be barren, or insane, or a chronic cheater, or just really annoying.

Abdul believes women can’t be trusted with money, or at least too much of it. They will allegedly tend to fritter it away on nonsense. Hence, he never gives his wife or sisters more than small amounts.

If, somehow, a woman manages to make a lot of money through work and doesn’t blow it all on nonsense, Abdul believes it will destroy her marriage, but not for any moral or even traditional reasons, but in more of a modern Red Pill-y way. He claims that if a wife makes more than her husband, she will look down on him and inevitably cheat. I inferred that he believes this happened to him with his last girlfriend.

Abdul claims that he has never cheated on his wife, and I 75% believe him. Infidelity is rampant in Ghana and seemingly all of West Africa (I’ll probably expand on this in a future essay). Quite a few men fully admitted their infidelity to me, so Abdul denying it gives him a bit of credence. However, Abdul also once said something like, “the tough part about saying a guy cheated is that he might just be looking for his second wife, so maybe it doesn’t count;” he also extensively argued that male cheating isn’t as bad as female cheating because men don’t get romantically attached through sex, while women always do. Maybe my 75% trust level is a little generous.

Like his own parents, Abdul would have no problem with his children marrying anyone of any race, nationality, or ethnic group. But on gender preference… Abdul believes that homosexuality is evil and a Western norm imposed on Africa by imperialists. This was not the first time I heard this sentiment.

Abdul has a sensitive side too. One night he confided that he worried his wife was lonely and that they didn’t have a good relationship. From his description of their interactions, they sounded very professional and mechanical together, with little romance left. He travels a lot, doesn’t see her much, and she spends all her time on childcare and household duties. Abdul admitted that they hadn’t had a conversation about anything but children and money for years. He was equally concerned about his relationship with his children whom he saw just as rarely.

It was pretty heavy stuff for a 29 year old guy. While talking about this, he began to plan a road trip for the whole family the following month, a solid week of time with all of them together. I hope they did it.

Abdul comes off as quite disgruntled at the general state of Ghana. He believes that all Ghanaian politicians are corrupt and are hindering the country’s growth (Jerry Rawlings being an exception and by far Ghana’s greatest leader ever). Abdul went to a local college and studied to be a pharmacist, but was unable to get work in the field after graduating, for which he blames the government. He seems unhappy as a tour guide but does it anyway for the money to take care of his family.

Abdul has a low opinion of foreign governments, which he casts as meddling and imperialistic (including both the US and China), but he has a high opinion of foreigners. Granted, I’m a foreigner, so I doubt he’d express any anger directly toward me, but throughout our time together he repeatedly cast aspersions on Ghanaians for being poor, ignorant, and uneducated in contrast to the foreigners he worked with. He found local begging and heavy handed selling toward foreigners to be especially egregious and considered these actions moral failings on the part of Ghanaians.

Miscellaneous

• “It is startling to note that in 1957 Ghana had the same per capita income as South Korea” – Politics of Reform in Ghana, 1982-1981

• The Atlantic Ocean coast of Ghana, and much of West Africa, has really strong waves on its beaches. Apparently the region is an emerging surfer spot.
• War of the Golden Stool – the British had nominal colonial sovereignty over the Ashanti Empire based in modern inland Ghana. In 1900s, the Ashanti briefly bucked British rule, so the Brits sent some soldiers led by Frederick Hodgson to put down the rebellion. When Hodgson arrived, as a sign of ultimate submission, he demanded that the Ashanti relinquish their Golden Stool, a literal stool made of gold used for royal ceremonies, which Hodgson may or may not have believed would grant him (as in, personally him) the eternal loyalty of the Ashanti. The Ashanti refused and ambushed Hodgson and his forces. More British reinforcements were called in until the rebellion was put down and the leading Ashanti chiefs were arrested and exiled. However, they never gave up the golden stool, which had been hidden throughout the war. Eventually, the British relinquished their claim on the stool, but formally annexed the Ashanti. We’ll call it a tie.
• Ghana is currently the 10^th largest gold producer in the world (top three are an axis of evil – China, Russia, and Australia).
• Ghana is currently the second largest cocoa producer in the world, trailing behind the Ivory Coast by over 2 million annual metric tons to less than 900,000 tons. However, Ghana makes basically no chocolate; don’t be fooled by the Ghana brand of chocolate bar, it’s made by South Koreans.
• Ghana only has one natural lake, but also the largest man-made lake in the world.
• Most post-independent African countries kept their colonial names with a few exceptions – Upper Volta became Burkina Faso, the Sudanese Republic became Mali, etc. The Gold Coast became Ghana at the suggestion of one of the founders of the United Gold Coast Convention, though a lot of sources falsely attribute the name change to Kwame Nkrumah. The name “Ghana,” was based on the Ghana Empire which existed from 700-1235 in modern day Mali and Mauritania. Or, in other words, nowhere near modern Ghana. Supposedly, many of modern Ghana’s ethnic groups migrated from the Ghana Empire.

• This adorable little guy got a lot of free food off me: