5. Conservatives, Nationalists, and American Romantics Debating Legal Education in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana

Abstract

In 1957, Ghana became one of the first independent states in Africa. Its new president, Kwame Nkrumah, opened the Ghana School of Law in November. In January 1959, a law department was founded at the University of Ghana. In this chapter, we explore the struggles over legal education that took place in Ghana. The faculty was the first in Africa to attract support from the Ford Foundation’s initiative to support teaching and research in new law schools. Ford provided not only funding but also support to expatriate staff from the United States working at the university alongside local and British colleagues. The purpose of legal education was a key intellectual and political battleground. We examine the conflict over the relative roles of the university law department and the Ghana Law School and explore how key protagonists positioned themselves in the debates. We argue that legal education in Ghana can be understood through the lenses of the cold war and nationalist politics, in particular with reference to Nkrumah’s deteriorating relationship with the United States, which led to the deportation of the American dean of the university law faculty in 1964.