British Propaganda and the Mobilization of the Gold Coast War Effort, 1939–1945

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

This article examines the nature and impact of the most extensive propaganda campaign mounted in a British West African colony during the Second World War. An avalanche of war information and appeals to the people of the Gold Coast was channelled through a new communications network which included radio broadcasting, information bureaux, and mobile cinema presentations. The innovative wartime publicity scheme was not enough to produce a completely voluntary war effort; however, the campaign was responsible for irreversibly changing mass communications techniques in the territory. The propaganda drive used in the war mobilization provided a pool of experienced propagandists and a successful structural model which proved valuable both to post-war governments charged with pre-independence political education, community development and public services, and, somewhat ironically, to anti-colonialist post-war party politics.