Et in arcadia ego: Politics and learning in Ghana

Abstract

Fragments of an autobiography are of little interest in themselves, but they may be of help in putting together the history of the times from which they are remembered. In the pages which follow, which include such fragments, I have tried to pursue a simple theme. It is that of the export of ideas and institutions from Britain to a colonial country, and the difficulties which arose from their import into Ghana. I was no more than half oonscious of such problems during the 1950s when I was engaged in adult education. I was too busy enjoying myself in as devoted a way as I could under the aegis of the department of extra-mural studies, and the questions which troubled others became for me of academic interest only later when I began to look back at the relationship between the university at Legon and the government in Accra. What that relationship was and what it is today reflect a familiar theme. It can be restated by noting that the location of political power in Ghana after the first election in 1951, as under the present military Redemption Council, was out of line with the very high social status accorded the educated elite of the universities. Admittedly, there was nothing very new in that: the correspondence between political and social power is rarely exact. It is also easy as Professor Mackenzie once pointed out for observers to mistake one for the other, to look at institutions and the powers vested in them without noticing the sometimes rival, sometimes complementary, strength of a social hierarchy in which power may rest on a very different footing.1 In Ghana, however, in the decade before and after independence, the educated elite and the political leadership were sharply opposed. They were opposed in a very broad sense as "rival colonists". From 1945 onwards, graduates from the universities had begun to enter the public service, local government, the professions and business enterprises, replacing the British, and becoming a new administrative elite with direct access to the resources of the state. But in laying hold of the proto-independent state, they were opposed by the power of a nationalist party in the hands of a " political class on-the-make " which was certainly no less determined to exploit the resources they were beginning to control. Of course, such differences were often blurred by expediency and common sense: but they were " encapsulated ", so to speak, in the opposition of the university as an institution of privilege to the nationalist and today the military government as an apparatus of control. These differences were sharpened