“Hail the Census Night”: Trust and Political Imagination in the 1960 Population Census of Ghana

Gerardo Serra

doi:10.1017/s0010417518000221

Abstract

AbstractThe article uses the first population census of postcolonial Ghana to analyze the relationship between statistics and the process of imagining the nation-state. In contrast with much historical and sociological literature, which conceptualizes the relationship between census-taking and state formation in terms of identification, classification, and quantification, the departure point of this analysis is the importance of gaining the trust of the counted subjects. In Ghana, where the possibility of obtaining accurate population returns had been severely hindered by people's distrust in the state, the 1960 population census saw the organization of a capillary education campaign in schools and in the press. By dissecting the iconographies emerging from the Census Education and Enlightenment Campaign, the article makes three contributions. First, it shows that understanding the concrete ways in which statistics inform political imagination requires an expansion of the field of observation beyond the statistical machinery and other “centers of calculation.” Second, complementing James Ferguson's understanding of “development discourse” as an “anti-politics machine,” it is argued that the possibility of making the people of Ghana “census minded” depended on the construction of a much richer set of inherently political representations about the nature of the postcolonial state. Finally, it shows the importance of critically interrogating the political implications acquired by the reception of global statistical practices. It does so by documenting the multiple ways in which the international standards promoted by the United Nations became entwined with the transformation of Ghanaian politics through the mobilization of children and press propaganda.

Highlights

In the early 1960s Africa was rife with hopes
Between 1957 and 1966, when a military coup put an end to the rule of Kwame Nkrumah, the state embarked on a radical attempt to expand the provision of health and Acknowledgments: Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 41st Annual Meeting of the History of Economics Society (Université du Québec à Montréal, 2014), the annual meeting of the African Economic History Network (London School of Economics, 2014), the “Figuring Disparity: The Measurement of Inequality in Historical Perspective” workshop (University of Cambridge, 2015), the “Development by Indicators: Knowledge and Governance” workshop (Nantes Institute for Advanced Study, 2015), and the 18th World Economic History Congress (Kyoto, 2015)
The provisional results of the count were released in May 1960: the total population of Ghana amounted to 6,690,730.116 The final population figure, published the following December, was even higher, amounting to 6,726,815.117 This largely exceeded the United Nations 1958 projections that had estimated the population in 1960 would be 4,980 million, and reach 6,100 million only in 1975.118 The difference between the total population recorded in 1960 and 1948 figures was around 2,600,000 people

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In the early 1960s Africa was rife with hopes. For the newly independent states, the collection, construction, and dissemination of statistics came to be seen as an important precondition of economic and social modernization. As the first colony in Sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence from British rule, in March 1957, Ghana incarnated the hopes of the continent. Between 1957 and 1966, when a military coup put an end to the rule of Kwame Nkrumah, the state embarked on a radical attempt to expand the provision of health and

C A M PA I G N

THE CENSUS RESULTS

CONCLUSIONS