The Making of a Nation: The Northern Territories and the Colonial Discourse of Nationhood in the Gold Coast, 1897–1950

Abstract

This article examines the exclusionary experiences of northern Ghana in the empire, which kept it at the periphery of Gold Coast national consciousness up to 1950. If the “nation” is an imagined community, as Benedict Anderson asserts, then the Gold Coast was a product of colonial discourse merging varying interests into a multicultural nation. The article explores why the Northern Territories lagged in influencing that imagined consciousness until 1951. I argue that a multiplicity of factors constrained the north’s contribution to the burgeoning national consciousness of the Gold Coast. The constriction was a function of colonial intentionality, distinct constitutional and political set-ups, economic policies, and the social circumstances in the protectorate. This work adds to our understanding of colonial northern Ghana and how structural disadvantages absented it from early colonial political and constitutional discourses that produced Ghanaian nationhood.