Transferring Power in Ghana: Some Thoughts on What the Archives Might Be Telling Us

Abstract

GHANA STUDIES / Volume 1 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 1998 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 123 TRANSFERRING POWER IN GHANA Some Thoughts on What the Archives Might Be Telling Us1 RICHARD RATHBONE Itisnowmorethanadecadesincetheideaofattemptingtoemulatetheworkof Sir Nicholas Mansergh2 on India and Hugh Tinker on Burma for the rest of the British colonial empire was first discussed.3 The timing was appropriate; a great deal of the relevant material was either opening or was shortly to be opened in the Public Record Office under the normal operational schedule of the United Kingdom’s thirty-year rule. The closure of the substantial body of material embargoed for longer than thirty years could be now be challenged with a greater expectation of success as a more receptive Lord Chancellor’s Committee responded to positive political moves in the direction of what was increasingly being called “open government.” The involvement of the then Minister, William Waldegrave, should be credited for the commitment to initiating the constructive changes which, unsurprisingly, historians have generally welcomed.4 Several volumes in the resulting series have now been published. These cover the making of imperial policy in the 1930s,5 the period of two post-war Labour Governments6 and the first Conservative government.7 We now have to hand, at high prices admittedly, a useful and stimulating survey of pre-war colonial policy , and comprehensive, multi-part coverage of the “high policy” concerns of post-war Labour and Conservative governments. So far as British-ruled Africa is 1. This paper was first read to a session on the TransferofPowerinAfrica at the biennial conference of the African Studies Association (UK), held at SOAS, London, in September, 1998. 2. NicholasManserghetal.(eds.),ConstitutionalRelationsBetweenBritainandIndia:TheTransfer of Power 1943–47, 12 vols. (London, 1970–83); and Hugh Tinker (ed.), Constitutional Relations BetweenBritainandBurma:TheStruggleforIndependence,1944–48, 2 vols. (London, 1983–4). 3. The history of the British Documents on End of Empire Project (BDEEP) is to be found in the opening pages of all the volumes in the series. 4. Whilechallengehasopenedupmorefilesforscrutiny,thevolumeofclosedmaterialremains significant. See Richard Rathbone (ed.), Ghana, 2 vols. (London, 1992), vol. 1: lxix., footnote 2. 5. S. R. Ashton and S. E Stockwell (eds.), Imperial Policy and Colonial Practice, 2 vols. (London, 1996). 6. Ronald Hyam (ed.), The Labour Government and the End of Empire, 1945–1951, 4 vols. (London, 1992). 7. David Goldsworthy (ed.), The Conservative Government and the End of Empire, 1951– 1957, 3 vols. (London, 1994). 124 Ghana Studies • volume 1 • 1998 concerned, the Ghana,8 Egypt9 and Sudan10 studies are soon to be joined by others dealing with Kenya and Nigeria; and in due course it is to be hoped that other national or regional histories will be covered if further funding can be secured. By the next millennium our deeper understanding of the process we call the transfer of power in British colonial Africa will have been considerably enhanced. Regrettably it appears that nothing resembling the extensive *nature of the BDEE project is contemplated for the Belgian, French or Portuguese empires. Some of the inspired guess work, source-sampling, press and memoir bricolages that most generalizing works on the wider, more over-arching “end of empire” issues have tended to feed-off should have been replaced by comparative and exponential analysisbaseduponanextremelywidetrawlofdetailedprimarydata;suchatask would have been hard if not impossible for a single scholar to undertake. Reviewers have been unanimous in suggesting that the early doubts expressed about the project at the planning stage, some of which the present author shared, were misplaced. We have learnt a very great deal about the terminal colonial period in British Africa from the project. This piece reflects upon some of the issues which have emerged in the course of three extended periods of archival research on modem Ghanaian history. While no-one could possibly exhaust the material on Ghana in the Public Record Office (PRO), editing the BDEEP volume necessarily amounted to an enforced immersion in the wealth of that material; and of course very many more documents were jettisoned than were eventually published. In the course of further research in Ghana, a reasonably exhaustive search involved trawling through material for the same period as that...