Politicians and Soldiers in Ghana 1966-1972 9780714640198

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
1. Military and Police Rule
2. Economic Policies
3. The Constitutional Commission
4. The Constituent Assembly
5. The Electoral Commission
6. The 1969 Election
7. Politics in Asunafo
8. Politics in Abuakwa
9. Politics in Swedru
10. Politics in Sekyere
Epilogue: Malcontents in Uniform
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

STUDIES IN COMMONWEALTH POLITICS AND HISTORY No.3

GeneralEditors: ProfessorW. H. MORRIS-JONES Institute of CommonwealthStudies, University ofLondon ProfessorDENNIS AUSTIN Departmentof Government, University ofManchester

POLITICIANS AND SOLDIERS IN GHANA 1966--1972

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Politicians and Soldiers in Ghana 1966-1972 Edited by

DENNIS AUSTIN Victoria

University of Manchester

and

ROBIN LUCKHAM Institute of Development Studies,

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge

Sussex

Taylo r & Franci s Grou p

LONDON AN D NEW YORK

First published197.5 by FRANK CASS AND COMPANY LIMIT ED Published2013 by Routledge 2 Part Square,MillOn Park, Abingdon.Oxon OX 14 4RN 71! Third Avenue, New Yoriuist, Chairman of the powerful Location Association in Sekondi, who had returnedfrom exile after the coup, was again confined in custodyby the N.L.C. which dealt with the disputehardly less severelythan the former party regimehad done.But between1966 and 1969, Lamptey,Scheckand Quist, usingtheir former contactsand links with the workers, were busy mobilising them aroundold accumulated grievances.It is significant that the first rally of the ProgressParty,after the ban on parties was lifted, was held at the Old Methodist School Park, Sekondi,on 18 May 1969. At this massmeeting,Busia reminded his audiencethat he was not only aware of the social and economic problemsof Sekondi-Takoradi(he had beenDistrict Commissionerin chargeof a Sociological Survey of the areain 1947-49)but had also sympathisedwith the workers,as evidencedby the supportgiven by his colleaguesduring the 1961 strike. He promisedto give the workerstheir proper rewards, and Lamptey and Scheck were cheeredby the over 50,000 people who had defied a two-hour rainstorm to witness the launchingof the party. On 7 June,Gbedemahalsolaunchedan equallywell-attendedrally at the sameport and railway town. He too promisedto create'right conditions for a happy understandingbetweenworkers and management throughthe improvementin the working conditionsof all Ghanaians'." But the electorsof Sekondi-T akoradi must have listenedto his speech with mixed feelings, for he had a history behind him which he was not allowed to forget. As a memberof the three-manPresidentialCommission which had handled the 1961 strike in its initial stages,he had ordered the imposition of a dusk to dawn curfew, declareda state of emergencyin the town, and orderedthe arrestof the marketwomenand the workers' leaders.Admittedly, shortly afterwards,he had gone into

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exile; but the image of Gbedemahwhich the e.P.P.Governmenthad tried to createwas that of a 'bourgeoisMinister', scaredby the radical directions towards which government policies were turning and seeking,in desperation,to forge conspiratorialrelations with the Opposition. Somewhatunjustifiably, therefore,he cameout of the crisis, on his return to Ghanaafter the coup,with the worst of both worlds: out of favour with the N.L.e. Governmentand out-flanked by Lamptey, Quist, and othersamongBusia'sassociateswho posedas the authentic spokesmenof the workers. His contactsin Sekondi-Takoradiwere thin on the ground, and his party sufferedin consequence.During the elections the poll in thesetwo key towns was a little low: only 56 per cent of the registeredvoters in Sekondi, and about 60 per cent in Takoradi, voted; nevertheless,K wesi Lamptey won easily, and the N.A.L. vote was less than half that for Progressin the two constituencies. If the historical oddsagainstGbedemahand N.A.L. in placessuchas Sekondi-Takoradiwere heavy, they were no less unfavourablein the rural, cocoa-farmingcommunities. Displaced by the N.L.M. in the Ashanti cocoa constituenciesbetween 1955 and 1957 the C.P.P. had re-establishedits grip after independence,and by the time of the first Republicin 1960the United GhanaFarmers'Council was underpartyappointedleaderswhoselack of any firm baseamongthe farming community was reflected in the frequency with which they commuted between world capitals. It was they who assuredthe governmentin 1959-60that farmers would be willing to have 6/- withheld from the price paid by the e.M.B. for every 60 lbs. cocoa-thatis, 16 per centof the price; two seasonslater, farmers too were askedto acceptgovernment bondsmaturingin ten yearsin placeof a further 10 per centof the price. It was indeedthe very heavyburdenon the cocoafarmerl2 which had led to an attempt by the C.P.P. governmentto widen the baseof taxation in the 1961 budget.Onceagain the former OppositionUnited Party had tried to build on the farmers'grievance.Therewere few open channelsof expressionthroughwhich discontentcould be voiced during the final yearsofNkrumah'srule, but the oppositiondid what it could to keep itself alive not only in Ashanti but in the south, especially in migrant farming areas.And these(illegal) attemptsto provide an alternative appeal and party brought their reward after the coup. The U.G.F.e.was disbanded; in its placethe CooperativeMarketing Council, and the CooperativeAlliance (both of which had been abolished under Nkrumah), were re-constituted; and early supportersof the co-operativemovement,such as K. B. Ntim (ProgressM.P. for Kade), GeorgeOteng (ProgressM.P. for Ahafo-Ano) and B. D. Addai came into their own again. Similarly, Gbedemahand N.A.L., by their links with the former party regime,were at a disadvantage.As in the caseof Lamptey and Quist in relation to the railway workers, so for Ntim,

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Oteng and others,in relationto the cocoafarmers,a new setof political circumstancesprovided new opportunities for political action. They appealedto the farmers for supportthrough the co-operatives,and in doing so found not only a basefor their own election successbut a potent sourceof strengthfor Busia and Progressin the cocoa growing areas. How did other sectionsof local society respond?There was an immensevariety in the re-awakeningof political life during the post-coup period, but perhapsthe most notableresponseto the fall of the c.P.P. was a generalreactionto the party'sattemptto assertthe superiorityof the central governmentover local bodies, including the weakeningof traditional authorities. The process had gone through many vicissitudes: but, by and large, the centre had gained power under Nkrumah at the expenseof localities, and populardiscontenthad been ruthlesslyand foolishly suppressed as evidenceof disloyalty to the state. After the coup, the reaction expresseditself in the proliferation and revival of Town Improvement Societies, Regional Organisations, Youth Associations,Ex-detaineeAssociations,andurbangroupsof one kind and another.Cautiouslyavoidingany brushwith the law (sincethe N.L.C. had banned political activities after the coup), these various groups publicly declaredthat their main objectives were social and economic.Eachregion complainedof neglect;and they neededactivist groupsto call the attentionof the N.L.C. to their needs-bodies like the Volta RegionEconomicAssociation,The NorthernYouth Association in the NorthernandUpperRegion;theBrong Ahafo Youth Association, the Ga Youth Association,and the AsanteYouth Association--each drawing on earlier organisationsof a similar kind. This manner of justifying their existencegavethem a greatdealof plausibility in theeyes of the soldiersandpolicemenwho, immediatelyon assumingpower,had committedthemselvesto an anti-centralistandvoluntaristplatform.But, as will be seen,in addition to being neededto fill the vacuumleft by the banningof the C.P.P.and its 'apparatgroups',theselocal associations providedpowerful supportfor the politicians asthey beganto emerge. Chronologically, the earliest groups were the local Town Improvement Associationswhich were later absorbedor overshadowedby Regional Associationsearly in 1968 and 1969. The following were typical of the various pre-party associationsin Ashanti of which the writer had particular knowledge-the Juaso Town Improvement Associationat the local territorial level, the Adansi Youth Association at the level of an historic community, and the AsanteYouth Association at the regional level: and each is a good exampleof the way in which local threadsof supportwere woven into an electoralnet. The Juaso Town Improvement Association was a revival of the Scholars Union, formed in 1948. Situated about 40 miles south of

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Kumasi, Juasowas once an important trading town (as evidencedby the ruined buildings of cocoa-buyingfirms) as well as an educational centre after a government school opened in 1918; its commercial, educational and administrative importance could hardly be rivalled within a radius of 40 miles. Kumawu, Juaben,Bompata,Agogo and Asokore, historically more important townships, were administered from Juaso,a preeminencewhich cameto be challenged,however,after the discoveryof gold in the 1930sat Konongosome7 miles away. The superiorwealth of Konongo then beganto be seenin its schools(both Catholic and Presbyterian),a busy lorry park, important expatriate of a comshops,an impressivepolice station and such appurtenances mercial centre as night-clubs. After independence,its growing importancebecamemore marked: a secondaryschool and a training college were built, and the District Magistrate'sCourt cameto hold its usual weekly sittings here instead of at Juaso. And it was the growth of Konongo at the expenseof Juasowhich constitutedthe foundationsof Juaso-Konongorelations. The early JuasoScholarsUnion had been formed precisely to protest againstthe decline of the town, but it was short-lived until immediatelyafter the coup when a meetingof citizens was held and the name, 'Juaso Town Improvement Association', adopted.I 3 Brancheswere then formed in Accra and Kumasiby citizens residentin the municipalities;the Accra branchwas active, concerned mainly with discussingthe mosteffectivestrategyto adoptin presenting petitionsto the appropriateauthorities.Before the ban on political parties was lifted, an unusuallypolitically consciousman, K. A. Karikari, a storekeeperof Messrs.U.A.C. Limited, Konongo, establishedlinks with the Associationand other similar groups.He had lived in AshantiAkim for a long time (though his home town is in the Sekyereconstituency) and had developeda wide network of influence through a systemof credit wherebypeoplewere enabledto buy a rangeof goods, from corrugatediron sheetsto textiles, on a systemof hire-purchase. His influence with the JuasoAssociationlay in the fact that he had no emotional attachmentto Konongo; hencehis good faith was in theory unimpeachable.As Chairman of the post-coup ManagementCommittee of the Konongo-OdumasiUrban Council, he helpedin the election of J. K. Boafo, a CooperativeAccountant, to the constituent Assembly in December,1968. After the formation of the Progressparty (he had been Busia's friend since the 1950s) he was made the Party Chairmanin the Ashanti Akim district, comprisingtwo constituencies; and he, in turn, appointedthe Secretaryof the JuasoTown Improvement Association to the post of local Progress Secretary at Juaso--similarappointmentsbeing madein other towns and villages in the two constituencies. These appointmentsdid not smotherlocal jealousies.As Maxwell

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Owusu shows in a later chapter,there was a pervadingfeeling in the country that a close, functional relationshipexistedbetweenthe origin of a parliamentarycandidateand local economicdevelopment.On the basisof this belief, every sizeabletown soughtto nominatea candidate for adoption,and in the Ashanti Akim South constituencyeachof the three main towns presented candidates: Boafo, the Constituent Assemblyman,for Konongo; K. Frimpong-Boadu,an Accra barrister, for Obugu;and J. A. Danso,a cocoacooperativeauditor,sponsoredby the JuasoTown ImprovementAssociation.It was the interventionof a fourth candidate,who transcendedthe local limitations of his rivals, that preventedwhat might have been an unpleasantcrisis. N. Y. B. Adade(later, Attorney General)was born in 1927 at Obugu,wherehis father, a friend of Karikari, was a storekeeperbeforebecomingthe local managerof John Holt Ltd. at Konongo; he was educatedat Juaso Government School and then lived at Konongo before reading economicsand law at Legon and London University. His mother's home town was in the Juaben-Edweso constituency,his father's town was in the Ashanti Akim North constituency. With such a wide background,a sufficient number of the competinggroups felt that he would work in the interestof all, and in this way Karikari was able on behalf of Adade to bind togetherthe various associationalthreadsof supportto ensurea substantialvictory for Progress.N.A.L. enteredthe constituencyonly after all this preliminary bargaininghad beendone. Free from the complexproblemof nominatinga candidate,it was only in the latter stagesthat one was chosenat all-K. Amoo Adare, a former c.P.P. Chairman of the Agricultural DevelopmentCorporation, who flew back from Nairobi where he was working for the U.N. High Commissionfor Refugees.Yet, despitehis late entry, he managed to collect almosta third ofthe vote from amongthosewho werestill dissatisfiedwith the choice of the Progresscandidate. We move now to a different level to look at the Adansi Youth Association, a revival of a similar Association which existed before 1949.14 Adansi was one of the numerousindependentAshanti states, strategically situated between Amansie (the Ashanti state nearest Kumasi) and the southernconglomerationof Fanti states.In the past, acting on a shrewdcalculationof their interests,the Adansi either acted as scoutsof the Asantehene-reporting British troop movements-or fought as the allies of the British. It was the discoveryof gold, and the formation in 1897 of the Ashanti Gold Fields Corporation(A.G.c.) which led Adansi to align itself decisively onthe side of the British since it now had a securesourceof wealth.ls Providing wealth and employment,the minesauthoritiesat Obuasihad nothing but friendly relations with the traditional rulers. The state, however, lacked post-primary educational facilities, and it was only after independencethat three

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training collegeswere built in thosetowns which (for local reasons) had supported the Nkrumah regime in the 1954-57 period of conflict-Akrokerri, Dompoasi and New Edubiasi. But it still lacked a secondaryschool and, exceptin Obuasi,good hospitalsand electricity. Educated young Adansis blamed the mining company which they believedhad got so much out of their lands and given so little in return, and moved by the twin passionsof a desirefor the benefitsof'modernity', and a strong anti-companysentiment,they revived the Adansi Youth Associationwhich had once existed as a local cultural society. The revival was well-timed, for the London-basedLonhro Company was now engagedin negotiationswith the N.L.C. Governmentfor a take-overof the Ashanti Gold Fields Corporation,and the immediate aims of the Youth Associationwere to exert pressurefirst on the N.L.C. to bargainfor suchtermsof agreementas would be beneficial toAdansi as a whole, and then on the Adansiheneand the State Council to use whatever new royalties would be granted for the developmentof the state. Revived as the Adansi Odo Ye Kuo (Adansi Fraternal Association), it met at Obuasi during Easter 1969, and beganto put forward demandsfor developmentprojects.After the lifting of the ban on politics, and through the influenceof two of its leaders-F.N. Mensah who was in the ConstituentAssembly,and Boatengwho had been secondedto the Assemblyas a secondClerk-theAssociationdecided to support the ProgressParty. Boateng(a son-in-law of the treasurer who was the mother-in-lawof the first M.P. from the areain 1951-J. B. Abu Bekr) was nominatedas the ObuasiP.P. candidate;Mensah,a prosperoustimber contractor,was chosenas a candidatefor the other constituency-inpreferenceto Abu Bekr whoseearliernominationwas vehementlyopposedby the Youth Association. The AsanteYouth Association(A.Y.A.) differed from both the Juaso and Adansi associationsin that it had much more precise political objectives. The original aim of the revival was to reconcile former political opponents,an aim which the N.L.C. itself had soughtto pursue after the releaseof ex-C.P.P.detainees.Immediately after the coup, there was a generalbelief in Ashanti that the region had sufferedthe greatest numberof detaineesunderthe Nkrumahregime,and had beendeprived of amenitiesbecauseit was the main centreof Oppositionin the 1950s. If politics was not to bedevil developmentonce again,(it was argued)it in the region.Suchwas the was imperativeto foster a spirit of , one-ness' general impulsebehind the revival of A.Y.A. in 1968, and the first meetingwas convenedon the initiative ofKumasi residents.It included Owusu Sekyere,the son of Baffuor Osei Akoto (former Chairmanof the N.L.M.), JamesOwusu, (former C.P.P. Chairmanof the Kumasi City Council), J. K. Akyeampong,(a Kumasi businessman).A. W. D. Adutwum (ex-Adansihene),and A. S. Y. Andoh (Registrar,University

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of Scienceand Technologyand a former Secretaryof the Asanteman Council). Andoh was appointedas Interim Secretary,and setout energetically to establish branches in Ashanti and elsewhere,especially Accra. Throughouthis travelshe emphasised onetheme:reconciliation;and he endeavouredto make the A.Y.A. independentof any forces that might emerge in the future. The contradictionsinherent in this approach becameapparent,however,early in 1969 when it was announcedthat the ban on politics would be lifted in May; they were suchthat Andoh's motives in fashioning the Associationas an independentforce became suspect.Divisions along former C.P.P.-U.P.lines cameto the surface. Atta Mensah,C. C. Addai, Yaw Asamoah-ex-C.P.P. and foundersof the pre-1949A.Y.A.-were on one side; Owusu Sekyere,B. A. Mensah, Sam Boateng and Dr. Kwame Safo-Adu-a somewhatmixed grouJr-onthe other. Both groupssoughtto fashion the Associationin directions they perceivedwould not be prejudicial to their interestsin any future alignmentof political forces. An inevitable struggleensued; meetings,both in Accra and Kumasi, becamenoisy; Andoh was virtually forced to resign,and when electionsfor new officers were held in April 1969, Dr. Safo-Adu become Presidentand swore an oath of allegianceto the Asantehene. Dr. Safo-Aduwas typical of a whole new generationof middle-class intellectuals who emerged in post-coup Ghana, notionally unencumberedby past conflicts. He had an extensivemedical practicein Kumasi, was an active memberof the CurrentAffairs Club, and Chairman of the Ashanti Advisory Committeeof the Centrefor Civic Education. His victory was seemingly a victory for the non-committed:in reality, by backgroundand upbringing, he was sympatheticto proBusia forces. As a Progresscandidatein Manhyia, a Kumasi constituency where he had his practice, he polled the highest number of votesin the whole country: 18,563to his N.A.L. opponent's4,335.But, although a Busia man, his 'non-committed'backgroundwas a significant factor in rallying the supportof such ex-c.P.P.activists as James Owusu behind his leadership.The main influence of A.Y.A. was in Kumasi, but by organisingyouth wings of the ProgressParty, it sent out campaignersinto other areasof the region. A.Y.A. had a complex, almost Byzantine, relationshipwith many of the chiefs, including individuals of traditional importance,like Baffuor Osei Akoto, and with the Ex-DetaineesAssociation which was bannedby the N.L.C. and then re-named the Committee for the Defence of the Coup. But whateverthe precisenatureof suchlinks, they were of considerableimportanceto Progressboth in the election and in the mobilising of party support. It would be wrong to conveythe impression,as theseexamplestend

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to do, that leadershipin the voluntary associationswhich emergedfell wholly into P.P. hands.That was not so. The NorthernYouth Association, for example,was more N.A.L. than Progress.Formedin 1967,its founders were strongly committed to the welfare of the two northern regions(the Northernand Upper Regions)which are themajor areasof economicdeprivationcomparedwith the rest of the country. Many of the Association'sleaderstendedto be of a moreradical dispositionthan the earlier generationof northernleaders;and the Northern Region in particular, the more southernof the two northernareas,had no cogent reasonto be bitter about the Nkrumah regime. It had receiveda good shareof educationalbenefits; scholarshipshad been awardedby the c.P.P.governmentto anyoneable to have the most expensivetype of education which only money (in acute short supply locally) could purchase,and few people from the region were detainedor suffered great hardshipunder Nkrumah. Many of the N.Y.A. membersindeed looked back on the decade1956-66 as a time when new leaderswere able to challengethe earliermonopolyof powerheld by the thenexisting alliance of chiefs and their educatedadvisers.For a variety of reasons, therefore,Gbedemahhad a first claim on the leadersof the N.Y.A., and one of the most active, Sibidow, an 'ex-graduate'of the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological College at Wineba, was instrumentalin moving the associationin a pro-N.A.L. direction. The region was also besetby traditional rivalries of a finely balancednature,as in the sway of local interestsbetweenthe Muslim chiefs and sub-chiefsover the Dagomba Skin disputein Yendi, in which N .A.L. and Progresswerein conflict not in national party terms but as opposedgroups of interestdrawn from rival mosques,villages, clans and families. The overall result in the Northern Region was thereforevery close-whicheverparty actually won a particular constituency.As App. II shows,Progresswon 47.8 per cent and N .A.L. 42.4 per cent of the votes in the contestedseats. Furthernorth, two contrastingelementsbroughta different result.It is truethatthe N.Y.A. in the UpperRegionincludeda new generationof educatedleaders,like the London-educatedbarristerA. A. Luguterah, who was to stand for N.A.L. in the Chiana-Pagaconstituency,and Issifu Ali who was Commissionerfor Information after the coup until he resignedto becomeN.A.L. candidatein Wa. But the region had been administeredunder the c.P.P.by a party Commissioner,A. A. Asumda, whose policies-especiallytowards his political enemies-had madethe impactof the Nkrumahregimesomewhatharsh.And the area was rich in able politicians of nationalstaturewho had consistentlyopposedthe C.P.P.,including S. D. Dombo,Duori-Na(Oppositionleader in parliament after Busia's voluntary exile), Jateo Kaleo, and B. K. Adama, all of whom later becomeProgressMinisters. Their loyalty to local interests,their 'northern-ness',their local standingamongMuslim

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and Catholic followers alike, and their non-subversiveresistanceto Nkrumah,gavethem a particularauraof respectwell beyondtheir own constituencies,as well as a solid baseof supportamongtheir immediate kin. It was difficult for any challengerto competewith them--orwith local leadersof greatinfluencelike Abayifa Karbo, a former opposition M.P. and later a lawyer, who had succeededhis father as Lawra-Na, thus combining a traditional strongholdwith a wide following among the growing numberof Christian-eduated young men in the north-west. None the less, N.A.L. was able to find clustersof support and willing candidatesfrom amongthe many rival lineageswhich formed the little chiefdomsof the region in which local competitionfor powerand status madeit impossiblefor anyoneparty-P.A.P.,Progressor N.A.L.-to exert an exclusiveappeal. In the Volta Region, a DevelopmentAssociationcame togetherin the beliefthat the Ewe-speakingregion hadstagnatedeconomically,not least because of its anti-C.P.P. stance. Under the presidency of Chapman-Nyaho(an ex-secretaryto the cabinet), who was not particularly enamoured of Gbedemah's leadership, the Association debatedways and meansof developingthe region now that the c.P.P. had disappeared.But the majority of the members believed that Gbedemah'spolitical experienceas a former FinanceMinister would serve the region well, and certainly Gbedemah'spolitical staturewas greaterthan that of his (fellow Ewe) opponents,such as M. K. Apaloo (U.N.P.) S.G. Antor (P.P.)and Kofi Dumoga(P.P.).The split in Busia's supportin the region, when Apaloo decidedto join the U.N.P. instead of P.P.-quiteapart from Ewe-Akan divisions-also contributed to the very poor performanceof the anti-Gbedemahforces in the region. The patternof voluntary associationexaminedin theseexampleswas by no means universal. No such well-structured and active groups emergedin the Central or the Western Regions. Instead,there were clandestinemanoeuvresamong a group of 'new' leaders-mostlyaccountants, lawyers and university lecturers-who tried to find an associationalbasewhich would be free from the political strifes of the past.The 'Third Force',as they cameto be generallydesignated,can be describedas the political expressionof halting attemptsto transcend past political differences representedby Busia and Gbedemah.Its origins went back to the immediatepost-coupperiod-moreprecisely to July 1966-whenan idealistic and energeticKumasi medical practitioner, Dr. John Bilson, brought togethera debatingclub called the 'Libertarians'.The societywasformed ostensiblyto uphold the tenetsof a free and opensocietyand, in practice,to put forward the claimsof the 'uncommittedyouth' to participatein public affairs in a reborn Ghana. A priori, there was much to recommendsucha group. But the military

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seizureof power had not wiped the slate clean,suddenlymaking Ghana an historical palimpset;old political memorieslingered and, like other groups,the 'Third Force' cameto be bedevilled by divisions basedon blandishmentsfrom forces arrangedbehindBusia and Gbedemah.But, for a time, it attractedamong its ranks lawyers, e.g. Luguterah(later N.A.L.), O.Y. Asamoah(later N.A.L.), A. S. Kpodonu(later P.P.)and Kwame Aidoo (later N.A.L.); it also attracteduniversity teachers,e.g. E. H. Boohene(later N.A.L. vice-chairman),K. A. Karikari (later P.P.) and G. K. Agama (N.A.L. ParliamentaryOpposition Leader until September1970); it countedbusinessmenand accountantsamong its members-E.K. Dadson(later N.A.L. candidate)and J. K. Rockson (later P.P. candidate). The outstandingfeatureof this groupingwas that it was urban-based and lacked roots in the rural areas;its modusoperandi consistedin trying to win the allegianceof the leadershipof the various voluntary associations.What it lacked in popular appeal it made up for in enthusiasmuntil, lacking a tabula rasa on which to write a whole new chapterof Ghanaianhistory, it split into warring factions. By the time the Constituent Assembly was inaugurated,the 'Third Force' had already begunto divide. The split was not, however,along ethniclines: on the contrary,asthe namesindicate,they were basedon the variousmembers'assessment of their chancesof winning a nomination and, should they win, on the probability that they would be given ministerial positions. This is best exemplified by Aidoo who joined the ProgressParty immediatelyafter deserting the ranks of the 'Third Force' and, on failing to win the nomination on a Progressticket, joined N.A.L. and was adoptedas a candidate,losing however to his P.P. opponent.After the split, one of the most energeticrumps regroupedas the RepublicanParty underthe leadershipof P.K.K. Quaidoo,an ex-C.P.P.Minister. The Republican Party then divided, one part under Rockson'sleadership-keeping the name;the other, under Quaidoo,allied itself with Dr. E. V. C. de Graft Johnson'sAll People'sCongressto form a new party, the All People's Republican Party. Before the open split, the Republican Party had mobilised supportin many partsof the centraland westernregions,until it reacheda position of strengthwhen it seemedcapableof altering the balance of support betweenthe major parties. Rockson, in particular, had extensivecontactswith chiefs and the variousAsafo groups (he was a captainof an Asafo Company)in his native Ekumfi district of the central region. Then, barely four weeks before the election, the RepublicanParty announceda merger with the ProgressParty. The decision appearsto have beenbasedsolely on a 'gamestheory' assessment of the relative chancesof the various contendingpartiesfor, as the former secretary,K. A. Sarpong,said: ' ... it is better to be swallowed

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by an elephantthan by an ant'Y Individuals were also active in ways (camouflagedby a variety of forms) aimed at enhancingtheir chancesfor adoptionas parliamentary candidatesagainstthe time when the ban on politics would be lifted. Kingsley Abeyie, for example,a Kumasi-basedlawyer and a founder member of the Current Affairs club, formed with other Kumawi residents in Kumasi the 'Descendantsof Tweneboa Kodua Society'-Koduabeing a Kumawu chief who is said to have sacrificed his life to ensureAshanti successin war-in an attempt to create a nucleus of support for his future campaign.18 In the southernAbura constituency,J. K. Fynn, a history lecturer at Legon, emergedas a 'favourite son' after he had joined the local Asafo Company-the traditional warrior organisationwhich is still powerful in the Central Region. The decision to join the Companywas taken after his return from London in 1965 when he began researchinto the history of his native Abura district; he was installed a captainafter the coup,his visits to Abura becamemore frequent,and therewas hardly an alternativeto him at the time of the election.He stoodfor the ProgressParty and won in all the polling stationsexceptthoseof his opponents'homearea.19 O. Y. Asamoah(later N.A.L. M.P. for Biakoye in the Volta Region) also built a personalelectoral machine, in a constituencywhere the electorateis of four different ethnic stocks,throughhis servicesas a lawyer and frequentweek-endvisits while lecturing at Legon:it is arguablethat he too could have won for anyoneof the contendingparties. It was through such personaland group activitiesthat a largefund of good will was built on which politicianstradedat the time of the election; and in Accra Harry Sawyerr, standing as an Independent, successfully withstood the party networks of his Progressand V.N.P. opponents. On the other hand, it was easyto over-estimatethe strengthof a personal following-as Joe Appiah discoveredin Atwima where he lost heavily to both Progressand N.A.L. It was not difficult to attract enthusiasticsupport for even a very small campaign,provided it was backedwith somefunds: the candidatewas ensuredby his followers of a growing support-forwhich more money was needed-untilpolling day when friends, followers, funds and votes melted away. Theselocal associationswere not the only institutionsthroughwhich support was mediated after the coup. State-sponsoredbodies also played a part, notably the ConstituentAssembly which-aswe have seen-held 96 sittings, passed 177 Articles, and enacted and promulgatedthe new Constitutionsevendays beforethe GeneralElection.20 Thus the period of campaigncoincided with the sittings of the Assembly.And this fact alone,coupledwith the procedurefor electing members to the Assembly, made its establishment notable. As described by Robin Luckham, the Constitutional Commission had

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recommendedthat the Assemblybe electedby the peopleon the principle of 'one man, one vote', a procedureconsiderablymodified by the N.L.C. The immediateeffect was that the Assemblynot only mirrored but reinforced the pluralistic characterof post-coup society, and it provided the meanswherebylocalities, chiefdoms,villages and voluntary groups were linked to national politics. Farmers, co-operative leaders,businessmen,trade unionists, and lawyers, debatedthe constitutional proposalsunder one roof. And, this bringing togetherat the national level of leaderswho had hitherto had little or no contactwith each other set the scene for intense political bargaining. To the Assembly from the Wenchi administrativedistrict cameBusia; from Takoradi,Sekondi,Mampong,Wa, Kpandu,Biakoye and Accra came Lamptey, Scheck, Amponsah, Adama, Kpodonu, Asamoah and Adjetey. Gbedemahwas absent,fighting a legal battlefor his exemption from being bannedfrom active politics. Of the members,only a handful were in any senseloyal to Busia. The majority consistedof a generation of educatedmen whosepolitical commitments,if they had any beyonda desire to be electedinto a future Ghanaparliament,tended tobe pro'Third Force': winning the loyalty of this new local leadershipwas crucial, therefore,and the opportunity was certainly seized. On the evidenceof the official reportsof the Assembly,Busia spoke on only a few occasions-least of all on occasionswhen controversial articles cameto be discussed.He was, however,busy interviewing, establishing links with the new leadershipin the Assembly,and sounding opinions. He soughtto formalise theseloose relationsin his suburban house, on the Accra-Cape Coast road, by instituting bi-weekly meetingsof such membersas were willing to discussthe constitutional provisions in detail. In January1969, the hard core of this group consisted of those of his old colleagueswho were in the Assembly;from March onwardsthe group had considerablyexpanded,and by July he could count on the loyalty of at leasttwo-thirds of the membersof the Assembly. By the time of the lifting of the ban on parties,the weekly meetings had evolved from a constitutional debating forum into the nucleus of a political party. Among the new additions from the Assembly were T. D. Brodie-Mends (Cape Coast Administrative District), later Progress member for Cape Coast; Haruna Esseku (Winneba Administrative District), later Minister of Transport and Communications,who was an enthusiasticmemberof the 'Third Force' until aboutsix weeksto electionday; S. K. Oppong,former principal of St. Augustine SecondarySchool, a 'Third Force' supporterand later Junior Minister of Education;B. J. da Rocha,previously'uncommitted' and fiercely independent,and later ProgressParty GeneralSecretary;J. B. Kaba, a lawyer and formerly a 'Third Force' sympathiser,later ProgressM.P. for Bolgatanga;A. S. Kpodonu,a staunch'Third Force'

THE

1969 ELECTION

159

supporter,who lost the Ho West constituencyas a Progresscandidate to N.A.L.: and J. G. Amamoo, previously opposed to Busia's leadership,a former Ambassadorunder Nkrumah, and later a Junior Minister in the Progressgovernment.J. A. Kufuor, Town Clerk of Kumasi City Council; MohammedAbdul Saaka,a Northern lawyer (later a Junior Minister); B. M. Akita from Shai and A. K. Boaitey(both lawyers); C. O. Nyanor, a banker (later a Junior Minister); and Rockson were also among the new acquisitions. In the absenceof Gbedemah,Busiawas easily the most towering political personalityin the Assembly. And it madethe task of knitting togetherthe scattered threadsof elite groupsrelatively easy. None the less,anti-Busiaforces did emergein the Assembly.JoeAppiah, representingthe Bar Association,led one such group which includedPeterAdjetey (Accra administrativedistrict), Alex Hutton Mills (Ga FarmersAssociation)and Dr. R. H. S. Bannerman.It was in this fashion that smallerpartiestook shape,like the U.N.P. which appealed directly to a particulargroup interest-theGa-yetwas able to attract other candidates(like JoeAppiah) who saw somehopeof a 'third party' which might hold the balancebetweenlarger groupings.Another section, led at various times by G. K. Agama of the University at Legon, and Sam Okudzeto,a lawyer, looked to Gbedemahand a solid core of Ewe members.A loosely joined 'Third Force' group was led by Dr. Asamoahuntil he, too, decidedto join N.A.L. Despitethis opposition, the balance of forces by July/August among the members of the Assembly, and amongtheir electoralsupportgroupsin the country at large, had shifted decisively in Busia'sfavour. Busia'spresencein the Assembly, coupled with his chairmanship of the Centre for Civic Education,enabledhim to havean initial purchaseon whateversupport structuresemergedin the pre-electionperiod. He beganto look like a leaderwho might win, andhis popularity-andsupport-grewwith his success.Organisation,adequatefinancial resourcesand hard work no doubt played their part: but both the major partieshad thesein almost equal proportions.Gbedemah,however,was still appearingbefore the ExemptionsCommissionand it was not until 17 March 1968 that he gave a precise indication that he would form a political party; in the meantime,someof his prospectivesupportswere either disqualified or demoralised.It is true that his homeregion, which had neverpreviously given him unanimousbacking, rallied to his support, and this coming together of a pro-Gbedemah,pro-N.A.L. movement in the Ewedominatedareascreateda degreeof backlashin other regions; but it was not that strong to account for the outcome of the election. Gbedemahhimself, in his political career, had never been greatly attached emotionally to his Ewe homeland:a man of cosmopolitaninterestsand tastes,he had had stronglinks in other regionsof the coun-

160

POLITICIANS AND SOLDIERS IN GHANA

try, and N.A.L. was able to put up candidatesin all but one of the 140 constituencies. It should be noted,finally, that theseeventstook place in a political setting which was dominatedby two considerations.One was that the initial policies of the N.L.C. (later policies scrupulouslysought to be fair and were occasionallyantagonisticto Busia) pointed in directions which left no one in doubt that the originators of the coup would not welcome the return of anyone associated,even remotely, with Nkrumah and the c.P.P. And, for many, Gbedemahundoubtedly carried too much of the C.P.P. past with him still. Secondly,popular justification for the coupran alonglines which Busiahad adumbratedin his long political career,thus giving him the imageof a prophet.A constant refrain, in conversation,was: 'Busia said so and so ... let us give him a chance.'And the results were an eloquent testimony of such beliefs.

Notes I. AmponsahbecameMinister of Lands & Mineral Resources;Ofori Atta, Minister of Education;Owusu, Minister for External Affairs; Lamptey, DefenceMinister, and Chief Dombo, Minister of State. 2. Coming togetherin 1970 to form the JusticeParty. 3. E. J. Hobsbawm'sphraseology,Primitive Rebels(ManchesterUniversity Press. 1963), p. 57. 4. Moses Danquah,The Birth of the SecondRepublic(Accra n.d.) is a compendium of useful contemporarymaterial on party manifestoes,election results.etc. 5. Rebuilding the National Economy. a broadcasttalk by the Chairman of the N.L.C.,2 March 1966. Seeabove,Chapter2. 6. Seep. 143. 7. AppendixII. 8. Imoru Ayarna was defeatedin his home constituencyof TempaneGaru in the Upper Region. 9. SeeJ. P. Nettl Political Mobilisation. London 1967. 10. See D. Rimmer, 'The Industrial Relations Act, 1958' in The Ghana Economic Bulletin. Vol. 3 No.4, April 1959, p. 8. II. M. Danquah,op. cit .• p. 47. 12. That farmers were harshly taxed was noted by Miss Polly Hill in 1958. By her calculations,' ... when world cocoaprices standaroundtheir presentlevel at £350 a ton, the cocoafarmer, howeverlarge or small he may be, is allowed to retain only about£ lout of every £3 of his income(net). Suchan averagerateof incometax has never been known in the world in peaceor war'. P. Hill, 'The CaseAgainst Double Taxation of Cocoa Farmers'in The Ghana EconomicBulletin Vol. 2. No.9. 12 September,1958. pp. 15-16. 13. This accountis basedon the lettersand RecordofMeetingsof the JuasoTown ImprovementAssociation. 14. The writer is indebtedto S. Fosahene,a founder memberand journalist, for an accounton the Adansi Youth Association. 15. See G. W. Eaton Turner, a Short History of the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation 1897-1947(n.d.), p. 20.

THE

1969 ELECTION

161

I am indebtedto Dr. J. Bilson and K. Karikari for this accountof the Third Force. M. Danquah,op. cit., p. 26. SeeChapter 10 for a close examinationof the election strugglein Kumawu. Result:J. K. Fynn, (P.P.)4,227;I. K. Nkrumah(N.A.L.) 1,796;de Graft Johnson (A.P.R.P.) 1,116; P. Begyina(V.N.P.) 62. 20. SeeChapter4. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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POLITICIANS

AND SOLDIERS IN GHANA

APPENDIX I Percentageof Votesobtained

%

Votes

Western

Ashanti

National

tolal

Votes

%

Votes

total Votes

Voles

%

total

Voles

Volta

~~

Votes

total

Votes

P.P.

876.378

58.68

215.707

14.45

71.240

4.77

28.491

1.91

N.A.L.

454.646

30.44

47.835

3.20

21.646

1.45

121.606

8.14

A.P.R.P.

27.328

1.83

622

0.04

9.896

0.66

91

P.A.P.

51.123

3.43

2.688

0.18

27.979

1.88

1.555

0.11

Indep.

27.216

1.82

5.228

0.35

2.991

0.20

929

0.06

V.N.P.

56.680

3.80

5.049

0.34

1.381

0.09

4.992

0.33

277.129

18.56

135.133

9.05

157.664

10.56

9.55

226.304

9.62

Total Votes

1,493.371

100

0.01

PercentageofRegisteredVotes Total Registered Voters

23.51.658

100

401.590

17.07

224.542

APPENDIX II National

Seats P.P. N.A.L.

Ashant;

%

/otal

votes

Western

% Seats regional Voles

Volta

%

Seats regional Votes

SealS

%

regional Voles

105

58.68

22

77.84

10

52.72

2

18.07

29

30.44

0

17.26

0

16.06

14

77.13 0.06

A.P.R.P.

1

1.83

0

0.22

1

7.32

0

P.A.P.

2

3.43

0

0.97

2

20.71

0

0.99

Indep.

1

1.82

0

1.89

0

2.21

0

0.58

V.N.P.

2

3.80

0

1.82

0

1.02

0

3.17

140

100

22

13

100

16

100

Total

100

163

THE 1969ELECTION

APPENDIX I (continued) Percentageo/Votesobtained Upper

Votes

%

Grealer Accra

%

Brong-Aharo

total Votes

Votes

43.608

2.92

39.145

2.62

0.49

4.328

0.29

5.286

0.35

6.174

0.41

4.874

0.33

28,456

1.91

1,387

169.712

11.36

121.711

8.15

150.839

total

Votes

94.315

6.32

54.743

3.66

3.201

0.21

7.293

Votes

%

Central

total

Votes

127.707

8.55

21.745

1.46

Northern

Eastern

%

% /o/al Votes

%

total

total

Votes

114.734

7.68

130.275

8.72

50.301

3.37

29.962

2.01

73.321

4.91

44.643

2.99

9,420

0.63

1.342

0.09

2.756

0.18

3.227

0.22

1,429

0.10

2.624

0.17

71

0.01

4.156

0.28

2.381

0.16

0.09

4.165

0.27

3.888

0.26

2.488

0.17

10.10

161.579

10.82

214,411

14.36

105.193

7.04

14.36

198.586

8.44

Votes

Votes

VOles

Votes

Percentageo/RegisteredVotes 302.807

12.88

172.858

7.35

221.451

9.42

265.920

11.31

337.600

APPENDIX II (continued) Upper

Seats

%

regional

votes

Greater Accra ~~

Seats regional

votes

32.36

3 3

0

1.89

0

0

4.30

0

0

3.11

0

2.87

16

100

9

100

13

3

55.57

Brong-Aharo % Seats regional votes

Central /.

Seats regional votes

Easlern

Northern

% Seats regional

% Seats regional

voles

votes

35.83

13

84.66

15

71.01

18

60.76

9

47.82

32.16

0

14.42

0

18.54

4

34.20

5

42.44

0

0

5.83

0

0.63

0

2.62

3.56

0

0

2.00

0

0.66

0

2.49

1

5.07

0

2

23.38

0 13

0.92 100

0

0.04

0

1.94

0

2.26

0

2.58

0

1.81

0

2.37

15

100

22

100

14

100

CHAPTER 7

POLITICS IN ASUNAFO* John Dunn In the days of the SeptennialAct, the English (as Rousseaumordantly suggested)were free once every sevenyears.1 On current showing the Ghanaianswill be doing well if they are free more than once every fifteen. The election of 1969 was the first unequivocally free national political act on the part of the unorganisedpopulacesincethe electionof 1954, the first election,that is, in which the coffers of the statedid not enter sharply into the political choicesof voters. To understandwhat mostvoterswere doing whenthey went to the polls on this occasionis to understandsomethingas central to the politics of Ghanaas the operation of the machineryof government-itis to understandwhat the people of Ghanaattempt todo politically when they are free.2 Whatever they may have brought about, the action which they performed in choosingin this way retainsits moral status.No doubt the Ghanaian electoratewas confusedand ignorant, and no doubt its wills were as particular as the next nation's.3But abstractthough it was and politically null as it soonturnedout to havebeen,thereis to be readin its choices, as there may perhaps be in the choices of all nations allowed the privilege of choosing,the shadowyoutlinesof a VolonteGenerale.Elections in Africa by now may be closerto rituals of affliction than to concrete embodimentsof freedom, but the sentimentsto which they give transientand paradoxicalshapeare no lessprofoundfor their failure to exemplify the assuranceof a masteredworld. In order to recapture

* The researchon which this article is basedwas assistedby a grant from the Smuts Memorial Fund of CambridgeUniversity. The writer owes his introduction to Ahafo and much of his understandingof its life to Dr. A. F. Robertson.He could not havedone mostof theresearchrequiredwithout theskilful assistance of SusanMcKaskieandJonas Omersu.Two points of method require a brief note. Firstly, he has taken pains not to identify any actorswhoseconductwas in breachof the law or of publicly specifiedstandards of propriety. This lends the accounta rather abstractair on occasion.To have been more concretewould have beento betray the trust of the very many participants on both sides who attempted generously to enable him to understandwhat was happening.Secondly,it will be apparentthat this article is not offered as a contribution to a value-freesocial science.It is neverthelessintendedto be a contributiontowardsunderstandingthe truth about the eventswhich it describes.There is somedangerthat it may be felt that having incisively seen through(with the advantagesof hindsight) the fantasyof transplanting'proletariantruth' to Ghana,the writer hasfallen a helplessvictim to the fantasythat 'bourgeoistruth' hasbeenso transported.He wishesaccordingly to record as a matterof historical fact that it was not becausehis feelings were biasedin favour of thesevaluesat the'outsetthat he perceivedeventsin this fashion. Rather,he felt as he did at the end becausethis was what he saw. 164

POLITICS IN ASUNAFO

165

somevagueoutline of thesesentiments,this chapterattemptsto discuss two separateissues:the questionof what happenedin the electioncampaign in the Asunafoconstituency,and the questionof what was meant by what happened. The Asunafo division of Ahafo is situatedin the westernrain-forest to the south of the main road linking Kumasi, the capital of the former Ashanti empire, to Sunyani, the capital of the presentBrong-Ahafo region. Its most direct political and administrativeties havebeenshared betweenthesetwo centresfor more than sixty years,for the greaterpart indeed of the British occupation of Ashanti.4 The balance of significancebetweenthe two towns has changedwith changesin the political relationshipbetweenthe centralgovernmentof the countryand the traditional political systemof Ashanti. Ever since the British conquestof Ashanti in 1896, the central governmenthas manipulatedthe political structuresof Ahafo as pawnsin its relationshipwith Ashanti. The delicate balanceof conflict and co-operationbetweenAccra and Kumasi hasalwaysbeencloseto the centreof the politics of the country as a whole, and in the light of this nationalpreoccupation,the politics of Ahafo inevitably appear provincial and instrumental. But whereas, from the perspectiveof Accra or Kumasi, Ahafo may well seema mere instrument,a counterin a gameof altogethergranderscope,it is important to rememberthat from the viewpoint of Ahafo this grandergameis apt to appear as instrumentalto more local purposes,and K wame Nkrumahor eventhe Asantehenehavetherebyseemedto be reducedto the statusof weaponsin local factional struggles.The confrontationof nationalelites,whethercolonial or postcolonial,with local communities hastendedto be describedin termsof the recalcitranceoflocal valuesto national ends,but its meaninglies (as throughoutthe period of indirect rule which is substantivelyfar from terminatedtoday) at leastas much in the subservienceof national power to very active local purposes. The administrativelinks of Asunafo with Sunyani and Kumasi are paralleled by the lines of physical communication along which the economic products of the area pass in order to reach the national markets.5 The economicdevelopmentof Ahafo and to no small degree the peopling of this densely-forestedarea followed upon the administrative penetration of the area by the British. As a district it representsthe most recent(and currently the most spectacular)example of the Ghanaianeconomicexpansionof this century,the processof rapid capital accumulationthrough the exploitationof the virgin forest for cocoacultivation,6 supplementedover the last twenty yearsby the timber industry.The greatmajority of the presentAhafo populationhas derived ethnically within the last two generationsfrom other areasof Ghanaor from abroad.7 Exceptfor the town ofMim with its sawmills and intermittentunion troubles,the economicactivities andthe political

166

POLITICIANS AND SOLDIERS IN GHANA

WAMAHIN SO GYEDU N TO TROS O River Tano

A S U T I F I KENYASE no. 2 KENYASEno. 1

ACHEREKISUA HWIDIEM

C O N S T I T U E N C Y

MIM

GQASO LOCAL COUNCIL AREA

NKASAIM

ASUTIrl LOCAL COUNCIL AREA

GOASO MEHAME

DADIESOABA AYUMSO FAWOHOYEDEN

A

S

U

N A

DANTA NO ETWINETO SIE N C H E M

KUKUOM

F O AKRODiE

KWAKU NYUMA

NOBERKAW ASUFUFUO

POMAKROM

SIENA ANWIAM

C O N S T I T U E N C Y ABOUM

KWAPONG

River Tano

SANKORE

KUKUOM LOCAL COUNCIL AREA

(Local cCouncil and

Ta male

GHANA

Constituency

Sunyanl Kumasl

boundaries are approximate.)

A H A F O

Ahafo Accra O

100

miles

200

o

10

5 MILES

15

POLITICS IN ASUNAFO

167

structuresof the areaare entirely pre-industrial,though the equipment usedin timber extractionis sufficiently massivein scaleto removeany suggestionof undisturbedbucolic tranquillity. A greatdeal of wealth is producedin Ahafo and much money is made there. The rape of the forest is an enthusiasticand participatory responseto the exigencies and enticementsof the world economy. The social relationscharacteristicof the areaare extremelyintricate. The continuinginflow, now somewhatslower than twenty yearsago,of thosewith capital to take up new cocoaland and of thosewith nothing but their labour to contribute,producesa very complicatedeconomic relationship with its environment. In some ways the area is in a neocolonialrelationship,not just with the world economybut also with other parts of Ghana, in that a substantialproportion of its farmers, particularly of Ashanti origin, are 'strangerfarmers'. Indeedthey are resentedas such sincethey are frequently absenteesand tend to export the profits of their farms to their homeareasinsteadof reinvestingthem locally.s The major capitalisationof the timber industry in the shapeof the Mim Timber Companyand MessrsGlikstensis also foreign to the area (though at least two former M.P.s now work timber concessions within Ahafo) and its profits too are largely exported. The initial characterof the district as thinly-populated,largely virgin, forest has meantthat it has had to import most of its capital and thus to endurea continuing and exploitativeoutflow of resourcesto other areas.Indeed, becauseof the increasedsocial responsibilityexhibited(undersomeinitial political pressure)by the expatriatetimber concerns,and the intrinsically more inscrutable character of their economic operations, strangerfarmersoccasionmore direct resentmentamongmost Ahafos than do the Europeaninterestsin the area.But althoughthe productive resourcesare exploited by those outside the area-aswas endlessly emphasisedin the electioncampaignwith respectto the depredationsof the government-Ahafoalso imports, besidesthe greaternumberof its capitalists,the greaterpart of what the American Marxists Fitch and Oppenheimerhave conceived as its rural proletariat.9 Much of the labour supply in the processof cocoaproduction-andvirtually all the non-familial labour involved-consists of semi-migrant foreign nationalsor northern Ghanaians.Luck, energy, and good judgement may enable some of these to take up farms on stool lands and to becomein effect citizensof Ahafo too. But for the most part the money which they can accumulateover a year or two is sufficient only to make them substantiallyricher in statusand power in their home countries and insufficient to give them preferentialaccessto the more productive and now rather scarcer land supplies in Ahafo. There is a chronic labour shortagein the rich cocoa areas,since the earningsof cocoa labourersare not such as to make the employmententicing for most

168

POLITICIANS AND SOLDIERS IN GHANA

southernGhanaianseven in conditions of substantialunemployment. The economicviability of cocoaproductionhas thereforecome todepend increasingly upon the continuedavailability of extremely cheap labour from much poorer areas.Therewas somediscussionduring the course of the campaignof non-Ghanaianbusinessenterpriseand its effects in the constituency,both Europeanand African, particularly that of Yorubas in the retail trade, but the dependenceof large-scale cocoafarmerson cheapimported labour was little mentioned. The systemof social stratification on the national level (in so far as sucha thing doesexiston the nationallevel) playedno part in the issues of the election. The sharpestconflicts of economicinterest within the area also did not appearsince the most economicallydeprived group had for the most part no local statusas citizens of Ahafo and in many casesno legal title to vote in a national election.lo It is an important featureof classrelationsin the areathat many cocoalabourersare in a semi-domesticrelationshipwith their employers,while eventhosewho are employed by wholly absenteeowners enjoy some degree of economic protection. The forest food crops, especially plantainsand cocoyams(a byproduct of the approvedmethod of growing cocoa), provide a diet which is plentiful, whateverits nutritional deficiencies. Few go hungry in the forest, and its most economically deprived groups-the migrants from the often drought-stricken savannah regions-arethus distinctly less deprived than they might well be at a politics home.The politics of Ahafo havealwaysbeenin consequence of faction at a lineage, atown, or divisional level, rather than a politics of class; a struggle between kinship groups and places rather than between geographically dispersed economic interests. Since the categoriesof classas suchdid not enterinto eitherthe vocabularyor the self-conscious political activities of the election, the intricacies of tenurial relations in cocoaproduction need not concernus hereY But two other self-identificatoryroles which havecometo Ahafo along with the purely economic aspectsof modernity did play a part. Both the Christian religion and modern education had come slowly to Asunafo;12 but both had appearedin a more vigorous form in the precedingten years,andthey undoubtedlyhad someweight in fixing the less traditional aspectsof the election'smeaning.The aspectof Busia's campaign which provoked most derision among some European observers and urban sophisticates,its vociferous god-fearingness, seemsto haverespondedin this rural environmentto somereal needs.13 At the same time the ProgressParty's appearanceas the party of respectability headed by a university professor made it the natural political vehicle in Asunafo, as in most parts of the country, for those who were admitted by the avenueof educationto the participatory fruits of modernity, above all public office and the salarieswhich go

POLITICS IN ASUNAFO

169

with it.14 The availability of post-Middle School educationwas a very crude symbol of the opening of modern opportunity to the people of Ahafo. The perfectcandidatefor the ProgressParty symbolically (and the candidatewhom they in fact ran) was a young man,not only Ahafoborn and gracedwith an HonoursDegreefrom the University of Ghana but teaching in the local Secondary School at Acherensuain the neighbouringconstituency,the provision of which had beenthe c.P.P. government'smajor local rewardfor political servicesrendered.Secondary education,in offering the possibility of dramatic social mobility through accessto public office, is making an offer more resonantthan that of la carriere ouverteaux talents.Thereis little bourgeoisnonsense aboutmeritocracyin the identificationof the purposesof education.It is the fact that careersshould in principle be opento many, not that they should be open to talent, which constitutesthe progress.The symbolic offer madeby educationcomesless as the wagesof virtue than as the prize of a sort of social sweepstake.Its point is not that the rewardswill accrueto virtue but that they may accrueto you. Educationenshrines many of the mostoptimistic fantasiesof Ahafo residentsandin doing so it lends powerful supportto the modernstatushierarchy.The greatest achievementof the C.P.P. nationally, and its most concretelocal service, paradoxicallyreinforcedthe political efficacy of its opponents. In addition to the localist and ethniccategoriesdiscussedbelow, and the abstractcategoriesof class,religion, andeducationderivedfrom the recent social history of Ahafo, there remains onefurther categorical dichotomy-derived in this case from the political history of the area-whichmust playa part in the explanationof what happenedin the election.In Asunafo,as in many otherpartsof the country,oneway of seeingthe election campaignfor many of its participantswas simply as a continuationof the political strugglebetweenthe former c.P.P.of Nkrumah (reincarnated uneasily in Gbedemah'sN.A.L.) and the former United Party now led again by Dr. Busia. At the level of local personnelthe continuity was often strongenoughto representa virtual identity. But both at what could be politely termedan ideological level, and at the level of local political accumulation,it was in the interestof both partiesin the 1969electionto sophisticatethis crudehistorical distinction. Gbedemahwould have been unable to don the mantle of Nkrumah overtly, even had he wished to do so-political parties had been banned by government decree precisely for allegedly doing so--andboth the circumstancesof his breachwith Nkrumah and his own personalitypresentedhim with little temptationto assumesuchan unequivocalidentity.15 At the sametime it was an importantfeatureof the rather pietistic pretensionsof Dr. Busia'sparty that it was a party of reconciliation,not one of revenge.16 In public testimonythis pacific reconciliation of all values (which of coursein practicemight equally

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well be seenas the consolidationof all interests)was testified to by a numberof former c.P.P.dignitaries(amongthem the former Regional Commissioner,Yeboa-Afari, who had had his own difficulties with Nkrumahbeforethecoup)appearingin theconstituencyto speakfor the ProgressParty. It is, of course,a generalcharacteristicof politics that all partiescan do with the votes of thosefor whoseopinions or beliefs they have no use whatsoever. Therecan be no doubtthat the legacyto this electionfrom the history of party conflict in Ahafol7 (despite such purposeful blurring of the historical boundariesby the two parties) extendedmuch further than the political equipesof rival party activists. Indeed the former United Party M.P. for the area assuredme with someplausibility, if not with total impartiality, that the election barely neededfighting. The P.P. (he said) had as good as won before it started,since he himself had consolidatedthe U.P. electoralallegianceof the areain the historic battles of 1954 and 1956 when the constituencyhad been almost three times its presentsize and when he had hadto lavish thousandsof poundsof his own money on the enterprise. The heroic age of political entrepreneurship,it was firmly suggested,was over, the market established;and thoseof lessinnovatoryskill and personalenergy,to say nothing of wealth and courage,could safely expectto reapthe rewards of inheriting it. In the early 1950sAhafo was not a politically sophisticatedarea.In the first national election of 1951 it was part of the extensiveKumasi West Rural constituency.The C.P.P.candidateB. F. Kusi was a young Kumasi trader from Bisease,12 miles from Kumasi but with family connectionsall over Ahafo. He won the seateasily. By the time of the next electionAhafo had split off as a separateconstituency.Kusi hadby this time quarrelled with the C.P.P. and he stood against the party without successin his home constituency.The c.P.P. candidatefor Ahafo, B. K. Senkyire came from Kenyase.He was opposed,after a contestednomination,by two candidates,one of them A. W. Osei, a former statenursefrom Goaso.Senkyirewon by a comfortablemargin after a vigorous campaign.IS Over the next two years Ahafo was subjectedto the full ravagesof the N.L.M. struggle.At its height,in the electionof 1956, Osei won the seatfrom the C.P.P.,with the assistance of a number of local chiefs, most particularly the Chief of Mim. 19 Subsequentpolitical conflict in the area was extremely savage by Ghanaianstandards.The C.P.P.reimposedits control at the local level throughextensivepurgesof traditional office-holdersandthe manipulation of local separatism,notably by the restorationof the paramountcy of the Kukuomhenein the courseof the creationof a separateBrongAhafo regiop.. Many peoplewere beatenup and driven away from their lands into the forest-'to bush'. The life of the M.P., Osei, a man of

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striking courageand determination,20belied by his diminutive stature, was threatenedon at least one occasionin a determinedmannerand numerousefforts were madeto get him to transferhis allegianceto the C.P.P.He was one of the last M.P.s to remainin oppositionand he continued to challengethe governmentintermittently (though without injudicious rudeness)in Parliament.Only the formal arrival of the oneparty stateand the electionsof 1965,in which he was consequentlyunable to stand,producedhis disappearance from the political sceneand restoredthe public representationof Ahafo to C.P.P.hands.Therecan be little doubt that the areaas a whole sufferedfor the obduracyof its resistanceto c.P.P. contropi and it is hardly surprising that there should have been substantiallocal enthusiasmat the prospectof a governmentof the reincarnatedU.P., when the formal ban on party politics was at last lifted three yearsafter the coup. The official campaignfor the 1969electionwas naturally confinedto the period after the lifting of this governmentalbanon overt political activity. But in Ahafo, as elsewhere,politics never stops and there are somefeaturesof the campaignwhich canonly be understoodin the light of the entire period sincethe overthrowof the Nkrumahgovernment.In one sense the most important feature of the election was that the machineryof governmentdid not interfere in the election on behalfof either of the two major parties. Its neutrality as an organisedinterest may have derived more from internal dissensionsalong ethnic lines within the ruling N.L.C. than from the sheerforce of its members'addiction to the proprietiesof democraticelection,but the motivesfor its organisationalneutrality are of no significancein this instance.What mattersis that it did not explicitly take sidesand that any partisanship displayedby its agentsat a local level was restrictedin efficacy by a stringent need for discretion. The local administration,in Asunafo at least, ran the election to such high standardsof propriety that despite the ebullient and far from polite atmosphereof the campaign,in which derogatoryaccusationswere in profusesupply,for sometwo and a half monthsthe writer never heard anyoneallege that it had deviatedfrom the strict demandsof impartiality. Individual policemen or returning officers might have strayed from this path on occasion, but, in an exceedinglyauthoritarianenvironment,modern authority in the constituencyattainedimpressivestandardsof purity in its performanceof the rituals. There is, however, a sensein which the ostentatiousimpartiality of the administration may have served in effect as the subtlestform of partiality. Therecan be no doubt that the most effective memberof the local administration (the young Ga Administrative Officer) would have been happy, had not the intenserectitude of his public conduct precluded such a choice, to support the victorious party. A man of

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startling energy, allied with great charm and histrionic ability, he had had a very considerableimpact upon the district in the two years of his administration.22 Despite his maintenanceof an elaboratemime of social distance,23he remainedendlesslyavailableto settledisputes,and he wrestled with elan against the lethargic reflexes of the central bureaucracyon behalfof the peopleof his district in an effort to dissipate their historical heritage of governmentalneglect. The coming of piped water to the town of Goaso,the administrativecapital of the district and the seatof his residence,while it was an achievementfor which many claimed responsibility,24representedfor him and indeed for the peopleof the town at large the consummationof his administration.As an incarnation of civic rectitude and sheer practical efficacy, he was himselffor many the most reassuringpolitical symbol-andone which plausibly united material benefit and moral purpose.If rectitudemeant piped water at last, who did not want rectitude?25 One further sense,symbolically revealing although of small importance in this particular constituency,in which the propriety of the government'sdemeanourwas less than impartial between the two major parties requiresbrief mention. Among the N.L.C.'s few specific political undertakingsduring the three yearsof its rule was the creation of the Centre for Civic Education, a government-sponsoredand financed voluntary associationfor purveying instructionon the ethical characterof the state. As one might expectwith a post-colonialstate, this ethical characterwas a pretty abstractaffair, largely a questionof being impartial betweenits subjectsand of being owed duties by them. Civic education was clearly education in not voting, when the time came, for the former President(though even here the N.L.C. government showed its lack of confidencein the efficacy of the educational processby banning any party which attemptedto provide this opportunity). But at least in its public dimensionsit could not be assertedto have beeneducationin votingfor anybodyin particular.The most that could be said was that earnestinjunctions to exhibit virtue when voting might suggestto the innocentvoter that to expendhis ballot on a man whose public image was somewhatpietistic would be a more virtuous act than bestowingit on a man whosepublic imagewas distinctly more raffish. In any caseit is hard to believethat the Centrefor Civic Education can haveexertedany very drasticelectoraleffect. Among the sixty or so men and women(not personallyengagedin runningthe campaign of one of the parties) interviewed in Goasoin three months before the election, extendedquestioningrevealedthat at most four or five had heard of the Centreunder any description,and of thesenone had any distinct idea of what it was for. What was more important from the point of view ofN.A.L.-as Gbedemahcomplainedon the occasionof his electoralvisit to Goaso--wasthat the man placedat the headof this

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emblematicallyimpartial body was to become,in due course,the leader of the party which eventuallywon theelection.Gbedemah'scomplaint was not, of course,that there was anything inauthenticfor Busia in the role of civic educator.(It was indeedthe precisionwith which the role fitted him which served in the unsympatheticeye to blur its impartiality.) What had arousedGbedemah'sresentmentwas that the Centre had given the ProgressParty's leader several years start in political organisationbefore the ban on politics had been lifted. Organisation had been the C.P.P.'s great talisman, a word of almost magical significance,pronouncedreverentiallyevenby the District Secretaryof the ProgressParty, and the practiceof it had alwaysbeenGbedemah's forte. In his speechin Goasohe contrived to turn the start enjoyedby his opponentsalmost into an advantagefor himself by the dramatic projection of the speed and the nationwide scope of his own organisationalefforts. It was a fine performance.But the bravadorang a little hollow. Organisation had always been an activity of slightly ambiguous meaning in Ghanaianpolitical practice. It took in, under one of its aspects,the masteryof the modern technical aspectsof political campaigning,a masterywhich the C.P.P.hadintroducedto mostof Ghana, the provision of propagandavans, leaflets, newspapers,speakersand party paraphernaliain which N .A.L. often enjoyedsomethingof an edge over its opponentsin this particular campaign.The symbol of this modern aspectof organisationmight simply be not missing thebus. In so far as it was in itself a sufficient conditionfor amassingvotes,thereis no reasonto supposethat Busia'stenancyof the Civic Educationplatform gavehim any significantorganisationaladvantage.But, in another of its aspects,organisation always meant something distinctly less public or modernist in character:the attentive stitching together of national coalitions out of local elites, in which thereremain necessarily almost as many seamsalong which to fray as there are strandsin the local political cloth. There can be no doubt that Busia'stravels around the country and his meetings with local notables had the effect of clothing the ProgressParty, on its eventualemergence,in the mantleof local elite approval, making the respectableparty into the party of national respectabilityin most areasof the country, and thus endowing with impressivepolitical weight an ideology which had seemedto less sensitive foreign observers almost devoid of social purchase.The organisationaltalentsof Gbedemahhimselfandthe C.P.P.in generalin this secondactivity had never beentestedin an environmentin which there existed real opposition, without the possibility of some more or lessdirect recourseto the coerciveor economicallyrewardingpowersof the state.The situationin 1969demandedsubstantiallygreaterpolitical skill for their control, and Gbedemahcertainly neededmuch moretime

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to unpick the seams,thoughtime alonewould hardly haveturnedout to be sufficient. There was thus real political substanceto the advantage enjoyed by Busia through his public institution, and he had in fact visited Goaso to inauguratea branch of it. And yet the opportunity which it must havegiven him in Asunafoto consolidatelocal elite support was in practicequite supererogatory.The main seamsof such a coalition had beenstitchedtogether,as A. W. Osei observedwith pride, in the electionof thirteenyearsbefore.The political memoryof Asunafo was largely a memory of the costsof this choice, and the survivors of this elite coalition had no needof a visit from their former party leader to commit them energeticallyto the effort to securethe belatedrewards of their past sufferings. As the bent old women who had been beaten from their villages under the C.P.P. danced in jubilation over their enemiesat the ProgressParty'selectionrallies, it wasclearthat the people of Asunafo had drawn their lessonsfrom an educationwith roots in a soil deeperif more ambiguousthan that of the civic. The campaignwhich took placewithin the painstakinglyneutral administrativeframework was conductedby two different typesof actors. One, a rather small group, comprisedthosewho were overtly or covertly contendersfor selectionas electoralcandidatesfor either of two major partieswhich alone in the end contestedthe constituency.26The other consistedof the political organisationsof thesetwo parties.The distinction betweenthe two groupswas in part one of status,a social matter, but also in part one of vanity, a personalmatter. Becomingan M.P. in Ghana representsdramatic upward social mobility for all except the vastly rich. A seat in Parliament,with its combination of direct and indirect economicreturns,is a prize of sucha scalethat only 'oneeligible manin Asunafo--alarge-scaletimber contractor-wasplainly too rich for it to be worth his while acquiringit. Selectionas a majority party's candidate for Parliament is an economic opportunity for which the ambitious might well chooseto contendfor purely egoistic reasons.It is thusnot surprisingthat someof thosewho did aspireto the parties' nominationswithout successshould then have failed to take any part in the election campaign.The story of the ProgressParty's triumph in the campaignis largely the story of the failure of a seriesof vanities,ruffled in political defeat,to give rise to the customaryfissions. The party's successin preservingits unity was facilitated in part by the timing of one of the most important contestsover candidacy.The eventual Progress candidate, Alfred Badu Nkansah, first attained political prominencein a tripartite competition for the nomination as a member of the Constituent Assembly for the two Parliamentary constituenciesof Asunafo and Asutifi (the GoasoCouncil area).The other two candidateswere A. W. Osei, the former United Party M.P. for the area,a substantiallyolder man,and a third rathershadowy

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figure, apparentlyan itinerant vendorof patentmedicineswho received little supportand disappearedfrom political view immediatelyafter the election. Nkansahhad the advantageof a university education,important in the contextof selectionfor constitution-making,without the disability which commonly accompaniedthis qualification of having chosento live and work outside the area. He had recently played a prominentpart in the successfulstruggleto destoolthe chiefof his home town, Akrodie;27 he was also an active member of the resuscitated Ahafo Youth Society, the modernist pressuregroup in the perennial conflict with the local statebureaucracy,a body of which Osei was probably the leading light. The electors for the representativeof the locality to the ConstituentAssembly were the government-appointed membersof the Local Council for the area,of which, too, Mr. Osei was a highly effective member.The total number of electorswas less than thirty and in no sense whatever could they have been said to be statistically representativeof the area. But, whether becausethe prominenceof officials in its compositiongaveit a more formalist sense of the qualificationsrequiredfor constitution-making(and henceled it to put greater emphasison youth and educational attainment), or whether for more direct reasons,the electors voted, somewhatto the surpriseof a number of shrewd local observers,strongly in favour of Badu Nkansah. In the subsequentmonths the latter's public performancein the Assembly was prominent enough to please the more attentive local political observers.Copiesof Hansardcontainingspeechesof his percolatedthrough to Goasoand one or two membersof the community, includingthe local representative oftheSpecialBranchof thepolice,who observed him in action in the Assembly and professedthemselves satisfied. In private, Badu Nkansahnaturally aligned himself with the large group of membersof the Assembly who favoured Dr. Busia and he beganto attendsomeof the meetingsof this group at Busia'sprivate houseon the outskirtsof Accra. At the sametime Osei was in extremely poor health for somemonths,and he becameincreasinglypreoccupied with the problems of running his businessand attending to his very extensivefamilial responsibilities.Whetheror not the 1969 nomination wbuld have been such a simple choice if he had been successfulin his earlier candidaturefor membershipof the ConstituentAssembly,it was not a difficult matter in the circumstanceswhich now prevailed to decide that he had had his fill of the travails of politics and could properly emulateCincinnatusin abandoningpublic for private duties. The avoidanceof any direct and embitteredclash betweenthe two men was of great significance,since the core political organisationof the party remainedin essentialsan inheritancefrom Osei'searlier campaigns. Both the party's District Secretary(a nephewof Mr. Osei. who lived

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in one of the rooms in his two-storey house in Goaso) and another leading member(who was not only a close personalfriend of Osei'sfor many yearsbut a former chief of Noberkaw,one of the premierchiefly ranks in the Ahafo division) had worked closely with Osei in the Ahafo Youth Society. There was a certain initial distrust towards these men on the part of the most active supportersand advisors of Badu Nkansah,a numberof whom werenot Ahafo-born,becausethey feared a resuscitationof Osei's candidacyand there were intermittent minor grumblingsover matterslike the control of campaigningfunds as these becameavailable, and over the generalunwillingnessto undertakethe entertainmentof visiting dignitariesdue to speakat rallies. But, despite the general scarcity of financial resources,the atmosphereremained strikingly amiableand co-operative. The maintenanceof amity in this key relationshipduring the campaign did not mean that the party escapedthe pains of a sharply contestedcandidacy.At the meeting held in the regional capital, Sunyani. some80 miles from Goaso,to inauguratethe party in the Brong Ahafo region, anothereligible figure from Ahafo appearedon the V.J.P. dais as a potential rival to Badu Nkansah.He was a man of roughly the same age as the latter, slightly more of an urban sophisticatein appearance. and he possessedthe additional advantageof a British M.Sc. degreein engineering.He worked at the modernport ofTemaand owneda rather new-looking Mercedes,whereasBadu Nkansah,as becameimportant at somepointsof the campaign,did not possessa car and his salaryas a school teacherwas totally insufficient for him to acquire one. (There were, indeed,certain stagesof the campaignin which the needto return to Accra to draw his allowances as a Member of the Constituent Assembly seemedto loom larger in his financial planning for the campaign than the needto participatein its deliberationsdid in his political planning.) This rival candidate,Yaw Podiee, hailed from Mim, the largestand wealthiesttown in the constituency,and this fact, combined with his greaterpersonalwealth, appearedto threatenBadu Nkansah with seriouscompetition. The threat was not an entirely idle one. The fairness of the first selection meeting of the party was successfully challengedby Podiee through the regional organisationof the party; and a secondmeeting,summonedfor the town of Sankoredeep in the forest, led first to an attempton the part of Podiee'ssupportersto persuadethe police to close the meeting and then to an extendedpublic wrangle before the chief of Sankoreabout the circumstancesin which the meeting had been summoned. At the end of this dispute, the representatives of Mim marchedout of the meetingand Badu Nkansah was confirmedas the candidateby an overwhelming(and clearly an absolute) majority of the delegates.Numeroussubsequentefforts to settle the dispute aborted,usually becauseof the difficulty of assemblingall

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the injured partiesat one time and place,and it was not until a meeting (in Mim itself) shortly beforethe election-whenthe District Chairman of the party who came from Mim, and anothereven more determined Mim representative,grumpily condescendedto take part in a rally-that the breachwas publicly healed.Allegations of corruption and chicanerywere passedenergeticallyin both directionsand it would be imprudentto attempta conclusivecausalanalysisof the result. But it was clear, quite apart from the advantagewhich he enjoyedby having alreadyappearedon the national political sceneas the representativeof Ahafo, that one reasonfor Badu Nkansah'ssuccesswasthat in the eyes of the electoratehe was a much bettercandidate.Podiee,a slight figure with a quiet and rather delicate mien, who had studiedin Englandfor someyears,had simply been away from home for too long. The air of urban sophistication which clung around him conveyed a powerful senseof social distance.Unlike his taller, charming.noisily articulate and slightly brash opponenthe lacked the capacity to 'move with the people'and did not know how to dominatea beerbar. Onecould not imagine anyonesaying of Podiee,as the District Secretarysaid over and, over againwith quiet and confidentsatisfactionofBadu Nkansah,'The people like him.' Badu's stay away from Ahafo had left him still in possessionof a reassuringlyfamiliar local identity, and he had hadthe political good taste to return and find a job and make his home in Ahafo. Podieehad travelled too far and returnedtoo belatedlyto serve as a plausiblevehiclefor the assertivepolitical demandsof Ahafo. In the event, even the possessionof the large car served,with his distant air, not to promise greaterefficacy as an advocateof the interestsof the area, but to accentuatethe transiencyof his relationshipwith it. What might have beenseenas a testimonyto its owner'seffectivenessserved in practice merely to emphasisethe extent to which he had become exotic. Even this accountof the selectionof the P.P.'scandidaterepresents, as will be apparentlater, a distinctly tidied up outline of the shapeof its campaign.For the selectionof the N.A.L. candidatethere is no way in which even this rather specioussimplicity can be matched.It had at leastalwaysbeenclear that one of the partieswhich contestedany election in Asunafo under N.L.C. auspiceswas certain to be someversion of the former United Party. What was not clear up to the very day of nomination was what other parties, if any, might enter the lists. One reasonfor this was simply the much greaterorganisationalfluidity of the other parties, a national rather than a local characteristic,though one which had distinct repercussionson the local patternof political activity. Another was the distinctly more furtive character(it was referred to by participantsquite explicitly as a largely 'secretcampaign')of the N.A.L. approachin the constituencywhen it did in fact begin. This fur-

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tivenesswas in a sensea rational responseto the precariousness of the government'simpartiality in the election.For while the governmentwas indubitably impartialas a unit betweenthe partieswhich were permitted to contestthe election,it did actively maintainits right to determinethe limits within which it was preparedto be impartial. Not only did it ban by decree at a national level parties for alleged complicity with Nkrumah; but, at a local level, C.I.D. or Special Branch officers attendeda large numberof electionrallies and took conscientiousnotes on the proceedings,while full particularsof the secretselectionmeeting for the N.A.L. candidate,held in a private housein Goaso,immediately found their way into the handsof the local administration.Paradoxically, in Asunafo, the party which was assumedto enjoy most support in the senior ranksof the police force nationally was subjectedlocally to a certain amount of inconvenienceas a result of this conscientioussur~ veillance. On the national level the party enjoyed an irreproachable security rating. Gbedemahhad not merely had the good fortune to be removedby Nkrumah from the Ministry of Financefor allegedcorrup~ tion. He had also had the political prudenceor personalpride to respond in due courseto this treatmentby leaving the country and engagingin bitter public recrimination againsthis former leader. But this political accreditationon the national level which, along with the economic resourcesat the disposalof his party, explainedwhy in the end he was able to field the only candidatewho did opposethe P.P. in Asunafo, could not suffice to provide an a~priori charterin the eyesof the local administrationfor the doings of his local agents. The N.A.L. campaignwas organisedby the licit residueof the former c.P.P.local hierarchy.The major organiser,and in fact the Parliamen~ tary candidatein the neighbouringconstituencyof Asutifi, Kojo Bonsu, was a former chief of Kenyase and a brother of the leading C.P.P. dignitary from Ahafo, B. K. Senkyire,M.P. in 1954,and Minister in the final Nkrumah government.The latter was widely thought in Accra to havebeenone of the major figures behindthe party organisedby Imoru Egala,a party bannedduring the courseof the campaignby the N.L.C. for its allegedintention to bring Nkrumahback from exi\c. Senkyirewas in no position to escapefrom any of the versionsof the government's Disqualification policies. But although he could thus, at no point, have taken an overt part in campaigning,thereis no reasonto believethat his brother (who used to appearin a Mercedesuniversally describedas Senkyire'sown) would not have been able, had governmentallicence permitted,to swing his supportbehind a party which appearedto be a more authenticinheritor of the c.P.P. mantle. As it was, it was said. rancorously by his opponents, that he had dallied politically and economicallywith at leasttwo further partiesbeforc settling his favours finally upon NA.L. Such inconstancyis not a trivial mattersince,ifit is

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ignored,the insistenceofN.A.L. memberson the degreeto which their membershipof the party had beena matterof coursewould be seriously misleading.There is no reasonto doubt the claim made by one of the most impressivelocal C.P.P. organisersthat he had always esteemed Gbedemah,even as againstNkrumah, as the epitomeof the true. pre~ tyrannical(and, one may suspect,pre~ideological) ological c.P.P.,a man whose advice,if followed, would have avertedthe calamity of the coup and the loss of many good jobs. Having acquired Gbedemahas a leader.the N.A.L. supporterswere in no dangerof being short of attributesto ad~ mire in him. But rationality should not be confusedwith causality:the quality of the determinationof their allegianceseemsto have been a largely rationality characteristicof it. One could not say that necessity had madestrangebedfellowsin this instance.But governmentallicence might certainly have made different ones. Gbedemah'seconomic resources,and the characterof his party as the contenderleast unlike the c.P.P. to contrive to survive within the limits of governmental tolerance, made him the natural inheritor of a local political equipe which increasinglylooked to be all dressedup with nowhereto go. But although this equipe was an excellent example of what could be acquired for cash on a decidedly oligopolistic political market. one characteristicof it points up a generaldilemmain Gbedemah'snational campaignstrategy. Whereasmuch local political supportcould be picked up on a purely of sup~ market basis,there were few placesin which a preponderance port could be picked up on this basis alone; while organisationalsup~ port of any political weight acquiredon a purely marketbasistendedto carry intrinsic costs above and beyondthoseof its political purchase. A political equipe authentically N.A.L. in its ideological identity (whateversuch an equipewould have been like outsidethe Ewe areas) would not have been unduly embarassedby administrativescrutiny. But a local c.P.P. apparatus,in which former c.P.P. District Com~ missionerswere covertly promised their jobs back if the party won, might well appearto the local administrationas intrinsically closerto its protractedhistorical identity than to the decorouspolitical label which it had so recently adopted.In this guise it might well seemto requireall the administrativesurveillancewhich it could conveniently be given. Without the government'sexclusion of a potential competitor Gbedemah,then, might well have failed to garnerthe political support which he did acquirein Asunafo. It is a mark of the equivocalstatusof N.A.L. as a contestantin the constituencythat, whereasthe first public P.P. meetingof the campaign was held in Goasoon 1 May, in the immediateaftermathof the lifting of the ban on politics, no major N .A.L. activity was discerniblein the constituencyat all (though a N.A.L. van did drive throughon 8 June)until

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the middle of Junewhen a meetingwas held in the smartestGoasobeer bar. The Special Branch representativein the district claimed that as late as 7 August the party had still not secureda permit for holding an official public rally some three weeks before the election was to take place.The two campaignsrepresenteda dramaticcontrastin styles.To a very substantialextent they went their separateways, resolutely ignoring the existenceof one another.The competition betweenthem took on many different guises,but one formwhich it neverassumedwas that of a rational and explicit debatebetweenthe two partiesabouthow the statecould bestbe governed.The Schumpeterimageof conflicting elites blandly offering their managerialtalentsto discriminatingconsumersin an assuredenvironmentwas as inept a picture of the efforts of the vendors as it was of the expectationsof the purchasers.The loyalties reachedfor were deeper and more pervasive, and the enterpriseto which electors were summonedwas altogethermore urgent than the practice of marketing. The rewards for successand the penaltiesfor failure were of quite a different scaleboth for elites and masses,and the prospectsfor failure were known by all not to terminatewith the election results. The image of cementingunity in the struggle against a nebulousbut menacingfoe, capturesthe languagein which the activity of electioneeringwasdescribedmuchbetterthanthat of the compulsory but attentive choice betweenrival schemesof hire purchase.It will be more illuminating to discussthe recruiting campaignsof the two armies separately,as they happened,and it is convenientto begin with the first to appearon the scene. The openingmeetingof the ProgressPartyin Goasoon 1 May, summonedby the Chief of Goasobeatinggong-gong,in a senseepitomised the problemsof the party in the coming months.Although it claimedto be the official inaugurationofthe party in the constituency,it wasin fact a meeting unauthorisedby the central machineryof the party: it was organisedby the faction in the longstandingGoasochieftaincydispute which opposedthe faction to which Osei belonged.As far as was then publicly known, the latter was still a prospectivecandidateand it was assumedthat the holding of the meetingat this time was an'effortto preempt the political ground for anothercandidate.Organisationallythe meeting also foreshadowed muchof the rest of the campaign:it had to be closedand reconvenedsomehourslater becauseof the paucityof the attendance.The subjectmatter of the speeches,appropriatelyenough, wasthe needto cometogetherto representthe interestsof Ahafo in view of the dreadful damageto theseinterestscausedby pastlocal disunity. Three weeks later, on 21 May, the national machineryof the party, in the masterful personof A. A. Munufie, a Sunyani lawyer and interim RegionalChairmanof the party, appearedin the constituencyto reimposesomeorder on the proceedings.The meetingwas supposedto be a

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meetingof the party executives,ratherthan the public, but it took place very publicly at the courthouse.Munufie was somewhatlate and the chief of Goaso attemptedto have the meeting postponedto another occasion.Munufie's powerful voice quieted the hubbub briefly and he explainedthat all the offices in the party were merely interim until the formal regional inauguration in Sunyani, three days later. Then a representativeof the alternativefaction in the local chieftaincydispute complainedthat the self-selectedparty executivedid not representthe peopleof Goasoand the meeting broke up noisily. The regional inauguration on 24 May duly saw many important Ahafo figures at Sunyani. The former Paramount of Ahafo, the Kukuomhene,was among the chiefs sitting in state beneaththeir umbrellas, while Mr. Osei and his nephew(the aspiringDistrict Secretary) and both candidatesfor the party nominationwere also conspicuously in attendance.Busia arrived to speakto a substantialcrowd, flanked by numerouspolicemen and traditional state executioners.It was a gay and festive occasion,featuring sundry party dignitaries from Accra, a band or two, some dancing, men with megaphones,party motorcyclists, a carloadof girls dressedin white and red, and a good deal of genial disorganisation.If the party shrankfrom the distribution of bread (or its Ghanaiananalogue,sardines),it clearly had no inhibitions about supplyingthe peoplewith circuses.A main themeofBusia'sspeechwas an assurancethat he did not proposeto dismantle the Brong Ahafo region (Sunyani'ssole industry). It was in essencea denial (maderather anxiouslyby Munufie in Goasothreedaysbefore)of the chargeof being a lackey of the Ashanti, which the former U.P.leaderwas clearly under strong pressureto make. In threeweeksafter this inaugurationthe decisivelynational focus of the campaign'sobjective,and the externalpolitical resourceswhich this made available within the constituency,beganto impose order on the ebullient particularism of Ahafo to the extent of providing it, by midJune, with an authorisedDistrict Executive,the election of which had been duly supervisedby party officials from outside the constituency. Osei'snephew,BensonAnane,duly becamethe Secretaryand his election was made more generally palatableby Osei'sown public declaration that he was not preparedto stand as a candidate.The self-elected Goasoexecutivewas largely supplantedoutside the town itself, but it swallowed its pride and continued to co-operatein the campaign. Further public meetings,at both of which Munufie spoke,were held at Mim and (in the secondweek of June) at Kukuom, in the immediate aftermathof Kukuomhene'sacquittal celebrations,28a piece of timing which securedan optimal audiencebut which clearly irritated the chief himself. On 29 June Badu Nkansahwas chosenas the candidate,Yaw Podiee having, as the Executive judged, improperly submitted his

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application to the regional office and thus being ineligible. The conof this disputedraggedon for severalmoreweeks,exhausting sequences most of the energiesavailable.Taken with the unavailability of a party van for the district, and with Badu Nkansah'smodestpersonalmeans and his need to leave the constituencyfor substantialperiods to participate in the ConstituentAssembly, it resultedin there being a temporary respite in the public campaign-arespite which lasted until a meetingin Badu Nkansah'shome town Akrodie in mid-July to which a leading V.P. former detainee,R. R. Amponsah,cameto speak. The remainderof the P.P. campaignwas more continuousand less eventful. There were a substantialnumber of further public meetings, held at leastoncein all the major populationcentresin the constituency, severalwith visiting speakers.A promisedvisit by Busia himself never materialised,though on two occasionsleading party supportersin the constituencymadeextendedtrips outsideit in order to hear him speak. The contentof speechesdid not vary very much,thoughthe toneof persuasionwaveredin sophisticationand delicacyfrom the purely pietistic to the sharply and personallyminatory, and from the grandly universalistic to the meanly ethnic. Apart from the intermittent characterof the candidate'spresence,the most striking organisational problem throughout was one of transport. The modern party van from the regional organisationwas sharedwith severalother constituenciesand wasthus only occasionallyavailable.Bedu Nkansah,out of the not very extensivecampaigningfunds raised at local rallies and madeavailable to him by the party'scentralorganisation,contrivedto borrow or hire a motley array of decrepit vehicles ranging from a Land Rover with a woodenbody to a pair of exhaustedVolkswagens,noneof which spent as much time available for use as they did being repaired. Theconstituency was of substantial size, and its population was scattered through the forest in clustersmost of which, becauseof the rather uncharacteristicallylow rainfall in 1969, could be reachedby road in a fairly robust vehicle. There can be no doubt that the party organisers were compelledto devotemore energyand moneyto actually getting to as many placesas possiblein the constituencyto campaignthan they did to any other part of their enterprise.When they actually did get to most of the more rural villages, they confined their political activities, apart from consultationswith the party's local representativeswhere such were to be found, to a brief introductionof the candidate,an identification of the party emblem(which illiterates had to rememberif they were to be able to vote at all) and an extensivelymimed representation of the activity of voting. The procedurefor voting was in fact fairly elaborateand the mime consequentlytook up mostof the time available at each halt. The entire procedurewas describedthroughout by the party organisersas 'educatingthe people'in how to vote. It was certainly

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true, too, that what was transactedwas more aptly described as educatingthem in how to vote for thosefor whom it was assumedthey would alreadywish to vote, than as attemptingto persuadethem to vote for a particularparty. The P.P. assumedthroughout(quite correctly as the resultsdemonstrated)29 that their problemwas simply oneof getting electorsto the polls with an understandingof the mechanismof casting a ballot, not one of persuadingthem to vote for the P.P. ratherthan for their opponents.On occasionthey pressedthis exercisein civic education rather hard-aswhen they visited a primary schooland attempted to get the Headmasterto teachthe children to identify the P.P. symbol in order to assisttheir parentsin doing so when the opportunity in due coursearose.The neutrality of this undertakingwas greetedwith some incredulity by the predominantlyEwe schoolteachersand in fact the N .A. L. vote in this village was one of the highestin the constituency. The N.A.L. campaignbeganlater and proceededin an altogether more covert and less assuredfashion. A bus load of supportersfrom one village deepin the forest was allegedto have gone to Gbedemah's inauguration rally but the P.P. resolutely denied that this had happened.A N.A.L. propagandavan, paintedin the party'sstriking red and yellow colours, had appearedin the constituencyon a numberof occasionsin the first half of June.The P.P. organisersclaimedto know the identity of the N.A.L. candidateas early as the middle of June,and indeed gave the (true) fact that he came from Mim as an argument againstthe chancesof Podiee'sbeing selectedas P.P. candidate.But it was not until shortly after this that N.A.L. held their first Goaso executivemeeting,presidedover by oneof the party'sregionalofficials, Mr. Essel, the Kukuomhene'sclerk. T. N. Baidoo, a former C.P.P. District Commissioner,a relative and long-time rival of Osei's and a colleagueon the first official agency for the developmentof the area seventeenyearsbefore,30spokeat lengthat this meeting.It wasclearthat the organisationaltalent of the party was a direct heritage from the c.P.P.,though the preliminary District Chairman,a male nurse,S. K. Dontor, was a Fanti and a relative newcomerto the district. On 5 July after a seriesof postponements an official candidateselectionmeetingof the party began.Therewere threecompetitorsfor the nomination.One, J. K. Osei, a quiet schoolteacherfrom Mim at that point teachingoutside the constituencyat Bechem,was a memberof the Ahafo Youth Society and agreed by all to be an excellent candidate.The other two contestantswere an agricultural survey officer from Akrodie, said to lack force of personalityand a large bull-like man, recentlyadmitted to the University of Ghanaas a maturestudent,who had studiedmeat technology in Germany and served as production manager of the governmentmeatpackingfactory in Bolgatanga.He had expresseda vehementand pungentlycynical interestin politics at his University in-

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terview and was clearly a formidable figure. But. as one of the executive remarkedquietly before the meeting began,he had little prospectof successsince he came from Ashanti and his eligibility derived solely from his mother'sownershipof a farm in the district at Ayumso: 'If we are not going to havea candidatewho is Ahafo-born,then let's stop the party.' Most of the meetingwas takenup with a disputeover the choice of the party District Chairman in which the geographicaldivisions, Kukuom side and Mim side, were reflected in a bitter conflict as to whosecandidateshould be selectedas Chairman,a conflict in which the even balanceof forces might well have foreshadowed(and was clearly expectedby all participantsto foreshadow)a conflict betweenthe two localities over the Parliamentarycandidature.Some of the structural problemsof the party were revealedby the subject matter of the dispute-thesignificanceof having a literate rather than an illiterate (sc. the Kukuom representative),the desirability of having a local man ratherthan a stranger(sc. the temporarychairman,S. K. Dontor), and the usual range of accusationsof chicaneryin the distribution of information. The valiant endeavourof the regionalpresidingofficer, Kojo Bonsu, and his determinedinsistenceon the need for unity and propriety, did not prevent the meeting from breaking up after some hours (and before the Parliamentary candidate had been selected)in what the District administration rather unsympatheticallydescribedas a riot. The one determinateresult of the meeting, the election of a District Executive, by confirming Dontor as District Chairman, further emphasisedthe tensionin the party'slocal identity. Since, asone of the Executive observed satta voce, the party's leader was very much a strangerto Ahafo, it would have beena pointlessexerciseto attemptto portray itself as more indigenousthan the indigenes.N.A.L. was forced thereforeinto the pursuit of the allegianceof the relatively large local strangerpopulation,aboveall the Ewes and Krobos. But in doing so, it risked discrediting itself as an authenticrepresentativeof the locality. Even the eventualrunning of an Ahafo-born candidatecould not quite dissipatethe whiff of the alien which hung about it and any more purposeful attemptto eludethis identity would haverisked the sacrificeof a more or less guaranteedcore of electoral support in exchangefor a highly speculative(and in all probability non-existent) chance of a majority. The day after the fracasat the courthouseN .A.L. appliedfor a police permit to hold anothercandidateselectionmeetingbut the requestwas refusedbecausethe District Administrationthoughtit likely that a week of cooling off might be requiredto preventfurther trouble. In the eventa N.A.L. van returnedto the constituencyfrom Sunyanion the following day and a secretmeetingwas held at the houseof T. N. Baidoo. rather mysteriously reported as a public rally in one of the national

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newspapers,at which the offer to the former c.P.P. District Commissionersthat they should regain their jobs in the event of a N.A.L. victory was allegedly made by the party official from Sunyani. Thereafterthe party contrivedto conductwhat was referredto, both by its own adherentsandthe P.P.with varying admirationor censure,asits 'secretcampaign'.It never had the full use of a propagandavan with which at one time all constituencieswere supposedto be endowedand there was somegrumbling amongthe party's temporaryemployeesat of other resources.Thereis no good reasonto supthe non-appearance posethat really largesumsof moneyeverarrived in the constituencyfor its campaigningpurposes,though there is much reasonto supposethat this cameas a considerableand disagreeablesurpriseto many of those concerned.Indeed some senior membersof the party were still expecting the arrival of somethousandsof poundsin the constituencyon the very eve of polling itself. The party's stylish propagandavans drove through the main towns from time to time, playing the same catchy religious popsongsfrom their speakersas those favoured by local motorisedsalesmenof patentmedicines,and the party's sloganswere duly broadcastat the bystanders.As campaigningit had, as far as it went, a harder, brassiertone than that of its opponents,slicker, more modernand more urban.But as campaigninggoes,it cannotbe claimed that in quantitativeterms it went very far, and the imageit left behindit had some of the meretriciousness,the urban untrustworthinessof the patentmedicinevendors,besidesits protectivepromises.The yawning gap betweenthis assuredand transient public advertisementand the furtive, persistent,'organisational'efforts of the local party machine, was not reassuring.It suggestedthe menaceat least as much as the blandishmentsof modernity. The climax of the N.A.L. campaign, by contrast, was the most dramatic and the most public local event of the entire election campaign: the visit of the party'sleaderto Goaso,Kukuom and Mim a fortnight before polling day itself. The excitementgeneratedby this event was intense.Whatevermay have beenits causalweight (and no doubt this should not be exaggeratedsince the party's total poll barely exceededthe joint attendanceat its three meetings), its symbolic significancecould hardly be overestimated.As the beautiful Ewe girls in all their finery dancedon the hillside in the sunshine,waiting for their leader,the atmospherein the crowd was sharply expectant.When the party vans at the headof the processionhurtled into town, blaring out the thuddingTwi rhythms,'He is coming:He is coming:He is coming,'a quite different level of political panachehad entered the campaign howeverbriefly. The meetingitself in Goasowas a demonstrativeexercise in the new political respectability.Gbedemah'sformer Parliamentary foe and locally prominentcurrentopponent,Mr. Osei, was given a

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seatof honour with Gbedemahand his local aideson the stepsof the GoasoLocal Council building, while Gbedemah'sspeech(which took up the entire meeting)includedmuch stresson the virtues of opposition in a Parliamentarydemocracyand the iniquity of political violenceand the one-partystate.A tall and powerful-looking man,of extraordinary self-assurance and striking physicalglamour,he formed as he stoodup to speaka stunningincarnationof sheerpower and success.If this was success,then it was easyto seehow many might feel that nothing else could succeedquite like it. The speechitself, althoughfluent enoughand undeniably forceful in delivery and sentiment, hardly matched the dazzling quality of the physical presence.Partly this was a matter of clashingstyles.The speechwas deliveredin a confidentTwi, but it kept lapsing at the more aspirationalpoints into clustersof apparentlywellworn phrases or whole sentencesin English.31 The attentive cosmopolitan'liberal' stresson the valuesof Parliamentaryopposition jostled against a rather cruder presentation of the meaning of Gbedemah'scampaigningpresence:the bringing of rain to a parched Navrongoand of a miraculousdraughtof fishes to the port of Elmina. The main themeof the speechwasthe certaintyof his electoraltriumph all over the country: Keta, Dodze,CapeCoast,Sekondi,Bawku, Bolga, Walewale, Wa, Manya, even Wenchi, and the consequent rationality-prudential and emotional--of joining in. The whole speechwas an articulation of the party's slogan'N.A.L. VICTORY'. The offer was plain and forceful enoughand if it was madein English, rather than, as with the P.P.'spietistic chant(P.P. Good Party) in Twi, thereis no doubtthat it was couchedin a dialect which hasbecomepervasively understoodin Ghana. Shorter versions of the speechwere delivered to smaller crowds in Kukuom (where the cavalcadepaid a brief private call on the chief but the latter did not appearat the public function); and at Mim whereGbedemahwasjeeredby a hostile crowd. One small detail, no doubt a consequenceof the strains of the campaigningtour,32 stood out in retrospect.As the resplendentGbedemah towered over the slight, bemusedfigure of the local N .A.L. candidate, whose hand he held up in introduction to the people ('if you vote for him, you will be voting for ME'), he twice, at Goasoand at Kukuom, forgot the candidate'snameand was obliged to ask in an irritable hiss what it was. When the electors went to the polls a fortnight later, they voted overwhelmingly for the ProgressParty, as they did in both the other constituenciesalong the main road out of the Ahafo forest towards Sunyaniand Kumasi. Asunafo

A. Badu Nkansah(P.P.) J. K. Osei (N.A.L.)

13039 2715

81 polling stations P.P. wins 79

POLITICS IN ASUNAFO Asuntifi

1. K. Osei Duah (P.P.) Nana Kojo Bonsu (N.A.L.) Kwame Anane Obinim (U.N.P.)

Ahafo-Ano

H. M. Adjei-Sarpong(P.P.) G. K. Annin-Adjei (N.A.L.)

187

6026 1707 124

42 polling stations all won by P.P.

11959 2268

49 polling stations all won by P.P.

It was a remarkablypeacefuland administrativelywell-organisedpoll.

Before considering,however,what the electorswere voting about, it is necessaryto discuss a number of possibly coercive features which would make such a questionotiose. If men are compelledto vote in a particularway it cannotusefully be said that they vote about anything. They merely do what they are told. Many Ghanaians,for convincing inductive reasons,undoubtedlydo expect that electra! behaviourwill be essentially an exercise in obedience.As one old man whom I interviewed replied testily in an answerto the questionof how one should choosea political party: 'I don't know anything about that.But when the time comesI will put the paperinto the box into which all the people are putting theirs.'33 Ghanaian society is in many ways highly authoritarianand it would be naive to expectpolitical partiesas composite social realities, if not as formal hierarchiesof command,to eschew the useof suchdispersedauthority as is availableto them. But it is not a trivially definitional matter to insist, againstHobbesor possibly Marx, on the crucial significanceof the voluntaristicelementin electing. Fear is not the sameas respect,and force without right as the basisof electoralchoice doeserasewhateversymbolically consensualelement might be thoughtto residein the act of voting. It is thus a matterof some embarrassment, thoughonewhich in prevailingconditionscould hardly be otherwise,that it is impossibleto pronouncewith completeassurance on the degreeof randomsocial coercionor malpracticeinvolved in the election. One point which doesseemclear is that such coercion asdid occur was on this occasion,becauseof the real secrecyof the ballot, effective at an economic rather than a physical level. The fear of violence may not have been altogether absent. There were a small numberof brawls in the courseof the campaign-theN.A.L. candidate in the neighbouringconstituency,Kojo Bonsu,was eventakento court himself on a rather tendentiousassault charge-butthe actual incidenceof violencewas distinctly lower than almosteveryoneexpected. Gbedemahhimselfdid feel it worthwhile to warn in his speechin Goaso that the soldiersin the constituencywere not coming to threatenpeople but to assistthe wholly inadequatenumbersof the police in supervising the large numberof polling stations.But only a small numberof soldiers ever appearedand they certainly did not intervene in the electoral process.More graphically,the chief of onetown did threatento beatthe

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passengersif a N.A.L. propagandavan came to his town. but it was reportedlater that one had done so without injury being incurred. In general,traditional authority does not appearto have been very active in the campaignevenin a non-coercivefashion.though one chief did arrive at the main P.P. rally with a busloadof supportersfrom his town and at least two otherspublicly declaredtheir supportof the P.P. The averageage of the chiefs in the areawas rather high, most of them having been removed by the c.P.P.,and then replacedby the N.L.C. under decree 112. Their formal legitimacy was on the whole impeccable. but it might be doubted whether all could have survived the threat of destoolmentfor so long in a more open political environment.In any case. whether becauseof the inertia of age and a senseof subjective fragility in their authority, or becauseof the stronggovernmentaldirectives to chiefs to remain neutral in the electoral campaign.most did maintain some public decorum. Furthermorethe P.P., which for obvious historical reasonsenjoyed the support of the majority of them. was in no position becauseof is unceasingpublic commitmentto rectitude to make use of these dubiously legitimate political actors for publicly coercivepurposesin any generalway. Any effort to do so on its partwould haveriskednot only anembarrassing exposureat thehandsof its opponentsbut also, since the ballot was in fact secret, distinctly counterproductiveeffectswhen it actually cameto the voting. Perhapsthe level at which the notion of coercion is relevantat all is the level of vague menace,characteristicin industrial society on occasion of some aspectsof workplace solidarity in which a measureof blackmail is indubitably involved, but in which it is clearly appropriate to see the threats as largely those of moral scorn, rather than of instrumental violence.34 There was at least one occasion when the ProgressParty representatives read out from the electoralregistersthe names of the inhabitantsof a small forest village, and warned them darkly that the electionresultswere going to be known this time, polling station by polling station,and the party would know all too well which way they had voted. There can be no doubt too that Gbedemah.when he emphasisedthe secrecyof the ballot in his Goasospeech35against those who had been threateningshare-croppersand cocoa labourerswith dispossessionor unemploymentif they voted the wrong way, was attemptingto deal with a real political threat. The reality of the threat was indeedconfirmedby the explanationgiven by a N.A.L. organiserof the small forest wards in which it did prove successful:that the main landholdingsin the area were under the control of strong party supporters. The naggingfear, too, that physical violence might ultimately be deployedwas not a total fantasy, though it was also not justified in the event. At leastone prominentP.P. campaignersuggestedin the immediate aftermath of its crushing victory that the party's supporters

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take the opportunity to repay someof the violence which they had incurred in the past at the handsof their C.P.P.opponents,though the suggestionwas indignantlyrepudiatedas atavisticand disgraceful.36 It would havebeenabsurdin a societylike that of Ghanato expectan electioncampaignto be uncontaminatedby a good deal of more or less discreetbullying. But evenwherethe numbersof electorsinvolved was low enoughpartially to vitiate the protectionconferredby the secrecyof the ballot, it would be easyto misdescribethe implication of the directed quality of the vote. Even if the politics of Asunafo is largely to be describedas a politics of patronage,and of integrating clientagesfor political purposes,it does not follow that such mechanisms-inconditions of genuinely secret balloting and without recourse to state power--canappropriatelybe envisagedas the rule of terror or as the subjectionof a massof individual wills to the antagonisticwill of a single man. After all, one can only vote in an election betweenthe candidates who presentthemselves,and betweenthe two candidateswho did so in this instanceit would have required a more than Chineseideological sensitivity to detect a trace of difference in the characterof their class appeal.This is hardly an occasionfor wonderin view of the virtually complete absenceof class-consciousness as such from the political mind of Asunafo. Such patronalpolitical instruction as was put about undertheseconditionswas certainlylesslikely to representthe coercive repressionof the desires of individual voters to vote in a particular fashion than it was simply the provisionto themof reasonsfor troubling to vote at all. In the particular N.A.L. village in question-avillage organisedby a long-term resident from the Kusasi area of northern Ghanaand peopledlargely by Kusasiswhom he had settledthere-its patronalreliability is as plausibly representedasdependingon its ethnic homogeneityand the strengthof personalobligations as on its susceptibility to purely economicthreats.In general,such solidarismas there was in the constituencyseemsto have taken an ethnic and not a class form. In a multi-linguistic areaof recent,but geographicallydispersed, settlementthe dimensionsof community which are directly relevantto the structureof men'slives necessarilyhave more to do with the concretenessof cultural affinity than with the abstractdimensionsof social stratification. Inter-ethnictrust is a necessary,and as yet unavailable, prerequisitefor the experientialsalienceof a consciousness of class. It is not a simple matter to capture the meaning of these events. Indeedthe problemsof analysingthe politics of such an areasubstantially recapitulatethe problemsof, in the graphicGhanaianvernacular, 'doing politics' in such an area. Where practiceis so intricate and so denselyparticular,theory is in no condition to leap confidently ahead.The entire election can be aptly seenas an investigationin very practical terms of the social location of moral feelings. But it would have been

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rash for any participant,and it would be still more rash of an external observer,to claim with confidencethat he was certainof just wherethe boundariesof such feelings do lie for different groups.But if we are to make any serious attempt to delineate the intersection between the national and the local which such an election necessarilyrepresents, and, aboveall, if we are to move towardsdeterminingthe termsof trade betweenthe national and the local which is wherethe internal meaning of the nationalpolitics of African stateslargely resides,it is essentialnot merely to distinguish in the current American style betweensymbolic identification and technical economic rationality in electoral choice but also to offer a serious account of the moral characterof such identification. The dimensionof technicalrationality neednot detain us for long. It has beenthe indubitableachievement,though it may perhapsnot have been the aim, of the American economic theorists of democracyto prove conclusivelythat no actualindividual in a westerndemocracyhas sufficient egoistic grounds,by their own stringentcriteria of egoism,to botherto drag himselfto the polling station at all. 37 A possibleincidental felicity of the study of African elections might thus be-whether through the offers of money, corned beef or sardinesor the threat of blows--to provide belated instancesof the vote as an economically rational act. It must indeed have been true during some elections in Ghanaunderthe C.P.P.that electorswereon occasiontried by the fearsome ordealsof Downs and Olson and not found wanting in egoistic rationality. But the secrecyof the ballot on this particular occasion, while it may haveleft somemen with reasonsupon compulsionto make their way to the polling booths,cannothavegiven anyonea reasonactually to casta valid vote for anyoneoncehe had got there.It is true that for anyonewho did reach the ballot box after extendedwaiting in the queue,becauseit had beenmadeclearto him that it wasin his interestto do so, the marginal cost of choosingto vote for the side he preferred over making a purely random choice might seem small; and the discrimination of rationality under such circumstancesmay perhaps prudentlybe left to thosewith the requisitemathematicaltechniques.In any casefew electorshad a sufficiently complexpicture of the political universe,upon which they might haveattemptedto exert a purchaseby their vote, to be in any positionto indulgein suchcomplexmathematics. But if the rationalefor voting must have beenof a symbolic and not merely an egoistically rational nature,the more traditional understandings of democracydo plausibly regardsomeforms of symbolic identification as distinctly more symbolic than others. A traditional understandingof egoisticrationality in voting would merelyrequirethat in voting men are choosing a state of affairs which they would, in their expectation,preferto any alternativeon offer. Rationality inheresin the

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preference (or set of preferences)itself, and does not have to be stretchedto the willingness to participatein the entire ritual. No doubt in the absenceof effective sanctionsat the level of expressedpreferences (the ballot being clearly secret in effect-as it was everywhere in procedure-inall but a few small and isolated polling stations),3Rthe electorsof Asunafo did on the whole attain this minimal standardsof rationality. Agreement on this matter, however, does not greatly sharpenthe point at issuebecauseof the virtual unanimity of the parties on what might be politely called policy issues.Not only was there no detectabledifferencein the classappealsofN.A.L. and P.P.,a matterin which Ghanaianrhetoric may well be closerto Ghanaianreality than is true of the politics of many other countries;there were few detectable explicit disagreementson the techniquesto be employedin the pursuit of agreedgoals. Political rhetoric remainedfirmly within the boundsof the kingdom of ends, and even there it cannotbe said to have taken a very contestatoryform. All parties promised economicdevelopment, employment,industrialisation,the fostering of agriculture,educational advance. (You want it, we name it). None provided concrete suggestionsas to how the cargo could be inveigled down to earth.The P.P. manifestowas perhapsslightly more explicit than that of its main opponents. But whatever significance that fact may have had in Ghanaianpolitics at large, it cannot have had much in the politics of Asunafo since virtually no one in the constituencyhad seena copy by polling day and it is doubtful whetheranyonein the constituencyhad read it. Few partiesin any country, of course,go to the polls on a platform of bringing aboutswingeingcuts in the generalstandardof living, and it is hardly unique to Ghana to regard politicians' public proclamationsof their intentions as possessinglittle or no predictive value. But it is more unusualfor a rational preferenceover social and economicpolicies to dependexclusively upon the relative credibility of the parties' proclaimed good faith.39 Since there was nothing about which to choosebetweenthe parties, except the degreeto which one could contrive to believewhat they said, the level of symbolicidentification involved in electoralchoice was, on this occasion,notably high. Two types of symbolic identification were in fact marketedby the two parties, and their purveying formed the ideological content of the campaign.The election result itself representedthe decisive,if perhaps necessarilytemporary,choiceof oneof theseidentitiesby the electorsof Asunafo. But there are two other types of symbolic identification with which the electionmight conceivablyhavebeenconcerned,but which it in practiceevaded.Thesetwo require to be discussedindependentlyof the campaignitself. The first may well havebeena potentiality only at a purely mythical level, the creatureof a story put aboutby Nkrumahand David Apter: the children of the transformational promise of the

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c.P.P., the youthful and pioneering protagonistsof modernity. The committed croyant in the efficacy of political mobilisation might endeavourto explain its absenceby the military government'sresonant antipathy to the notion, and by the fact that the N.A.L. was almost as unenthusiasticabout it as the N.L.C. itself. Since, however,its earlier appearancein the story derived directly from the even more resonant sympathyof the precedingc.P.P.government,it is not necessaryto be over~impressedpressed by the economy of this explanation: 'no political mobilisation without the risk of subsequentpolitical demobilisation'. The stategaveand the statehath takenaway. Blessedbe the nameof the state. No one in Asunafo appearedto conceiveof himself in terms in any way continuous with these. Fifteen years of submissionto the ordeal of political modernisationappearedto have left local identities not merely unreconstructedbut virtually unscathed. The secondpotentialidentity which failed to appearin the campaign to any significantextentwas almostthe obverseof the first. Whereasthe c.P.P.had been an instanceof political lexical transfermasquerading as political institutional transfer, this second identity was un~ challengeablyconcrete,historical and there.The termsof tradebetween national and local had beensuch indeedthat, while the C.P.P.supplied the words, Ahafo retained a fairly unremitting control over their meanings.The history of the c.P.P.'s struggle to establish its local power by the manipulationof multitudinouslocal identities proved, in substance,to havelent its power to their purposesto an evengreaterex~ tent. Localism isa powerful force in Ahafo and the meaningof the e1ec~ tion might well have been purely localist, might have beenconfined to the reenactmentof local factional conflict betweentown and town or betweenone consolidatedchiefly interest and another.The first even~ tuality seems never to have occurred. Even such inveteratehistorical foes as Kenyasi I and Kenyasi1140 voted firmly for the samecandidate. The fact that in the Asutifi constituencyN.A.L. did not even win a single polling station, and in Asunafo it won only three out of some80, disposesconclusively of the possibility that either party contrived on this occasion to turn the election into a simple town squabble.The traditional tensionsbetweenKukuom side and Mim side cameout in an etiolatedform only in the candidateselectionprocessof the two parties. But as a shadowof its former self it was so pale as to bereft of causal significance.The most impressiveresult of the election, and the con~ c1usivetestimonyto N .A.L.'s failure, wasthe establishmentof the unity of Ahafo as a political interest. A necessarycondition for such unity, and one which was surprisingly in practice available,was an accepted common front on the problems of the traditional political order of Ahafo. The difficulty of contriving this requiressomelittle explanation.Most

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local areasin Ghanaare subjectedto regulardisputesover the location of traditional political legitimacy. Enormous energy is expendedon such disputes, and it requires great political sensitivity and skill (sometimesgreater than is available) for the local and national administrationsto control the dimensionsof confiict.41 Extensiveefforts, both financial and coercive,aremadeby local protagoniststo securethe servicesof the national administrationfor their purposes,and equally strenuousefforts in much the same currency, are made by national political forcesto uselocal dissensionsto consolidatetheir own national patronagestructures.The monopolyof power in the handsof the state now makesit (and hasmadeit for sometime in the past)impracticalfor local actorsto offer explicit resistanceto the stateas such. Biafra may dream of secession.But no such opportunity, transparently,can be opento the Dagombaor the Nzima.42 Nevertheless,duesubservienceto state authority does not necessarily imply obedience to its local representatives. The King is alwaysgood, but any of his local ministers is plausibly wicked and may at leastbe subjectedto purposefulobstruction on behalfof the King's supposedreal will. (Evenwithin the colonial theoryof impassiveobedience,the impassivityat the receivingendoften surpassedthe obedience.)This presentationis madeeasierby the fact that the statehas not ceasedto advertisethe virtuous quality of its will since the time of the British conquestof Ashanti, and there has been generalverbal agreementon the criterion for virtue in the adjudication of traditional legitimacy: namely, tradition. Ideologically the transaction hasbeenonebetweena nationalnear-monopolyof fire-power and a local near-monopolyof legitimacy. It has been a transactionin which eachparticipanthas been able to supply real servicesto the other. Indirect rule provided both agentswith cheap,if intrinsically limited, incrementsof power. But over the yearsfire-power has proveddistinctly easierto concentratethan legitimacy. If this is in someways deplorable, it should not be in any way surprising. The promiseof the integrative revolution is the constructionof an ideologicalor spiritual snrrogatefor an armoury. But it is increasingly unclear whether in post-colonial statesthe spiritual componentcan,for sometime, be much more than a legend over the armoury door. Traditional legitimacy in actuality is almost as dispersedlocally as charisma.Conceptuallyit reposesvery solidly uponhistory. Practically,however,history mustbe seenasbeing tastefully rearrangedaround it. Few statementsabout the history of Ahafo, howeverinnocentin intention, can escapebeing politically partisan in effect. There are almost as many historiesof Ahafo as thereare long establishedsettlementsin Ahafo.43 Since, too, they exist orally rather in a written form and since politics goes on, both locally and nationally, their political availability need notbe impaired even by the constraints of consistency over time. The Ancient Constitution of

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Ahafo has many historiographersand they display what Nkrumah,for instance,would haveseenas an altogetherexcessivemeasureof feudal legalism.44 Village Spelmansand Bradys, they are far from mute and they can enjoy their own glories without having to submit to the chasteningdisciplinesof print. Much of the political disputein Ahafo is conductedin consequence, just as it was in the seventeenthcentury Englandor France,45in terms which wear,to the alien moderneye, an air of ratherdesperateparadox. It is not the historicist oddity of regarding a set of events in the sociologically (and indeed chronologically) distant past as the proper criterion for a set of presentpolitical arrangements,but the extraordinary logical contortions(made familiar for English history by John Pocock)which are necessarilyinvolved in the reasoneddefenceof the setof pasteventsselectedto act asthe criterion. When theselogical conundra have been resolved in the constitutional history of Ahafo they have had to be so more by exerciseof the will than of the intelligence. Therehasbeenno obviousshortageof wills, however,readyto shoulder the burden,either inside or outsideAhafo. Whateverthe origins of the earliestsettlersof Ahafo, it is undisputedthat the areawas at one time thoroughly integratedwithin the Ashanti empire.Both of the main constitutional traditions in Ahafo acknowledgethat the propercontextfor its political analysis,ever since its incorporation,has beenthe struggle betweencentrifugal and centripetalforces inside the empire. The circumstancesunder which it was integrated, serve to explain the characterof its political subordinationto Ashanti, while this character in its turn goessomeway to accountfor the enduringstrengthof local separatism.Its initial incorporationinto Ashanti followed on the pursuit, into the virtually uninhabitedforest areaby a punitive expedition underseveralof the Kumasi wing chiefs,of an invadingforce from what is now the Ivory Coast,which had contrived to sack Kumasi. In the aftermathof theseevents(the Abiri Moro war) the Ashanti leadersleft behind them in the forest areasa numberof small settlementsmanned by their followers. These settlementsnaturally retained their Kumasi traditional allegiances. Consequently,different Ahafo towns owed allegiance within the traditional constitution of Ashanti to different Kumasi chiefs and the Ahafo area as a whole lacked a unitary local political focus. During the last quarterof the nineteenthcentury.under the impact of British military and diplomatic pressure,the central political control of Ashanti weakenedand the possibility of successful local political consolidationagainst Kumasi becamea real one.46 In 1896 the British signed a treaty of protection with one of the major Ahafo chiefs, the Kukuomhene.Shortly afterwards,with the defeatof the last Ashanti strugglefor independencein the Yaa Asantewaawar, the British authoritiesrecognisedthe Kukuomheneas the Paramount

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Chief of an Ahafo division which was renderedformally independentof Ashanti. In the Ashanti understandingof theseevents,this represented the recognition of a fait accompli, but one the status of which was exclusivelydefactoratherthan dejure. In the separatistunderstanding, it was merely the recognitionof the rights alreadysecuredby the Ahafo war of liberation, the Asibi Entwi war, the very occurrenceof which is deniedby Ashanti.47 The British colonial authoritiesat this stageappear to havedisplayeda fair degreeof moral relaxationin their treatmentof traditional legitimacy. Their recognition of Ahafo's independenceundoubtedlyowed more to their senseof prospectiveadministrativeconveniencethan to their regardfor the historicity of Asibi Entwi. Over the next thirty years, the British administration in Ashanti developed,as public bureaucraciesand particularlyBritish onesare apt to do, an extremelymoral conceptionof its own role. Partly out of guilt at its own initial callowness(evoked largely by the intractablefigure of Rattray who enlightened his bemused colleagues on the spiritual meaningof the Ashanti habit of humansacrifice)andpartly out of sheer exhaustionat the recalcitranceof local political identities,it acquireda healthy respectfor the significanceof history. Eventually, in 1935, it chose to expiate its past guilt and enhanceits future power by the resuscitationof the Ashanti confederacyin virtually its pristine splendour. (Humansacrificewasomitted).This restorationwas a supposedly consensualaffair. All ParamountChiefs affected were consultedand most welcomed the proposal, though Kukuomhenedid show apprehensionover whetherhe would be permitted to retain his Paramountcy.48 In the event, since the restoration was so complete, Ahafo towns returned to their disparate traditional masters in Kumasi and the Kukuomhenebecameonce again merely one among the many other local chiefs. The restorationwas undoubtedlyeffective in that chieftaincy affairs, after slight initial turbulence,remainedrelatively placid and uncontroversialfor the next two decades.But thereis no doubtthat the interest of Ahafo as such, both in the costly traditional courts of Kumasi49 and the relatively modernist exploitation of the Ashanti National Levy, were not well protectedagainstthoseof Kumasi. There was consequentlyextensivelocal separatistsentiment,of a firmly economic character, available for political utilization. In his struggleagainstthe Ashanti-basedN.L.M. Nkrumahwas consequently able to unite the economic and traditional political componentsof Ahafo separatismto provide a supplementto the Brong separatismof the Brong-Kyempim Federation. The institutional outcome of his strenuous rewiring of the circuits was the creation of a separate Brong-Ahafo region out of most of what had long before been the WesternProvinceof Ashanti and the restorationof the Paramountcy over a reconstitutedAhafo division to the Kukuomhene.The lines of

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political division inside Ahafo thus arrayedthe traditional political interestof Kukuom and the modernpolitical interestof the C.P.P.(a union symbolisedby a numberof substantialfavours the Kukuom State Council were preparedto do for the former c.P.P.Member of Parliament,B. K. Senkyire)againstthe traditional political interestof Ashanti and the modernpolitical interestofthe United Party.In the aftermathof the 1966 coup howeverall the chieftaincy arrangementsof the c.P.P. were conscientiouslyundone.The former U.P. chiefs were returnedto their stools, the Kukuomheneceasedto be a Paramount,the lines of allegianceto the Kumasi chiefs were restored,and the Kukuomhenein due course was personally, if perhapsrather untraditionally,5°summonedto pay his allegianceto the Asanthene. The political situation to which theseeventsgaverise was as murky as it was important. Indeed it is largely the casethat it remainedso murky precisely becauseit was so important. The traditional issues were so delicatethat they were at no point left in the handsof the Chieftaincy Secretariat,52the decorousbody set up by the N.L.C. to restore belated impartiality to the State'shandling of traditional affairs, but were dealt with throughoutdirectly by the governmentitself. A government commission,the BannermanCommission,was set up to consider the questionof Ahafo lands,but its proceedingswereshortly suspended sine die, and nothing more was ever heardof it. In the meantimeAhafo traditional land revenueswere frozen, the areabeing bereft of a State Council. Chiefs failed to receivetheir salariesand scholarshipand other developmentfunds were renderedunusable.There was general local agreementon the imperative need for the restitution of some local political order, though the local supportersof Ashanti, headedby the Chief of Mim, and those of Kukuom inevitably continuedto differ on the issue of what form this order should appropriatelytake. As the election campaignbegan,the Kukuomhenewas appearingon a state charge before the High Court at Sunyani for refusing to obey the Asantehene'slegal summonsto pay his homagein person. He was defendedagainstthis charge-thepenaltyfor which, had he beenconvicted, would have been a substantialjail sentence-bya Sunyani lawyer, Munufie, who duly turnedout to be the interim RegionalChairman of the ProgressParty and who becamea Minister in the government. On 9 Junethe Circuit Judgefound the K ukuomhenenot guilty of the offenceschargedon the groundthat the Kukuom stool was not subject to the Golden Stool of Ashanti.52 The extendedhistoriographical basisof the judgementdid not conceal(asin all argumentsof a prescriptive character,where argument has becomenecessary,it inevitably could not conceal),the firm basisof choiceon which the verdict rested. There are, plausibly, many legal contextsin which it is not a felicitous analysisto maintainthat law is what the courtsdecide.But this was cer-

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tainly not one of them. The effort to cementthe chiefs allegiancepersisted until the election itself. Munufie took the opportunity of his acquittal celebrationsto hold a ProgressParty rally at Kukuom, rather to the chiefs annoyance.Gbedemahin his turn duly paid his respects of the occasionof his own visit to Kukuom. The P.P. local organisers worried intermittently over the chief's prospectivesupport and many of the N.A.L. campaignerstended to assumethe continuity of his loyalties. Even in Kukuom itself there remaineddoubt about his sympathiesalmost up to the day of polling. Given such a level of decorum and discretion,the effect of his sympathiescannothavebeenvery extensive. But whetherit remaineda decorousprudenceor a genuineimpartiality, there is no questionthat it furnished a necessarycondition for the exclusionof onepotentiallysalientmeaningfrom the campaign,that of being yet anotherbattIe in the long war againstAshanti control of Ahafo. The ProgressParty in Ahafo did not needthe forceful backing of the chief ofKukuom in orderto win the election.N.A.L. undoubtedly did, if it was to presenta real political challengeat all. Perhapssuch an opportunity was closed to it even before the campaignbegan, and before the High Court in Sunyani brought in its verdict. After the close of the P.P. inaugurationrally in Sunyani, prominent party supporters congregatedat Munifie's house on the outskirts of the town. Among them, at one point, in two successivecars of drastically varying elegance,there appearedthe Kukuomheneand Victor Owusu, former N.L.C. Attorney Generaland the only leadingpolitician of long standingto enjoy ministerial responsibility under them. Balancingthe political and economicclaims of Ashanti and Ahafo had beena tricky political assignment and it must have required all the attentive governmentalhandling whichit could be given. When the voting came, this attentivedelicacywas amply repaid.Onceagainimpartiality wasto show itself to he the subtlestand most effective form of partiality. It is possiblein thiS way to dismissthe potentialrelevanceof both the universalistface of the C.P.P. and the purely localist face of Ahafo's faction-torn traditionalismto the meaningof the electionby noting the absenceof any identifiablegroupsin the contextwho conceivedit firmly in theseterms.The problemof assessingthe scopeofthe two competing meaningswhich must now be considered,is not that they cannot be shown to be embodiedin the personsof any of the contestants,but rather that it is not altogetherclear how intimate is the connection betweentheseenergeticallypurveyedidentitiesandthe identificationsof thosewhoseelectoralallegiancethey secured.If the two meaningswere to be offered as a causalexplanationof the voting figures they would plausibly beg the questionthey purport to answer.Accordingly, a simple if slightly evasivecausalexplanationis set out as a rational debate betweenthe effort to derive power from authority and that to derive

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authority from power. The election was a contestbetweennational elite coalitionsfor local masssupport.In the political history of Ahafo with its extensivecocoa interestsand strong,if ambivalent,Ashanti connection,local allegiance had beenpredominantly,even under conditionsof substantialpolitical pressure,to the former United Party. The ProgressParty, being led by the former United Party'sleader,inherited the allegianceof a political coalition held togetherby a common history of struggle and to some degree governmentalneglect and oppression.In the precedingthree years this local elite, with some national assistance,had contrived to begin to undo the ravages of neglect by securing the provision of suppliesof cleanwater53 and by an increase(claimed specifically in the courseof the campaignto be a product of Dr. Busia's advice) in the producerprice of cocoa.At the sametime, as we haveseen,it had contrived to closeup someof the historical fissuresoflocalist political conftict 54 which the c.P.P.yearshad widenedalarmingly. Its effectiveness in consolidatingthis historical inheritanceof political support in the event of the campaignwas enhancedby the distinctive identity of the party which eventually emergedas the alternativenational contender for power. N.A.L. was not referredto commonlyin the constituency(as it was for instanceamongthe Legon students)as 'Ewe party'. It would certainly befalse to describe thecampaignlocally in termsofthe projective engineeringof primordial hostilities. The position of Ewesin Ahafo is not one which subjectsthem to any obviously greatersuspicionthan any other strangergroups-andthe Ahafo populationprobably has a higher strangercomponentthan that of any other part of Ghanaexcept the new urbanconglomerations.Ewesare particularly prominentin the teaching profession,but unlike the Ibos in Northern Nigeria before 1966, they do not representa pervasive economic threat in petty retailing or modern craft work. It was true that Busia comes from Wenchiand Gbedemahfrom Keta and this geographicalsymbolismdid playapart in the campaign.55 But the way in which it was presentedwas very secular,and far from atavistic. It is safe to assumethat whereas few Ahafos identify themselveswith Brongs for any, except crudely political, purposes,all would be likely, other things being equal,to feel strikingly more at easein political union or social intercoursewith a Brong than with an Ewe. Yet in Ghanaianpolitics otherthings neverremain equal unlessthey are energeticallymadeso and the achievement of keepingthem so was not in practicelightenedby any effort to invoke hostility to Ewes as such. As is suggestedby the exampleof the Legon students,ethnic hostility was often much strongerat an elite than at a masslevel, and in Ahafo at leastthe local elite was fortunatethat it did not need to draw heavily on ethnic hostility to cement its mass following, since the requisite style of hostility was only dubiously

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availablefor it to draw on. Gbedemah'sproblemin Ahafo turnedout to be not that the fact that he was an Ewe countedagainsthim, but that so little but the fact that he was an Ewe countedfor him, and that in Ahafo, as in general outside the Ewe areas,this alone could hardly count enough.As a non-Ashantihe appealedforcefully to many of the poorer southern(and indeed northern)strangers,and as being at least more C.P.P.than Busia,he appealedto thoseto whoselives the C.P.P.had renderedsubstantialand direct services.But when it cameto the count these twin appealsturned out to make little inroad into the inherited U.P. political c1ientages.The causalexplanationof the P.P. triumph was locally (as it was nationally) the degreeof political skill in its consolidation of elite support, coupledwith the fact that it had as a genuinely national competitor only Gbedemah'sapparat to compete against. The egoisticbasisof the P.P.'snationalsolidarity in the inter-ethnicelite competition for power and profit may have been rational even in Olson'sterms56 (though I do not believethat its motivation can be accurately and exhaustivelyanalysedin this fashion). And the solidarity of its local electoral c1ientagesmay have derived largely from the membersdoing their betters a prudent favour, rather than from any more intenselymoralistic performance.But whetheror not this is what it derivedfrom-whetheror not public morality is still somethingwhich their mastershaveto do for them57-it cannotbe the casethat this was all it meant. What men do, the meaningof their actions,cannotbe fully known. while resolutelyignoring what they supposethemselvesto be doing. To uncover this final layer of meaning it is necessaryto brush aside the axiomatic professionalcynicism of the political scientistand attendin all simplicity to the storieswhich actorstold themselves.For thesewere stories which they did tell in private or when exhaustedlate at night. when gloomy, irritable or excited, not just on the pompousrespectability of the public platform. If they were masks at all, they were certainly masksmost of the time to the men themselves.If that was not wherethe action was, it is hard to seewhere there was left for it to be at all. 58 The commonestlocal accountof the meaningof a political party was simply men coming togetherto help to choosea government.The electoral referenceis plain enough.The significanceof 'coming together'is its fusion of the descriptive content of campaigning(which does tie men from different localities to a commonpurpose,though it certainly doesnot dissolvethem into a commonpurpose)with the moral content of the traditional political valuesof unity and harmony.It is a reflection of traditional culture as much as of recent experiencethat the commonestreply to the question'what would you mostlike to happenin the world' amongthe ordinary citizens of Goasowas simply 'peace'.Both partiesnecessarilymarketedto individual electorsthe benefitsof uniting

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for peace.The dramaticdifferencebetweenthe two lay in their presentation of what peacemeant.The essentialcharacterof the N.A.L. appeal was individualistic and pragmatic, that of the P.P. collectivist and moral. The N.A.L. campaign stressed(as the party slogan implied) 'Victory' and what you could get out of it, the P.P. campaign(again as its slogan suggested)stressed'virtue' and what it could mean for you. This is not to imply that the N.A.L. campaign was self-consciously diabolist or even amoral nor that the P.P.'s appeal could be aptly describedas ascetic. Asceticism has markedly little appealin Ghana and the most flamboyantly corrupt c.P.P. ministers were often generousto their own (sometimesvery extended)'families'. The polarity remainednevertheless,in theseterms, astonishinglysharp. At the N.A.L. candidateselectionmeeting a leading memberof the party observedwith stunningeconomy'If poweris being sold, try to sell your old lady to go and buy the power. After you have got the power you will be able to go and bring back your old lady.' When askedhow supportwas acquiredpolitically, all N.A.L. organisersreplied in terms of the expectation of concrete benefits to be received.59 Electoral allegiancewas seen as being consolidatedin whatever currency was practically available. Morality stoppedat the boundariesof the party. Party unity was a technicalprerequisitefor party victory which, in turn, was plainly a technical prerequisitefor the many good things which it would bring with it. Such moral characteristicsas it did display were products of the shared history of struggle, moral artefacts in the Hegalian manner of the conflict itself,60 not ends external to it and helping to constituteits point. Politics was a severelytechnicalactivity with its own toughly Machiavellian rationality.61 The former C.P.P. organiserswere proud of their own professionalismand scornful of what they saw as the P.P.'sbumbling amateurism.Indeedin a way this conception was at least partly accepted by the P.P. workers too; amateursthey might be, but they were also in contrast to their opponents,at least arguably,gentlemen. Holding this unflinchingly egoisticview of political value and lacking, on this occasion,accessto the coercive or incentive resourcesof the government,the N.A.L. organisersfaced their bleak assignmentwith gaiety and a good deal of courage. Indeed they showed some little political imaginationin the degreeof symbolic identification which they did manageto evoke. The core of party organisersenteredthe N.A.L. campaignbecauseof their past c.P.P.loyalties, and they enteredas a political equipepurchasedon the oligopolistic national political market by Gbedemah.Much of the support which they gatheredcame from those with a common history of c.P.P. allegianceor from stranger elementswhose affection focused upon N.A.L. as an anti-Ashanti party. But the most interestinggroup of supporterswere the local members

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(here sometimes Ashanti themselves) of the groups to whom Gbedemah'snational campaign rhetoric of inevitable victory was directed.62 Often young and usually not very well educated,though sometimeshighly intelligent, their feelings revolved very much around the image of Gbedemahhimself as a conceptuallydiffuse, but highly cathectedsymbolof socialeffectiveness.The reasonwhy he was certain to win the election,they felt, was alsothe reasonwhy it wasdesirablefor him to win it. He knew all the big men in the country (enjoyed,that is, the supportof leadingc.P.P.dignitaries)and was well acquaintedwith and well esteemedin all the big countriesabroad,especiallythe biggest and most exciting of all, the United States.Above all he had extensive businesscontacts,and even more businessskills. A high level of structural unemployment and an increasingly steepening pyramid of educationaladvancethreatenedmost young Ghanaianswith a gloomy future. Entrepreneurialskills (which consist subjectively in a heady combinationof magic, chicanery,intelligence and sheerefficacy) of a very high order were clearly to be required to make theseclouds lift. In the face of this disagreeableand pervasive aura of necessita, Gbedemah'ssupereminentcommandover Fortuna was just what was needed.All this may soundlike purely technicalrationality, but it wasin practiceevery bit as much a modeof symbolic self-identification,a participatory value, as the P.P.'sproferredvirtue. In strictly political terms it had, too, a rather dense historical rationalein the experienceof c.P.P.rule. Whereinstrumentalpolitics is the politics of patronagesystems,the most apparentpolitical value is simply to succeed,to associateyourself with the biggest and best. Gbedemah'sappealwas explicitly pitched (apart from the totally unintelligible cosmopolitanismof his party's title) at a level of pure economicegoism. The tactical disadvantageof this was that, since no one was againstprogress,63it only constituteda reasonfor voting for Gbedemahhimself amongthosewhom he could furnish with direct incentivesfor so doing.64 Even in the post-electoralfantasy world of the party's triumph, it would be a mistaketo supposethat most of its supportersexpectedwith any assuranceto derive concretebenefitsfrom it. What they were committed to, symbolically speaking,was a government which took their dreams seriously. Few were still optimistic enoughto expecta governmentto realisetheir dreams.The valuewhich Gbedemahrepresentedwas the value of successand N .A.L. offered, as had the c.P.P. in its later stages,symbolic participation in the most powerful patronagemachine. The atmosphereof gleeful and rather naive chicanery which hung over the N.A.L. campaign,reflected the self-imageof thosewhosechanceof living well could derive only from their manipulativewits along with plentiful draughtsof sheerluck. For these secular and non-ethnic supporterswhat N.A.L. offered was a

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belated form of participation in modernity, the consummationof knowingnessas a political value (the consummation,too, in an oddly pure form in which knowingness became its own reward). One historical consequenceof the C.P.P.'srule had beento offer a view of politics in which knowingnessdid becomea truly participatoryvalue, not merely one which reflected an axiomatic distrust of all social loyaIties.65 In an area with such a large proportion of relatively recent immigrants, such an offer might have been expectedto enjoy a wide appeal. But in a competition betweenknowingnessas its own reward and virtue devoid of costs,the painsof social changeand geographical mobility turned out to be insufficiently searingto make knowingnessa more attractiveoffer. The basis of the ProgressParty's successwas their capacity to establish a belief, of howeverfleeting a character,that virtue would turn out to be devoid of costs.This belief, in practicaleffect, meanta beliefin the moral trustworthinessof the official local statussystem.It is a commonplaceof contemporaryanthropologythat many of the strains of modernisationfor traditional communitiesare carried by individuals whose roles place them in an interstitial position betweentraditional village and moderncity, and thus enablethem to act as cultural brokers betweenthe two. Suchmen reinterpretthe bleak demandsof modernity and the unintelligible requirements of public bureaucraciesinto assignmentswithin the grasp of traditional villagers. They perform these services,on the whole, for extremely concreterewards.66 They tend to playa peculiarly critical role in the engineeringof rural credit and may at times be well placedto exacta steepprice for the indispensability of their services.The demographichistory of Ahafo and its intimate connectionwith the spreadof cocoaas a cash crop cast some doubt on the propriety of describing its villages as traditional communities at all, and the sheer frequency of geographicalmobility in Ghana,plausibly implies that the marketfor suchcultural brokerageis more competitive than it was for Wolf's Mexican villages. But the demandsposedby the extentof illiteracy arecommonto both countries, the role of mediatoris even more heavily culturally approvedin Ghana than in Mexico, and the needto have mattersfixed is certainly often a pressingone in Ghanatoo. The entrepreneurialprovisionof suchan unofficial surrogatefor the CitizensAdvice Bureaumay not exemplify the higheststandardsof marketfreedom,but it doesdo the communitycertain services. Knowingness is the cultural value marketed by such fixers. The fact that the valuehasto be paid for may even,as perhapsin the case of psychoanalysis,serve retrospectively to enhance its credibility. The initial scarcityof information is such that it is far from simple to be certainin any particularinstancewhat one hasobtainedin return for one'sinvestment(evenif, againlike psychoanalysis, it is often

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apparentthat it is certainly not quite what one wanted).Such brokers may not alwaysbe trusted-literacyis too greatan inequalityof power to be compatiblewith any greattrust. The point of educationis to avoid being cheated by literates.67 But however equivocal their trustworthiness,no one would be likely to deny their indispensablerole in the social division oflabour.The fact that they areindispensable,and that they are paid piece work rates,may also make them subjectively more reliable than their publicly-salariedsuperiorswhose direct services to individual lives are not always intelligible to the naive understanding.Socialdistancecan breeddistrustasreadily as admiration. It might feel substantially safer to put one's trust in the raffish and knowing fixer than in the respectableincumbentof a social role, the rationale of which may be unintelligible (and on occasionmight not even be there). Ghanaianshave a sharp nose for hypocrisy, and the course of twentieth century social changehas given them extensive practicein its detection. The political achievementof the P.P.campaignwasto teaseout these ambivalentcharacteristicsof the experienceof modernityandthe social roles around which it focused into a sharp polarity. On the one side they setin their public rhetoric(andindeedsubstantivelyin their private tricksters, conceptionof the campaign)the sly, knowing, undependable explicitly hell-benton Victory, without statusto lose in their pursuit of power and with class all too much to gain. On the other side they displayed themselves,perhapswith some complacency,a stagearmy of the good, but one in which somewarriors at leastdid bearthe scarsof real and far from forgotten battles,also modernmen, men who had indeedto their credit somesmall achievementin the discipline of modern statusand class competition,the educated,the virtuous, the wise, the brave. It is not to be supposedthat this glowing transfer was in fact madeto adherein its entiretyto the consciousness of mostvoters.But it does appearto have struck quite deep chords in many. It derived its plausibility from a history of guilt displayed in disunion, and the suffering generatedby disunion; and the remedywhich it offered was the re-establishmentof union, a proposalwhich assimilatedthe moral and the practical. Most importantly of all it offered an accountof how such a union could be morally credible in terms of the pledgedgood faith and knowledgeof thosein the communitywhoseword andjudgement men had most reason to trust. What the ProgressParty did politically was market the moral self-imageof the higher segmentsof the local status system, modern and traditional.68 The consumer response suggested a stability in the status dimension of social stratification,69which current writings on the sociology of modernisation have totally failed to capture.In Dahrendorf'sterms an abstract elite seemedwell on the way locally to becomingan establishedelite.70

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The moral project offered by this elite was the exorcism of a past shameby the engineeringin the presentof a collective moral will. Disunion had beenbroughtinto Ahafo71 by thievesand cheats.Ahafo, as a whole, had had to pay the moral price of disunion becauseof the complicity of some of its citizens in this invasive immorality. It was precisely becausemembersof the community had been ready to demand-or at least to accept-concreterewards for the allocation of loyalties which should havebeenallocatedon a basisof Kantian purity, that the moral integrity of the community had been violated. The fact that the violation of this integrity occasioneda history of overt and, at times. violent conflict, servedboth to deepenthe moral squalorof the betrayal. and to provide a moral rationalisationof the sufferings in which the betrayal resulted. Having touched pitch, the men of Ahafo had only themselvesto blame if they had duly becomedefiled. A few had done well out of theseimpure practices,but for the community at large it had spelled nothing but neglect and dangers.In a village a private thief, if apprehendedin the act, might risk being beaten to death. Without justice, what could the statebe but a greatbandof public thieves?The people of Ahafo were summonedto endow the state with justice by keepingtheir own heartspure. Two questionsare raised by this remarkablerendition. How was it that the P.P. attemptedto show that this, in someways, ratherstrained story merited the belief of the electors, and why was it that they succededin some measurein arousing such belief? It is important to separatetheseissuessincethe form of authenticationwhich the P.P. in fact stroveto provide, while it was the only form of authenticationconceptually available, may equally well not have been the causeof its acceptanceby the electorate.That the problem of credibility was at the heart of the election no one who listened to the gloomy private responsesor the ribald public challengesat the party'srallies could well doubt. As far as promisesof improvementwent, the long suffering electors had heardit all before and they were not slow to inquire how they were supposedto tell whetherit meantanything more on this occasion than it had before.The P.P.'sdialectical responseto this challengewas not in detail impressive.(It is hard to seehow anyone'sresponsecould have been).But it did attemptintuitively to forestall it by one featureof its campaigning.In that representativedemocracynecessarilyimplies the choice of a single man by a large numberof men, and in that the chosen individual in Ghanaian politics is legally required to be somewhatunrepresentativein a statisticalsense72(and in all representative politics he is sociologically likely to be highly unrepresentative) the questionof what reasonelectorscould have to choosesomeoneto representthem is a very acute one. If democracyis indeed a choice betweencompetingelites, in a country in which the class, status and

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power gaps between elite and mass are as yawning as they are in Ghana,it is not at all obviouswhat the point of democracyis supposed to be for the massof the population;while it is abundantlyclearthat its point, as far as the elites are concerned,might readily take on the characterof a Conspiracyof Unequals.All that could be provided to avert the risk of such conspiratoir betrayal, was a set of character referencesfrom thosewho did not obviously standto gain too directly from the upward mobility of the successfulcandidatefor inequality. Thus the former United Party M.P., Mr. Osei, spokeeloquently at the Akrodie rally of how he had known Busia since their schooldays togetherin Kumasi and how he had never known him perform a discreditableact, while at the ProgressParty'scandidateselectionmeeting at Sankore,a former school fellow of Badu Nkansahalso talked at length of how long he had known him and how sterling had been his conductthroughoutthis time. The intimacy of the recollectionsoffered a trajectory acrossthe massivesocial chasmbetweenstateand people without submissionto merefantasy.It provided,howeverevanescently, an image for the unimaginable,how the subjectscould also become citizens, the ex-colonial state becomea nation. To be a credible representative,their candidatehad to be a man with a firm local identity and a man for whom others with firm local identities would standsurety; and the leader of their party, while it certainly helped that he had a geographicalidentity which was not too distant,also hadto be vouched for as a man by thosewith firm local identities.The coalescingof local political elites was not just the mechanismof party integrationon the nationallevel; it was also the mosteloquentvehicleof party propaganda on the local level. It was on the knowledge of men whom they themselvesknew and respectedthat the rationality of the choiceof the majority had necessarilyto depend. The moral credibility tsucn as It was) of the leaders'presentationof themselvesin this role depended,in part, upon adventitioushistorical factors.The local eliteshadbeenratherunusualby prevailingstandards in the extentto which they had resistedthe blandishmentsof the C.P.P. government,to say nothing of its less gentle approaches.This meant both that their own handswere comparativelyclean,and that the area as a whole had undergone a rather more than average share of governmentalneglect. Uniting for peacein this instance,and behind these leaders,could be plausibly presentedas uniting againstneglect and oppression.Furthermore,the imageof the local community as the moral victim of an immoral government was paradoxically strengthenedby the extentof local prosperity.Such prosperitywas, to be sure,relative; there was continuedand vociferouseconomicdiscontent. But it was neverthelessindubitablythere.The Ahafo productionof cocoaand timber remainedas high as anywherein Ghana.Wealth was

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unquestionablyproduced in the constituency and it required little political or economicsophisticationto graspjust preciselyhow large a part of the surpluswas extractedby the government.The low level of governmentdevelopmentexpenditure,the high level oflocal production and the history of extensivegovernmentaltaxationon the productionof cocoaand timber, servedtogetherto confirm a simple physiocraticimage of the location of economicvirtue. A set of parasiticpublic thieves had battenedon the virtuous and productiveforest. The time for justice to be done had comeat least.Sincethe local elites had, however,failed to collaboratewith this brigand invasion, it was in fact they who (to sharpena historical irony) were the 'natural leaders'of the exploited peasantsin the effort to securethis belatedjustice. All this is very much taking the ProgressParty at the valueof its own moral face. It had naturally other and lessmoral faces.Oncein possession of state power, no party in Ghanatoday could well retain such purity of moral outline, let alone out in a neo-colonial setting the simplistic fables of physiocratic economics.If the dreamsof Frantz Fanon could not be realisedby the Algerian war of National Liberation, they were in no dangerof beingfulfilled by the electoraltriumph of the Ghanaianbourgeoisie.Indeed the constraintsof social structure made it all too probablethat, while the elite campaignersof the P.P. might derive fairly direct benefitsfrom their sharein the marketingof virtue, having voted for virtue would turn out for most voters to have been its own sole reward. It would be unjust to the ProgressParty to suggestthat the secondof these considerationsloomed large in their consciousness. But it would be naiveto supposethat thefirst had not occurredto a fair numberof them. Discussionof the fruits of electoralvictory was often as directly egoisticand as uninhibitedin its gustoamong them as among the N.A.L. supporters.But thesefruits were seenas rewardsfor having investedin virtue, not simply as returnson having invested in investment. The moral image was closer to that of the spiritual churchesthan it was to either the unbendingprinciplesof Kant or the crude importunities of the National Lottery. Rewards were genuinely rewards,prizes for having beenvirtuous, not merely adventitious windfalls. Even if the point of being virtuous (in the senseof the sufficient motive) was the prospectof its resulting in concretegains, it would be an error to imagine that many inhabitantsof Ahafo had the poiseto conceivetheir lives unflinchingly as a marketenterprise.Early socialisation,however variegated,had certainly served to accentuate for many the subjective probability of rewards accruing to virtue. Whateverhistory may havedonefor the inhabitantsof eighteenthcentury Konigsberg,it hasnot left thoseof Ahafo today in any conditionto make senseout of the bleak requirementsof Kant. To say that they did not sensethe deprivationsof altruism in the attachmentof political

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virtue to public goods, is thus only to observethat it remains a psychological possibility in Ahafo to have reasonto attempt to live virtuously. Whetherit remainsa philosophicalpossibility is not a question which can be answeredhere. Even in the extensivelystudied societiesof the industrial west elections cannot plausibly be claimed to be eventswhich are particularly well understood. Their position in the ideology of representative democracy is well established,but their precise characteras social events,their social meaning,remains imaginatively opaque.In the thinly studied societies of contemporaryAfrica it would be remarkableif their meaningwas not even more opaque.Along with their abandoned stateapparatus,the departingcolonialistsleft behindthem the recently introducedformal prerequisitesfor egalitariandemocracy.It could thus be arguedthat what Africa is stumblingly in searchof is not democracy (which at leastintermittently and unstablyit perhapsenjoysor at least experiencesalready),so much as representation.Electionsas a modeof choosingrulers aretied historicallynot somuchto democracyassuchas to representativedemocracy,a theory of how democracycould be made a reality in a territorial ratherthan a city state.In the territorial statesof western Europe the practice of representationlong preceded the achievementof democracy.Indeedit long precededthe establishment of anything resembling a nationally self-conscioussystem of social stratification. RepresentativeAssemblieswere summonedby existent statepower, the monarchand his court, largely in order to enhancehis tax-gatheringeffectiveness.Naturally such local representativeswere for the most part men of high statusin the local community. Had they not beenso, they could hardly haveservedto bind the otherinhabitants of their communityby their choice.Despiteits origins as a devicefor increasingthe central power of the state,representationdid not (whereit was permittedby the statepower to remain at all) remain restricted to the serviceof this purpose.Indeedover time, and largely beforethe advent of democracy,it becamethe deviceby which societyacquiredsuch control as it has over the state. With the (causally linked) advent of democracyand a self-consciousnationalsystemof social stratification, representationbecamethe instrumentfor securing the level of social equality and individual freedom, such as it is, now characteristicof westernsocieties. If the accountwhich has beengiven of the election in Asunafo is to any significant extent veridical, it raisesan interestingquestion.In the current absenceof a nationally self-consciousclass stratification in Ghana, what authentic forms of representationare possible? The possibility of representationstops at the boundaryof the moral community. Socialist theory in nineteenthand twentieth century Europe attemptedto stretchtheseboundariesfirst to the national and then to

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the internationalproletariat.Although it cannotbe said that it was very successful,it does seem likely that the electoral transposition of a measureof proletariansolidarism was a necessarycondition for such internal political rationality asthe political systemsof the westernworld currently display. When it comes to interpreting African politics, however,westernobserversseemfor the most part to have left behind such feeling as they possessfor this painfully slow extension of the moral community. Taking their cue from the legalistic universalismof the electoralsystemsleft behind by the colonial powers,they haveseen the insistentrecurrenceof localist values,'tribalism', as a reversionto primitive barbarism. By insisting on peering irritably at the national level and noting how badly the stateshave managedto cope with the problems left to them by their former masters, they have failed to perceivemost of the extendedpolitical achievementinvolved in begin~ ning to deal with the difficulties which they actually face. 'Tribalism' is undoubtedlya dangerfrom the point of view of the state,but it may also representthe painful constructionof a political community. Whilst it was simply a matter of sharing out the contentsof the public coffers among the successorelites such a perspectivemight seem perverse. When it can be shown, however fitfully, at work in the processesof a democraticelection campaign,it may be easier to understandthe moral substancewhich, along with its immoral and its dangerous characteristics,it doesbeyond questiondisplay. The ProgressParty in Asunafo advancedan image of Ahafo as a moral community. They elected a man from Ahafo who had grappled with modernity but returnedto live within Ahafo to standfor them in the nationaltourneyin which community strugglesagainstcommunityfor the goodsand evils which the governmentdistributes. Under the C.P.P., as the chief of Sankorebitterly observed,a black man had forgottenthat he was black, but after the coup 'Peoplewho had madethemselveswhite men cameto understandthat they were black men like us'. The anxiousimageof the future which the ProgressPartycampaignattemptedto allay, and at the sametime the eventuality which it attemptedto avert, was that once again black men should think they had becomewhite men. In the elec~ tion, what the ProgressParty offered was an image of virtue predicted on a moral community. The story of how the electors of Asunafo, perhapsrather bemusedly,chose virtue is a story which deservesa shareof honour even outsideits own country. What else better, in all innocence,could they in fact havedone?73

Notes

2I.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau,Du Contrat Social, Bk III, ch. XV. Political Writings, ed. C. E. VaughanOxford, 1962, II, p. 96. 2. This freedomis, naturally, a very limited matter,limited by scarcityof information

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and sheerinsecurity. The secrecyof the ballot may still make it in somerespects English electors.The scope more free thanthat enjoyedby most eighteenth-century of the franchisealso is vastly wider in Ghanathan it was in the Englandof which Rousseauwrote. 3. This picture emergesequally clearly from the studiesconductedin the tradition of Paul Lazersfeldand BernardBerelson,The People'sChoice(New York, 1944) and Voting (Chicago, 1954), and from the work of the Survey ResearchCentre, Michigan, A. Campbell et al., The American Voter, 1960 and P. Converse.'The Nature of Belief Systemsin Mass Publics',in D. Apter (ed.), IdeologyandDiscontent. (Glencoe, 1964). 4. Brief accountsof the changingstructureswithin which the Ahafo division was administeredup to the 1939-45 war can be found in W. Tordoff. Ashantiunder the Prempehs,Oxford 1965, and K. A. Busia, The Position oJtheChieJin the Modern Political SystemojAshanti,2nd. ed. London, 1968.There are extensiverecordsof the conductof British administrationin the Ahafo division in the GhanaNational Archives in Accra, Kumasi and Sunyani. 5. The main road from the administrativecapital of Ahafo, Goaso,to the north is the lifeline along which the vast bulk of the area'sproduction of timber and cocoa passes.It was one of the two major roadswhich the British administrationdecided to build to Goasoat the time at which the main Ashanti road systemwas designed. The surviving recordsof the executionof this plan makeit clear that it was a consequencemore of administrative accident than of economic or geographical calculation that this road was in fact built and the other road which would have connectedGoasodirectly with Kumasi was never completed. 6. For the economics of this process see especially R. Szereszewski.Structural Changesin the EconomyoJGhana,189I~I911.1911 London 1965. 7. The 1960 population censusrecords the population of the Brong-Ahafo South Local Council Area as 81.590. Of theseonly 9.030 are recordedas Ahafos. It is plausiblethat, of the 36,150recordedas Ashanti,somehavebeenresidentfor more than two generations.But there are good reasonsto believethat the proportion of long-term resident families suggestedby these figures is of the right order of magnitude.See 1960 Population Censusoj Ghana. SpecialReport E. Tribes in Ghana, Table S I. 8. Oneof the largestlandholdersin Ahafo, for example,is Bafuor Osei Akoto. a major organiserof the N.L.M. in 1954. 9. B. Fitch and M. Oppenheimer,Ghana: End oj an Illusion. New York 1966. pp. 38-40, 129~30. 30 10. F. R. Bray, Cocoa Developmentin AhaJo, West Ashanti. Achimota 1959 has a useful discussionof the processby which land rights (the basisof local citizenship) are acquired,seepp. 17~23.23 Slightly undera seventhof the recordedpopulationof the Brong-Ahafo South Local Council area was born outside Ghana. (1960 PopulationCensus,Vol. 11.) II. The classictreatmentof the developmentof tenurial systemsin cocoaproductionis in Polly Hill's, The Gold Coast Cocoa Farmer, Oxford 1956 and Migrant Cocoa Farmers oj SouthernGhana,Cambridge1963. 12. The slow progressof both missions and governmentschools is recorOedin the Ahafo District Record Book, Vols. I and II, Ghana National Archives,Kumasi. The 1960 Census(Vol. II) recordedroughly the samepercentageof male children in the 6~ 14 age group as currently enjoying education as was deprived of it (whereasamong those over the age of 15 nearly four times as many males had never had accessto educationas had enjoyedthe opportunity).Today thepercentage of children attendingschool appearsto be substantiallyhigher than in 1960. 13. Christian religious affiliation is almost as strongly connectedwith achievedsocial statusin Ahafo among those over the age of thirty as is educationalexperience.

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14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

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Before the Nkrumah government'sexpansion of education, the link between organisedChristianity and educationalprovision was a very closeone. When questionedas to which of threeroles they would prefer their child to attain. the majority of those interviewed in Goaso preferred an office in the state bureaucracy(District Commissioner)to that of politician or chief on the grounds that the first enjoyedcomparablepickings and far greatersecurity of tenure. He felt it necessaryto testify at length (and in essentiallythe sameterms) to his devotionto the idealsofmuIti-party democracyin his speechin Goasoin August as he had in a speechto the Legon studentssomemonthsearlier.The similarity of the pronouncements may havetestifiedto the sincerityof his commitment.In Goasoat any rate they certainlydid not testify to his political sensitivity. Few had any ideaof what he was talking about. The themewas repeatedat length in Busia'sspeechat the party'sinaugurationrally at Sunyani and again at a speech at Techimentia which the Asunafo party dignitariescontrived to attend.It was also emphasisedby R. R. Amponsahon his visit to Akrodie. In a more rough and ready way it featuredin many local rallies. The behaviour of the party's organisersin the immediate aftermath of victory provided clear testimonyof the sincerity of the commitmentof most of them. 'We have got two kinds of people.United Party peopleand c.P.P.people.'(Interview with N.A.L. constituencyofficial, explainingthe basisof political allegiancein the election.) Senkyire5,400. Osei 1,744. B. D. Addai 579. Osei 7,248. Senkyire2, 854. See the remarkable speech on the expediency of maintammg diplomatic relationshipswith South Africa made by Osei on 15 February 1965 (Hansard cols 1062-63)and the scornful commentof a C.P.P.member'A short manwith a small sense'.Whatever may be thought of the rationality of Osei's argumentit requiredconsiderablecourageto put it forward in the Ghanaianlegislaturein 1965. The main road north of Goaso is frequently impassablein the rainy seasonbecause it has not beentarred.There was allegedto be a confidentialfile on this road in the RegionalOffice with a minutefrom one of the C.P.P.RegionalCommissionersinstructingthat the road not be tarredany further southbecausethe areato thesouth was solidly United Partyin political allegiance. When askedwhat individual had done most for the town of Goasoin the last few years virtually all of thosewhom I interviewedin Goasonamedthe then District AdministrativeOfficer. He took painsto seethat his wife did not makefriends amongthe local Goasocommunity and his social life was largely confinedto the official communityresidentin Goaso. He did not himself speak to the local populacein Twi. although he un· derstoodTwi perfectly and could speakit quite well. Both A. W. Osei and Badu Nkansahin their capacity as membersof the Ahafo Youth Societyclaimedresponsibilitvfor its arrival in severalspeeches. Cf Busta"s speechat Tecnimentiain July (translatedfrom the Twi) 'This is the meaningof our name,the Progress... Everyonelikes Progress.If you have one cloth and we help you to get onemore,will you not like it? If you haveno houseand you are providedwith a houseto buy by instalments,will you not like it? As we are short of drinking water, if a pipe is broughtinto your town to saveyou going four or five miles to fetch water, will you not like it? Everyoneneedsprogress.' It was not clear until the day of nominationitself how many partieswould in fact contestthe seat.On the day in question,the ProgressParty District Secretarytook the trouble to accumulatea new set of signatureson the nominationform because of the rumour that oneof nominatorshad beennominatedhimselfat the last minute to stand liS

II

clIndidllt" for th" TJ N P

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27. His initial statementin the ConstituentAssembly included a strong attack on the abusesof chieftaincy and an allegationthat the Constitutionwas biasedin favour of the chiefs (Proceedingsof the ConstituentAssembly,23 January 1969. pp. 143-45.)Later his attitude upon this point becameconsiderablyless urgent. 28. He was