History tells us that no new media system has been built to challenge an established social order without a more general social movement. This may be seen in many national histories, including that of the United States – and it is also true for post-colonial Ghana, which will be the primary focus of this post.
There has been increasing interest in Ghana among scholars focusing on President Kwame Nkrumah, who fought against British colonialism, and who was part of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), sought internationalism, and experimented with building a nation with socialist ideals. Historians like Jeffrey Ahlman, P.A.V. Ansah, Ama Biney, Jennifer Blaylock, Frank Gerits, Matteo Grilli, Matteo Landricina and others have examined Ghana’s liberation movement and its post-colonial struggles.[1] This brief post draws deeply from these studies, particularly those concerning media and communications, to underline Ghana’s importance for Non-Aligned countries’ attempts to reconstruct their communications systems.
Ghana, which in 1957 was the first African country south of the Sahara to win independence, was a leading force in the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle. Under Kwame Nkrumah (1957-1966), a new media system was built as part of Ghana’s nation-building project and a Pan-African unity deeply rooted in internationalism.
However, before talking about Ghana’s case, it is important to emphasize that attempts to experiment with new media and communication systems were Herculean tasks for colonized and newly decolonized peoples – ones that emerged from many years of continued suffocation by the tentacles of old and new colonial powers and that faced aggressive Western propaganda machines and repeated CIA interventions.[2] Thus, the experiments were not perfect and involved mistakes and internal and external conflicts along the way; however, the visions that guided their struggles to build new systems continued to inspire additional efforts.
Under extremely hostile political and anemic economic conditions, Ghana pursued self-determination, economic transformation, and Pan-Africanism.[3] To achieve these political goals, Nkrumah positioned himself as part of the non-aligned nations. However, Ghana’s non-alignment didn’t mean political neutrality or not taking any position; rather, as Frank Gertris argues, it was a way to maintain political and diplomatic independence.[4] Nkrumah asserted, “Ghana does not intend to follow a neutralist policy in its foreign relations, but does intend to preserve its independence to act as it sees best at any time.”[5] His foreign policy principle, commonly known as “Positive Non-Alignment” or “positive neutrality,” embraced not only anti-colonialism, socialism, and Pan-Africanism, but also peace and disarmament. This framework provided a way for newly independent nations to survive and rebuild their countries.[6] For this exact reason, it was imperative for Ghana to control the production and flow of its own information: to permit the international news agencies to set the nation’s agenda was to ravage its own framework.
In 1949, Nkrumah urged immediate political independence and formed the Convention People’s Party (CPP) – breaking away from the conservative United Gold Coast Convention party. The CPP wasn’t just a political party, but a movement backed by peasants, farmers, trade unionists, urban workers, civil servants, teachers, students, market women, and the unemployed. C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian-born historian, reflected on the CPP and noted that, “in the struggle for independence, one market woman in Accra — and there were fifteen thousand of them — was worth any dozen Achimota graduates. The graduates, the highly educated ones, were either hostile to Nkrumah and his party or stood aside.”[7] The CPP movement spearheaded Ghana’s independence.
As the CPP mobilized Ghanaians to build a radical political party and unify against the British Empire, the party launched a newspaper, the Accra Evening News followed by Morning Telegraph and Daily Mail.[8] For Nkrumah – a journalist himself – newspapers were not merely tools to disseminate information and ideas; like Lenin, he saw them as both a “collective organizer” and “a weapon, first to overthrow colonialism and then to assist in achieving total African independence and unity.”[9]
Rejecting the pluralist marketplace media model, the newspaper was a political instrument and revolutionary tool to fight colonial propaganda and to build and sustain the movement.[10] Ghanaians recognized that the anti-imperial and anti-capitalist struggle had to be waged not only on political and economic fronts but also in the realm of information and communications. The Nkrumah government invested significant resources and personnel throughout his regime to build an independent media system to break from colonial political and economic media structures.
In 1957, on the cusp of independence, Ghana established the Ghana News Agency (GNA) under the Ministry of Information, which later became the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. It was the first news agency in Sub-Saharan Africa at a time when imperial news agencies –Reuters, Agence France-Presse (AFP), United Press International (UPI), and the Associated Press (AP) – dominated the global news market. The GNA, by establishing 10 foreign bureaus, gathering and centralizing Ghana’s own domestic and international news, countered the news from the imperial core.[11] And by 1966, Ansah points out that Ghana was able to lay down 5000 miles of teleprinter lines inside Ghana[12] – a major contributor to nation-building.
However, when Ghana established the GNA, the country lacked sufficient equipment, trained personnel, and infrastructure.
This was a consequence of being intentionally underdeveloped and exploited by European colonial regimes – articulated by Walter Rodney – not due to an innate inability on the part of Ghanaians.[13] Thus, for practical reasons, Ghana requested and received help from Reuters.
Nkrumah was fully aware of the danger of working with Reuters, which operated in the interest of the former colonial government. Doing so could have re-subjugated the GNA under the former colonial media system. In his speech at the opening of the GNA, Nkrumah reflected on this sentiment; he appreciated Reuters’ assistance but called for a “vault door policy”:
Why should Ghana not have what I have chosen to call a vault door policy? A vault door does not remain shut all the time. It simply protects the treasure in it. A vault door can be swung open for legitimate transactions of benefit of both parties concerned, and it can be swung shut when predatory forces are in the neighborhood. The people of Ghana always expect the government to open and close the vault door in their best interest.[14]
Nkrumah’s Vault Door policy was not reckless courage; rather it was grounded in Ghana’s defiance and guided by its positive neutrality which advocated for Ghanaian and African interests.
Under Nkrumah, the Ghana Institution of Journalism was established in 1957 to train Ghanaians and other African journalists.[15] The government published several newspapers, including the Ghanaian Times, The Spark (inspired by Lenin’s revolutionary newspaper Iskra, meaning “spark” in Russian), Voice of Africa (VOA) magazine, and later took over the British-owned Daily Graphic. At the same time, they also lifted the ban on the import of publications from communist countries, which had been imposed by the British colonial state.
The purpose of the VOA magazine, published by the Bureau of African Affairs, was to unify the African liberation front. The magazine was distributed free of charge across Africa, and freedom fighters from various countries – who came to Accra as a revolutionary hub for training and to share strategies – became part of its distribution networks, which couldn’t be broken by the colonial authorities.[16]
However, the circulation of newspapers alone had limitations in reaching ordinary people when the literacy rate in Ghana was pitifully low after 100 years of rule by Britain – which had claimed to be “civilizing Africans.” As a result, Nkrumah’s Ghana adapted radio as an important tool for informing, educating, and raising political consciousness.
By the 1950s, radio had become a popular mass medium, but it was built for colonial regimes – political elites and European settlers. However, one week after its independence, the Ghanaian government announced that the Ghana Broadcasting System (GBS) would drop all BBC content and replace it with its own. This was a direct attack on Britain, which was also competing for influence in Africa against its new rivals – the US and the Soviet Union.[17]
In 1961, Ghana launched the Radio Ghana External Service to broadcast African news and share information from other liberation movements on their common struggles. Radio Ghana began broadcasting to West Africa and Central Africa in Arabic, English, French, Hausa, Portuguese, and Swahili.[18] In 1961, Nkrumah proclaimed that “The voice of this service will not necessarily be the Voice of Ghana; indeed, it will be the Voice of Africa.”[19] In fact, as liberation fighters were encouraged to contribute to the Voice of Africa magazine, they were also given airtime and asked to produce their own radio shows about their struggles and political situations. [20]
Besides newspapers and radio, Ghana developed its own television station, which was included in its second Five-Year Development Plan (1959–1964) and was part of the country’s broader modernization project.[21]
In 1959, the government sought advice from Canada, which was not a former colonial power, and set up a commission to conduct studies and make a recommendation on establishing a television service in Ghana. Blaylock’s research shows that Ghana accepted most of these recommendations but rejected commercial content to generate revenue.[22] The government understood that the commercial media model was not compatible with a socialist nation-building and the confrontation with neo-colonialism.
In 1964, Nkrumah appointed Shirley Graham Du Bois, a longtime African-American freedom fighter and internationalist, as the director of Ghana National Television. The government sent her to the UK, France, Italy, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, and Japan to learn about television broadcasting systems. The trip spurred ideas for Graham Du Bois about Ghanaian television, including not only technology but also the various roles of television, such as adult and children’s education, culture, and national unity. She learned about and implemented a public broadcasting model designed to serve the interests of the masses.[23] Graham Du Bois traveled around the world searching for alternatives to a capitalist media system.
Though ambitious, in reality, it was not feasible for Ghana to build its television station infrastructure using only its own technologies and technical expertise, so Ghana sought assistance from other countries, and worked and consulted with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the British Marconi Company for equipment and technical training, Japanese companies for manufacturing television sets, and the Federal Republic of Germany for television programming.[24]
President Nkrumah fully acknowledged this and thanked them in his speech at the opening of Ghana Television (GTV). Ghana’s collaboration with foreign countries and companies, and in particular, the British company Marconi could be seen as caving in to its former colonial regime. Rather, Nkrumah was strategically working with various foreign countries and at the same time exercising his diplomatic independence: another “vault-door policy.”
The principle for Ghana’s media was clear as Nkrumah strongly objected to commercial media and repeated, “Television must assist in the socialist transformations of Ghana.” At GTV’s inauguration, he spoke:
Our Broadcasting service should struggle ceaselessly to make itself the people’s service. It should identify fully with the people’s aspiration for a fuller life. we should continue to fight uncompromising against the forces militating against our progress. It will be the task to expose and unmask imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism in all its forms and manifestations and support our endeavors for the political unification of our continent.[25]
Ghana’s state-controlled media would be often seen as a tool for Nkrumah’s move toward an authoritarian regime. However, controlling and producing its own information was a vital weapon and necessity – for both defense and offense – in Ghana’s pursuit of meaningful national sovereignty, and the mobilization of an anti-imperial struggle across Africa.
Furthermore, Ghana’s efforts to build a socialist media system and to control the flow of information and communications began only fifteen years before non-aligned nations officially called for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) at the 1973 summit in Algiers. As Accra became an early center of revolutionary thinking and activism around communications, Ghanian struggles not only prefigured but also fed into the NWICO movement that was to follow.
* Thanks to Dan Schiller for feedback and discussion.
[1] Jeffrey Ahlman, Ghana: A Political and Social History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023); P.A.V. Ansah, “Kwame Nkrumah and The Mass Media,” Paper presented at the Symposium on the Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon May 27-June 1985; Ama Biney, The Political and Social Thought of Kwame Nkrumah (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Jennifer Blaylock, “New Media, Neo-Media: The Brief Life of SocialistTelevision in Ghana,” boundary 2, 49, no. 1 (2022): 195–230, doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9615459; Frank Gerits, The Ideological Scramble for Africa: How the Pursuit of Anticolonial Modernity Shaped a Postcolonial Order, 1945–1966 (Cornell University Press, 2023); Matteo Grilli, “African Liberation and Unity in Nkrumah’s Ghana: A Study of the Role of “Pan-African Institutions” in the making of Ghana’s foreign Policy, 1957 – 1966” (PhD diss., Universiteit Leiden, 2015; Matteo Landricina, Nkrumah and the West: “The Ghana Experiment” in British, American, German and Ghanaian Archives (Austria: Lit VerLAG, 2018)
[2] Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (Granta Books, 2000); Susan Williams, White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa (Hurst Publishers, 2021).
[3] Grilli, “African Liberation,” xvii.
[4] Frank Gerits, “‘When the Bull Elephants Fight’: Kwame Nkrumah, Non-Alignment, and Pan-Africanism as an Interventionist Ideology in the Global Cold War (1957–66).” The International History Review 37, no. 5 (2015): 951–69.
[5] Cited in Douglas G. Anglin, “Ghana, the West, and the Soviet Union.” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science / Revue Canadienne d’Economique et de Science Politique 24, no. 2 (1958):152–65. https://doi.org/10.2307/138765.
[6] Matteo Grilli, “Making sense of decades of debate about Nkrumah’s pan-African ideas,” The Conversation, March 4, 2020; Gerits, “The Ideological Scramble for Africa,” 65
[7] C. L. R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (Duke University Press, 2022), 46
[8] Ansah, “Kwame Nkrumah and The Mass Media,” 4.
[9] Nkrumah addressed this at the second conference of African Journalists in Accra in 1963. See Ansah, “Kwame Nkrumah and The Mass Media,” 5; Biney, The Political and Social Thought, 114.
[10] Biney, The Political and Social Thought, 115; Ansah, “Kwame Nkrumah and The Mass Media,” 3-5.
[11] Audrey Gadzekpo, “Fifty Years of the Media’s Struggle for Democracy in Ghana Legacies and Encumbrances,” Ghana Studies, no. 10 (January 2007):94.
[12] Ansah, “Kwame Nkrumah and The Mass Media,” 5.
[13] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Verso Books, 2018).
[14] Ghana’s Vault Door Policy,” Ghana Today, March 19, 1958.
[15] Biney, The Political and Social Thought, 114.
[16] Grilli, “African Liberation,” 127.
[17] Caroline Ritter, Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire, (University of California Press, 2021), 119.
[18] Grilli, “African Liberation,” 191.
[19] Kwame Nkrumah Speech: Inauguration of Ghana External Broadcasting Service (1961), https://kafui-dey.blogspot.com/2019/10/kwame-nkrumah-speech-1961-inauguration.html.
[20] Matteo Grilli, “Southern African Liberation Movements in Nkrumah’s Ghana.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. 30 Jul. 2020.
[21] Gabriel K. Osei, The Spirit and Structure of Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (London: G. K. Osei.1962), 31.
[22]Blaylock, “New Media, Neo-Media,” 202-203.
[23] Blaylock, “New Media, Neo-Media.”
[24] Ibid., 207.
[25] Speech by Osagyefo the President on the inauguration of Ghana Television on the 31st July, 1965. Blaylock uploaded a copy of the speech to the Internet Archive.
