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.