Monuments and negotiations of power in Ghana

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2015

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The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories, and Infrastructures

Abstract

Ghana arrived at nationhood on 6 March 1957, burdened with many vestiges and entanglements of its pre-colonial and colonial past. Its inherited establishments and facilities were polyglot – it subsumed, and has been presiding over, different polities, traditional authorities, institutions, and interest groups with incongruous aspirations and relationships. As Prime Minister, Dr Kwame Nkrumah led a Convention Peoples Party (CPP) government that was the first to rule the new nation. He and his government failed to dissociate themselves from the Christiansborg Castle, a facility that had served as the seat of the British colonial administration of Gold Coast, and the residence of the Queen of England’s representative. Instead, they adopted it as their administrative headquarters and Prime Minister’s residence. The castle, on the coast of Accra, Ghana’s capital city, was first built in 1652 as a small trading lodge by the Swedish Africa Company, and in 1661 was bought by Danish merchants who refurbished and expanded it into a castle from which they administered their affairs along the Guinea Coast until the British acquired it in 1873. It thus embodies pre-colonial and colonial heritages that relate to the mercantile, political, and other economic interests of Western Europe. Nkrumah and his government’s use of the facility was thus a paradox, one officially explained as a ‘psychological operation meant to impress upon the people that a new era had dawned’. This suggests Ghanaians were to understand the government’s appropriation of the castle as a celebration of their triumph over colonialism. © Derek R. Peterson, Kodzo Gavua, and Ciraj Rassool 2015.

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