Creating the Nation in Early Post-Colonial West Africa
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Date
2016-11-30
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Abstract
Although recent years have seen an increased engagement of historians in attempting to write the history of post-independence societies, the number of more profound studies, which would try to unearth and to use empirical material is still very limited. Even more, there is no real consensus what questions should be asked for such new “national” histories (and I put “na-tional” in inverted commas because for the historian, it cannot be the goal to simply endorse the trajectory of a so-called national community, as it has been done in many cases). Should we seek a path of political history, or of social history? How local should these post-independence histories be in the end? And how much should they be concerned with national sentiment, or its creation or invention, in a perspective spanning over the late colonial period and, at least, the first two decades of the postcolonial states and communities? Regarding the source base for such new interpretations, the last years have not brought too much progress. It is frequently argued that post-independence histories of West African societies cannot rely on “classical”, i.e. written documents, or at least not much. Various historians opine that these sources are rare, or impossible to access. Proof is rarely offered on that point – and the whole debate impresses through a lack of explanations.
This paper intends to give a comparative reflection on the creation of national sentiment in two pioneer West African societies – Ghana and Senegal – which are characterized by especially vocal intellectual activity in the decades before and those after independence (also, both coun-tries have nowadays academic communities that are amongst the most vibrant in the African continent). It takes as point of departure two debates on the nation: the “citizenship and assim-ilation” debate in Senegal between 1963 and 1965, and Ghanaian debates on the Aliens’ Com-pliance Order and its effects in 1970/71. The idea is to discuss, through a comparative view, how “nation” as an inclusive and exclusive concept was appropriated both by officials who had to decide on administrative processes involving citizenship and its absence, and by individuals who tried to position themselves to the exclusion of “foreigners” from national citizenship.
The paper also hopes to give some arguments for the importance, or renewed importance, of the regional archives. I am fully aware that the interpretation of written post-independence ar-chives is only one of a mix of methods to approach the social history of the societies in question. But regional archives in Ghana and Senegal constitute treasure chests that should be more ag-gressively taken into account: while the future interpretation of the big political-historical pic-tures can perhaps not be carried out on the basis of these archives, they are most important for a successful interpretation of social processes.
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empirical, national, political history, post-independence