This chapter explores how academics and textbook authors created Ghana’s foundation story from the heavily politicised narratives of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and his Convention Peoples Party. It argues that empathy for successful political parties exhibited by first generation Africanists bequeathed to the present a grand narrative fraught with teleology because of its emphasis on anti-colonialism as a recurrent and unchanging problematic. The scholars failed to see a calculated engagement with global ideas and a simultaneous choice made by numerous Gold Coast thinkers to chart intellectual and political projects within the context of the possibilities and constraints of their time. The intellectuals are presented in a hierarchy from proto, cultural, conservative, to radical anti-colonial nationalists, thereby affirming the preeminence of tmuch-vaunted radicals. Recalled this way, the intellectuals’ projects remain distorted and misrepresented. Fortunately, a consideration of the intellectuals’ transnational dialogic encounters within a cosmopolitan prism presents a fuller picture.

The commemoration on 6 March 2007 of the fiftieth anniversary of Ghana’s emergence from eighty years of British colonial rule exposed not only a bitter national divide over whom to credit with the nation’s founding, but also the possibility that a flawed ‘Grand Narrative’ of Ghana’s modern history is the source of this abiding threat to national unity. In marking the Golden Jubilee, the government of the day, led by President John Kufuor of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), honoured heroes of both the national and continental struggles for independence. On the national level, the NPP chose to celebrate the collective known in Ghanaian historical folklore as ‘The Big Six’, the leadership of the post-World War II United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) nationalist movement.

This chapter examines Kenya's use of debt-based financial statecraft, revealing an uneven track record. It first describes how the Kenyan government diversified its portfolio of external finance with both international bonds and Chinese loans. Drawing on interviews with government and donor officials, the chapter then shows Kenya's mixed success in extracting bargaining leverage from its new sources of finance. While the Kenyan government achieved increased flexibility from donors on governance issues, it encountered greater resistance on financial management practices. The chapter highlights that donors' strategic interests in their relationship with Kenya encouraged them to be more flexible when Kenya diversified its portfolio of external finance, but that their concerns about accountability and use of funds led them to be more stringent on issues of financial management.

This chapter empirically analyzes how portfolios of external finance impact aid agreements. The chapter integrates data on external debt and foreign aid to establish a comprehensive picture of developing countries' portfolios of external finance, demonstrating that these have become less reliant on traditional donors over time. The analysis tests if a greater share of finance from Chinese or private sources is associated with favorable terms from traditional donors, using measures of aid volume, infrastructure project share, and conditions attached to World Bank projects. The findings indicate that as countries draw a greater share of their external finance from nontraditional sources, they are more likely to receive aid on preferred terms. The relationship is stronger for countries of strategic significance to donors and, especially, those with higher donor trust.

This chapter examines key writings of James Africanus Beale Horton and Edward Wilmot Blyden to highlight the inconsistencies inherent in the labelling of these activist writer-intellectuals as “proto nationalists.” Horton was a British army medical officer who was a participant in British conquests. Yet, he is indispensable to nationalist history because of extant evidence in letters, pamphlets and books that establish his commitment to self-government for West Africa as well as its progress. Blyden occupies the position of foremost articulator of the “African personality.” Yet, Blyden campaigned for Britain to colonise Liberia. Treating them as hostile to the ideals of later anti-colonial nationalists falls down because they shared with this later group a faith in and hope for African independent fluorescence. These conundrums are resolved by understanding them as, first, dealing with problems of the day in the terms of the day and second, being pro-African and not necessarily anti-colonial.

This chapter considers Ghana's use of debt-based financial statecraft, describing the country's early embrace Chinese loans and substantial borrowing in international bond markets. Despite diversifying its sources of external finance, the government had limited success leveraging its reduced reliance on traditional donor funds in aid negotiations. Based on interviews with government and donor officials, the chapter demonstrates that, while the Ghanaian government initially secured some negotiation wins, it ultimately struggled to achieve its preferred outcomes with donors on either economic policy or financial management. The chapter attributes these difficulties to donors' diminished perception of Ghana's significance and a lack of donor trust, underscoring the complexities of using alternative finance as leverage in aid negotiations.

This chapter examines the post-WWII era where the idea of exclusive Convention Peoples Party (CPP) radicalism and Pan-Africanism rests most thickly. It argues that debates about the CPP’s Citizenship Act complexifies its pan-African credentials. Also, the CPP’s political philosophy was not radical and distinct compared to its opponents, as it fits within a broad liberal/ cosmopolitan tradition rooted in Europe and America. So-called conservatives were oftentimes more radical, as shown in parliamentary debates on the “Motion of Destiny.” Contentious discussions about whether to achieve self-government by proclamation or negotiation, are obscured by the dyad of radical versus conservative. Debates about federalism, regionalism, and unitary government remain unexplored because the grand narrative rebukes the opponents of Kwame Nkrumah’s socialist agenda, while granting him hero status. Nkrumah’s prolific writing and the squeezing out of his opponents after he became Prime Minister in 1957 are identified as the architects of Ghana’s grand narrative.