Against the dominant tendencies to either overlook the interwar period, or to dismiss it as dead-end conservative nationalism irrelevant to the important history that will unfold after WWII, this chapter reveals it as an engagement with problems of ongoing relevance in Ghana. Resting on different ideas about Akan culture and political values, thus chiefs, the debates are conscious of contemporary thinking in the wider world, and based on different opinions about how to go forward. It is a defining moment in time when the notion of Akan homogeneity enmeshed debaters in personality squabbles, factional and party rivalry. The chapter employs Emma Hunter’s insight about other liberalisms, arguing that the debaters had a vision that employed an older but still relevant communal, group rights liberal vision. This connects them to the contemporary, and removes them from the place they are often placed: as backward looking and refusing to think constructively.

The label “cultural nationalist,” deployed by David Kimble in 1963 continues to be used by scholars to describe early Gold Coast intellectuals. Kimble and others like Kweku Larbi Korang assumed that nationalism in the Gold Coast was a continuum of anti-colonial “resentment and criticism.” Contrary to the theme of the early twentieth century as a period of cultural nationalism and of opposition to colonialism, it was a period of constructive criticism of an inchoate colonial system and advocacy for synthesis of local customs within a liberal imperial frame. Regarding the intellectuals as anti-colonial cultural nationalists proved difficult because of their apparent pro imperial statements and actions. Critics disparaged the intellectuals as motivated by self-preservation, blindly pro-colonial, deluded, or traitorous to their culture. So-called cultural nationalists can be more properly understood by not assuming Kimble’s unchanging problematic and recognising the British presence then, now homogenized as “colonialism,” as something less cogent.

The introduction previews the argument that developing countries can use borrowing relationships to their advantage. It situates this argument about the financial statecraft of borrowers within the literature on sovereign debt, foreign aid, and African politics. It explains the specific focus on sub-Saharan Africa by outlining three dynamics that enabled African governments to diversify their portfolios of external finance in the early twenty-first century: debt relief, Chinese lending, and liquidity in international bond markets. The chapter describes the book's mixed-methods research design, combining statistical analysis of the terms of aid agreements with three case studies of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Ghana. Finally, the chapter highlights how the financial statecraft of borrowers contributes to debates on financial interdependence, multipolarity, and the agency of developing countries.

The conclusion of Money, Value, and the State reflects on the rise of a neoliberal government of value. The architecture of political economy for postcolonial Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda—their currency management, agrarian credit, export monopolies, and price controls—was similar to how many other nation-states managed capitalism, exerted sovereignty, and cultivated citizenship in the postwar decades. And like many other parts of the world, by the late-1970s, the government of value in East Africa was challenged by new models of determining worth. The neoliberal proviso to “get prices right” targeted the legitimacy of the moneychanger state: instead of controlling the conversion between currencies and managing exchange rates, central banks would delegate power to commercial firms. It was likewise a call to eliminate state monopolies on the valuation of export crops and other commodities in favor of merchants’ power to set prices. Yet, instead of merely being a project of marketisation, neoliberalism was always a theory of state power and the ethos of citizenship. As structural adjustment was imposed—haltingly, imperfectly—by international creditors and their East African partners, the problematic of price continued to imply far more than the value of a commodity. It was a call to revalue the relationship among people and between citizens and states. As a result, the state government of value has not disappeared--it has been disavowed by central banks and bureaucracies that dismiss popular claims-making in favor of serving the sovereignty of capital.

If political independence provided Africans more latitude in how to pursue economic sovereignty, it hardly settled the matter of how it should be institutionalized. Debates about currency, for instance, persisted in East Africa after formal decolonization, and only in 1965-66 was the colonial money replaced by money issued by the independent states. This chapter traces the unexpected trajectory of decolonization, including the persistence of the imperial East African Currency Board. Decisions about the postcolonial monetary regimes were delayed, in part, by the machinations of British officials who tried to protect the racial capitalism of East Africa from the challenge of African independence. Yet, the establishment of national currencies and central banks was also delayed by Africans’ own commitment to supranational linkages, including an East African common market and currency. This chapter shows that the fortunes of a proposed East African Federation rose and fell on the dynamics of uneven and combined development in the region. And, finally, it examines how the central banking model adopted by postcolonial leaders reinforced the dependence of their nations on the accumulation of foreign currencies. The “moneychanger state,” in which postcolonial governments intermediated between domestic and foreign currencies, was critical to their own survival and ideas about development. Ultimately, though, it was the rural cultivators who would bear the burden of maintaining national solvency, a material reality that spurred a productivist ideology in which merit was revealed through earning export value.

By the second decade of independence, Uganda’s economy groaned under the pressures of domestic misrule and international turbulence. This chapter traces the variety of popular and state reactions as price inflation and commodity shortages came to prevail. Some Ugandans experienced shortages as an affront to their ethical expectations about merit and redistribution; they accused their compatriots of misdeeds and demanded their government better manage the economy. In response, large domains of economic life were criminalized as the state tried to redirect trade toward avenues more easily taxed or regulated, including through an Economic Crimes Tribunal that indicted innumerable Ugandans. Yet, smuggling, hoarding, and overcharging proved especially bedeviling to the state, Drawing on a range of police investigations, trial records, and petitions, this chapter details the sorts of opportunistic exchanges and engagements that characterized Uganda in the 1970s, an improvisational mix of dissidence and claims-making, acquiescence and rebuke that radically challenged sovereignty and citizenship.