Introduction

The final chapter examines the working conditions, lives, and intellectual discourses surrounding those who were supposed to build socialism in post independent Africa. Kwame Nkrumah’s dream of economic salvation and sovereignty could only be achieved through the workers. Workers were to prove the maxim from his Independence Day Speech that the “Black man [wa]s capable of managing his own affairs” and to demonstrate to the world that, when given the chance, the African could “show the world that he is somebody!”Footnote ¹ With the future uncertain during this exhilarating moment of decolonization, the CPP’s magazine, The Party Chronicle, reminded the workers that it was their job “to build Ghana into that showpiece of African success which we are all so proud to think of.”Footnote ² From the head of state to the press, workers were charged with building the socialist de-colony, Black freedom.

For their part, the workers embraced and subverted the socialist visions of the state and its leftist supporters to articulate a more equitable present and future. Perhaps without irony, Ghana’s ruling party justified their power in relation to the workers, calling themselves a workers’ party and arguing that their and the workers’ interests were interchangeable and aligned – despite passing strong measures to try and curtail workers’ ability to unionize and strike outside of state channels. The workers were not muted, however. Despite these measures, workers used their voices, feet, and letters to highlight the contradictions and the limitations of a postcolonial African government and its socialist intellectuals that both championed workers’ rights and sought to put the means of production into their hands.Footnote ³ Indeed, the chapter demonstrates how workers skillfully made significant use of the state’s growing bureaucratic channels, such as the Trade Union Congress (TUC), the district and regional commissioners, and the district labor officers to challenge decisions, particularly sackings, increased working hours, and verbal and physical attacks against them.

Despite contravening laws and regulations, workers courageously formed small, divisional unions within companies that operated quite autonomously from the TUC and government. These small, local unions encouraged and led strikes against unfair labor practices and found ways to circumvent the blunting of their collective labor power. Workers then were sophisticated actors. They were astute students of labor laws and agreements. Consequently, these local unions became important sites of clashes between workers, the state, private companies, and the TUC. The workers forced Nkrumah’s government to reconsider their relationship to capital, domestic labor, and their socialist aspirations. The workers demanded a space that embraced the revolutionary ideals and ‘political kingdom’ Nkrumah and his associates had constantly referenced. These revolutionary slogans could not be empty rhetorical measures; they had to be actualized. The revolutionary rhetorical currency of Ghana’s socialists became simultaneously valuable to the Ghanaian worker and dangerous to the Ghanaian state, its socialist visions, and private enterprises. While the lives and experiences of workers have been scattered throughout the previous chapters, this chapter centers them.

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Workers in Ghana were internationalized, very mobile, hailed from different regions, and possessed different skill sets. The British “internationalized” the Colonial Ghanaian labor force by importing inexpensive and forced laborers from China, Nigeria, and the French colonies.Footnote ⁴ By 1939, approximately 54 percent of the workforce in the mines came from northern Ghana, Nigeria, and the French colonies.Footnote ⁵ From 1937 to 1940, about 35,000 Northerners migrated to the south for work. This number reached 46,000 by 1945. Around 1948, this figure doubled to nearly 92,000. In 1954, approximately 200,000 Northerners had migrated south seeking employment and seasonal migrant labor.Footnote ⁶ Perhaps as many as 47 percent of female workers in Ghana could be classified as migrant workers.Footnote ⁷ Only a paltry percentage of women in the Northern Region were employed in nonagricultural work.Footnote ⁸ As noted in Chapter 2, the British colonial apparatus and mining companies contributed to this migratory pattern by funneling people from the northern to southern regions.Footnote ⁹ Simultaneously, the cocoa industry boom in southern Ghana made it an attractive site for northern laborers.Footnote ¹⁰ This had a dark underbelly, however. Forced female labor underpinned cocoa production and was critical both to its productivity and profitability.Footnote ¹¹ However, with the cocoa boom, Northerners were increasingly able to transform wage or enslaved labor into what historian Gareth Austin calls “managerial share-cropping.”Footnote ¹²

By 1960, urban areas such as Accra, Kumasi, Sekondi, and Takoradi in southern Ghana witnessed “considerable” growth, while southern mining towns such as Tarkwa and Obuasi also grew modestly.Footnote ¹³ Women constituted 1,870 out of 33,840 miners, quarrymen, and related workers. They also comprised 101,520 out of 395,940 craftsmen, production process workers, and laborers “not elsewhere listed.”Footnote ¹⁴ Regarding female employment more generally, approximately 80 percent were self-employed or employers, with most being “petty traders or hawkers.”Footnote ¹⁵ While factory workers’ constituted a “very small proportion of the total population,” they were crucial to Ghana’s “future development.”Footnote ¹⁶ Southerners overwhelmingly tended to occupy skilled positions, while Northerners and foreigners occupied unskilled ones. Historian Richard Jeffries has argued that occupational differences were converted into ethnic and cultural ones, undermining workers’ solidarity.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet, workers in Ghana often banded together within trade unions, whose origins lay in the colonial period, to fight for better working conditions.

The Ghana TUC became a vehicle for both anticolonial and nationalist activity and an avenue for economic protection for laborers in various sectors.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1941, the British colonial government legalized trade unions in response to widespread discontent in the colony.Footnote ¹⁹ Soon, British union leaders traveled throughout the colony to try and develop trade unions that functioned in concert with the government’s interest. Unfortunately for the British, this did not come into fruition. According to historian Jeffrey Ahlman, mine workers in Colonial Ghana had “emerged as one of the most militant and politically aggressive groups” by the early twentieth century.Footnote ²⁰ Scholar G. M. Carter argued that the TUC’s radical wing caused both Nkrumah and the British difficulties leading up to independence.Footnote ²¹ To counter this development, Ahlman argues that Nkrumah and the CPP brought “the colony’s labor movement into its fold” to harness their anticolonial activity by both appointing Nkrumah’s allies and declaring the CPP a workers’ party. Indeed, the TUC’s magazine, Labour, told the workers to sideline their interests for the state’s. Labour argued that the trade union’s role was “firstly, to mobilize and organize the workers to carry out state plans, and secondly, to be concerned with systematically improving their living and working conditions.”Footnote ²² Nkrumah echoed those sentiments. Nkrumah opined, “We [the workers and the state] must, therefore, mobilise our efforts again in grand unison in order to ensure the success of our economic revolution.”Footnote ²³

Despite these pronouncements or hopes of unity, labor under Nkrumah’s government had not been pacified, nor had they linked increased production and achieving the state’s goals to their own success and well-being.Footnote ²⁴ In December 1959, according to F. S. Miles, a British official in the British High Commissioner’s Office in Accra, despite foreign perceptions that the TUC had become the government’s arm, it continued to secure gains for its members. Miles ventured:

As we will see, small, local unions went on strikes without the TUC’s consent or knowledge. In fact, as Miles noted, the labor movement in Ghana was more independent and perhaps more militant than their British counterparts. Moreover, although the senior Ghanaian trade union officials were “well” compensated, they worked doggedly. They traveled across the country “putting across … new ideas to the workers,” increased membership, created a robust bureaucratic machine,Footnote ²⁶ organized annual conferences, created educational rallies, organized self-help seminars, and provided members with basic forms of literacy.Footnote ²⁷

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Yet, the utopian life Ghana’s independence leaders envisioned remained out of reach for many workers as constant and visible monuments and whispers of corruption within the governing party and the government swirled. While wages in public and private sectors remained stagnant during the early years of Nkrumah’s government despite the increasing costs of rent and living,Footnote ²⁸ Kojo Botsio, an influential cabinet member and minister, had recently built “a very ostentatious new house”Footnote ²⁹ and people witnessed TUC vehicles utilized as private property at nightlife entertainment “spots.”Footnote ³⁰ Perhaps here was the first betrayal. In addition, European companies such as Elder Dempster Agencies Limited and the United African Company (UAC) fired workers over dwindling profits and rising costs.Footnote ³¹ Public calls to embrace socialism and struggle became hollow to workers when Nkrumah increased his cabinet ministers’ wages from £1,200 to £1,800 a year in June 1960.Footnote ³² Some workers “began to mutter ‘one law for the rich’” and another for the rest.Footnote ³³

During the TUC leader, John K. Tettegah’s absence to the Soviet Union, on August 3, 1960, about 100,000 workers in Accra “threw the municipality into pandemonium when they staged a demonstration at midday … demanding more pay and better working conditions.” The workers carried placards reading: “We want better pay,” “We too know how to drink whiskey and educate our children,” “One man no chop in the Republic of Ghana,” “£1,000 a month too big for one man,” among other signs. While holding these placards aloft, the protesters “sang war songs and made terrific noise, booed and rained abuses on TUC officials who were under police protection.”Footnote ³⁴ Some workers referred to the concept of socialism as the “the devilsown [sic] crafty instrument” for continuing to oppress them.Footnote ³⁵ Thus, while Chapter 5 articulated how the socialist ideologues believed that socialism was the cure to oppression and social evils, some workers viewed socialism as a mechanism and smokescreen for their continued suffering and alienation.

In response to the mass strike, the executive board of the TUC released a statement that they were “absolutely convinced that the recent demonstrations in Accra and other parts of the country were not direct [sic] against the Convention People’s Party, the Government or the Trade Union Congress.” Instead, the executive board insisted that the workers were reacting “simultaneously … to long standing [sic] anomalies and grievances existing in certain employments [sic] and the demonstrations were directed against employers’ adamant refusal to negotiate on these issues and the consequent deadlocks that occurred.” The executive board reiterated their full support for “the workers’ general demand for wage increases in line with its devoted aims to raise the standard of living of the workers.” They tried to assure their members that they were in active consultations with the government to address their grievances.Footnote ³⁶ Such concerns could still be heard four years later. Not only from workers but from parliamentarians as well. J. D. Wireko, a Ghanaian parliamentarian representing the Amansie-East district and a CPP party member, questioned the minister of Finance’s 1964 budget proposal and seemed to support the workers’ concerns:

While the TUC’s promises sought to placate the striking workers, parliament quickly passed amendments to the Labor and the Criminal Codes in August 1960. Together, the bills granted the minister of Labor and Co-Operatives the authority to decide salaries on the grounds of “public interest” and effectively made strikes illegal. The state could now scrutinize newspaper publications reporting on country-wide revolts,Footnote ³⁸ permitted a “union shop”Footnote ³⁹ requiring workers to join a union and pay dues, and granted the CPP and Nkrumah greater control and scrutiny over the “activities of individual union leaders.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Every worker now had to “possess [a] trade union membership,” and employers were barred from “hiring non-union members for more than a month.” British observers argued that the measures put the minister of Labor in control of the TUCFootnote ⁴¹ and dissolved all unions unaffiliated with the TUC,Footnote ⁴² merging approximately 100 unions into 16 national unions.Footnote ⁴³ It was a reconfiguration Tettegah had called for in September 1957.Footnote ⁴⁴ The TUC’s Education and Publicity Department noted that the bills created an “elastic system of negotiation and conciliation which” rendered “strikes almost unnecessary.” However, not only had strikes become ‘unnecessary’ but were effectively illegal.Footnote ⁴⁵ These measures were intended not only to bolster state control over workers but to further Ghana’s economic program of seeking foreign capital – as discussed in Chapters 1 and 4.

The state sought to make Ghanaian labor more attractive to foreign capital and interests. Ako Adjei, the Ghanaian minister of External Affairs, assured foreign investors that “Ghanaian labor would not be troublesome.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Consequently, the 1960 Labor and the Criminal Codes were part of an attempt to assuage foreign investors, not domestic interests, that labor in Ghana would be sufficiently muzzled and productive in their pursuit of profits. In 1962, a further eight regional labor departments were created, with each employing a regional labor officer to provide the government with greater administrative and political control.Footnote ⁴⁷ These anti-worker measures were criticized by some and fiercely contested.

Joe Appiah, an important figure in the oppositional United Party, expressed grave concerns that the amendments contravened the Ghanaian constitution’s “fundamental principle of the liberty of the subjects and human rights.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Even among the CPP faithful, the measures were difficult to swallow.Footnote ⁴⁹ Critics argued that the new draconian measures deprived the unions of their teeth. At a CPP meeting, a few of the “Bill’s exponents” were given “rough treatment” while explaining the Act’s benefits.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Ghana United Africa Company Workers Union severely derided the TUC’s attempts to create sixteen unions. “[W]hy 16?,” the newsletter questioned. It then continued, “Just sixteen (16) as if the workers are like flocks of sheep and cattle that can be grouped just as herdsmen want.”Footnote ⁵¹ The newsletter then criticized the “scheme” as simply a “copy-book” of the German and Israeli trade union “patterns.” The workers saw the new structure as an “instrument of exploitation” to transfer wealth from the union members to benefit a handful of career professional trade union leaders. They called the measures “undemocratic and contrary to known practices in all democratic countries.”Footnote ⁵² Indeed, in the Ghana United Africa Company Workers Union’s analysis, they distinguished themselves, the workers, from their leaders, who they described as career professional trade unionists. The distinction was intended to emphasize to their readers or would-be sympathizers about their own predicament, which was separate from their leaders. This was further demonstrated by the reality that the workers, and not their leaders, suffered repercussions from the state following their 1961 strikes. Following the affair, the sociologist St. Clair Drake noted that approximately fifty workers were arrested “under the provisions of the Preventative Detention Act.”Footnote ⁵³

Despite the measures to limit strikes and worker power within the first three years of independence, British officials wrote with amazement that trade unions’ regional secretaries were “continuously bombarded by streams of workers bringing their grievances,” creating “an atmosphere in a Regional Office … often near … bedlam”Footnote ⁵⁴ and “rank and file” workers still influenced “their leaders.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In one particular incident, a Regional Labor Advisory Committee meeting on July 21, 1962, in Tamale, raised serious concerns about the numerous reports indicating that contractors knowingly employed girls under the age of fifteen and paid women laborers below the minimum wage.Footnote ⁵⁶ The secretary to the regional commissioner in the Northern Region wrote that the government’s “efforts to get the contractors to pay the approved minimum rates have tended to involve the replacement of the female labor by male labor.” Not only did the men replace the women laborers, but the contractors increased the men’s wages for the same tasks. Owing to the loss of employment and income, the women “created pathetic scenes much to the embarrassment of the Labor Officers.”Footnote ⁵⁷ As the next stories demonstrate, workers in Ghana did not cower behind these new laws and neither did said laws silence them. Ghanaian workers remained emboldened. They studied these laws, found loopholes to subvert them, and flaunted them.

Workers created smaller unions that operated effectively outside the TUC’s direct control within their companies. These unions continued to devise clever methods to circumvent the socialist government’s legislative attempts to curtail strikes and control labor. For instance, on Saturday, February 27, 1960, in Takoradi, 275 Construction and General Workers Union workers from Messrs. A. Hoffman and Sonner Company went on strike to protest “against the dismissal of a carpenter for insubordination and insulting behaviour.” Within the day, the union and the company’s management negotiated a settlement to terminate the strike. The company agreed to reinstate the fired carpenter “on the condition that 2 hours extra work would be put in” that day “for the loss” of labor that occurred that “morning.” However, at the day’s conclusion, the workers refused to complete the extra two hours and went home. Management retaliated. They did not reinstate the carpenter. Two days later, one laborer urged his comrades “not to resume duty but to continue the action strike.” His colleagues agreed. After two and a half hours of striking, the district labor officer “intervened,” and the workers returned to work. The company retaliated, firing the employee who had urged his companions to strike. However, the regional labor officer of the Western Region convinced the company to suspend rather than sack the worker. As part of the peace-settlement, the officer informed the company and the workers that inciting “workers to go on strike [wa]s an offence under Section 39 [sic] of the Industrial Relations Act” and urged the workers to study the laws that criminalized strikes, and notified the employer that they could not enforce state law. “[N]o employer ha[d] jurisdiction over it,” the officer warned. Thus, the company could not dismiss a worker for breaking the legal code. The following day, the Western Regional secretary of the TUC visited the workers and reinforced the regional labor officer’s point that the workers left “themselves open for prosecution under Section 29 [sic] of the Industrial Relations Act,” which prohibited “strike action.” However, the issue was far from settled. The company was determined to show their ruthlessness and pettiness to their employees.

A few days later, the company dismissed nineteen workers “on grounds of redundancy.” If the company had expected a subdued response, they had severely miscalculated. Rather than call another strike, “all” the workers asked the company “to pay them off individually.” The workers had effectively resigned en masse. It was an ingenious tactic. It could not be classified “as a strike” nor could any laborer be “held responsible for any stoppage of work.” Fashioned in the Western Region, this novel maneuver nullified the Industrial Relations Act and the government’s attempts to pacify labor. It also paralyzed capital and left the regional labor officer simultaneously stupefied, impressed, and caught off guard.Footnote ⁵⁸ These workers were brave.Footnote ⁵⁹ In a perilous economic climate and uncertainty over new streams of income for themselves and their families, they accepted the words of Benjamin Franklin, one of the founders of the United States: “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” The workers knew that they had to stand together or be dismissed individually or in groups at the company’s whim. Their recent experience had supported this reality. The company had already fired workers one-by-one and then dismissed nineteen without cause.Footnote ⁶⁰ To show their commitment and loyalty to each other and to highlight their sophisticated understanding of the power of solidarity amidst precariousness, the workers were willing to, and did, resign en masse. While posing threats to the state and foreign capital and companies, these actions severely undermined the TUC’s Education and Publicity Department’s prediction that strikes would almost cease to exist. They also demonstrated that labor had not been co-opted into the state machinery.

In another incident, on February 15, 1965, the Kalmoni & Co. Workers’ Union Divisional secretary, B. Asare, wrote to the general secretary of the TUC and the management of Kalmoni & Company Limited that the company’s decision to lay off seven workers without first informing the local union contravened their collective bargaining agreement. Asare criticized the TUC’s general secretary for not notifying the local union of the impending cuts. “Also (assuming you got the said notice),” Asare wrote, “you have up to now not made it known to us [the local union] in spite of the fact that it deals with a matter which involves, without any form of compensation, a loss of means of livelihood to many of our comrades and their dependents.”Footnote ⁶¹ The leaders of Kalmoni & Co. Workers’ Union demanded a seat at the negotiation table. They sought clarification about the need for the redundancy measures, who was on the chopping block, and demanded an extension of the redundancy timeline from one week to two months. Referencing Clause XVII, Number 6, of their collective bargaining agreement, the local union noted that “The Company shall be called upon to pay two months of salary to a redundant employee if the former fails to notify the Union of his intention to declare redundancy.” Asare shrewdly defined “union” in the agreement to refer to the local union and not the TUC. Thus, he noted that the company had failed to satisfy the redundancy clause of their agreement by not consulting with the Kalmoni & Co. Workers’ Union even if it had communicated with the TUC. As a result, Asare demanded that his colleagues receive two months of additional salary because the company had broken their contractual agreement.

By creating an institutional and ideological wedge between the TUC and the local union, Asare sought to secure greater financial gains for his “comrades.” Through letters, local unions inscribed and inserted their influence into labor disputes. On the grounds of proximity to and familiarity with their colleagues, local unions argued that they, and not the TUC, had a legal right and moral standing to know and participate in employment decisions. They insisted that employment-related matters about their colleagues had to be transmitted through them first. Local union leaders closely studied and understood the gaps within complex state laws and collective bargaining agreements, and its implications for themselves and their comrades.Footnote ⁶² These parochial unions often acted without the approval or knowledge of the regional and district labor officers or the TUC. Instead, their main purpose was to ensure the protection of their members’ jobs and rights against all other interests and parties.

While the Labor Acts and Amendments tried to “dissolve” all unions not officially tied to the TUC, small, local, independent unions arose in its wake and continued to operate well into the final year of Nkrumah’s government. While the harshest and most cynical critics of the Labor and Criminal Acts and Amendments argued that labor would become “toothless” and that power would be centralized, this reality was not borne out due to the ingenious and savvy means local unions devised to keep power in the “margins” and away from the center. Despite the dominant Ghanaian historiography that centers the hegemonic control of the TUC and the state over labor in Nkrumah’s Ghana, smaller unions operated with strong autonomy and posed (significant) challenges to the state, the TUC, and to industry.

Moreover, workers individually made significant use of the state’s growing bureaucratic channels, provided by the TUC and the district and regional commissioners, to challenge decisions, to highlight abusive state behavior, and ill-treatment (see also Chapter 2). For instance, in 1962, a European contractor in charge of constructing the army barracks at Appremdu, a town slightly west of Takoradi, failed to pay his Ghanaian workers and fled. The workers had traveled with their wives and children from Koforidua and Accra to build the barracks. Unable to afford food because the European had vanished and failed to pay them their wages, the workers and their families ventured to nearby “cassava farms to beg” for food. Using the language of Nkrumah’s dutifulness and love of Ghana in their letter to the Western Regional commissioner, the workers noted that they continued to work on the army barracks despite their predicament because it was their “duty to serve our country-Ghana and to serve her well.” On the morning of May 12, 1962, the minister of Defense, Kofi Baako, arrived on the scene.Footnote ⁶³ The editor of the socialist magazine, The Spark, Kofi Batsa, had described Baako at one point as someone who was “passionate and impulsive, would always rather act than consider.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The unfolding events perhaps proved Batsa’s character assessment of Baako.

Baako instructed the workers “suddenly” to stop working. The workers admitted being “all mixed up” in their minds and confused by Baako’s order. Events took a violent turn. Baako chased after the workers “with his stick, clearing” them “as if we were goats.” The workers informed the Western Regional commissioner that while they had already contacted the TUC and district labor office about their plight, nothing had changed. While the workers thought that the two organizations were doing their best to support them, they still believed that they needed to write to the Western Regional commissioner “to come to their aid,” and pay them before they died “of hunger.” The workers warned that “perhaps” Baako had “forgotten that if you trouble a hungry snake, you will force it to bite you. Yet we are not snakes and will never act like that [sic].” Despite the second clause insisting that they would not bite the state, the workers warned the regional commissioner that they were almost “one thousand” and that if they “were to die of hunger, it will be a great disaster to the Ghana Nation, yet we belief in the freedom and justice of Ghana [sic].”Footnote ⁶⁵ The archival record ends there. We do not know if Baako faced any disciplinary action. Nonetheless, workers in Ghana were unafraid to use bureaucratic channels to report on the misconduct of prominent government officials like Baako or their bosses, as we witnessed in Chapters 2 and 3. These actions created an archival record, a trail of misconduct that could be used to discipline or remove senior officials as we saw in Chapter 2 with Darko or Chapter 3 with Roman, the European, who called Allasan Moshie, a “Blackman Monkey.”

These stories indicate that workers felt emboldened to write complaints about anyone, even about the minister of Defense, to seek remedy. This is where the political and social currency of a state beholden to the worker had weight. It was through these letters that allegations and incidents of neglect, oversight, unfair treatment, and discrimination came to light and forced the state, whether superficially or substantially, to address them. It also compelled the state to confront its self-fashioning ideology as worker-centered.

Ghanaian Labor and Black Liberation

Ghanaian labor and intellectuals theorized and situated Ghanaian workers within global debates on workers’ rights, Black liberation, and the political economy. “By reporting on strikes and the living and working conditions of the proletariat in various countries around the globe,” the Ghanaian literary class “triggered” what historian Ilham Khuri-Makdisi argues is “the audience’s deep empathy with the suffering of world populations and masses.” In so doing, Khuri-Makdisi maintains that “the press … contributed to the creation of a sense of solidarity among workers in different realms.”Footnote ⁶⁶ While Khuri-Makdisi referenced early-1900s Mediterranean workers, the same could be argued for workers in Nkrumah’s socialist Ghana.

Through words and images, the press and political class took it upon themselves to ensure that the workers in Ghana remained abreast of international affairs, particularly the plight of other workers, fostering a sense of solidarity across race and class. Articles on the horrors of white supremacist rule in southern Africa circulated widely and constantly in Ghana.Footnote ⁶⁷ For instance, in June 7, 1963, Steve Lawrence wrote in The Spark about how white minority rule in Apartheid South Africa was leading to the nation’s self-immolation. Lawrence argued: “Mad with fear, the racialist tyrants of South Africa are rushing the country headlong to a holocaust – and their own destruction.”Footnote ⁶⁸

On March 21, 1960, the Pan African Congress (PAC), a splinter political group from the African National Congress (ANC), encouraged Black South Africans to leave their passes at home, boycott work, and to go to their local police stations to be arrested. The apartheid government required all Black South Africans to carry a passbook or face arrest; the passbook contained an individual’s employer, race, ethnicity, homeland, and their area of residence. Residents of Sharpeville followed the PAC’s call. Soon, the South African security forces arrived and gunned down unarmed Black South Africans.Footnote ⁶⁹ The caption in The Spark succinctly captured the horror: “Colonial police mow down African patriots.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Images of the South African police shooting at and mercilessly beating defenseless and desperately fleeing Africans in Sharpeville disseminated throughout Ghana. Another image of a white police officer grabbing and dragging a Black South African woman by the arm despite her protestations circulated in Ghana. The words: “Arrest and jail have become the daily lot of African women, as well as men,” were published under the image. On May 15, 1964, the Welsh scholar Idris Cox lamented in “Zero Hour in Southern Rhodesia” that over the “past four months 45 Africans have been shot dead by armed police. In one week in April over 300 Africans were arrested, among them were 60 women carrying babies on their backs.”Footnote ⁷¹ People in Ghana learned that African women suffered under white minority rule. White supremacy and apartheid’s victims were not gendered and the youth and old suffered equally. No one was safe in southern Africa. These articles showed the depravity of white supremacist rule.

Nearer to home, the Evening News informed the public that the Nigerian police had fired upon striking dockworkers in Nigeria. In February 1963, John K. Tettegah, then the secretary of the AATUF, sent a public cable to the Nigerian prime minister, Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, criticizing “the death of two workers, as a result of the brutal beatings by the police.” Tettegah urged the Nigerian government to address “this genuine industrial struggle of the Nigerian dockworkers in defence of their living standards.” This was not the only message from Ghana’s labor leaders about the incident. The TUC wrote to S. Imodu, the leader of the Independent United Labour Congress of Nigeria, that “the working people of Ghana alongside their brothers all over Africa express their sympathy and full solidarity with their struggling Nigerian Comrades.”Footnote ⁷²

These headlines, images, and top-down directives, radiating from across the African continent to Ghana, allowed workers in Ghana to link their strikes and demands to a broader movement against anti-Black racism and political systems that employed law enforcement to dismiss, arrest, or kill disgruntled Black workers. For instance, the striking workers at the Pioneer Tobacco Company in Ghana in the vignette that opened Chapter 3 held aloft placards stating: “We are not in South Africa. Down with Flood. Away with Mclean. We want our rights. Mate-Nicols Aide-Camp. Flood go back to South Africa. Remove NC. Nicol – Big Stooge.”Footnote ⁷³ International discourses made their way back into the protest vocabulary of everyday workers. Not only were international events used to make local claims, but some Ghanaian workers thought of themselves as leading a new vanguard of workers against imperialism, white supremacy, colonialism, neocolonialism, and injustice. Through such demonstrations, Black Ghanaian labor simultaneously informed their socialist Black liberationist government and their white employers that while whites in southern Africa might be able to treat Blacks with impunity, it would not be tolerated in the socialist de-colony. Because the Ghanaian political elite positioned Ghana and themselves as the heartbeat of the global Black liberation movement, it permitted workers and their leaders to coopt global events and discourses to make and stake domestic claims against white supremacy and anti-worker statism into a coherent narrative to bolster their demands.

Anti-worker violence across Ghana’s borders were painful reminders of the fragility of workers’ rights in postcolonial Africa. While the Ghanaian government had not deployed such police force against striking domestic workers, the threat of violence hovered constantly. In response to each strike, the Criminal Investigation Department (CIDPOL) conducted investigations. Afterward, it produced and received wireless messages on whether “the Industrial Relations Act No. 56/58 Sections 23, 1-3 AND (1) AND B has been complied with” and what actions the police would or should take.Footnote ⁷⁴ As in the case of Mensah, the story that opened Chapter 3, the police and management hounded him. And if Kofi Baako had had his way, perhaps the weapon of choice he used to chase away the workers, the stick, might have been more deadly, a rifle.

Demonized Labor

Not all forms of labor were celebrated in Ghana, however. Despite its legality, some within the government and the press demonized sex work frequently. On July 21, 1962, Oliver Frimpong in the Ashanti Pioneer called “prostitution” a “social evil” and lamented its “alarming and unprecedented heights in recent years.” He urged the government to revoke “licensed prostitution,” since it was an “exotic” practice, “and a vicious legacy of colonialism.” Frimpong argued that sex work was a Western import, with Lebanese and whitemen driving young Black women into the profession. The writer castigated “debauched foreign nationals who inveigle – our women folk into perversion with money,” maintaining that “school girls” were being seduced by the “fruits of this evil-practice” and were “prepared to sell themselves” to people with “white skin … for anything next to nothing.” To counter this “evil,” Frimpong called on pub owners to stop housing “a number of girls in their bars,” to cease engaging in “unlicensed prostitution,” and called on the “male sex” to “stop patronising license prostitution.” By doing this, Frimpong noted that everyone could save Ghana and create a society “free from all social evils.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Whereas “Prostitution [has] become [an] accepted social evil in other parts of the world,” Frimpong declared that there “should be no reason whatsoever for allowing them to flourish” in the socialist de-colony. The writer concluded that sex work provided the “imperialist skeptics whose greatest delight is to paint Ghana in the most sordid pictures, something to talk about when they go back to their country after a stay or visit here.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Frimpong’s demonization and foreignization of sex work was not new. As historian Jean Allman has shown, the “general chaos in gender relations that shook the Asante” in the 1920s and 1930s manifested itself in fears over “prostitution.” British government officials and the Asante leadership linked the spread of venereal diseases to sex work and unmarried women. Officials detained single women, “spinsters,” and demanded fees for their release.Footnote ⁷⁷ While the CPP attempted to transform gender and social relations fundamentally, figures like Frimpong sought to control the types of labor women could do. To do so, Frimpong offered an ahistorical argument about the origins of sex work within a larger accepted anti-imperialist discourse to cobble support for his position.

By 1965, angst over sex work loomed large and shifted from inflammatory press reports to the corridors of Nkrumah’s cabinet. Susanna Al-Hassan, the then minister of Social Welfare, and T. M. K. A. Yarney, the acting secretary to the regional commissioner, adopted Frimpong’s cause but, unlike Frimpong, had the support of the state machinery. Al-Hassan had become gravely concerned “with the soaring rate of prostitution and lewdness” amongst young women and about “how best to combat such evils.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Al-Hassan created an eighteen-person committee representing various religious and government sectors and interests to end “PROSTITUTION [all caps in original],” their “arch enemy.” The committee offered an eleven-point solution, urging the community to view the young girls as their “own daughters,” and not “aliens,” who were “fallen victims … to social evils.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Yarney argued that “serious minded citizens” were “greatly concerned with the soaring rate of prostitution and … depravity and lewdness among … young working girls.” Yarney called for a “relentless war on those undesirable social practices and see to their complete eradication from” Ghana.Footnote ⁸⁰ The social anxiety and moral panic surrounding young working women was echoed in Uganda and Tanzania.Footnote ⁸¹ Whereas Frimpong had foreignized sex work, Yarney situated it within the intimate, the personal and familial. Yarney called on the CPP to hold “rallies to help educate both young and old to desist from prostitution.”Footnote ⁸² Moreover, he urged law enforcement to “intensify” their “checks” of “drinking bars and hotels” to ensure that young women were not engaged in “undesirable social practices.”Footnote ⁸³ If the owners failed to comply or were complicit, Yarney called on the police to “suspend [their] licenses.”Footnote ⁸⁴ While the campaign against sex work had drawn prominent public and private figures within the Northern Region into its orbit, the committee did not substantially address the socioeconomic realities that pushed these young women into “undesirable” occupations or that women engaged in more “desirable” occupations were being underpaid and then dismissed when government officials sought to compel their employers to increase their wages.Footnote ⁸⁵ Calls to criminalize both sex workers and business owners’ complicit in encouraging it landed on barren soil. Police officers seemed uninterested in making arrests and doling out fines and parliament did not pass laws criminalizing it.

While sex work appeared to threaten the moral fabric of the new society, laziness threatened the entire political economic project that state officials and socialist theorists envisioned. Indeed, while celebrating the CPP’s fifteenth anniversary, Nkrumah instructed workers to “work hard and eschew anything that borders on laziness, dishonesty and subversion.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Other figures throughout the socialist de-colony and the Nkrumah-era reinforced this message. In 1962, the Accra City Council chairman, E. C. Quaye, warned workers that the council would not “tolerate any sign of laziness and indiscipline.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In February 1963, the Ghana School of Law Employees’ branch of the Educational Institutions Workers’ Union of the TUC “warned against laziness and rumour-mongering,” arguing that such “evils” impeded the nation’s progress.Footnote ⁸⁸ That same month, K. A. Kwateng, the district commissioner for the Manso-Achease area in the Eastern Region, urged all employees “to close their ranks against laziness, and tribalism” and “to work hard to make the council’s development programme a success.”Footnote ⁸⁹ On August 27, The Party Chronicle castigated workers who showed an “unhealthy desire to get rich quick” instead of “working hard to build Ghana.” “Some workers,” The Party Chronicle argued, were “criminally addicted to laziness” and thus stealing from Ghana.Footnote ⁹⁰ Nkrumah acknowledged that workers had to “work doubly hard now that” they “were laboring for ourselves and our children, and not for the enrichment of the former colonial power.”Footnote ⁹¹ In 1964, the chairman of the Ghana Rural Corporation concurred with this sentiment. He told his listeners that “hard work and greater sacrifices” were necessary to ensure the nation’s success.Footnote ⁹²

During the Nkrumah-era, the government and press spent considerable time bifurcating the worker into two types: the parasitical and the selfless worker. They defined the former as lazy and selfish, while the latter was considered industrious and altruistic. The theorists maintained that the lazy worker guarded their own interests while the industrious laborer looked out for the community. Ghana was not alone among socialist countries harboring these dualistic conceptions of the worker. In the Soviet Union, lazy workers were framed as saboteurs, resulting in their murders in some cases. In the 1960s, without the state violence Stalin inflicted upon “hostile workers,” the Soviet leadership urged workers to be disciplined, to abscond laziness, and to increase production. From the USSR to Ghana, leading officials argued that it was only through worker ingenuity and hard work could their nations achieve socialist freedom.Footnote ⁹³ One of the traits of an ideal socialist worker, the theorists maintained, was one who voluntareed to improve the material conditions of their neighbors.

Self-Help and Nation Building

Like other parts of the postcolonial world, local and volunteer work, and self-help projects and labor were encouraged and repeatedly praised during the Nkrumah era.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the socialist de-colony, volunteer labor was framed as a local necessity and as a moral and national duty. It underpinned the socialist utopia Nkrumah and his associates advocated. For instance, Nkrumah maintained that “the building of a new state” required “voluntary service.”Footnote ⁹⁵ On February 14, 1963, the Evening News praised and welcomed reports of “self help projects” coming to their attention. The paper highlighted the construction of a new chapel, street drains, and market sheds across the country. Its competitor, The Daily Graphic, not only welcomed volunteer labor, but praised women and men for financially contributing to these projects.Footnote ⁹⁶

To legitimize and popularize free labor, the press sought to co-opt and associate monarchy with volunteer labor and to delink it from slavery. On February 9, 1963, The Daily Graphic showed a monarch, the Omanhene of the New Juaben area, leading a “group of communal workers” in using pick axes and shovels to clear the area around the Koforidua sports stadium.Footnote ⁹⁷ Similarly, on January 20, 1965, The Daily Graphic published an image of over thirty women cleaning Mankissim’s markets and streets, with the Queen Mother leading the procession (Figure 6.1).Footnote ⁹⁸ Pictures of traditional rulers alongside their subjects doing communal work merged and submerged them with the new state’s postcolonial dreams and authority. It permitted the advocates of self-help initiatives to argue that no one was too important or unimportant to build the socialist de-colony. Everyone had a role to play in making Ghana better, cleaner, and more productive. Everyone had to make sacrifices. Sacrifice could not simply be relegated to the masses. Whereas the British colonial authorities compelled and co-opted local monarchs to acquire forced labor to engage in colonial projects,Footnote ⁹⁹ the press sought to distinguish the socialist, postcolonial government’s intentions from the British’s. The press implied that in the colonial regime, individuals were forced to work for the monarch and foreign power. However, in the socialist de-colony, monarchs worked side-by-side with the people. The press reminded its readers that one was working to enrich their future and to ensure Black freedom and not to bolster the British empire. The press and government argued that the people’s interests were not separate but intimately tied to the state’s socialist project. At all levels of power, from the Ghanaian president to the ordinary party operative, there was a unified front to stir communities to develop and deploy self-help schemes and seek “volunteer” labor to complete it. Yet, the press had masked the dangers of communal labor and severed it from its colonial and precolonial history. In fact, as historian Rebecca Shumway reminds us, notions of self-help could be traced to the Asafo Companies, which were military units formed to protect communities from the violence of slavery along the Fante Coast.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Like the acts of the 19th-century Asafo Companies, self-help projects were seen as social and moral imperatives for the safety and betterment of the people.

Figure 6.1

“Women Clean Up Their Town,” Daily Graphic, January 20, 1965.

Despite the moniker of volunteerism and self-help, there was a dark underbelly to these campaigns in the socialist de-colony. At times, forced labor masqueraded as volunteer labor. On April 21, 1960, the principal Community Development officer instructed individuals in Northern Ghana to “start work … immediately” on building dams, roads, wells, market sheds, and centers.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Those who refused fell afoul of the law. Area district commissioners instructed development officers to report “any cases” where individuals or groups failed to work voluntarily.Footnote ¹⁰² Those reported were not merely insulted or listed in the government’s ‘bad books,’ but were “fined” and arrested.Footnote ¹⁰³ There is no archival evidence yet to suggest that Nkrumah or members of the presidential cabinet directed local officials to arrest individuals for failing to engage in self-help projects. This practice appeared to happen independently of central authority or knowledge. Local officials on the ground, apparently with great latitude to, pursued actions that were entirely reminiscent of the colonial era. Yet, officials and the press continued to extol and eulogize communal labor’s impact and its importance in fomenting and inspiring socialist ethos and personal accountability and responsibility.

Ableism

In a society increasingly constructed around the rhetoric of national development and production, disabled Ghanaians became both increasingly antithetical to the national economic agenda and the site of government efforts to make them economically productive. Kofi Baako suggested that those who “accumulated wealth through hard and honest labor, would have their property protected from ‘lazy, unscrupulous undisciplined but able-bodied citizens.’” According to historian Jeff D. Grischow, “By implication, those who did not comply would not be allowed to share in the fruits of economic development.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Toward the twilight months of 1960, at least 100,000 Ghanaians were considered disabled.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Oliver Frimpong, who earlier called for a ban on sex work, authored a vicious attack on disabled people, claiming that they used their ailments for “public exhibition.” The “more horrible and serious their disease,” Frimpong insinuated, “the better chance they stand in exciting compassion and, subsequently, money from passers-by. These maladies,” Frimpong continued, “include such revolting ones as shrivelled hands and feet atrophied fingers of a leper places … which catch the eye every day when we [abled-bodied persons] go about our daily duties.” He called “the physically weak who cannot work” as the “most nauseating group of beggars” in relation to those who were able-bodied but feigned “sickness” or those who were “quack fortune tellers.” For Frimpong, the disabled who begged “infest our streets, alleys, public houses, nooks and crannies.” Frimpong’s language of ‘infestation’ linked disabled people to insects and viruses that had to be “disinfected,” “cleansed,” and removed from society. Like sex work, Frimpong insisted that mendicancy provided the “imperialist skeptics whose greatest delight is to paint Ghana in the most sordid pictures, something to talk about when they go back to their country after a stay or visit here.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This language was dangerous. It was designed to create fear, animosity, and alienate those suffering in the socialist de-colony.

Whether it was undergirded by a leftist socialist mission or a rightist abhorrence of the disabled, both camps believed that disabled Ghanaians needed to be integrated “into the workforce as productive wage laborers.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ These ideas and policies, as Grischow revealed, had its roots in the 1940s British colonial policy to “retrain” disabled ex-colonial Ghanaian soldiers into “productive workers.” For Nkrumah, Rehabilitation Centers were central to incorporating and converting disabled Ghanaians into productive labor. In 1961, the government established a National Rehabilitation Service “for the benefit of the adult blind, deaf and dumb.” The state also created Rural Rehabilitation Units in Kwaso in the Asante Region, Ho in the Volta Region, Tamale in the North Region, and Bolgatanga in the Upper Regions, and an Industrial Rehabilitation Unit in Accra for “the urban disabled.” Owusu Afriyie, the minister of Social Welfare and Community Development, argued to the Ghanaian presidential cabinet that such spaces would “encourage” the disabled “to learn three or four trades … should demand fail in another.” During their leisure, the minister envisioned the residents discussing “the week’s news, the work of the central government” and local councils, and “the responsibilities of the individual to the welfare and security of the state.” These measures were to ensure that disabled individuals could “take their place in the counsels of the people.” “The objective of the rehabilitation courses,” Afriyie maintained, “is to restore the disabled as nearly as possible to the economic and social position which they would have occupied but for their disability.” However, due to “staffing and accommodation” issues, these places could only accommodate “160 male disabled people” at “any one time.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Herein lay the problem.

Those aforementioned programs and services, including training in farming, poultry, “tailoring, sandal making, craft work in raffin and cane rural building and wood carving” had not “been extended to disabled women.” The minister admitted that access to the new training centers had been gendered and requested similar spaces for women. Consequently, he urged his cabinet colleagues in July 1963 to accept the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind’s offer to create a home training scheme for “blind women” in Ghana. The minister noted that the courses would assist “blind women” “gain confidence in themselves, when carrying out normal household and domestic duties”; and “readjust their attitude to their blindness, to revive hope, encourage effort in the daily round of activity, and retrain them in the methodological handling and use of articles in the domestic environment.” Furthermore, the minister hoped that the courses would teach blind women to “clean, cook, grow food, sew and care for the family.” Afriyie expressed hope in the program because it was “integrated” and that “the blind and the sighted” would be “trained together.” It would be the first such course taught in the world and would position Ghana as a leader in this field, Afriyie observed. “The objective of the rehabilitation courses,” the minister argued, “is to restore the disabled as nearly as possible to the economic and social position which they would have occupied but for their disability.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ While the men’s rehabilitation centers were designed to teach them nondomestic trade skills and provide them with a means to (re-)enter the workforce, the minister’s vision for blind women was to domesticate them. He saw their labor and place in society as primarily in a caregiving capacity at home. The home, Afriyie implied, was where blind women could add the most value to the state’s socialist project.

While Afriyie’s views on the place of women in Ghana’s socialist society left much to be desired, Nkrumah’s government decided to utilize funds from the Kwame Nkrumah Trust to support organizations like the Ghana Society for the Blind, Ghana Child Care Society, Ghana Society for the Deaf, the Ghana Cripples Aid Society, and the Society of Friends of Lepers.Footnote ¹¹⁰ On March 17, 1964, the presidential cabinet approved to allocate funds to “provide a pipe-borne water supply for the Central Destitute Infirmary at Bekwai” and to “serve the needs of the physically handicapped and infirm inmates of that institution.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Nkrumah’s government did not distinguish between the disabled behind bars and those outside of them. The state policy was to ensure that incarcerated disabled people should also have an opportunity to transform themselves into productive workers. For individuals like Frimpong, who abhorred the disabled, it was not the state’s responsibility to care for them. Instead, it was the duty of religious institutions, such as churches to “sponsor the education of a number of blind men in the Ghana Blind School,” so that they could “learn a trade to be useful citizens.”Footnote ¹¹² Now, I turn to the case of Abolga Frafra, a laborer at Messrs. P. & W. Ghanem Traders and Contractors in Tamale, who became disabled through an unfortunate work accident, to understand the relationship between disabled workers and the state. Albeit one example, the letters about Frafra, hidden in the archives, opens a small window for us to unpack the life of a disabled worker within the socialist de-colony.

Frafra was maneuvering a “tripper truck” at work on September 15, 1961, when he was involved in an accident. “I am now completely paralyzed,” Frafra wrote, “and cannot do anything other than sitting on the wheelchair presented to me when I left hospital [sic].” Through the Ministry of Labor’s intervention, P. & W. Ghanem, his former employer, awarded Frafra a single, lump-sum payment of £490.5. By October 30, 1965, however, Frafra’s finances had withered. “All that amount has been spent by me on my livelihood and continued treatment,” Frafra wrote to the Upper Region’s regional commissioner. Frafra was “now completely destitute.” Due to his “invalidity,” most of his family members had “abandoned” him. Frafra begged for pity and an extra “some small ex-gratia award to enable” him “to live.”Footnote ¹¹³ While rehabilitation centers, designed to educate, re-train, and strengthen disabled workers and make them ‘productive’ economic parts of society had been opened in Accra, Ho, Bolgatanga, and Tamale by 1963,Footnote ¹¹⁴ it is unclear whether Frafra had joined any. However, in September 1961, Frafra had no centers to join.

An official, E. K. Ando-Brew, took “pity” on Frafra’s “pathetic” plight and urged the regional commissioner to assist Frafra, noting that Frafra could not be “offered any gainful employment however light it may be” because he was “totally paralyzed in both legs and can only move about in a wheelchair with the constant help of others.” Ando-Brew acknowledged that P. & W. Ghanem had done their legal duty to Frafra by both compensating him with the lump sum of £490.5 and providing him with “a wheel-chair costing £30.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Nonetheless, Ando-Brew beseeched the regional commissioner to help Frafra acquire some extra funds. However, I. B. Ashun, the secretary to the regional commissioner, curtly dismissed the request.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Frafra’s situation underscored both the revolutionary agenda’s economic, political, and social contradictions, and perhaps the limitations of Black freedom and ableism as the new state’s economic foundation. While the government and industry expected workers to be devoutly loyal to the course of national development, those succumbing to its debilitating effects, besides minimal financial compensation, were largely relegated to invisibility. Frafra’s relationship both to the archive and the revolutionary, socialist project was one of squalor, discomfort, and hardship. His tastes, interests, dreams, and hopes outside of his “disability” are unrecorded, unknown, and forgotten; they reveal the limits of an archive and postcolonial project centered on ableism and economic production. Yet, it is through his pleading communications that we can peer into his life and into the lives, perhaps, of other people in similar circumstances.

Conclusion

The politicians and intellectuals needed the workers to build socialism.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Workers were charged with making the, at times, overlapping dreams of Nkrumah, the state, and the broader African and Black world a reality. Workers in Ghana then became the bedrock of the state’s global and domestic ambitions. The literary and political elite constantly informed the workers that they were not simply laboring for profit, their families or the colonial economy, but for a new Ghana and future. They were laboring for global socialism and against centuries of anti-Black and African denigration. The literary and political elite admitted that it was only through the workers could Ghana embody Black power and socialism’s freedom and potential. Yet, not all types of labor were respected or revered. Critics assailed sex work, lazy workers, and mendicancy as colonial and imperial vices that had to be cut from the national body politic.

While state officials extolled the workers and insisted that their political power derived from them and that the workers were indispensable to Ghana and Black freedom, they passed laws to curtail the workers’ power and to control their labor. Workers in Ghana then embodied the contradictions of the socialist de-colony. While they were characterized as the owners of the state and supposed to embody Black liberation, state laws and foreign and domestic capital sought to undermine their rights. However, measures to cower workers failed spectacularly. Workers fought back with ingenious techniques. They created local unions separate from the TUC. They studied the laws and their collective bargaining agreements closely. These movements and moments perhaps represented the truest embodiment of Black liberation in the postcolony. Workers understood that their positions were tenuous and that true liberation, perhaps, was only possible in coordination and in conjunction with each other. Black liberation was not a solo affair; it could never be. As Nkrumah had famously articulated on Independence Day: “[T]he independence of Ghana’s was meaningless unless it was linked up to the total liberation of Africa.” For workers in Ghana, it was a truism; their liberation was linked up with the survival and success of Black labor worldwide. Events and time would perhaps prove them right.