Ghana @ 50

On March 6^th fifty years ago Ghana became the first nation of sub-Saharan Africa to gain its independence. Few colonies had a more auspicious start. Ghana supplied two-thirds of the world’s cocoa, it had the best schools in Africa and plenty of investment stewarded by a very capable and inspiring leader called Dr Kwame Nkrumah. The optimism of those days still resonates from speeches that announced the imminent march into the ‘economic kingdom’, replayed endlessly in the past couple of weeks. Sadly, in the fifty years since that event, Ghanaians are still about as poor as they were then.

Ghana has experienced a trajectory depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied the history of development since its ‘discovery’ in the post war years. The grand schemes of industrialization at independence, the subsequent economic collapse and consequent military coups, followed by a crippling debt burden in the eighties, the application of IMF inspired structural strait jackets and the recent return to some form of democratic governance. Look at the history of countless Africa states and they will paint a similar story. Ghana is Africa, Africa is Ghana.

Not that all that should stop a good party. After the hype of the past couple of months, fifty years of independence were duly celebrated in military style by the children of Humjibre as they demonstrated their marching up and down the football field for a good two hours. In fact, it wasn’t just the kids, the farmers, hairdressers, market traders, hunters and taxi drivers all marched showing the ‘diversity’ of Humjibre’s resource base. It was all quite sweet really, though the speech at the start about celebrating the throwing off of the yoke of their colonial slave-driving masters did make me shift uneasily in my seat for a while. We watched the bare face-saving minimum and made our way to a wedding in a nearby town. This was a much more amusing affair and I was only just denied the chance to add to my list of “odd places I have sand You’ll never walk alone” by a technical hitch. But that was very much compensated by an opportunity to give a full throated rendition with a load of villagers I had taught the words to at the conclusion of a fantastic night at Anfield as the Reds won by losing against the mighty Barcelona. Watching it for the second time that night on a dimly lit TV among sleeping children in someone’s room, I told my only fellow supporter, a nine year old kid in a tattered eighties LFC away shirt, “My Father, Mother and many of my Brothers are at this game, singing these songs”. To which he replied, poignantly I thought, “and you are here”.