second part of this chapter uses the NRC’s reports of suffering as a guide and touchstone in a brief recounting of Ghana’s journey through the late twentieth century. Encountering Ghana’s past in this way, through claims of human rights abuse, is controversial. Are these stories proven to be true? Are there other truths that are missing from citizen testimony? Can policies justified in their time now be condemned as intolerable? What separates a human rights violation from other types of violence? A human rights history of Ghana evokes uncertainty and even dispute; it is an accounting that avoids the illusion of consensus and instead magnifies the way Ghanaian political history remains unsettled.
Rights Talk and Ghanaian History
Before the NRC, Ghanaians deployed the language and concepts of international human rights in national politics. As a normative part of global, national, and local politics—indeed, as a “world-wide secular religion”—international human rights is expansive and diverse, including law, rhetoric, policy, and practice.9 It has the capacity to “construct a wide array of different discourses.”10 This fecundity is evident in decolonizing Ghana, where human rights rhetoric was utilized by diverse communities, for multiple audiences, and to diverse ends. In the era of decolonization, various communities marshaled human rights as the ethical ballast of diverse political agendas. Politicians, newspapers, and public intellectuals marshaled “rights talk” to discuss the global implications of Ghanaian politics, while labor unions, social organizations, and activists employed rights rhetoric to address their national government and the wider world in the same breath.
Contemplating human rights in late-1950s and early-1960s Ghana departs from the scholarship that emphasizes the waning days of the Cold War as the moment when international human rights captured the global imagination.11 This study presents an earlier trajectory where human rights talk was part of mapping and pursuing freedom in Africa’s anticolonial and early independence era. Aligned with Bonny Ibhawoh’s exploration of the significance of human rights language in colonial and decolonizing Nigeria, this study traces how Africans in Gold Coast and then Ghana “appropriate[d] and deploy[ed] in diverse ways the same language of rights and liberty that was so central to the British imperial agenda.”12 Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian anticolonialist and nationbuilder, utilized the rhetoric of human rights as a pragmatic political language, alternately marshaled at opportune moments in the halls of the United Nations and then later discarded as an emblem of Western political hypocrisy. Although the historian Jan Eckel describes Nkrumah’s ambivalence as evidence that human rights was a “marginal” concept in decolonizing Africa, this study challenges the idea that human rights pragmatism signifies a limited engagement.13 Rights talk, whenever and wherever it has been deployed—in the post–World War I League of Nations, in Geneva in 2016, or in the colonial Gold Coast—can never be separated from its political utility. Fundamentalist notions of human rights as a language of true believers mask the ways rights talk is always and everywhere a political weapon.
Writing in Foreign Affairs as the prime minister of a newly independent country, Kwame Nkrumah explained to “American readers” that in Ghana, self-determination was an “inalienable right.” “We are more concerned with fundamental human rights than with any particular skin color,” he explained, attempting to both assuage US fears of Pan-Africanism as racial chauvinism and to criticize American Jim Crow.14 Nkrumah’s attempts to win global hearts and minds were troubled by rival Ghanaian politicians who used the language of global human rights as a weapon against him. Foremost among these was Kofi Abrefa Busia, an esteemed Ghanaian politician and social scientist who vocally criticized Kwame Nkrumah’s leadership in the global public square.
Less than six months before Ghana’s independence in 1957, Busia urged the British government to compel Nkrumah’s party to include the European Convention of Human Rights in the new Ghana Constitution.15 Binding the newly independent Ghana’s constitutional order to the European Convention, according to Busia, was a necessary “safeguard.” He continued along these lines even after independence. In London in 1961, Busia criticized Europeans for failing to speak out against Nkrumah’s government in Ghana. “Is the cause of democracy served,” he admonished, “by accepting different standards of tolerance, or freedom, or veracity, or human rights?”16 Three years later, in another speech, this time to the Ghanaian Students Association, Busia again railed against Nkrumah’s leadership, specifically focusing on the cause of political prisoners and using the language of human rights. “We’ve got so used to it we don’t even stop to ask what it means to be inside a prison in detention,” Busia exhorted the students. “Do you know how they are being fed? Or when they sleep? Or what happens to them? We don’t. I have tried to get reports, I appealed to the Human Rights Society in the U.S., I appealed to the International Commission of Jurists.”17 For Busia, the language of human rights was a way of pursuing an international community response to Nkrumah’s excesses.
Over time, Kofi Busia’s missives from abroad became more strident. No longer was human rights simply a critique of Nkrumah’s flawed rule. Now, the pursuit of human rights justified actively undermining Nkrumah’s government. In a pamphlet entitled “Ghana Will Truly Be Free and Happy,” Busia laid out the opposition-in-exile’s plan to overthrow the Nkrumah state. The fourth point of the platform was to rewrite the constitution in order to “express the people’s identity and aspirations, ensure fundamental human rights and personal freedom, and establish a truly free, independent, and respectable judiciary.” He ended his missive confidently, inviting Ghanaians to “cast away their fear and defeatism … to do their part” and know that Ghana would be free. “Be prepared. More will follow.”18 Scholars who claim that “the UN was the only real place where anti-colonialism and human rights intersected,” overlook the machinations of the Ghanaian opposition who deployed human rights, in earshot of the world, to question Kwame Nkrumah’s capacity to lead.19
Politicians in exile were not the only ones who voiced criticism of Nkrumah’s government in the key of human rights.”20 In 1959, when the famous Railway Workers Union derided the new Industrial Relations Act, which required all unions to join the government affiliated Trades Union Congress, they claimed that it “contravene[ed] the United National Declaration on Human Rights. On Ghanaian soil, critics used the idiom of human rights to describe Ghana’s increasingly restrictive laws as betrayals of the ideals that Nkrumah championed during the anticolonial struggle. “We fought for independence to be able to live as freemen governed by principles of the UN Declaration of Human Rights as well as Ghana’s own coat of arms motto: freedom and justice,” Kwow Richards, then secretary of the United Party, admonished.21
While opposition groups made their discontent known at home and abroad, Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) government also found human rights a fertile ground for ideological battle. Human rights universalism was an opportunity to parse the hypocrisy of the global order. C. L. R. James, a vocal ally of the CPP, bristled at the audacity of European countries knee-deep in colonial atrocity presuming to criticize independent Ghana on human rights grounds. “Who are the backward ones in the Belgian Congo today? Who are the advanced and who are the backward ones?” wondered James.22
During the 1959 Nyasaland crisis, Nkrumah’s CPP again sought to use Britain’s commitment to international human rights to win concessions for Africans. In 1959, the British government sent three thousand troops to Nyasaland (now Malawi) to put down a pro-independence movement. In the resulting violence, 51 people were killed, more than 1,300 were detained, and many more were wounded.23 Ghana’s CPP organized protests in solidarity with the Nyasaland freedom fighters and marched to the UK High Commission in Accra. “We are trying to prove to the whole world that Africans are conscious of their human rights,” the general secretary of the CPP explained.24 However, pro-apartheid forces elsewhere in Africa would not cede the moral and political high ground to Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana. The Rhodesian European National Congress fired back that they too would organize a national day or mourning—for opposition activists detained without trial in Ghana.25 For some critics, the Nkrumah government’s authoritarian policies undermined Ghana’s ability to act as a credible human rights advocate abroad. “Two wrongs do not make