An Overview of Kwame Nkrumah's Cultural Policies on Ghana's Visual

Research Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies Vol. 3 No.3 2017 ISSN 2579-0528 www.iiardpub.org An Overview of Kwame Nkrumah’s Cultural Policies on Ghana’s Visual Culture Jerry Orhin Yorke JID Multimedia Consult, P.O.Box MC 2507, Takoradi, Ghana [email protected] Emmanuel Kodwo Amissah Department of Art Education, University of Education, P. O Box 25, Winneba, Ghana [email protected] Patrique deGraft-Yankson & Joseph Essuman Department of Graphic Design, University of Education, P. O Box 25, Winneba, Ghana [email protected], [email protected] Abstract This paper attempts to inquire about Kwame Nkrumah’s cultural policies and philosophies on the visual culture of present day Ghana. The study hinged on the Art Historical research procedures within the qualitative research paradigm and gathered data through interviews, field notes, observation and discussions. The study examined Kwame Nkrumah’s cultural policies and philosophies based on his policy actions and pronouncements and their influence on the visual culture as well as their relevance to the policies. The study revealed that, Nkrumah did not make a distinction between politics, culture and economics. He had a dialectic approach to all his policies because he acknowledged the interconnected nature of the social life of the Ghanaian. Based on this, he propagated that Ghanaians should recognise their cultural heritage and take pride in projecting it; that Ghanaians needed to create their nation state based on their culture heritage and that Ghanaians should recognise their cultural heritage as assets for national development. Keywords: visual culture, Kwame Nkrumah’s cultural policies, pronouncements. Introduction The polemic over whether Kwame Nkrumah‟s government had a cultural policy or not has been on among historians and in academia for some time now and this has generated a discourse in the cultural world. While some researcher have tried to categorize Nkrumah‟s cultural policies into Statutory and Non Statutory cultural polies, some anthropologists have argued that there exist no printed documents that can be labelled as Kwame Nkrumah‟s cultural policy document. Present day Ghana is a conglomerate of ethnic states right from the 10th Century AD. From the mid-1800s to 1957, it became a British colonial territory. Known as the Gold Coast until 6th March 1957, Ghana became the first black African state south of the Sahara to gain political independence. The new black African state, drawing on the traditions and cultures of its ethnic groups, took its name from the medieval empire of Ghana IIARD – International Institute of Academic Research and Development Page 22 Research Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies Vol. 3 No.3 2017 ISSN 2579-0528 www.iiardpub.org which occupied an area around the upper Niger River, several hundred miles to the northwest of present day Ghana. It has a total land area of 238,500 sq. Km, a coastline of 539 Km (Encarta, 2009) and more than 50 different ethnic groups. Ghana had a lot of cultural intangibles in the form of historical benefits, traditional insignias, iconic figures and untold stories which together inspired Kwame Nkrumah in the crafting of his cultural policies which, till date, have impacted positively on the visual culture of Ghana. At a second past midnight on 6th March 1957, Ghana in West Africa was born. Kwame Nkrumah became the Prime Minister and this gave him the authority to make very important policies towards the development of his African Personality concept which has impacted on the visual culture of Ghana since 1957. Nkrumah (1957a) declared: At long last, the battle has ended! And thus Ghana, your beloved country is free forever. … Today, from now on, there is a new African in the world! … That new African is ready to fight his own battles and show that after all, the black man is capable of managing his own affairs. We are going to demonstrate to the world, to the other nations, that we are prepared to lay our own foundation. … We are going to create our own African personality and identity. It's the only way that we can show the world that we are ready for our own battles. The researchers are of the view that Kwame Nkrumah‟s independence speech was very clear on the cultural policy direction of his government. For the purposes of this study, the underlining statement from his speech is his call for a new African in the world. It was clear Nkrumah saw the need to immediately recognize the “Ghanaian national” cultural heritage and took pride in projecting it. He also immediately advocated the need to lay a new foundation of nationhood based on the “Ghanaian national” culture and that meant the Ghanaian ethnic art forms, motifs, symbols, etc. which were labelled as primitive by the colonizers should server as assets for national development. This gives meaning to why the Nkrumah government established and opened the Ghana National Museum and the National Archives before the eve of independence. Their roles were to collect, preserve and protect the cultural heritage of the new nation Ghana. Botwe-Asamoah (2005) claims that, the proposition overthrow colonialism and declare it evil was recognised upon Nkrumah‟s entrance in the political scene. He continues to state that, “not only did Nkrumah use African art forms, oratory, aesthetics, motifs and symbols, during and after the campaign for national independence, but he also initiated policies and created cultural movements and institutions in Ghana”. (p120) Traditionally, Ghanaian ethnic cultures, over the many years of their civilizations, had used the arts and crafts to ensure their continuous existence. Through many informal systems, those arts skills and technologies have been handed down from generation to generation to this day (AD 2017) and the trend is likely to continue. Nkrumah pursued an agenda to identify and link the African past, present and future, all in a search of a National Identity. His cultural policies inspired visual artists to create positive socialist conceptions of the African society, stressing on the efficiency and validity of its ethnic statecraft, its purposeful energy and many more. Based on Nkrumah‟s African Personality concept, a visual culture was developed by artists like Kofi Antubam for the political authority of the new nation Ghana. Abbey (2008, p. 36) postulates, during the last ten years of his life, from 1954, Kofi Antubam had become an inspiring nationalist and a leading advocate of Kwame Nkrumah‟s concept of the African Personality and was playing prominent roles in all public functions. After Kwame Nkrumah‟s overthrow in 1966, Ghana‟s political leadership and intellectuals have generally seemed more inclined to foreign cultural concepts and ideals; IIARD – International Institute of Academic Research and Development Page 23 Research Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies Vol. 3 No.3 2017 ISSN 2579-0528 www.iiardpub.org probably because it seems more prestigious to them. The seeming inclination to foreign cultural concepts and ideals, however, has created a nation with a questionable visual culture; a culture that is very much dependent on Western ideas to the detriment of Nkrumah‟s Pan- Africanist or home grown ideas. As a result of Ghana‟s continuous over-reliance on alien cultural concepts, the Ghanaian visual culture that was carefully crafted and painstakingly pursued after independence seems to be gradually disappearing and that further threatens the originality and creativity of the Ghanaian cultural identity. If this present situation is left unchecked, future national cultural art forms that will form part of Ghana‟s visual culture may lose all traces of the Ghanaian identity and ownership. This led to the main objective of the study which was to inquire about Kwame Nkrumah‟s cultural policies on Ghana‟s visual culture and explore how this cultural policy was implemented. The framework to this study was situated within the qualitative research paradigm. This method emphasizes on words and the data collected are in the form of narrations and it is concerned with qualities and non-numerical characteristics of the data. The data collection techniques associated with this method includes observation and structured interviews. These were the factors that informed the researcher‟s use of this particular method. Data collection instruments used therefore included interviews, field notes, observation and discussions and the data collected was qualitative data. The focus of the study was on Nkrumah‟s cultural policy directives and actions from 1951 to 1966. The sampling strategies used to arrive at the samples were both probability and non-probability sampling techniques. Triangulation and multiple data sources were used to ensure the validity of this study. For ethical reasons, interviewees‟ consent was sought and the agreed terms of confidentiality were respected. Data for this study was collected through both structured and unstructured interviews with historians, art historians, traditional rulers, artists and Ghanaians living both in and outside the country. In gathering the data for this study, the researchers used the paper and pen methods: personal field notes and live methods, observation, interview, and discussion were employed. Participant observation enabled the researchers to observe some of the artefacts made as part of the implementation of the cultural policies in order to gain a clearer picture of the research context. This is because the research study discussed the influence of Nkrumah‟s cultural policies on Ghana‟s visual culture. Results Cultural Policies According to Miller & Yudice (2002), Cultural policy is a framework for making rules and decisions that are informed by social relationships and values, cultural policies, public and private, implicit and explicit –all the time. On the other hand, Atlas (1985) is of the opinion that cultural policy is connected to all the major issues of our societies: economic stratification, race relations, international relations, technology, education and community development (p.

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