Kwame Anthony Appiah: evaluation

Transcript context

…Maybe you could explain Ghanaian history to me in a nutshell. If I read about Ghana today, it’s commonly cited, there’s a relatively high degree of national unity or identity. Politics is fairly coherent. But if I go back and look at history, not that long ago, there are coups in 1966, 1972, 1981. Instability, ethnic tensions in 1994. Why does Ghana now appear to be such a stable nation-state, and not too long ago, such an unstable nation-state? Well, I think the first question is the really puzzling one. The earlier instability’s not too surprising. After all, Ghana was created in 1957, and I don’t just mean that it was decolonized in 1957. The country of Ghana is the union of the former British Togoland with the Gold Coast in 1957 as a result of a plebiscite in Togo in the mid-’50s. So it’s younger than I am, the country. That it has a strong sense of national anything — that’s the big surprise, I think, not the other way around. There are various theories about this. I think one of the most interesting is that, because most of what’s now in Ghana, at least west of the Volta — lake, once river — was at one point or other within the ambit of the Ashanti Empire, which is something that goes back to the 18th century, and which radiated trade out from Kumasi in central southern Ghana for hundreds of years. It’s sort of integrated economically. It’s been integrated economically for quite a long time, and people know each other. They may speak different languages. There are 80 languages spoken in Ghana, but people have been speaking Twi, the Ashanti language, which has dialects on the coast, as well, and in between — people have had it as a second language since long before the British took over, which you have to remember happened in the 20th century. The final British-Ashanti war, Anglo-Ashanti War, was in the first decade of the 20th century. My father’s father was born before British rule in Ashanti and died after British rule in Ashanti. It lasted less than his lifetime so that whatever shapes that region, I don’t think it can be those 90-odd years of that, because it seems deeper than that. I think the political stability can be credited to significant achievement on the part of a man, namely President Rawlings, Jerry John Rawlings, who is not someone I hugely admire in every way, but he came in in one of those coups. He was a military ruler for a while. He civilianized the country, and he actually — probably with the assistance of Kofi Annan, who was then UN peacekeeping head and used Ghanaian troops a lot — he re-professionalized the Ghanaian military to think of itself as a military in service of a civilian power, not as people who might come in from time to time to correct political mistakes. Ironically, at the end of his two terms, when he lost, he appealed to the army, and they said, “No, you taught us that we don’t do that, so you lost. The other guy should come in.” We’ve now had a whole set of cycles of the two main parties oscillating back and forth, winning and losing. I think now, whereas there was celebration in the streets in coups in the past, now people would be really angry if the military intervened, and I don’t know that they could get away with it. There would be bloodshed and horrible stuff, and they know that. s in coups in the past, now people would be really angry if the military intervened, and I don’t know that they could get away with it. There would be bloodshed and horrible stuff, and they know that. I think that is the result of political learning, watching what happens when you do things with coups, and discovering that it doesn’t get much better if you do it that way, and deciding to go with the patience that’s required for democracy.…

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