'Accra is changing, isn't it?': urban infrastructure, independence, and nation in the Gold Coast's 'Daily Graphic', 1954-57

The August 29, 1954 issue of the Daily Graphic contained an article entitled "Some Aspects of Gold Coast Life Fifty Years Ago." In its few pages, a local journalist, S.N. Addo, offered a retrospective on the colony's turn-of-the-century past. It was not a nostalgic piece. Instead, it characterized the early decades of the twentieth century as a period of deplorable conditions and undesirable constraints. Years ago, infrastructural "setbacks," including poor roads, lamentable housing, and a mediocre communication system, had limited the colony's political, economic, and social growth. Fortunately, Addo remarked, much had changed. In the last fifty years, extensive construction and building projects had facilitated local commerce, improved sanitation, and accorded men and women with increased mobility and safety. Things like pipe-borne water, post offices, and tarmac roads had also paved the way for important administrative and cultural transformations. The omanhene (chief) was no longer "the be all and end all of all things," soldiers and police no longer had the law "in their own hands," and "fetish cult and idol worshipping" no longer dominated the spiritual landscape. Infrastructural change, in other words, had allowed the Gold Coast to abandon its "age of darkness" and enter the modern world.1 For historians of twentieth-century Africa, Addo' s piece offers a complex commentary on the impacts of the colonial past, the promises of an independent future, and the transitions that bridged the two. But from 1954 to 1957, the years immediately prior to Ghana's independence, regular readers of the Daily Graphic (and its weekend edition, the Sunday Mirror) would have been familiar with Addo' s message. During that brief span, the newspaper contained a great quantity of articles, photo-essays, and editorials that discussed the state of the colony and the meanings of the increasingly imminent opportunity for self-rule. Many of these pieces focused on standard "national" themes, including politics and government, economic strategies, and the colony's relationship with the outside world. Individual pieces, such as "Do You Vote for a Party?" and "Call Us Ghanaians,"2 reveal the ways in which the newspaper, like the written word elsewhere, offered its readers an opportunity to amass shared knowledge and claim membership in a coherent national community.3 While the Daily Graphic was the Gold Coast's most dominant newspaper of the period, it was not simply an open forum for the articulation of a shared national consciousness. The 1950s was a decade of swelling anti-colonial energy, but it was also one of considerable contestation and opposing points of view. Today, these diverse agendas most frequently emerge through the lens of party politics, where Gold Coasters actively debated the process and character of self-determination. And while the significance of the formal political sphere cannot be disputed, the process of imagining the nation4 extended far beyond its confines.5 Addo' s piece suggests that the Daily Graphic was one site of such reflection. Unfortunately, few historians have examined the ways in which the newspaper's staff approached political possibilities or the nation-to-be. This article constitutes a preliminary effort to address their work, clarify their perspective, and recognize the ways in which they imagined the new Ghana as a modern urban entity. It argues that Graphic writers were not simply purveyors of news, but that they were tacticians who mediated between the Gold Coast and the outside world, the local and the national, their readers and themselves. When approached from this angle, Addo' s work is important not because it was distinct, but because it voiced an enthusiasm for infrastructural development that was frequently extolled within the newspaper. From 1954-1957, the Graphic published an expansive array of articles that focused on the physical environment of the colony's capital city, Accra. …