Paper short abstract:

By examining the collapse of public education during the 1970s, this paper argues that neoliberalism took root in Ghana well before structural adjustment programs were adopted in the 1980s.

Paper long abstract:

Universal, free, academic public education was the bedrock of Kwame Nkrumah’s vision for Ghanaian development in the 1950s and 1960s. To that end, education dominated government spending in the first decade of independence. Yet, by the late 1970s, Ghanaian families spent more on private education than any other African nation. What had gone wrong? This paper examines the rise of neoliberalism in Ghana from the perspective of public education. It argues that the collapse of a viable public schooling system during the 1970s created an opening for the private schooling sector to flourish in Ghana well before structural adjustment programs were adopted by the Jerry Rawlings regime in the 1980s.

By focusing on public schooling, this paper analyzes the larger notion of “the postcolonial state” in terms that were meaningful to ordinary people. Going to school was paramount for many families (as indicated by the amount Ghanaians spent privately on education). The state’s inability to safeguard Nkrumah’s vision of universal public education created a crisis of faith in the state itself, leading to the erosion of a socialist future in favor of a neoliberal one.

Tracing the emergence of neoliberalism from the grassroots helps nuance our understanding of the ways that neoliberalism found purchase in Ghana. Neither imposed unilaterally from the outside nor a purely endogenous development, neoliberal education policies triumphed not because they had won any ideological war, but because the battle for public education had already been lost.

Paper short abstract:

African countries were not forced by the World Bank to accept austerity. Rather, leaders like Ghana’s president Jerry Rawlings embraced ‘Anticolonial Capitalism’. The free market had to replace Kwame Nkrumah’s failed African Socialism and provided a means to build a New International Economic Order.

Paper long abstract:

The shift from the Keynesian welfare state to the neoliberal market society is understood to have taken place in the Global North between, the 1970s and the 1990s while the Global South was forced to accept the economic liberalization and austerity, as devised by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This paper redresses this imbalance by studying how African economists, sociologists and politicians in Ghana co-wrote neoliberal development theory, co-created an anticolonial definition of capitalism and shaped Ghanaian diplomacy which sought to create a different kind of economic order. When Jerry Rawlings staged his final coup in 1981, he transformed from someone with vague socialist sympathies into a leader who spearheaded market reform and applied for loans from the World Bank and the IMF. Rather than a cynical move to retain power, this paper argues he and his advisers were part of a broader intellectual shift in which African Socialism, dependency theory and Marxism were rejected as ineffective. Instead, the market came to be wielded as a new weapon for anticolonial liberation in the 1970s and 1980s. Principal thinkers with a connection to Rawlings were Jonathan H. Frimpong-Ansah, Kwesi Botchwey and James C.W. Ahiakpor. They are analysed in this paper which explores the intellectual foundation of a political regime that fundamentally changed Ghana in the 1980s.

Paper short abstract:

Regionalism (regional integration between nation-states) in East Africa today – often seen as a product of the contemporary neo-liberal global system – should be understood as emerging historically from longer term market and statist logics that have overlapped as much as they have competed.

Paper long abstract:

Accounts of regionalism have often emphasised a sharp break between what is often termed ‘old regionalism’ of the mid twentieth century – emphasising the role of states and co-ordinated planning to achieve development – and ‘new regionalism’ – which is seen to emerge from the dominant neo-liberal framework of the late twentieth and twenty-first century. Yet on closer examination of particular cases, while obvious differences between these two phases do exist, there are also equally striking continuities that can be observed. Through an examination of regionalism in East Africa, this paper reveals deep continuities in the rhetoric that surrounds the notion of regionalism, and in many of the dilemmas and tensions in regionalist politics that exist, often dating back to the colonial period. Regionalism in both its old and new phases has been imagined as a form of protection against a predatory world economy, rather than a simple tool of integration into a global economy. Yet, the logic of regionalism articulated during both these phases has also been premised upon a vision of ‘market integration’ that created inherent tensions that led to the collapse of the first East African Community (EAC) in 1977 and continue to challenge its current iteration. This paper explores these continuities and tensions in ‘regionalist rationality’ in East Africa across the twentieth century to the present.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the work of Kenyan educator and politician Eddah Gachukia, this paper searches for the frictions, uneasy alliances, and jagged edges in which decolonial African futures focused on women in the 1960s ambivalently paved the way for Structural Adjustment Programs in the 1980s and 1990s.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the relationships between the growth of women-led forms of developmentalism between the 1950s and 1970s and the adoption of Structural Adjustment Programs across Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. Often called Women in Development, or WID, these programs embraced the notion that the human capital of women needed to be fully marshalled to support colonial, national, and pan-African visions of development in the mid-20th century. This was true for African states across the political spectrum, from Tanzanian, Ghanaian, Senegalese, and Guinean socialism under Nyerere, Nkrumah, Senghor, and Touré; to capitalistic Kenya, Zaire, and South Africa under Kenyatta, Mobutu, and the apartheid regime. In the 1980s and 1990s, now-widespread Women in Development programs and the ideas underpinning them sometimes paved the way for Structural Adjustment-led cuts to African social welfare states and broader neoliberal impulses. Both building on and departing from existing literature – some of which centers white, North Atlantic-based actors such as Ester Boserup and treats neoliberal austerity as a one-dimensional imposition onto Africa – the paper examines the work of Eddah Gachukia. Gachukia was a Kenyan educator, women’s activist, anti-racist advocate, leader within the United Nations women’s movement, Member of Parliament, and NGO founder. Her work to develop the human capital of women through education beginning in the 1950s later became ambivalently coupled with neoliberal forms of austerity during Structural Adjustment. This paper does not argue for smooth transitions from the utopian socialist futures of the 1960s to neoliberal dystopias of the 1980s and 1990s. Nor does it claim that a complete rupture existed between the two periods. It instead searches for the frictions, uneasy alliances, and jagged edges through which socialist and other forms of African decolonization focused on women came to serve neoliberal cuts to the welfare state and the individualization of political action.