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Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on the press to explore popular understandings of the meanings of “freedom” in decolonizing Ghana and Nigeria. While political leaders struggled over the structure, ordinary women and men developed diverse and often highly cosmopolitan ideas about what freedom should look like.

Paper long abstract:

The historiography of decolonization in West Africa has little to say on the intellectual content of popular support for independence. While there is a substantial literature on the ideas of the leadership of anti-colonial movements, we know little about the aspirations of the masses who supported the political movements that these men led. By the early 1950s it was widely understood that Nigeria and the Gold Coast would achieve independence within a few years, but what was this “freedom” that was widely anticipated? This paper draws on print media to explore what it was that people were imagining independence would bring. The question was rarely addressed directly; nevertheless, the press provides a rich resource for identifying those expectations and their diverse expressions defined often by class, age, and especially gender. If Kwame Nkrumah famously asserted “seek ye first the political kingdom,” many of those ordinary people who supported him and other leaders were plainly more interested in other, more material, kingdoms. In the vibrant popular culture worlds of West African cities and towns younger women and men meshed local and global cultural impulses and fashioned often gendered and cosmopolitan notions of freedom that disconcerted their elders, colonial authorities and eventually the often puritanical and repressive leadership of independent regimes. In those exciting years when citizens of states-in-the-making looked forward to the future, many saw freedom less in terms of cultural independence than in full membership in global cultural communities.