Paper short abstract:

This paper demonstrates how a pan African ideology pursued by Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, deparochialized the state and structured a citizenship recognition and identification system which differed significantly from standardized notions and practices of citizenship

Paper long abstract:

This paper throws light on how political governance and ideology shaped a distinctive citizens' identification and recognition system in Ghana's first republic. In attempting to realize African unity, Ghana's Republican Constitution of 1960 envisaged, and made way constitutionally, for a Pan-African future in which individual state sovereignty would be "surrendered to a Union of African States". The direct implication of such a constitutional provision was that, by law, every Ghanaian would be an African, and every African would be a Ghanaian. This view by Nkrumah and the Republican Constitution of Pan-Africanist citizenship and nationhood "encouraged many non-Ghanaians to move into and settle in Ghana without obtaining any valid documents" (Adjei Adgepong, 2012). Nkrumah's vision was of all Africans, regardless of country of origin, able to move freely and reside anywhere on the continent, without being regarded as an immigrant or 'alien' (ibid). Consequently, from 1960 to 1966, many non-Ghanaian Africans from Nigeria, Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Liberia etc., qualified for and enjoyed the full rights of Ghanaian citizenship. Whilst this practice effectively deparochialized the state and citizenship, it departed significantly from standardize ideas of citizenship as knotted to the nation-state, and also to traditional Ghanaian conceptions of autochthony, belonging and citizenship. Reversing this vision, the second republic, declared the non-autochthonous population as 'aliens' to be excluded from the benefits of citizenship. The paper concludes that it is from the first and second republics that we can understand the contradictions, ambiguities and malleability of citizen identification in contemporary Ghana.