Nima Maamobi In Ghana S Postcolonial Development

This book provides a deep insight into the socio-economic reality and complexity of two of Ghana's largest slums - Nima and Maamobi - located in the capital city, Accra. It identifies and analyses the socio-religious, cultural and political contexts of the two communities. These are ethnically and religiously diverse populations with a common history of migration and integration. The book shows that the causes of economic stagnation and underdevelopment in the two slums are deeply contextualised, complex and nuanced. Through a biographical examination of the political activism of Agnes Amoah, a foremost local leader, the book brings to bear how Mrs. Amoah also brought socio-economic transformation to the communities by breaking cultural, religious and gender barriers in the interest of conviviality. In context, the book sheds important insight on the urban, political and the local and translocal histories that have shaped the social transformations of Nima and Maamobi.

This title was first published in 2001. When Ghana became independent in 1957, becoming the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa to banish colonialism, there was a general optimism that irreversible socio-economic development was about to unfold. But by the end of the 1970s Ghana paradoxically became the first country in Twentieth Century Africa to have experienced socio-economic decline. What failed Ghana? This book seeks to answer this question. By combining sociological, economic, political and institutional perspectives, this book focuses on the interplay between state politics and socio-economic development. It provides a model, which suggests that Ghana’s postcolonial development has suffered mainly as a result of the failure or inability of governing elites to develop consensual politics and a clearly specified long-term development objective that could be widely understood, accepted and have relevance for policy making. This book presents a much-needed self-assessment of the post-colonial development experience which contends that governance, economic management and institution building are basic challenges without which the search for development is likely to falter.

Since the turn of the millennium, in Ghana and in other African countries, there has been a vociferous debate over the history and present condition of the family. The debate has largely fragmented the Ghanaian constituency into two nearly intransigent camps: those who think the indigenous family system should experience cultural osmosis to accommodate the seismic Western cultural revolutions and the overwhelming religious constituency who advocate the retention of conservative family system. This book is a contribution to the debate. Written by an African Studies academic, it seeks to use the resources of both the social sciences and religion to assess the merits of the various parties to the debate. The author believes in the legitimacy of the traditional family system as conditio sine qua non for preserving human civilization. Nevertheless, the goal of this book is not to further polarize the Ghanaian front, but build bridges, by inviting the various parties to the debate to walk the complex pathways of exercising compassion without compromising the values that support human flourishing. Charles Prempeh is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Cultural and African Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi-Ghana.

This collection explores the communicative dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana, redressing the absence of perspectives from Africa and the Global South in pandemic discourses and highlighting the importance of considering the impact of local contexts in global crises. The volume critically reflects on the significance of communicative dimensions, understood here as the effects of communication on bidirectional flows between senders and receivers, on many different aspects of the coronavirus pandemic. Grounded in transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives and drawing on data from the Ghanian experience, the book showcases how important it is for local factors to be taken into account by governments, medical professionals, social commentators, and everyday people in communicating during a pandemic, when local cultures, histories, and infrastructures all play a role in shaping communication and the dissemination of knowledge. Chapter examines such topics as the role of metaphor, the use of social media in disinformation, and the range of strategies and channels employed by stakeholders. This volume centers the pandemic experience in a Global South context, demonstrating the importance of a greater focus on local contexts in understanding communication in a time of pandemic. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in intercultural communication, crisis communication, health communication, discourse analysis, and African studies.

This book looks at how digital technologies are revolutionizing electoral campaigns and democratization struggles in Africa. Digital technologies are giving voice and civic agency to a cross section of African voters, providing important spaces for political engagement and debate. Drawing on cases from Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe amongst others, this book traces the shifts and tensions in this changing electoral communications landscape. In doing so, the book explores themes such as hate speech and disinformation, decolonisation, surveillance, internet shutdowns, influencers, bots, algorithms, and election observation, and looks beyond Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and YouTube to the increasingly important role of visual platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. Particularly highlighting the contribution of African scholars, this book is an important guide for researchers across the fields of African politics, media studies, and electoral studies, as well as to professionals and policymakers in political communication.

In March 2017, the president of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa-Akufu announced his intention to build a national cathedral to the people of Ghana. The announcement elicited watertight counter arguments that morphed into two a priori re-litigated assumptions: First, Ghana is a secular country and second, religion and state formation are incompatible. Informed by a frustrating paradox of an overwhelming religious presence and concurrent pervasive corruption in the country, public conversation reached a cul-de-sac of “conviction without compromising.” In The Political Economy of Heaven and Earth in Ghana, Charles Prempeh deploys the national cathedral as an entry point to provide both interdisciplinary and autoethnographic understanding of religion and politics. The book shows the capacity of religion, when properly cultivated and curated as a worldview to answer the why questions of life, will foster personal, moral, collective and ontological responsibility. All this is needed to stem the tide against corruption, commodity fetishism, environmental degradation (illegal mining—galamsey), heritage destruction and religious exploitation. Prempeh recuperates a historical fact about the mutual inclusivity between religion and politics—politics helping to manage differences, while religion provides a transcendental reason for unity to be forged for human flourishing. Separating the two is, therefore, ahistorical and an obvious threat to the intangible virtues that answers, “why and how” questions for public governance.

"This title was first published in 2001. When Ghana became independent in 1957, becoming the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa to banish colonialism, there was a general optimism that irreversible socio-economic development was about to unfold. But by the end of the 1970s Ghana paradoxically became the first country in Twentieth Century Africa to have experienced socio-economic decline. What failed Ghana? This book seeks to answer this question. By combining sociological, economic, political and institutional perspectives, this book focuses on the interplay between state politics and socio-economic development. It provides a model, which suggests that Ghana's postcolonial development has suffered mainly as a result of the failure or inability of governing elites to develop consensual politics and a clearly specified long-term development objective that could be widely understood, accepted and have relevance for policy making. This book presents a much-needed self-assessment of the post-colonial development experience which contends that governance, economic management and institution building are basic challenges without which the search for development is likely to falter."--Provided by publisher.

For postcolonial Africa, modernization was seen as a necessary outcome of the struggle for independence and as crucial to the success of its newly established states. Since then, the rhetoric of modernization has pervaded policy, culture, and development, lending a kind of political theatricality to nationalist framings of modernization and Africans' perceptions of their place in the global economy. These 15 essays address governance, production, and social life; the role of media; and the discourse surrounding large-scale development projects, revealing modernization's deep effects on the expressive culture of Africa.