During the Cold War, development aid served West and East Bloc countries as useful for seeking influence in the Third World. In Ghana, however, a hostile press controlled by the regime of Kwame Nkrumah attempted to cancel the ‘soft power’ of major West Bloc donors, including West Germany. West Germany thus faced a serious dilemma from 1960 to 1966. On the one hand, frequent press attacks threatened the favourable reputation and good will its Foreign Office hoped to gain by granting aid. On the other hand, withdrawing it or even refusing to back new projects might push the Ghanaian government to do its worst – give diplomatic recognition to the communist-dominated East German government. As it was, Nkrumah repeatedly upgraded relations with East Germany.Footnote 1 The press war, spreading a toxic mixture of East German propaganda and the Ghanaian government's own severe critiques of West German policies in sub-Saharan Africa, forced West German officials to pursue various defensive strategies. None of them, not even hints about blocking development aid, could stop it. Only Nkrumah's fall in 1966 brought the press war to an end. Aid, it turned out, had only limited value as a political tool.
This article offers two contributions to the historical literature on international relations and the press. First, it shows that in the Cold War even a small, aid-receiving country could use its newspapers to put a larger donor country on the defensive (in 1960 Ghana had 6,958,000 people to West Germany's 55,433,000).Footnote 2 Second, it reverses the widespread scholarly emphasis on the privately-owned press's autonomy as foreign policy actor.Footnote 3 In Ghana the West Germans dealt with newspapers under the ownership and tight control of a one-party state, unshakably loyal to the policies of its leader. Of course, they were not the only targets; the United Kingdom and the United States also came under fire. In the first case, the papers sought to sabotage a prospective visit to Accra by Queen Elizabeth II or (in the Ghanaian version) retaliated against attacks on Nkrumah by British newspapers that objected to the visit.Footnote 4 In the second, Ghanaian papers blasted American foreign policy, called the US ambassador a ‘cowboy nuclear imperialist’ and accused the US Central Intelligence Agency as well as other Western intelligence services of supporting an assassination attempt against Nkrumah.Footnote 5
Yet West Germany operated under serious vulnerabilities that its Anglo-American allies did not face. Because some former Nazis held prominent places in the diplomatic service, the judiciary, industry and the professions, West Germany was vulnerable to charges of inheriting the legacy of Nazi Germany.Footnote 6 Its vehement claim to sole representation of the whole German people, the basis of its demand that other states shun East Germany, could only worsen this problem. At the same time, West Germany suffered in Ghana the disadvantage of its post-Nazi European alliance politics, as we shall see below. Finally, it kept close ties with white-ruled South Africa into the 1960s due to a long-time admiration for the dominant Afrikaner minority and the presence of German settlers and their descendants.Footnote 7
This article also connects the foregoing history to the small body of literature that finds development aid of limited or little use in modifying the behaviour of recipient governments. US President John Kennedy's ‘engagement’ policy of trying to win over Third World leaders combined professions of respect with US development aid. Nkrumah, for example, received US loans to dam the Volta River. The policy wore out its welcome under Lyndon Johnson, who expected tangible concessions in exchange for aid.Footnote 8 In India the United States and the Soviet Union wooed different ministries with aid, hoping to pull the government in the direction of free-market capitalism or state-planned industrialisation. Both powers overplayed their hands and alienated their Indian counterparts.Footnote 9 The West German Foreign Office distributed aid to discourage countries from recognising the rival regime in East Berlin or upgrading the latter's diplomatic status.Footnote 10 Yet it thereby opened West Germany to blackmail – in effect, ‘give us aid or we'll recognise East Germany’.Footnote 11 It would have even less luck trying to leverage itself a better position in press diplomacy.
Finally, this article will emphasise the importance of this press war for West German-Ghanaian relations during the 1960s. West German officials devoted much attention, energy and time to coping with Ghanaian attacks. Most previous accounts have been short and summary.Footnote 12 Far more extensive has been a recent book by Matteo Landricina, who rightly treats press war and aid as important topics during the later Nkrumah era. He also discusses Western assessments of Nkrumah's role in fomenting the press war as well as some of the West Germans’ countermeasures. Of particular interest is West German journalist Lutz Herold, whose arrest for espionage provoked a resurgence of attacks in late 1965.Footnote 13 On the other hand, Landricina devotes only cursory attention to the contents of Ghanaian articles and the way they forced Bonn to cope in Ghana with blowback from its morally questionable policies elsewhere in Africa. He also misses the urgent, ongoing dilemma that the conjunction of press war with aid presented to the West Germans.
The rest of this article will fall into two sections. In the first I will examine West German development aid in the context of similar programmes by other Western countries. In the second I will discuss the Ghanaian press, the substance of its attacks and West Germany's vain attempts to counter them, including attempts to use aid as a means of pressure. The chief sources are files in the Political Archive of the Foreign Office (PAAA) and the Ghanaian newspapers themselves; I have not been able to consult archives or other sources in Ghana. In all but one case I have reviewed the Ghanaian stories themselves rather than relied on PAAA memoranda. In that one case, not cited here, the story was missing from its place in the relevant microfilm reel.
Development Aid and the Challenge of Ghana
When West Germany became a development aid donor, it joined a US-led coalition of states seeking to gain influence and help prevent or limit the spread of international communism by raising the standard of living among developing countries. The United States itself led the way with President Harry S Truman's famous Point Four inauguration speech in January 1949.Footnote 14 Denmark began contributing to multilateral aid through the United Nations.Footnote 15 West Germany appropriated its first aid in 1952.Footnote 16 Just as the United States established the US Agency for International Development in 1961, so too did its allies create similar agencies – the French and West Germans in 1961, the Danes and Norwegians in 1962, and the British and Dutch in 1964.Footnote 17
These states differed, however, in their geographic concentration. The British and French gave most of their aid to their former colonies. The French were especially concerned with perpetuating the rayonnement (radiation) of their cultural influence in Africa, maintaining military bases in West and Central Africa, and preserving a special franc zone (the Communauté Financière Africaine or CFA).Footnote 18 During the 1960s and later, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands favoured India and Tanzania via bilateral aid, with the first two also targeting Kenya. Norway also selected Uganda, Zambia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the Dutch Tunisia and Indonesia as special recipients.Footnote 19 West Germany, however, had no strong preference for former colonies and no short list of long-term beneficiaries; instead it applied what critics called a ‘watering can principle’ of giving to as many countries as possible.Footnote 20
More than most Western donors, West Germany had a vital interest in playing the role of global benefactor; in addition to competing with East Germany, it had to distance itself from Nazism and establish itself as an important state. As two Americans wrote in 1968, ‘for Germany, which has struggled with what is now called an “image problem” for two decades with varying success, publicity for the nation's humanitarianism satisfies a special need’.Footnote 21 Right after asserting that West German aid meant a ‘genuine commitment’ to developing the Third World, one scholar conceded in 2003 that ‘Foreign aid was seen from the perspective of how a “new” Germany presented itself to the world’.Footnote 22 For ‘new’, read post-Nazi. Lacking colonies since the end of the First World War, West Germany expected to inspire confidence among newly independent states and perhaps serve as a ‘natural mediator’ between African states and their former rulers.Footnote 23 In 1965 a US analyst noted West Germany's ‘longing to cut a dash in the world’ as one of its aid motives.Footnote 24 West German officials spoke of a ‘radiance’ that projects would give to ‘free Germany’.Footnote 25 In 1960 one of them told the Bundstag's Foreign Affairs Committee that he saw development as a ‘means of important cultural policy or a means of publicity work’, especially as a means of ‘direct or indirect political influence’ on developing countries.Footnote 26 The second minister of the Development Ministry, Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski (1966–8), remarked that sensible project selection would promote a ‘positive policy of self-presentation’.Footnote 27 Officials abroad agreed. In Togo, for example, the West German ambassador advised embracing an ‘egoistic development policy’ that concentrated on projects with low expense and high publicity value.Footnote 28
Pursuing the halo of benevolence, West Germany showered gifts upon Ghana. Before 1966, it extended a DM 20 million loan for a bridge over the Volta River. Technical aid projects included a financial consultant, X-ray equipment for a hospital in Agogo, a training school for auto mechanics in Kaneshie, workers for a slaughter yard and meat factory in Bolgatanga, telecommunications and transportation, and various investments in the fishing village of Biriwa.Footnote 29 A recipient country's leader should have been grateful and cooperative.
Instead that leader revolted against the West Germans. President Nkrumah and some members of his ruling Convention People's Party (CPP) identified as socialists and therefore sympathised with East Germany as a socialist country.Footnote 30 He allowed it to open a trade mission in the capital city of Accra in 1959 and in 1963 opened a Ghanaian one in East Berlin. In defiance of the West German claim to be sole representative of the German people, he promoted the idea of two Germanys at the 1961 Belgrade Conference of Non-Aligned Nations. These moves caused considerable resentment in Bonn as well as worry about a possible East German breakthrough to recognition.Footnote 31 Furthermore, press attacks ensured that Ghanaians would not receive positive images of West Germany without considerable interference. But why were there press attacks at all? Nkrumah was not content with developing Ghana alone; he desired the freedom of all Africa from Western colonialism and neo-colonialism.Footnote 32
In this light, West Germany blocked the way to the supreme goal. As a member of the European Economic Community, it put itself into league with former or current colonial powers in Africa: Great Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal.Footnote 33 As a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, West Germany likewise identified itself with the capitalist bloc.Footnote 34 To West German diplomats Nkrumah and his officials raised four specific objections. First, they demanded in 1959 and 1960 that the Germans oppose France's atomic bomb tests in the Sahara Desert.Footnote 35 Second, they accused West Germany of supplying weapons to Portugal's war against anticolonial rebels in Angola.Footnote 36 West German officials denied doing so.Footnote 37 In fact the accusations were true.Footnote 38 Third, the Ghanaian government deplored close West German relations with South Africa, where the white regime brutally oppressed the black African majority.Footnote 39 Fourth, West Germany might join an American-sponsored ‘multilateral force’ in which NATO members, perhaps even Portugal, would share control of some nuclear weapons, possibly deployed on surface ships able to cruise off African coasts.Footnote 40 The latter three issues formed much of the content in press attacks.
Ghanaian newspapers also fell in with themes promoted by the East Germans, who were determined to tie West Germany to the Nazi past it wished to escape. East German leaders presented their rival as the embodiment of imperialism, militarism, fascism, racism and monopoly capitalism, but themselves as champions of anti-militarism, anti-colonialism and international working-class solidarity.Footnote 41 In the East German view, West Germany was a danger to world peace.Footnote 42
The Press War
Since his rise to power, Nkrumah and his radical followers had built up a press establishment that acted as his regime's war machine. He already had the Evening News, founded in the late 1940s as the organ of the Convention People's Party then campaigning for independence from Great Britain. Its poor quality led the CPP to set up a second daily in 1956, the Ghanaian Times.Footnote 43 In 1961 these papers had circulations of 18,000 and 30,000.Footnote 44 Their editors conferred daily with Nkrumah's publicity officer and the president himself.Footnote 45 To promote Pan-Africanism, the government's Bureau of African Affairs set up two more publications, the Voice of Africa in 1960 and the weekly Spark in December 1962.Footnote 46 The latter, named for Vladimir Lenin's famous pre-First World War newspaper, also came out in a French-language version, L’Étincelle. Both periodicals were distributed by Ghanaian embassies, allowing them to inflict symbolic damage elsewhere in Africa.Footnote 47 According to a British diplomat in 1963, Nkrumah rather than his followers was the guiding force in anti-Western attacks.Footnote 48
At the same time, Nkrumah had suppressed the possibility of dissent in print. Laws passed in 1959, 1960 and 1963 banned ‘false reports’ injuring the reputation of Ghana's government or officials, required suspect publications to submit to pre-publication scrutiny and forced all newspapers to operate under state license, renewable annually. The opposition Ashanti Pioneer was suppressed in 1961 and taken over in 1962.Footnote 49 Ghana's most popular paper, Cecil King's Daily Graphic, with a circulation of 90,000, became the property of a government-controlled trust in 1962.Footnote 50 The West Germans were lucky that it did not join the attacks against them, but they could expect no defence from any Ghanaian publication.Footnote 51 I now turn to the attacks themselves.
Beginning in 1963 the regime press reacted strongly against West German military support for Portugal. The Evening News and Ghanaian Times picked up and conveyed East German news – accurate in this case – that the West Germans stationed paratroopers and fighter jets near the town of Beja.Footnote 52 More serious was alleged West German involvement in Portuguese colonial wars.Footnote 53 One report claimed straight out that Bundeswehr soldiers were guarding Angolan diamond and ore mines from the rebels.Footnote 54 Various articles established the arrival of West German military equipment, including aircraft, Uzi automatic rifles purchased from Israel but marked with the ‘West German Federal Eagle’, gunboats with heavy machine guns, armoured vehicles and mortars. There were also West German trainers in Angola, it was alleged.Footnote 55 The rhetorical support that Portugal received from Richard Jaeger, Vice-President of the Bundestag and member of the Christian Democratic Union, also inspired outrage.Footnote 56 He publicly argued that Portuguese rule should not be considered ‘foreign’ to Angola and Mozambique because it had been there for 500 years.Footnote 57 Complaining that Jaeger had called Portuguese rule ‘entirely harmless’, Obotan Awuku of the Spark wrote that ‘It is no wonder that a Nazist [sic] should see no harm in such humanities [sic]. Even the extermination of the Jews was to Nazis an imperious necessity for the preservation of civilization and the advancement of man!’.Footnote 58 West German Ambassador Walter Reichhold (1963–4) conceded internally that ‘These strong words [by Awuku] are an expression of the agitation that reigns in black Africa against Portugal and South Africa’. West Germany should do nothing to heighten this mood, ‘especially because our past offers more openings for attack [Angriffsfläche] than that of other nations’.Footnote 59
West Germany's cordial relations with South Africa raised at least as much ire. The Times, News and Spark consistently labelled the government of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd as ‘fascist’ or ‘Nazi-like’ and often drew a connection to Germany's dark past.Footnote 60 In August 1963 the Spark called a West German aid package to South Africa a ‘vicious stab in the back’ and ‘the unkindest cut of all’. Under a photograph of former chancellor Konrad Adenauer captioned as ‘Enemy of the African Revolution’, the paper warned that West Germany was a threat to world peace as well as to African freedom.Footnote 61 When word of a cultural treaty with South Africa came out in March 1964, the Spark claimed that West Germany had a ‘vital interest’ in cheap African labour and called it ‘party to the plot to enslave the African forever’.Footnote 62 The Voice of Africa called the agreement a ‘serious crime’. ‘It seems as if Germany has forgotten the horrors of Nazism and the bestiality of the Hitler regime, in spite of the reminders of the current Frankfurt trial [related to the Auschwitz death camp]’.Footnote 63 VOA also revealed the existence of a secret military cooperation agreement signed in July 1961, to be implemented by Major General Wilhelm (actually Friedrich) von Mellenthin, resident of South Africa and a former member of the Wehrmacht's general staff.Footnote 64 In August the Ghanaian Times claimed that German corporations Siemens and Telefunken were helping the South African Institute of Rocket Research.Footnote 65 Six weeks later it published accusations by a visiting East German official that West Germany was building bases in South Africa.Footnote 66 According to communist Pat Sloan in June 1965, Nazi emigres had ‘merged with the racialist ruling class of South Africa with whom they share a similar ideology’.Footnote 67
In 1965 newspapers also faithfully echoed Nkrumah's deep concern about the multilateral force. The Ghanaian Times warned in mid-January that ‘We know, in our own time, what treasures German militarism has left for the world’. It cited the Ghanaian's leader's fear that nuclear-armed warships could appear along the African coast to aid Portugal's war against African liberation movements.Footnote 68 Three days later South African communist H.M. Basner argued that the MLF's only purpose was to allow the United States to share nuclear weapons with West Germany, where the same industrialists and militarists who unleashed war in 1914 and 1939 now wished to forcibly reunite Germany and who still saw Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic states as German colonies.Footnote 69 The Spark warned that a nuclear-armed West Germany might provoke a Third World War and that it planned to dismantle collective farms and state-owned industries for the benefit of Prussian Junkers and West German monopolists should it ever take over East Germany.Footnote 70 It is hard to imagine this latter prospect worried Africans of any political stripe, but the story certainly reflected a willingness to channel East German concerns.
According to the press, the West Germans acted in other ways as a neo-colonialist power either on their own behalf or in association with other powers. At the end of 1962 the Times accused Bonn of conspiring with Washington to remove Nkrumah, and when that failed, of colluding to leverage trade and aid against Ghanaian state control of enterprises and enable penetration of West German and US capital.Footnote 71 West Germany supported Portuguese colonialism, claimed Awuku in the Spark, to advance the interests of ‘Krupp, the DEMAG and Rheinstahl’. ‘Cheap African labour’ would ensure ‘colossal profits’ for these companies.Footnote 72 On 23 April 1963 the Evening News quoted at length a Soviet writer who accused West German ‘monopolists’ of exploiting official economic and technical aid to resume control of former German colonies in Africa.Footnote 73 In November the Evening News cited a story from the East German organ Neues Deutschland, which complained that ‘The notorious “Goethe Institue” [sic] is establishing its colonial branches, dishonouring the great humanist’.Footnote 74 In January 1964, celebrating a referendum that approved making Ghana a one-party state, a columnist rejoiced at Nkrumah having foiled hostile foreign powers, including ‘that inferno of modern capitalism, Western Germany’.Footnote 75 In March the Spark called West Germany one of the ‘imperialist wolves’ who were ‘putting their dirty snouts into everything – and always pretending to be your friends’.Footnote 76 Six weeks later it accused West German companies Siemens, Ferrostaal and Krupp of seeking to continue colonialism by other means. Furthermore, the paper complained, the Bundestag required as a condition of aid that African countries respect the West German claim to sole representation of the whole German people, while the East Germans set no such condition.Footnote 77
Apart from African issues, West Germany came under more general attack for its militarist and Nazi heritage. The Voice of Africa, in denouncing the European Economic Community as a pawn of ‘big industrialists, bankers – militarists of West Germany’, called that country ‘an expression of revived German imperialism, and of all those sinister forces which unleashed two world wars and the monster of Hitlerism’ as well as the ‘spearhead and instrument’ of US imperialism.Footnote 78 Basner accused West German Defence Minister Kurt-Uwe von Hassel in June 1963 of seeking to incite the ‘furor teutonicus’ in a venomous speech at Koblenz. Hassel is supposed to have said that there could be no doubt about German hostility toward peoples living under communism and urged that military academies remain in military rather than civilian hands, to inculcate the proper spirit.Footnote 79 Three months later the Times attacked President John Kennedy's call for German reunification.
Does he mean that Hitler's generals still in command of the West German Reichswehr must have the power to launch a new assault on Eastern Europe or that Hitler's administrators must have the power to build new gas ovens for the few Jews remaining in Germany? That is, at present, still the dream of many Germans in high positions.Footnote 80
The Spark warned in mid-July 1965 that ‘Powerful forces in West Germany are dreaming of regaining Hitler's lost frontiers’.Footnote 81 That country, strengthened internally by a new emergency law, might attack as soon as 1967!Footnote 82 In 1965 newspapers also discussed East Germany's Brown Book, a directory of some 1,800 former Nazi officials, many of them war criminals, holding high positions in West Germany's government, industries and media outlets.Footnote 83
West German Countermeasures
Throughout the hostile press campaign, the West Germans tried to make it stop. Their embassy wrote letters to editors offering corrections or objections, which the newspapers sometimes printed or referenced.Footnote 84 It also delivered at least seven written protests to the Ghanaian Foreign Ministry from 1963 to 1966. The Foreign Office wrote to the Ghanaian embassy on 7 April 1964. On at least twenty-four occasions, West German officials complained in person to Ghanaian officials, including Special Ambassador Michael Dei-Anang, Foreign Minister Kojo Botsio, Ambassador Doe in Bonn and President Nkrumah himself.Footnote 85 On at least one occasion, in 1962, the West Germans joined in a ‘concerted démarche’ with the United Kingdom and the United States.Footnote 86
They defended themselves, though not always accurately, with denials to Ghanaian officials, Ghanaian newspapers, and each other. West Germany was not shipping weapons, they claimed (falsely as we have seen), or military advisers to Portugal's colonies.Footnote 87 It was not arming South Africa or helping to build a weapons factory, and German firms Siemens and Telefunken were not aiding South Africa's army in developing rockets.Footnote 88 There certainly was not a secret arms agreement with South Africa, they claimed.Footnote 89 Outgoing Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was no ‘enemy’ of the African revolution; during the Nazi era he had even spent time in a concentration camp with ‘men of the left’, though this claim was not true; Adenauer merely suffered arrest and was soon released.Footnote 90 Defence Minister von Hassel's speech was falsely rendered, said the West Germans; he had in fact stressed the Bundeswehr's defensive mission and its subordination to civilian control.Footnote 91 The multilateral force was no threat to Africa, and even with it West Germany would still not possess or have exclusive control over atomic weapons.Footnote 92
The West Germans called on the services of the famous Hanna Reitsch, but to little effect. A decorated Luftwaffe test pilot during the Second World War and an admirer of Adolf Hitler, she became an intimate friend of Nkrumah in 1962 and the operator of a glider training school until his overthrow in 1966.Footnote 93 In March 1963 Ambassador Carl-Heinz Lüders (1961–3) partially credited her with an apparent stop in ‘defamatory’ attacks on West Germany but offered no specifics.Footnote 94 She certainly made a go at it in December 1964 during a breakfast with Nkrumah, Dei-Anang and Ambassador Hans-Georg Steltzer (1964–8).Footnote 95 Unfortunately, this and whatever other interventions Reitsch may have made in private did not stop the attacks.
The last card in West Germany's hand was development aid, which was a weakness as well as a weapon. Because it represented a financial investment in West Germany's image abroad, its officials had to pay careful attention to newspaper attacks. As France's ambassador in Ghana remarked to Lüders, ‘We can completely ignore all that [i.e. anti-Western press campaigns], but we can do that because we are not giving Ghana one franc of development aid or offering any otherwise advantageous trade relations’. In Lüders's view, neither the German public nor other developing countries would understand why West Germany should continue aid in the face of such negative publicity.Footnote 96 On the other hand, aid might serve as a club if, by threatening to withdraw it, the West Germans could bring Nkrumah's regime to heel. Unfortunately, carrying out the threat might push (or free) him to recognise East Germany, something that they must avoid at all costs. As Ambassador Reichhold wrote in November 1963, trade sanctions would carry no weight because Nkrumah knew that West Germany would continue buying Ghana's cocoa. Development aid was useful to Ghana, but not indispensable. If Nkrumah rejected it while loudly insulting the West Germans as ‘reactionary’, ‘warlike’ and ‘neo-colonialist’, he would find people who would applaud him and then tear the West German embassy apart.Footnote 97
They never went so far as to cut or refuse aid, or to explicitly condition aid on an absence of defamatory coverage, as Ambassador Lüders suggested in his final report; instead they took a middling course of making dark and sometimes vague allusions while continuing to discuss and approve new projects.Footnote 98 One week after the Evening News story on 6 February, ‘Angola: West German Federal Eagle in Colonial War’, Ambassador Lüders delivered and read aloud a démarche protesting this as well as a story on 31 December 1962 in the Ghanaian Times titled ‘Americans and Germans Want Nkrumah Removed’. It said, ‘my Government is under the impression that the Ghanaian Government has either acquiesced in the publication of these articles or has even instructed the Party Press to follow this general line’, and that the government could stop the attacks if it wanted to. It warned that ‘decisions which are now under consideration will be influenced by the pressure of German public opinion following these grave, renewed press attacks’. Lüders reported that the Ghanaian Foreign Ministry officials present – State Secretaries Richard Akwei and Quarcoopome, as well as Mr. Brew, manager of the Europe section – were ‘strongly impressed, perhaps even distressed’ by the statement. Asked which ‘decisions’ were meant, Lüders referred to economic negotiations in progress, including the grant of Hermes export guarantees. Akwei promised to inform Nkrumah while Mr. Brew, in seeing Lüders on his way out, said, ‘It is a shame to ask for development aid and at the same time start this disgrace in the press’.Footnote 99
One week later, on 20 February 1963, the Foreign Office held a press conference in Bonn. Leaving nothing to chance, the Foreign Office prepared in advance a question on the press war, as well as a detailed answer.Footnote 100 When a reporter failed to act as scripted, the Foreign Office spokesmen, a Dr. Hille, raised the issue himself.Footnote 101 By claiming that West Germany had participated in a bomb plot against Nkrumah and that it was supplying weapons and mercenaries to suppress the right of self-determination in Africa, he said, the Ghanaian government press had injured its own neutrality by making a communist thesis its own. The federal government had warned that German public opinion would probably force it to examine the maintenance of friendly relations with Ghana. A reporter now asked whether this examination might affect development aid. Dr. Hille warned that while West Germany set no political requirements for development aid, such a departure from Ghana's official neutrality in the Cold War would force the Foreign Office to ‘reassess’ (prüfen) its aid policy.Footnote 102
The embassy issued another warning in October 1963. The Ghanaian embassy in Tanganyika had distributed copies of the Spark, which claimed that West Germany lent South Africa £650 million, that it had given Portugal military aid to suppress the rebellions in Angola and Mozambique and that it was preparing for a third world war. According to the West German note, ‘It is a recognized rule that diplomatic missions shall not exercise any propaganda against Governments to which the country they are accredited to entertains friendly relations’. Such press attacks would make an improvement in relations impossible and ‘considerably distrub [sic] economic co-operation between the two countries’.Footnote 103 The Ghanaian Foreign Ministry's reply, on 19 October, did nothing to satisfy the Germans. It merely took ‘cognisance’ of their position.Footnote 104 Another démarche followed in mid-December, again without result.Footnote 105
Steltzer worked hard to win over Nkrumah, but he too invoked aid in an effort to discourage bad press.Footnote 106 In late 1964, he warned the president's cabinet chief that continuing malicious and unjustified accusations in the press ‘would make it harder to convince the German government of the usefulness of close economic cooperation with Ghana’. According to rumour, this threat prompted Nkrumah's personal intervention.Footnote 107 In September 1965 Steltzer asked the Foreign Office to reprimand Ghana's ambassador in Bonn, writing that it was not appropriate to ask a country for help and then trample on it.Footnote 108 When he met with Nkrumah, the governor of the Bank of Ghana and Nkrumah's economic and technical advisers to decide on capital aid priorities, Steltzer asked him to stop press attacks on West German development aid as exploitative. Even Ghana's finance minister, he said, recognised loan terms of three and a half percent over fifteen years as favourable to Ghana. Addressing the Foreign Office, Steltzer claimed that a previous written protest and this verbal complaint to the leader showed that German patience was not unlimited, though he cautioned that ‘threats like withdrawing development aid must absolutely be avoided’.Footnote 109
End of the Press War
West Germany's diplomatic position improved almost as soon as the Ghanaian Army toppled Nkrumah on 24 February 1966. The new regime, headed by an eight-man junta calling itself the National Liberation Council, was determinedly anti-communist.Footnote 110 It not only shut down the East German trade mission in Accra and its Ghanaian counterpart in East Berlin, it expelled more than a thousand Soviet technicians and forced a drastic reduction of personnel at the Soviet and Chinese embassies.Footnote 111 NLC chair Lieutenant General J.A. Ankrah soon publicly endorsed German reunification, which Ambassador Steltzer took as an endorsement of the ‘sole representation’ claim. The press war against West Germany ended immediately; Steltzer reported with satisfaction two weeks after the coup that the Spark had ceased publication and that columnist H.M. Basner and other pro-East Bloc journalists were in prison.Footnote 112 The war of nerves over decolonisation and apartheid was at an end.
Conclusion
This article has advanced two arguments. Not only have newspapers acted as a significant force in international relations, as earlier scholarship has already established, but in the Ghana press war they were able to turn a small West African country's asymmetrical relationship with a wealthy West Bloc country upside down. Representing the Pan-African and socialist policy priorities of Kwame Nkrumah, they imposed discomfort on West Germany as punishment for its misbehaviour, real or alleged, in central and southern Africa. Through party ownership of friendly papers and government control or suppression of unfriendly ones, Nkrumah's regime ensured a consistent message as well as being able to turn the pressure on and off at will, like a water tap. It took advantage of West Germany's peculiar weaknesses as well, the need to compete with East Germany and the historical continuity with the Third Reich. In this way the benefactor was made to look like an adversary in public and forced to act like a wounded supplicant in private, demanding again and again an end to the pain. Second, development aid for a regime could do very little against it, in the sense of diverting it from the definition of its vital interests or its ideological aims. Loans, experts, equipment and training programmes for Bolgatanga and Biriwa in Ghana could not outweigh, in Nkrumah's mind, the rightful grievances of black Africans in Angola or South Africa. The West Germans could not overcome the misfit between the implicit assumption behind aid, that the host government was content with securing its borders and improving its resources, and a regime with continental ambitions that crossed West German interests.
Further research could add more to both sides of the press war. Ghanaian archives may hold documents clarifying how and why President Nkrumah or his subordinates directed press attacks against West Germany and how they weighed their desire for aid against their need to change West German behaviour, please East German officials or fulfil other objectives. A thorough review of West German reporting on Ghana and Nkrumah might reveal to what extent newspapers in that country took notice of Ghanaian attacks, responded to them, or perhaps provoked them by unfavourable portrayals and commentary.
