Youth, discipline, and development were the interlinked priorities of the Ghanaian postcolonial agenda during the years between 1957 and 1966. As in other parts of the continent, the Ghanaian youth – particularly for the nationalist government of Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People's Party (CPP) – represented, to borrow from Mamadou Diouf, ‘the hope of African nations under construction’ and, perhaps more importantly, ‘the hope of the world’. It was the youth, Diouf has argued, who were to be ‘the chief actor[s] in African societies’ struggles against underdevelopment, poverty, misery, and illiteracy’.Footnote 1 To capitalize on the revolutionary potential of this section of the populace, the Nkrumah administration's youth policy focused on extensive programs of regimentation characterized by vocational, academic, and ideological training; community service and public development; and job creation. This article analyzes one key feature of the CPP's youth policy, the Ghanaian Builders/Workers Brigade.
Founded in 1957 in the midst of Ghana's independence celebrations, the Brigade initially served as a response to the country's growing unemployment problem, urban housing shortage, and – in Accra specifically – concerns over the loss of the Ga ethnic group's traditional lands. Structured around a program of civic and vocational training, the Brigade aimed to inculcate a respect for discipline and order into the country's young men and women and catalyze the development of a new generation of productive and patriotic citizens. Locally and internationally, the apparently militaristic nature of Brigade life came under regular fire during the late 1950s and early 1960s, with opposition members of parliament (MPs), journalists, and scholars alike often comparing the Brigade – as well as other CPP youth initiatives – to fascist youth movements in central and southern Europe.Footnote 2 Meanwhile, on the ground, the Ghanaian public expressed apprehension over the changing generational and gender relations the Brigade and other party organizations appeared to be promoting under Nkrumah. For the nation's ever-growing number of brigaders (approximately 25,000 Ghanaians at the time of the 1966 coup), though, the organization – with its training programs and close connection to the state apparatus – provided new avenues for political and social mobility during the Nkrumah period.Footnote 3 Through the types of work they engaged in and regular access to money, Brigade life also offered them alternative paths to male and female respectability in their communities. The Brigade, this article argues, was thus a key site for generational and gender debate in late 1950s and early 1960s Ghana as brigaders, their communities, and the political elite negotiated the role and responsibilities of the country's young men and women in the nation-building project.
LAND, LABOR, AND UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE CITY
The Brigade had its origins in questions over urbanization and unemployment in the late colonial Gold Coast. The inter-war period had witnessed a dramatic influx of new residents to the colony's urban centers: a trend replicated throughout much of the continent in the early twentieth century. Attracted by the prospect of employment and, by extension, a more secure position in the cash economy, groups of primarily young men and some women entered the continent's cities and towns in an attempt to forge a new life for themselves and their families. By the end of the 1930s, the scale of this urban migration led key colonial figures to argue that urbanization represented the future of Africa. A revised colonial policy, they insisted, had to reflect this reality.Footnote 4 After 1945, the return of ex-servicemen and the effects of increased educational opportunities that accompanied the colonial reforms of the 1930s and 1940s had resulted in a further escalation of the urban boom. By the decade's end, colonial cities like Accra were catering to nearly 75,000 additional residents.Footnote 5 This urban growth continued unabated throughout the 1950s, with the population of Accra more than tripling by decade's end.Footnote 6
For those who made their way to the cities and towns, expectations often collided with bitter realities. Viewing the city as a bastion of well-paid, white-collar work, young educated and semi-educated school leavers flocked to the urban centers' civil service and office sectors upon their arrival, only to find that more often than not they lacked the qualifications for such work.Footnote 7 Moreover, as John Iliffe points out, an early 1950s increase in urban wages attracted an additional wave of migrants, yet at the same time encouraged the replacement of workers with machinery, further curtailing the opportunities available to the continent's growing urban population.Footnote 8 In the mid-century Gold Coast specifically, Dennis Austin notes that escalating expectations and growing under- and unemployment left the colony's youth disaffected and frustrated. Upon arrival in the colony's cities and towns, these urban migrants and school leavers were forced to ‘struggle through adolescence in a series of unskilled jobs’ and other forms of part-time employment, opening paths to such threats to colonial order as juvenile delinquency, urban overcrowding, and nationalist politics.Footnote 9
For most colonial thinkers, the twin problems of rapid urbanization and youth unemployment were primarily male concerns. It was predominantly young men, officials (in certain cases erroneously) argued, who were making their way to the cities.Footnote 10 Moreover, it was presumed that it was these same men who, when they could not find work, proved a threat to the colonial social order with delinquent behavior that included idleness, insolence, and hooliganism.Footnote 11 Among colonial administrators, the city's role in catalyzing the breakdown of traditional social networks emerged as the dominant theory explaining the African youth problem in the mid-century Gold Coast as well as elsewhere. For instance, in his 1950 survey of the western coastal cities of Sekondi and Takoradi, sociologist and later opposition politician K. A. Busia noted how absentee parenting, the sending of children away to urban centers for schooling, and occupational pressures led to a breakdown of the extended family network and stranded segments of the colony's youth in cities without any direct supervision at home. This in turn left them free to engage in petty crime, gambling, and the ‘piloting’ of foreigners to local prostitutes.Footnote 12 Five years later under the Nkrumah-led transitional government, a report from the department of social welfare and community development echoed Busia's assessment of the youth problem in the Gold Coast urban sphere as it emphasized the potentially unsavory influences of dance halls, bars, and cinemas.Footnote 13
Independence did not quell official concerns over urbanization and youth under- and unemployment. Throughout the period of CPP rule, the Nkrumah government had a conflicted relationship with the country's urban youth. In the halcyon early days of the nationalist struggle, no group more symbolized the potential power of the nationalist cause than the disaffected urban youth as they translated their frustrations with the Gold Coast political and social scene into an unprecedented local and national mobilization campaign with initiatives featuring literacy classes, social welfare programs, and party-run community development projects.Footnote 14 Party officials also mobilized the urban youth (at times violently) against their opposition supporters, with opposition parties often doing the same with their own youth wings.Footnote 15 However, by the time of CPP-led independence in March 1957, the party's instigation of the urban youth had become much more measured as party and government officials weighed the youth's mobilization capabilities and potential radicalism with the governmental need for security and order. Likewise, as African nationalism's promise of more jobs and better housing gave way to calls for greater patience, key groups of urban youth – initially including Muslim day laborers in Kumasi and Accra, Asante cocoa farmers residing in or near Kumasi, and later unemployed Ga youths in Accra – began to organize against the CPP. The result was the inauguration of several ethnically-based political parties and associations during the transition to self-rule.Footnote 16
The mid-1957 emergence of the Ga Shifimo Kpee (Ga Standfast Association) renewed concerns over the urban youth's threat to the young state. Emerging in Nkrumah's own electoral district in central Accra and the most reliably pro-CPP city in the country, the Shifimo Kpee sought to challenge the CPP on issues of job creation, the under-representation of Ga officials in the government and party, urban overcrowding, and the sale of Ga lands to groups comprised of primarily Akan ‘strangers’. As a result, in the weeks following the country's independence celebrations, bands of Ga youths took to the streets with demands that ‘Ga mei abii, nye teashi’ (‘People of Ga Descent, Arise’) and claims that ‘Ga shikpon, Ga mei Anoni’ (‘Ga lands are for Ga people’).Footnote 17 The issues surrounding the Ga uprising were symptomatic of those facing nearly all newly independent and underdeveloped countries in the mid-twentieth century. Like the colonial administrators before them, the new CPP government – set on proving its ability to maintain order – portrayed the conflict as a natural, yet unwarranted, result of uncontrolled urban growth and the lack of structured work for youth in the nation's cities.Footnote 18 Leading with proposals for the establishment of a ‘National Workers Brigade’, the government in turn argued that formal institutions had to be created in order to provide the youth with the ‘opportunity to give patriotic service’ to the country and, in so doing, engrain in them ‘a healthy respect for the dignity of manual labour and national service’.Footnote 19
The perceived beneficent qualities of state guidance stood at the center of the Workers Brigade's – soon to be renamed the Builders Brigade's – mission. An August 1957 cabinet memorandum argued that a lack of structure in the youth's lives bred insurrection and disorder such as was seen in parts of Accra in mid-1957 as the ‘vital talents’ of the country's young men and women were being ‘wasted’ in unproductive pursuits.Footnote 20 The Brigade promised to alleviate this likely scourge on national development with the creation of a nationwide network of uniformed work camps. In these camps, eligible young men and women – initially meaning any unemployed individual between the ages of 15 and 45 – would receive training in modern agricultural practices, road and housing construction, sewing, and other craftwork.Footnote 21 Under the government's initial plan, brigaders were to be hired for a two-year period during which time they would earn a small allowance dependent upon the type of work they performed, minus a small amount to cover meals and incidentals.Footnote 22 However, by the time the Brigade celebrated the induction of its first recruits in November 1957, the plan had undergone considerable revision as the cabinet debated several competing and often very different formulations of the organization.Footnote 23 As a result, for those who joined the Brigade's first camps in Accra and in the Northern Region village of Damongo, there was a pay scale ranging from three to four shillings a day, while some artisans collected an additional tool allowance for the purchase and maintenance of equipment.Footnote 24 Further supplementing their pay, Damongo brigaders also received free food, housing, and uniforms, while their compatriots in Accra's non-residential camp received two meals a day, free transport to and from work, and a set of dress and work uniforms. As the face of the Brigade in the nation's capital, Accra brigaders also attended citizenship lectures and literacy classes supported by the government.Footnote 25
Among the country's unemployed, the Brigade proved extremely popular. By December 1957, for instance, the government had already received more than 21,000 applications, all from men.Footnote 26 An analysis of approximately 14,000 of these applications conducted by the government's international advisor, H. D. Cochran, determined that, 83 per cent met the requirement of being unemployed. Cochran also reported that only 30 per cent of those who applied had had no schooling, while ‘no less than 45%’ had attended to at least the middle school level.Footnote 27 In order to meet this apparent demand for state employment, the Brigade grew rapidly over the next two years, expanding from its original two camps in Accra and Damongo to twenty-four in mid-1959, employing a total of 8,500 Ghanaians.Footnote 28 Among these new camps were three designated female camps (Okponglo, Takoradi, and Jachie), which in early 1959 employed a total of 420 Ghanaian women.Footnote 29 Thus, by June 1959, the government was claiming that, in its first months of existence, the Brigade had lowered the number of registered unemployed Ghanaians by approximately 28 per cent. Moreover, government officials forecasted that, within a year, the number of unemployed would decrease even further as the Brigade increased its membership to more than 25,000 Ghanaians.Footnote 30
GENDER, GENERATION, AND THE BRIGADE
The academic literature on the role of African youth in government development and mobilization initiatives has folded youth and community perspectives on state-run youth organizations into a singular discourse of state power and coercion. Only recently have scholars begun to break down this one-dimensional picture of youth, community, and state relations in late colonial and early postcolonial Africa. Writing on the Guinean example, Jay Straker adopts the Parti Démocratique de Guinée's (PDG) youth program as an analytical foil for investigating the experiences of the Guinean forestiers under Sékou Touré. In doing so, Straker illustrates the ways in which both the youth and their teachers in the Guinean forest region negotiated the personal and political constraints imposed by PDG authoritarianism and uncovers the unintended consequences of the Guinean government's youth policy through the alternative futures imagined by those affected by it.Footnote 31
The study of the CPP's youth policy and particularly its state-run institutions has been unfocused and superficial at best, with the bulk of the scholarly attention going to the Builders Brigade's sister organization: the Ghana Young Pioneers.Footnote 32 Since Peter Hodge's 1964 essay in the British Journal of Sociology, the Brigade's position in the Ghanaian political and social spheres has largely gone unstudied.Footnote 33 Like the government planners who instituted the organization, Hodge's focus on the Brigade centered on its role as a response to the problem of youth unemployment. Addressing his study to future and current development thinkers, Hodge argued that the study of the Brigade ‘offers some lessons’ to ‘governments and agencies' seeking a solution to the social ills associated with unemployed youth.Footnote 34 The reach of the Brigade, however, stretched much further than its overt political and social mission as Brigade life offered key groups of Ghanaian young men and women new opportunities for challenging generational and gender hierarchies in their communities. Moreover, in doing so, it helped them forge alternative paths to a socially recognized adulthood in the increasingly chaotic world of postcolonial Africa and in the (presumably) revolutionary one-party state.
As in much of the rest of the continent, gerontocratic authority had limited the opportunities available to Ghana's young men and women, but particularly the men.Footnote 35 Structured around the elders' prioritized access to the community's resources – most notably land and marriageable women – the gerontocratic framework of much of Gold Coast/Ghanaian traditional society buttressed a social system whereby the youth – a social category necessarily denoting a sense of personal incompleteness – were reliant on their elders' blessings for key aspects of their personal and social development, the most prominent being marriage and, by extension, fatherhood. In the territory comprising modern Ghana specifically, gerontocratic authority found its strongest expression in the region's centralized states. In Asante, for instance, elderly men and chiefs maintained a social system that ensured themselves the initial right of access to nearly all of their respective communities' young women.Footnote 36 In certain cases, Emmanuel Akyeampong notes, this even included arranged marriages to girls as young as infants.Footnote 37 With adulthood tied to marriage and procreation, the result was a prolonged youth for Asante's young men as they wavered between a biological adulthood and a socially recognized one.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century and accelerating throughout the first half of the twentieth, Western-style education provided Gold Coast youth – young men in particular – an alternative to the gerontocratic model of their villages as most aimed to translate their education into new forms of wealth (money and full-time employment) and in turn access to marriageable women.Footnote 38 Like schooling, the Brigade provided youth with an alternative to gerontocratic authority as the state served as the gatekeeper for a very specific form of revolutionary adulthood in the postcolonial era. Inspired by the Israeli Nahal, the Brigade camp brought together a regimented program of patriotic ritual with vocational training and agricultural work.Footnote 39 Brigaders opened their days with marching and drill, flag raising ceremonies, the recitation and singing of Brigade pledges and songs, and physical training exercises. From there, brigaders dispersed to conduct their work. In Accra, this work – peppered with breaks for song, games, athletic competitions, and coursework – initially included the construction of the Brigade's base camp in the Kanda section of the city, while, in Damongo, brigaders primarily focused on yam production and other agricultural activities.Footnote 40 As new camps emerged throughout the country, brigaders gained the opportunity to specialize their work by focusing on everything from fishing and farming to carpentry and auto mechanics (fitting) to sewing and musical performance.Footnote 41
Brigaders, for their part, presented their involvement in Brigade activities in terms of their ambitions to attain the skills and values necessary to be respectable and admired citizens in their communities. Adopting the CPP's modernist and politically-disciplined notion of citizenship, the brigaders and the family members of brigaders that I talked to in 2007 and 2008 celebrated the personal and professional opportunities which the organization offered. Speaking, for instance, on his brother's experience in the Brigade, Accra resident E. B. Mensah explained that ‘Somebody will come from a poor family, their father cannot even afford to give a kyale wctee (a set of rubber sandals), but if he go[es] there and the father see[s] how they are dressed, people like[d] the way they are dressed.’Footnote 42 This dress, as embodied in the Brigade uniform, symbolized that its wearer was dedicated to the dual tasks of bettering him or herself and the nation, for Mensah continued by recounting how ‘[i]f you [were] with them [the Brigade] and you are semi-educated or you have not got any education at all, they [the Brigade] will send them [the brigaders] to school to learn how to read and write.’ Mensah insisted that young brigaders were able to take these skills – academic and vocational – and translate them into full-time blue- and white-collar work, although he was unclear about the type of work most brigaders actually attained upon leaving the organization.Footnote 43
Others echoed Mensah's portrayal of the opportunities Brigade life offered. As former Tafo camp supervisor Yaa Fosuawaa explained to me in 2008, when Nkrumah ‘started the Brigade, he employed all of us. He gave us all jobs, both men and women.’Footnote 44 Organizationally, these jobs often adhered to a clear, but at times fluid, gendered division of labor as government officials – reflecting on longstanding administration concerns over the presumed softening of the African youth – evoked the Brigade as the most efficient means by which to return Ghana's young men and women to the land.Footnote 45 Upon their return to the land, these young brigaders were not to engage in just any sort of agricultural labor. Rather, they were to cultivate and transform the land in a way that accentuated Nkrumah's envisioned modern and mechanized future for the country. As a result, images of brigaders – young men as well as some women – driving tractors, plows, bulldozers, and other heavy machinery regularly dotted the Ghanaian political and agricultural landscape of the early postcolonial period, laying the basis for today's perhaps nostalgic memory of the agricultural potential and output of the Brigade during the Nkrumah years. For as several individuals insisted in their conversation, the regimentation, mechanization, and organization of the Brigade production network had reportedly made food and other Brigade goods so cheap that, in 2007 and 2008, these goods – including foodstuffs, baskets, shoes, tobacco, furniture, and tailored cloth, among other items – were remembered as being almost free.Footnote 46
For their part, most Brigade women advanced the organization's mission through the sale of Brigade-made goods, cooking, sewing, planting, and craftwork. Yaa Fosuawaa explained:
We [the Brigade women] were planting cassava. We were also cooking for the men. Sometimes we cooked gyigyi (a local food made of dried cassava that looks similar to fufu) and sometimes we cooked yakayake (buns made of gari). Sometimes we cooked yams or cocoyam. We cooked it with whole boxes of tinned pilchards. We planted sugarcane, yam, cassava. Sometimes, the women also planted.Footnote 47
For Fosuawaa in particular, the Brigade had proved a personal and professional boon. Having not attended school prior to her employment with the Brigade, she, like most Ghanaian women, made her living through cooking food for sale, trade, and some small-scale farming.Footnote 48 After entering the Brigade, Fosuawaa and a select few other Ghanaian women successfully rose through the organization's ranks. The result in Fosuawaa's case was her promotion to a supervisory role in the Brigade's Eastern Region camp near the town of Tafo, a position from which she gained both the privilege and responsibility of ‘watching over men’.Footnote 49
REVOLUTIONARY ADULTHOOD AND THE BRIGADE
The experiences of brigaders like Fosuawaa simultaneously challenged and reinforced conventional gender and generational expectations in early postcolonial Ghana as the Brigade promoted the state-sanctioned ideal of the revolutionary, productive, and responsible citizen. In the case of Fosuawaa specifically, the Brigade provided her with the income necessary to send her children to school.Footnote 50 Moreover, she and several other interviewees asserted that brigaders – most notably, male brigaders – married and started families following their tenure in the organization.Footnote 51 With both masculine and feminine respectability tied to marriage and childbearing, the Brigade thus became a means for young men and women to proceed towards socially recognized adulthood in their communities. This was particularly true for the Brigade's young men as they balanced desires for marriage and children with the social demands required of them as potential breadwinners. As Akyeampong notes, few women and even fewer of their families would deem a man marriageable if he could not give the appearance of being able to provide for his family.Footnote 52 Prior to the colonial wage economy, this support ideally came from the land. However, with the growing urban environment of the twentieth century, the meaning of familial support had shifted to that of regular access to and participation in the expanding cash economy. Money emerged in the twentieth-century Gold Coast/Ghana – as in West Africa more broadly – as a symbol of masculinity for both the region's men and women.Footnote 53 The ability of male brigaders to translate their experiences and training in the Brigade into regular and secure employment – both during their tenure of service and afterwards – allowed them, as several interview participants explained, to live up to what was expected of them as men, future breadwinners, and citizens of the new Ghana.Footnote 54
Likewise, the effects of the Brigade on the social development and ambitions of its female members challenged and expanded conventional female gender expectations. In most Ghanaian communities, marriage and – even more so – childbirth represented a woman's clearest path to adulthood and in turn social respectability, for childbirth in particular ensured the perpetuation of the woman's (and her family's) matrilineal line.Footnote 55 As a result, barrenness or an unwillingness to have children placed a woman in a state of limbo in her family and community, for, as she aged, she was considered neither an adult, nor a child; in certain cases, she was even viewed as a threat to the community.Footnote 56 Yet, the structure of the Brigade, with its residential work camps, forced many women to make the choice of delaying marriage and childbearing as they pursued the real and anticipated benefits of the organization: access to stable wage employment, educational opportunities, and vocational training.Footnote 57 Moreover, a select group of women – like Fosuawaa – found it possible to break out of the Brigade's gendered division of labor and engage in activities traditionally conceived as masculine. These tasks included, but were not limited to farming, construction work, drill instruction, and most famously tractor driving. Following their tenure in the Brigade, most women then translated their experiences in the organization – albeit not necessarily the ‘masculine’ work they performed – into a mechanism for returning to more established gendered roles as mothers and wives while using the money they earned as brigaders to ensure social and economic stability for their future families.Footnote 58
Meanwhile, for the state, the display of women performing masculine tasks was orchestrated so as to promote the modernist and progressive dimensions of Nkrumahist development. With these images, the regime suggested that the new Ghana was not simply undergoing a political and technological revolution. Rather, like its socialist brethren in the Eastern Bloc as well as on the continent, the display of defeminized women's work showed that Ghana was also – and perhaps more importantly – in the midst of a social and cultural revolution in which women had the same rights, responsibilities, and opportunities to contribute to the nation-building project as their male colleagues.Footnote 59 It was these women who would become the lasting symbols of the Brigade. When asked about the Brigade, nearly all of my interview participants emphasized the masculinization of women's work in the organization despite the relatively small number of women engaged in such work. Speaking of his cousin's experience in the Brigade's Techiman camp, Owusu Brempong emphasized that ‘she [his cousin] was a girl … [and] she came there and was a truck driver for tractors’. According to Brempong: ‘[I]n those days, women driving tractors was wonderful. People were flabbergasted to see women trained and driving tractors, and the women who did it were highly respected to do a man's job.’Footnote 60 E. B. Mensah further echoed Brempong's sentiments as he argued: ‘The most hardest (sic) thing they [the brigaders] do is tractor driving … [and] they train the women because if you hear [of] a woman driving you would be surprised … [and] you would be very happy.’Footnote 61
DEVELOPMENT, DYSFUNCTION, AND INDISCIPLINE
By the mid-1960s, the Brigade had become a force on the Ghanaian political scene. As the emergence of the one-party state increasingly closed off the political options available to most Ghanaians, the Brigade – like its sister organization, the Ghana Young Pioneers – emerged as a conduit through which both its members and the state could perform the generationally defined role of nation-builder. As a young, radical, disciplined socialist, the nation-builder, through his or her labor, was to lead the new Ghana and Africa more broadly to their rightful places alongside the world's developed nations.
However, not everyone was happy or comfortable with the structure and mission of the Brigade. From the outset, opposition officials derided the Brigade as everything from inefficient to fascist. Speaking to the National Assembly in August 1957, for instance, Dagomba South MP Alhaji Yakubu Tali insisted that a uniformed youth movement was ‘Hitler's own idea’. According to Tali, Hitler had ‘hardened his young men’ with a uniformed system of forced labor specifically designed for his own self-aggrandizement as opposed to the benefit of the nation.Footnote 62 Two years later, Wala North MP Jatoe Kaleo added to Tali's sentiments as he reported on his visit to the Brigade's Damongo camp. According to Kaleo, the ‘activities there [at the camp] are marching, singing songs of praise to our dear Kwame Nkrumah, [and] the waving [of] Ghana flags’, while, in his opinion, brigaders were ‘doing practically nothing as far as trade is concerned’.Footnote 63 Others recounted even more insidious behavior on the part of the Brigade. Several prominent MPs – including S. G. Antor, Joe Appiah, and Victor Owusu – reported incidents where young male brigaders apparently threatened and attacked opposition supporters at polling stations and opposition rallies.Footnote 64 The result, insisted the leader of the Ashanti Region's United Party (UP) Youth League, Opanin Kofi Juantuah, was ‘unnecessary hardships to [the] villages’, for, according to him, ‘villagers cannot, because of fear, go to their farms, their only gainful occupation’. Thus, because of the Brigade, Juantuah asserted, ‘hunger and privation are their lot’.Footnote 65
The opposition's most persuasive concerns with the Brigade focused on the perceived militarization of youth. At the heart of this debate was the matter of the uniform. Dressed in khaki-colored shorts, trousers, and (for women) skirts coupled with a field hat and scarf, brigaders took to the Ghanaian public sphere with a highly orchestrated performance of drill, parade, and regimental discipline. Ghanaians reacted to this systematized display of state power by creating stories about the young organization and its members, which bemoaned an apparent arming of the youth. Reflecting on his impressions of Brigade life, for instance, Ben Nikoi-Oltai asserted:
They [the Brigade] train you as a soldier. Their dresses, their caps and shoes, green like the army … They march around. They march as soldiers march. They do parade … They have weapons, [the] Workers Brigade. They've got everything, guns, everything.Footnote 66
When asked why the government would give its brigaders' weapons, Nikoi-Oltai – a self-proclaimed ardent Nkrumahist and party member since the late 1940s – explained: ‘Politics is [a] very subtle organization. It's [a] very bad thing, very subtle. They [politicians?] have something at the back of their minds.’ As a result, for Nikoi-Oltai, the apparent militarization and perceived arming of the youth served as a protective measure for Nkrumah and his supporters as they combated what, with hindsight, Nikoi-Oltai described as the opposition's ambitions on Nkrumah's life.Footnote 67
Others gave an even less understanding picture of the Brigade's militaristic atmosphere. Explaining that ‘they [the brigaders] were trained like soldiers’, Koforidua resident Kofi Ampadu connected the Brigade to Nkrumah's need for a reliable and forceful voting base, noting with a certain amount of cynicism that ‘every governor wants crowds of supporters and would do anything to attract people’.Footnote 68 Likewise, in Tema, Emmanuel Sekyi portrayed the Brigade as an army of informants for the Nkrumah government, while Accra resident Nicholas Budu argued that, ‘once you do anything [against the party] and they [the brigaders] catch you, they will beat you like soldiers [beat people]’.Footnote 69 Longtime Nkrumah opponent and former Central Region pupil-teacher Eden Bentum Takyi-Micah summed up the public concern with the Brigade; Nkrumah and the CPP had always promoted the Brigade as a disciplined and productive labor force, yet ‘they were always misbehaving. They had no respect for anybody, except the party CPP.’Footnote 70
Public apprehension over the Brigade caused consternation as party and government officials maintained that the public was being deceived by subversive forces in the political opposition. As a result, party leaders and government officials during the late 1950s and early 1960s took to the streets, National Assembly, and press with sweeping proclamations declaring the organization a boon for national development, while also denouncing oppositional rhetoric as little more than ‘fear mongering’.Footnote 71 Tales of brigader abuses, however, flourished during the period as reports and rumors connected brigaders to everything from political violence, voter intimidation, and bribery to public drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, and a supposed influx of unwed mothers and fatherless children in the villages and towns neighboring Brigade camps.Footnote 72 At the core of the Brigade's problems, popular opinion suggested, was the corruption and coercion of the Ghanaian youth. The 1960 inauguration of the Ghana Young Pioneers and transition to the one-party state, which from 1960 to 1962 silenced most formal opposition to the Brigade as well as to other CPP institutions, only added to the public's cynicism towards the Brigade and the party's youth policy more broadly. With the formation of the Young Pioneers, the Nkrumah government added to its stable of youth organizations a program specifically designed to enroll schoolchildren – some as young as four years of age – in a state-run uniformed movement aimed at cultivating a party-driven sense of civic duty and ideological consciousness.Footnote 73 Like the Brigade, Young Pioneers – with their thrice-weekly meetings – engaged in militaristic drills and parade exercises, gymnastic routines, and civic works projects: training that many Young Pioneers at least initially perceived as preparation for a career in the military.Footnote 74 Meanwhile, others – generally those outside the scope of CPP youth politics – argued that, with these organizations, Nkrumah and the CPP were involved in a culturally and generationally seditious program constructed to ‘brainwash the youth … [by] let[ing] them [the youth] feel that they are the power behind the government’.Footnote 75
The government sought to respond to the public's concerns with a rebranding of the Brigade from 1960. At the forefront of this initiative was a recommitment to the discipline of the organization as government officials brought in advisors from the Israeli Defence Forces to assess the organization and its productivity.Footnote 76 As part of this period of reinvention, new bases for vocational and leadership training were established as brigaders recommitted themselves to public works projects including the paving of city streets, refuse clean-up, ditch digging, and flood relief. Furthermore, the organization returned to its original name (the Workers Brigade), signaling a shift in the Brigade's mission from that of being primarily a movement designed to return the populace to the land.Footnote 77 In May 1961, for instance, the Brigade formally entered into the industrial sector with the opening of the Brigade Garment Factory in Accra, which was to supply uniforms for all of Ghana's Nkrumah-era uniformed organizations.Footnote 78 Over the next several years, as the country prepared for the new Seven-Year Development Plan, the Brigade expanded its mission and reach rapidly. By 1964, the organization boasted of 38 farms under the Brigade's purview with a total of 14,000 acres under cultivation. Moreover, the Brigade also announced the intended opening of its own mattress factory and the establishment of an independent ‘Construction Wing’ to handle the organization's purportedly growing number of governmental and private contracts.Footnote 79
Caught up in its own political and ideological dogma, the CPP government, however, misread the public's apprehension with the Brigade and its sister organizations. As understood by the government, the people's unease with the Brigade and the party's youth policy more broadly rested not in questions over militarization or political coercion, but in a perceived lack of progress. The only response, according to most government and party officials, was a more sustained commitment to the productivity of the nation and the promises of national development: both of which necessitated the infusion of an even greater degree of discipline into the Ghanaian youth and Ghanaian society writ large. The reaction on the ground, though, was an increasing suspicion of the Brigade and its mission as Ghanaians coped with a government commonly believed to be out of touch with life in the one-party state and a threat to the ‘Ghanaian way of life’. As Takyi-Micah explained in 2008, all the Brigade did was entice young men and women away from their families with promises of ‘smart uniforms’, free housing, and electricity. In so doing, he insisted it left the country's elders to fend for themselves in the villages and on their farms as the youth trained to be little more than obstinate and disrespectful party stooges.Footnote 80
THE BRIGADE AFTER NKRUMAH
Despite the public's ambivalence, by 1964 the government was arguing that the Brigade had cultivated a cadre of young citizens ready to form the ‘Vanguard of the Workers Pioneers’. As one report noted, it was only now that the organization could ‘achieve its proper bearing as a semi-military institution’ with the ‘introduction of military law’.Footnote 81 However, within just a year, some of the government's optimism would wane as the CPP commissioned East German officials to undertake a wholesale inventory of Brigade life. The East Germans reported a mixed and colorful picture of camp life. Applauding the intense discipline that flowed throughout the organization and celebrating the apparent lack of gender discrimination in regards to Brigade employment and work, the East Germans compared Brigade life to that of Germany between 1931 and 1932: a time in Germany purportedly marked by an ‘abundant gaiety and eagerness’ to work as well as by shortages and a lack of equipment. The East Germans noted a camp structure overrun with enthusiasm, but plagued with broken-down machinery, tractors unable to operate due to a lack of parts, and inadequate and inappropriate tools.Footnote 82 As a result, at Nkrumah's insistence, the East Germans reported back to the Ghanaian government with a recommendation to transform the organization into the centerpiece of an all-encompassing program of national service comprising all Ghanaian young men and women.Footnote 83
The 1966 coup overthrowing Nkrumah and the CPP, however, halted any plans for the Brigade's reconfiguration. Following the coup, the Brigade – like most other CPP organizations – came under attack from the new National Liberation Council (NLC) government as high-ranking Brigade officials were arrested, detained, and brought before an array of commissions of enquiry in the months following Nkrumah's overthrow. From July to October 1966, a commission of enquiry specifically designed to investigate the structure and operation of the Brigade heard oral testimony detailing an intricate system of fiscal malfeasance, patronage, waste, and abuse shaping Brigade life under Nkrumah.Footnote 84 The Brigade came under attack in the press as well, as coup leaders and other members of the NLC government challenged the Brigade's legitimacy with reports on corruption and abuses in the organization. These included accounts of the use of corporal punishment in the Brigade and violence against the organization's members. In an April 1967 edition of the Daily Graphic, for instance, the newspaper reported an incident in which former Brigade national organizer Lieutenant-Colonel Musa Kuti ordered a brigader to ‘strip naked’ before being beaten, humiliated, and doused with water in full view of his male and female colleagues.Footnote 85 Meanwhile, others reported on the problematic legacy of the draconian measures taken by the CPP in order to secure land for the Brigade.Footnote 86 As coup leader Colonel Akwasi Afrifa suggested in his 1966 account of the overthrow, for most NLC figures, the Brigade represented little more than an ‘instrument of Kwame Nkrumah's desire to turn this country into his private domain’, and it had to be dealt with accordingly.Footnote 87
Yet, the internal and local politics surrounding the Brigade disrupted the NLC's desires to eradicate the institution as the Brigade developed a relatively long, albeit anachronistic, afterlife in post-Nkrumah Ghana. For as the doors closed on the Young Pioneers and institutions like the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute (KNII) and the Bureau of African Affairs, NLC officials met with deposed Brigade leaders to determine the future of the organization.Footnote 88 The key concerns facing the NLC were the size and economics of the Brigade. As one report noted, at the time of the coup, the Brigade employed approximately 25,000 young men and women and maintained an operating budget of more than £8.5 million, making it one of the government's largest single expenditures.Footnote 89 The government's initial response to the situation was ‘ruthless but diligent cuts’, including mass lay-offs. For as one official reminded his colleagues, it was important to remember that ‘the prime aim of establishing the Brigade was to boost up the economy, that is not merely providing work for the unemployed but [for the organization] to be self-maintaining as well …’.Footnote 90
Fears of mass unemployment and urban and rural unrest, however, tempered much of the NLC government's economic assault on the Brigade, although a political and cultural critique of the organization persisted. As a sign of its anti-Nkrumah and anti-communist credentials, the NLC almost immediately and unsurprisingly rejected the East German recommendations for the Brigade's reinvention, which were still being debated within the Brigade and the CPP at the time of the coup. According to one pithy ministry of defense official, these reforms were designed for nothing more than ‘boosting the prestige of the former President’.Footnote 91 Additionally, the new government striped the Brigade of the most visible aspects of its paramilitary structure.Footnote 92 This included the wearing of the regalia and badges of rank that had become integral in marking the regimented nature of Brigade life under Nkrumah, while interestingly the NLC government sought to maintain the rest of the militaristic discipline – drill, parade, uniforms – of the Nkrumah-era camps.Footnote 93 By September 1966, however, with the Brigade purportedly down to a more ‘manageable’ 20,000 members, the NLC shifted course as ministry of defense officials now began calling for a suspension of the organization's downsizing.Footnote 94 Moreover, seven months later and just over a year after the initial coup, the NLC's highest ranking figures would now begin to celebrate the Brigade's role in Ghanaian political and economic life, with, in one 1967 speech, Major-General A. K. Ocran applauding the organization for all it ‘[had] and can contribute … towards the material welfare of the people of Ghana …’. More importantly, though, Ocran also noted with pride that the Brigade now operated no less than 78 camps in the country: more than two dozen more than were reportedly in operation in the year preceding the coup.Footnote 95
CONCLUSION
Discipline, productivity, and order were the themes of Ocran's post-Nkrumah portrayal of the Brigade, themes eerily echoing the language of the Nkrumahist state during the country's most vehemently anti-Nkrumah period. For both the CPP and NLC, the Brigade offered a new type of citizen – young, productive, and disciplined – upon which to build their respective envisioned nations. Under the CPP, this nation was to become the breadbasket of the new Africa as Ghanaian young men and women sought to transform the country's economy into a bastion of modern, mechanized agricultural and industrial growth. Likewise, the Brigade – as one of the most visible features of the party's political and ideological apparatus – was to initiate a political and social revolution among the Ghanaian youth. As foreseen by Nkrumah and his colleagues, this revolution would culminate in a citizenry fully committed to the state and its vision for Ghana's place in the emerging postcolonial world.
Uncomfortable with the Brigade from the start, by the coup's first anniversary, however, Ocran and the NLC began to see potential for the Brigade as they searched for political and social stability in their governance over what they saw as a reinvigorated country. For them, the Brigade – composed of thousands of otherwise unemployed and potentially volatile young men and women – both held promise and represented a threat to the social order they desired. The archival record is unclear on the matter, but by the early 1970s the Brigade appears to have quietly faded from the Ghanaian political and social stage. Many camps likely dissolved on their own accord with many brigaders leaving their camps in the face of uncertainty over pay and the other benefits of Brigade life under NLC leadership. Other camps may have been incorporated into the government's State Farms system, while, for others still, local farmers and chiefs may have reclaimed land previously taken for Brigade cultivation.
Approximately four decades later, echoes of the post-Nkrumah ambivalence with the Brigade can still be heard in contemporary Ghanaian recollections of the organization. However, the Brigade experience entailed more than the political, social, and cultural malfeasance reported in these stories. For those involved in the Brigade, Brigade life – particularly under Nkrumah – offered an opportunity to form a relationship with a state that otherwise seemed alien and aloof. In so doing, they advanced their own personal and professional interests through a generational and gendered regimen that allowed many of them to come out of the organization and marry, have children, and become respected and responsible members of their communities. The Brigade in short provided these young men and women a path towards a socially respected, politically conceived adulthood as they and their communities adjusted to the often disquieting realities of life under Nkrumahist and later military rule.
