INTRODUCTION
This paper seeks to contribute to a growing literature on the politicisation of citizenship and ethnicity in post-colonial Africa.Footnote 1 Although this topic has retained scholars' interest since the 1970s, when ethnic politics began to threaten Africa's fragile pluralistic nation-states (Young Reference Young1993, Reference Young, Guibernau and Hutchinson2001), interest has recently been refreshed by the threat of political exclusion in Africa's current wave of democratisation. As Geschiere (Reference Geschiere2009: 17) noted succinctly, ‘Throughout the continent the wave of democratisation of the early 1990s seemed initially to bring a promising turn toward political liberalisation. Yet, in many countries it inspired, quite unexpectedly, determined attempts toward closure in order to exclude certain groups from their full rights as national citizens – or at least to distinguish between citizens who “belong” and those who belong less.’
While ample empirical evidence demonstrates a salient correlation between the more recent surge for democratic rule and the politics of exclusion, attempts to exclude others from the benefits of citizenship are often sharpened by economic factors. Africa's precipitous economic decline during the 1980s was made even more critical by the policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that imposed restrictions on public expenditure on social and economic services in order to facilitate payment of foreign debts. Structural Adjustment Programmes imposed on African nations by these institutions compounded already difficult economic situations and thus intensified competition for shrinking resources. In this context, people of foreign provenance became the victims of economic stagnation. This helps to explain the resort to a politics of exclusion pursued by nations that had earlier enjoyed economic success.
Ghana's struggles to create a stable pluralistic society provide a good example of the interplay between economic imperatives and the politics of exclusion. Although Ghana was a major recipient of colonial labour migration, and was among the first to experience major tensions associated with the creation of the type of pluralistic society that reflects a more modern concept of citizenship, scholars tend to ignore the country when discussing issues of ethnicity or politicisation of citizenship. For example, there are no chapters specifically on Ghana in two major recently edited volumes on migration and citizenship in Africa (Coquery-Vidrovitch et al. Reference Coquery-Vidrovitch, Goerg, Mande and Rajaonah2003; Dorman et al. Reference Dorman, Hammett and Nugent2007). This is also true for Peter Geschiere's important book referred to above, and Jeffrey Herbst's (Reference Herbst2000, ch. 8) theoretically influential book on state and political authority in Africa, in which the politics of citizenship is discussed in detail. Yet Ghana is hardly impervious to the politics of inclusion and exclusion that has swept across the continent.
The following analysis explores not only the processes by which foreign provenance has emerged as a tool of political manipulation since independence, and how it has been pursued by Ghanaian politicians seeking political leverage, but also the processes through which people of foreign provenance sought inclusion into Ghana's political landscape. Focusing on migrants' struggles for acceptance as Ghanaians, the paper highlights the processes by which they transformed a shared perception of marginalisation as aliens into a political asset after a botched attempt to deport them in 1969–70. Drawn together by a locally constructed diaspora culture as well as through fear of another deportation, this group has evolved into a powerful political force capable of deciding political outcomes in tightly contested elections. Analysing the processes by which the politics of citizenship was constructed and contested in the Ghanaian political landscape thus highlights the tensions between provisions in positive law and popular perceptions of citizenship. I argue further that these tensions have been resolved through a combination of non-violent political activism pursued by the migrant population, and the perception among Ghanaian politicians that the migrant community represents a critical ‘vote bank’ that must be harnessed to ensure victory during highly contested elections.
The campaign leading to Ghana's 2008 election provides an example of the importance of this ‘vote bank’ to Ghanaian politicians, and thus sets the stage for examining a consistent pattern in the politicisation of Ghanaian citizenship. It was alleged during the campaign that the presidential candidate for the National Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Arkuffo-Addo, had threatened to deport the people of the Zongo (the generic name for areas inhabited by immigrants in Ghanaian towns) if he won the election. This allegation was enough to dissuade the majority of the Zongo community from voting for NPP candidates, including those for whom they had voted in previous elections. Nor was this the first time the NPP had lost an election probably owing to rumours that the party would expel foreigners. It is also generally believed that the NPP lost the 1996 election to the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in part because of rumours that the party's leader and presidential candidate – the late renowned historian, Professor Adu Boahen – had threatened to deport people of the Zongo if he won the election. Threatened and humiliated by this rejection of their citizenship despite constitutional provisions that granted them Ghanaian nationality, Zongo residents voted overwhelmingly for the NDC, even though many would have preferred to vote for NPP candidates.
Recognising that losing the ‘Zongo vote’ might negatively affect NPP candidates, party leaders frantically campaigned to refute the allegation, but without much success. For example, Mr Ofosu Asamoah, the incumbent parliamentary candidate for the Kade Constituency in the Eastern Region, found it politically crucial to hold his final campaign at Kade Zongo in order to assure residents of this community that his party would not deport people of foreign ancestry. He declared at the rally that the Aliens Compliance Order, which deported immigrants in 1969–70 (discussed below), ‘belonged to history and that since the NPP came to power in 2001 no such expulsions took place’. He further reminded them that the NPP holds ‘aliens’ in ‘high esteem’ and ‘that was why it selected Alhaji Aliu Mahama as vice president from 2001 to date’ (Ghana News Agency, 6.12.2008). Most political analysts would agree that the NPP's narrow loss to the NDC was due to its failure to obtain significant Zongo votes. Aware of the importance of the Zongo vote during the 2000 election, the NPP presidential candidate John A. Kufour avoided any remarks that might offend Zongo residents, and even selected Aliu Mahama as his running mate. Aliu Mahama is a Dagomba from Yendi, but he is also believed to have some Hausa family connections. Kufour won the confidence of some Zongo residents and, indeed, won the election.Footnote 2 At the climax of the 2008 campaign, many FM radio stations and internet chat zones provided forums for Ghanaians to vent their anger or show support for constitutional provisions that recognised the citizenship of people of foreign provenance whose parents or grandparents were born in the country prior to independence. The debates demonstrated the contradictions between the legal provisions of citizenship and the growing popular resentment against such citizenship laws.
ISLAM IN GHANA
Because the people of the Zongo are mostly Muslims, a brief overview of the history of Islam in Ghana is crucial in foregrounding our subsequent discussions on political and economic contests between northern Ghanaian Muslims and their co-religionists from other parts of the sub-region. Although most of what today is called Ghana had been engaged in commercial activities with Muslim merchants since the fifteenth century, only the north could be considered Islamised at the time of the colonial conquest (Levtzion Reference Levtzion1968; Levtzion & Fisher Reference Levtzion and Fisher1987; Trimingham Reference Trimingham1954: 19; Wilks Reference Wilks2002; Wilks et al. Reference Wilks, Levtzion and Haight1987). Some northern ethnic groups, for example, Dagomba, Gonja, Wala, and Mamprusi, converted to Islam as early as the sixteenth century, when they came into contact with Mande and Soninke merchants (also called Djula) from what is known today as Mali. By the nineteenth century, Hausa merchants from northern Nigeria had also extended their commercial activities to Ghana, and in the process continued the Islamic propagation that had been begun earlier by Djula traders. Through these processes, Islam became the main religion and culture of a significant portion of the urban population of the north. Intermarriage between the traders and indigenous people facilitated integration, and created a hybrid Islamic culture that bears elements of both Mande and Hausa customs.
While trade contributed to the Islamisation of the north, the proselytising merchants failed to Islamise the south, which mostly comprised Akan-speaking people, despite centuries of commercial relations. Rather, Akan rulers allowed Muslim merchants and clerics to settle in areas designated as Muslim quarters, from which they traded with the indigenous population and provided spiritual services (divination and charms) to political elites (Depuis Reference Depuis1824; Owusu-Ansah Reference Owusu-Ansah1983). As a result of their isolation in Muslim-migrant settlements, these elites came to represent a category of outsiders, distinguishable by their religion, culture, commercial success and putatively magical powers.
These settlements expanded rapidly during the colonial period. The vibrant colonial economy of southern Ghana (Gold Coast) centred on labour-intensive mining and cocoa farming, which attracted new migrants from the north (Northern Territories); from other British colonies, especially Nigeria; and from the neighbouring French colonies of Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Niger, Togo, Dahomey (now Benin), and the French Soudan (now Mali). Most of these migrants were Muslims who shared the common culture of West Africa's savannah climate zone. Their common physical features, religion, and customs distinguished them from the indigenous southern populations. Their distinct identity was reinforced by their concentration in residential areas which were carved out for them by colonial authorities and indigenous rulers who recognised the migrants' need for separate living space, where they could practice their religion away from indigenous religious practices and customs. These areas came to be known as Zongo, from the Hausa language, which became the community's lingua franca due to the dominance of Hausa clerics and Qur'anic school teachers in Muslim institutions.
During the early period of settlement, therefore, the diaspora Muslim/savannah cultural identity and the community that evolved around it facilitated sojourn in a foreign land. New arrivals often found a well-established community to settle in, and non-Muslim migrants found it expedient to convert to Islam in order to benefit from the community's fraternal resources and networks (Grindal Reference Grindal1973). Although the various ethnic groups competed among themselves for economic opportunities, and for political and religious positions within a particular Zongo community or ethnic group, they largely saw themselves as a community united by a common faith. Islam and the Hausa language defined the relationship between members of any Zongo community as well as between themselves and the non-Muslim indigenous population. For indigenous southern Ghanaians, the migrants constituted a homogenous group, and were collectively called ‘Muslims’, ‘Hausa’ or ‘immigrants’ (nhohuo in Akan).
This apparent or perceptive cohesiveness of the group led Akans to describe them as ntafuo (literally ‘twins’, but implying fraternal bonding or, in popular usage, outsiders). The host society admired them for their hard work and feared their putative supernatural powers and collective responses to external threats, but also considered their customs and religion eccentric. For their part, the migrant community avoided direct social interactions with the indigenous community, whom they considered non-believers. Yet the two communities co-existed and interacted with each other peacefully. By the time of Ghana's independence in 1957, most of these migrants and their offspring had lost connections with their places of origin through extended stay or because they were born in the colony, and thus Ghana became their new and permanent home.
PRE-INDEPENDENCE PARTY POLITICS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF MIGRANT-MUSLIM POLITICAL IDENTITY
The starting point of a political identity for Zongo Muslims can be located in the pre-independence party politics of the 1950s. In 1948, Zongo leaders of Accra founded the Muslim Association as a community organisation that would assist them in claiming government support to rebuild their homes, which were devastated by the 1948 earthquake. To ensure that their interests were served by the colonial government, they sponsored candidates for municipal elections in Accra and Kumasi, and these candidates went on to win a number of municipal council seats in these two largest cities of the Gold Coast.
The Gold Coast's political landscape was changing rapidly between 1948 and 1956. As the colony, now united with the Northern Territories, moved closer to independence, regional identities began to shape political configurations and identities of newly founded political parties. The National Liberation Movement and its predecessor, the United Gold Coast Convention, came to be dominated by Ashanti people, while the Northern People's Party (NPP) derived support primarily from the north. Only Kwame Nkrumah's Convention People's Party (CPP) transcended regional affiliations and drew significant support from all regions. Hoping for a secured place in the post-colonial state, some Zongo leaders transformed the Muslim Association into a political party and formed the Muslim Association Party (MAP) in 1953, becoming the only party bearing a religious identity. However, despite its Islamic base many Zongo residents – especially the second generation who called themselves yankasa, meaning ‘citizens’ in Hausa, or literally ‘those born in the territory’ – disregarded it and supported the CPP. Northern Muslims also ignored the MAP's Islamic appeal and leaned toward either the CPP or the NPP. Other indigenous Muslims not resident in the Zongo, including Ga Muslims (people of Accra), Fante, and Ashanti, supported either the CPP or the Ashanti/Akan-dominated National Liberation Movement (Allman Reference Allman1991). The MAP's Islamic appeal was thus disregarded by the majority of Muslims, for whom religious identity seemed irrelevant in the prevailing political climate. Weakened by the foreign origin of its founders, and lacking Western-educated elites or unanimous support from Muslims, the MAP was destined to become a political nuisance that would shape Ghanaian politicians' perceptions of both the political clout and the fragility of Zongo Muslims.
The awareness that Zongo Muslims could act as spoilers in the impending elections of 1956 led Kwame Nkrumah to personally solicit their support. He appointed a number of Zongo ethnic leaders who supported the CPP to the vague position of ‘chief of propaganda’ (Rouch Reference Rouch1956: 58–9). The responsibility of the chief of propaganda included ensuring the loyalty of his followers to the CPP, and encouraging them to go to the polls on election day. Like Nkrumah, leaders of the Ashanti-led NLM openly solicited the support of Zongo leaders, and even proposed a merger with the MAP in an attempt to prevent Nkrumah from winning any significant constituencies in Ashanti during the 1956 election.
However, foreign provenance and the inability to forge a common political agenda also exposed the fragility of Zongo people, and allowed politicians to intimidate them into pursuing a desired political behaviour. Back in 1953, when the MAP appeared to threaten CPP dominance in Accra and Kumasi, Nkrumah went as far as threatening to expel those leaders who continued to mix religion with politics (Allman Reference Allman1991). Concerned that the various Zongo communities scattered throughout Ashanti territory might cause the NLM to lose strategic parliamentary seats to the CPP during the 1956 election, the Asantehene invited Kumasi Zongo leaders to his palace on 15 April 1956, and advised them not to obstruct the NLM's victory in Ashanti territory. He reminded them that they were migrants living in Ashanti, and must therefore show gratitude to their host by voting for the NLM. The Hausa chief, Amadu Baba, who was also the leader of the MAP in Kumasi, understood the threat when he responded, ‘It is our earnest desire to continue to cooperate with the Kumasi State Council and to lend our support’ (ibid.: 20). At the end of the election, Nkrumah's CPP won a clear majority. The MAP, however, won only one parliamentary seat in the north, where personal popularity rather than the party's strength led to the candidate Alhaji Usman's victory (Allman Reference Allman1991; Balogun Reference Balogun1987; Bennet Reference Bennet1954; Rouch Reference Rouch1956).Footnote 3 These pre-independence political activities fragmented Zongo communities, especially in Accra and Kumasi where political rallies often ended in violence. The division was so deep that even mosques came to be identified either with ‘Islam’ (the MAP slogan) or CPP.
GHANAIAN NATIONALITY AND ZONGO-MIGRANT IDENTITY IN THE FIRST REPUBLIC (1957–1966)Footnote 4
In formulating Ghana's post-colonial citizenship as part of reconstituting the colonial state into an independent modern democracy, Nkrumah's government modified the British model to suit the nation's peculiar situation. The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act of 1914 had divided residents of the colony and the Northern Protectorate between ‘natives’, ‘subjects’ and ‘migrants’. ‘Natives’ referred to the indigenous population, while ‘subjects’ designated immigrants from other English colonies. Both subjects and natives enjoyed the same privileges and responsibilities, including British citizenship (Mabogunje Reference Mabogunje1972: 122). For instance, as British subjects, Nigerians in the Gold Coast enjoyed the same rights and privileges as indigenes. On the other hand, the law designated migrants from the neighbouring French colonies as immigrants or ‘aliens’ who were subject to expulsion from the colony if they were considered a threat to public order (West Africa, 18.12.1954: 1108; 25.12.1954: 1203). The 1914 Act was replaced by the British Nationality Act of 1948, which conferred citizenship on all British subjects who had not acquired citizenship of another country.Footnote 5 The 1948 Act changed neither the status of aliens from French colonies, nor that of British subjects from other British colonies. However, at the time of Ghana's independence in 1957, people of the Gold Coast lost their status as British subjects and thus their quasi-citizenship, because the law did not recognise dual citizenship.Footnote 6 While individuals from non-independent British West Africa technically remained British subjects, those who accepted Ghanaian nationality could no longer claim to be such. In this context, the status of immigrants from French colonies and their offspring remained to be decided by the new government, who could either grant them Ghanaian nationality or maintain their classification as aliens.
The first bill deliberated by the new independent parliament was the Ghana Nationality Bill, which became the Ghana Nationality Act (Act No. 1) in May 1957. Under this law, an individual was considered a citizen of Ghana if one of his/her parents or grandparents were born in Ghana. The initial assumption was that second-generation migrants (that is, those who were born in the colony before it became independent) were considered citizens. Immediately after this act came into effect, the government announced the deportation of Uthman Lardan and Amadu Baba, two prominent leaders of the Muslim Association Party in Kumasi, on the grounds that they were foreigners whose continued residence threatened Ghana's national security. The government explained that the two MAP leaders were aliens who instigated public disturbances during the 1956 election and therefore must be removed from the country to safeguard public peace. Lardan and Baba appealed their joint case at the Kumasi Appeals Court on the grounds that they were born in the Gold Coast. To address loopholes in the law, parliament amended the law to add a grandfather clause, requiring the claimants to prove that their grandparents were also born in Ghana. To avoid any additional litigation on the matter, parliament also passed Act No. 19 (the Deportation Act of 1957), which legitimised the expulsion of any individual whom the government considered a threat to public order. Without waiting for the court's rulings, the government deported the two defendants to Kano, Nigeria, which was their parents' home (West Africa, 14.12.1957: 1191). By the end of 1957, the government had deported several MAP leaders and a number of Lebanese and Syrian merchants who were declared ‘threats to public order’. Chiefs Amadu Mossi (the Mossi chief in Kumasi) and Amadu Gao (the chief of Malians in Kumasi) were deported on 6 September 1957 to Burkina Faso (then Upper Volta) and Mali respectively (Schildkrout Reference Schildkrout1978: 209).Footnote 7
Act No. 19 therefore became the government's weapon of selective deportation, even as Nkrumah elevated some descendants of migrants to high positions in Muslim organisations, including some former members of the MAP.Footnote 8 With this selective deportation, Nkrumah initiated the construction of the ‘alien’ identity in post-colonial Ghana, which was to be expressed in both popular and formal discourses.
The alien identity was further solidified when, in 1963, the CPP government passed the Aliens Act, which required all foreigners to obtain residence permits before accepting employment or engaging in commercial activities.Footnote 9 Though the government did not enforce the law, it placed people of foreign provenance (regardless of the length of their sojourn in Ghana) in a state of apprehension until the overthrow of the Nkrumah's government in February 1966. As Niara Sudarkasa (Reference Sudarkasa, Shack and Skinner1979: 162) rightly pointed out, Nkrumah's selective deportations of immigrants and the ‘laws under which they were effected, signalled the beginning of a legal transition in the status of the population of foreign origins in Ghana from that of “strangers” to that of “aliens”’. In most pre-colonial West African societies, a ‘stranger’ was equivalent to a guest, who customarily enjoyed the respect and generosity of the host society. The word ‘stranger’ (ohohuo in Akan, baako in Hausa, for example) had a positive connotation and imposed customary obligations on the host to protect the guests, as long as these complied with the host community's customs and laws. On the other hand, the word ‘alien’ derived from the colonial discourse of exclusion from the privileges of citizenship. As the word came to be employed in post-colonial political discourse, it acquired additional pejorative connotations, implying an imposter whose continued residence in the country was contested or even detested. Unable to claim a village or town within Ghana's territory as an ancestral home, the alien remained in the country only with the permission of the government, regardless of length of sojourn or place of birth.
By the late 1960s, aliens had become a specific category of Ghana's population whose continuous residence depended not on legal provisions, but on good political behaviour. On the popular front, indigenous Ghanaians applied the word ‘alien’ to anyone who lived in the Zongo, dressed like a Muslim, and spoke Hausa (Kobo Reference Kobo1999). However, the indiscreet application of the term ‘alien’ to all Muslims placed northern Ghanaian Muslims who shared the Zongo identity in a difficult position, because they were indigenous Ghanaians and therefore did not want to be classified as aliens. Yet in the south, the diaspora culture and lingua franca had obliterated the difference between immigrants and indigenous northern Muslims. I address the effects of this ambivalence below.
FROM ‘ALIENS’ TO ‘NON-INDIGENOUS’: THE GOVERNMENT OF THE NATIONAL LIBERATION COUNCIL AND ZONGO POLITICAL IDENTITY
Keenly aware of immigrants' anxiety over possible expulsion during the latter part of the Nkrumah era, and seeking to win the support of the Zongo community, the National Liberation Council (NLC), which overthrew Nkrumah's regime, passed the Nationality Decree of 1967. This decree specifically granted citizenship to all persons born in Ghana (The Ghanaian Times, 12.6.1967: 1). Yet, within a year, the NLC government repealed the law with Legislative Instrument 553 of 1968, which required non-indigenous people to obtain residence permits before either accepting employment in Ghana or participating in commercial activities (West Africa, 2.10.1968: 1445).
The passing of this law resulted from an anti-immigrant sentiment that had been developing since the 1950s among some indigenous Ghanaians who were seeking leverage in their competition with well-established merchants, mostly of foreign provenance. This growing sentiment led Denkyi-Awere, an Ashanti businessman, to campaign against the immigrants' alleged dominance in the commercial sector since the early 1950s. While Nkrumah's government ignored Denkyi-Awere's campaign, the passage of Legislative Instrument 553 revived it. Denkyi-Awere founded the National Crusade for the Protection of Ghanaian Enterprises to mobilise indigenous Ghanaians to take control of the country's commercial sector away from non-indigenous people. The ‘Crusade’ encouraged indigenous Ghanaians to create indigenous organisations, independent of the existing trade organisations dominated by non-indigenes. With this encouragement, the indigenous members of the Ghana Manufacturers' Association seceded and founded the Indigenous Manufacturers' Association in 1968, leaving the former organisation to aliens. Similarly, indigenous Ghanaian members of the Ghana Butchers Association broke away and founded the Indigenous Butchers Association (Addo Reference Addo1974; Peil Reference Peil1971: 212). In each case, indigenous Ghanaians argued that the original organisations were dominated by aliens. The case of the Butchers Association is of particular interest because most of its members were Muslims, and non-indigenous Muslims maintained a monopoly over every aspect of the trade, from selling live animals to butchering and selling the carcasses.
Interestingly, from 1968 the word ‘indigenous’ replaced ‘alien’ as the key term in the popular and legal discourse of Ghanaian nationality. ‘Indigenous’ became the defining characteristic of a ‘true Ghanaian’, based on claims to ancestral provenance within the country's territorial space, in contrast to ‘others’ whose claims derived from ambiguous and constantly changing legal provisions. ‘Indigenous’ represented de facto nationality, in contrast to the de jure citizenship offered to aliens by positive law, which could be annulled by the government. ‘Indigenous’ reinforced citizenship, and rendered it supra-legal in order to justify the exclusion of individuals of foreign provenance from its benefits. The driving force behind this indigenisation process was the decline of Ghana's economy, which started in the late 1960s and created intense competition over diminishing resources. But it also arose from the emerging commercial elites who found the commercial sector saturated by individuals of foreign ancestral origin, including Syrians and Lebanese.
BACK TO ‘ALIENS’: THE ALIENS COMPLIANCE ORDER AND THE SOLIDIFICATION OF THE ‘ALIEN’ IDENTITY
The summer of 1969 was both an important watershed in Ghanaian politics and a crucial historical moment in the evolution of the citizenship status of the people of the Zongo. After three years in power, the military government organised an election to transfer power to a civilian regime. During the campaign, it became evident that Ghana's political landscape continued to reflect ethnic and regional affiliations. Among the political parties of the 1950s, only the National Liberation Movement (NLM), renamed the Progress Party, re-emerged. Nkrumah's Convention People's Party had been disqualified from contesting the election because all former members of that party had been barred from politics. The Northern People's Party disappeared permanently after Nkrumah's banning of political parties, and the declaration of Ghana as a one-party state in 1961. The MAP and other minor parties were not reincarnated. The two leading political parties were the Progress Party (PP) of the renowned Oxford sociologist Dr Kwasi Abrifa Busia, and the National Alliance of Liberals (NAL) founded by Mr G. A. Gbedemah, a former minister of finance in Nkrumah's regime. These drew the bulk of their support from their founders' ethnic groups: Akan supported Busia, while Ewes overwhelmingly supported Gbedemah.Footnote 10 Among Zongo people, old cleavages re-emerged. Because they were allowed to vote despite the series of laws passed earlier to deny them Ghanaian citizenship, the Zongo was once again fragmented along the political cleavages of the 1950s. In general, CPP loyalists leaned toward Gbedemah's NAL, while the former members of the MAP supported Dr Busia's Progress Party. At the height of the campaign, it was rumoured that people of foreign origins would be deported after the election. The leaders of both the PP and the NAL assured the migrant population, now clearly in their second and third generations, that they would not be expelled.
The election was held throughout the country on 29 August 1969. On 31 August, even before the official transfer of power, a preliminary meeting of the new parliamentarians hastily passed its first law, the Nationality Act.Footnote 11 Under this law, only those who were married to indigenous Ghanaians or who were the children of such a relationship could claim Ghanaian nationality. The law thus denied an overwhelming majority of migrants and their descendants the right to Ghanaian citizenship. In November 1969, the Government of the Second Republic passed the Aliens Compliance Order, which gave non-indigenous people two weeks to acquire residence permits or to leave the country (West Africa, 3.2.969: 1526). Unable to obtain resident permits within such a short time, especially by those living in the rural areas, some frantically headed towards the borders of their parents or grandparents' countries of origin, abandoning their properties or disposing of them far below their values. Besides, only 40,000 resident permits were issued between November 1969 and June 1970, which further demonstrates the difficulties of obtaining these permits in the first instance (Peil Reference Peil1971: 206).
In a familiar explanation for expelling foreigners, the government blamed immigrants for Ghana's economic and social problems, especially high unemployment and rising criminal activities. It explained that based on the 1960 population census, there were about 1 million immigrants in Ghana (comprising about 12·3% of the population), of whom the majority (800,000) came from other parts of West Africa (Census 1969: Table 26). Despite their relatively small population, they dominated both the labour market and the commercial sector at the expense of indigenous people. The government argued that most butchers, small-scale traders, diamond prospectors, mine workers and public construction labourers were aliens, living and working in the country illegally. Margaret Peil (Reference Peil1974: 371) commented: ‘All of the country's ills were blamed on aliens, and citizens were urged to seek them out to be sure that they had left. The front pages of the newspapers were filled each day with the results of pre-dawn “swoops” and lorries being loaded for the trip to the border. Letters to the editor(s) [of local newspapers] were mostly complaints about aliens.’
Empirical evidence supports the argument that migrants indeed dominated the labour market. During the colonial period, southern Ghanaians shunned menial labour, preferring the more lucrative cocoa farming (where a bulk of the work was done by migrants), large-scale hauling of merchandise and public administration. Similarly, they left petty trading, which was not very profitable, to immigrants. It was also widely known that people of foreign origin (primarily Yoruba, Zerma and Lebanese) were involved in diamond and gold prospecting and, sometimes, illegal exports of these precious metals (Mabogunje Reference Mabogunje1972). However, rapid urbanisation and the persistent decline in the price of agricultural produce in the 1960s, along with the expansion of educational opportunities throughout the country during the Nkrumah regime, precipitated the emigration of young men and women from rural areas to the urban centres, as they searched for wage employment at a time when public employment had been either saturated or curtailed due to budget deficits. Given the limited employment opportunities in the urban areas during this period, these new internal migrants seemed willing to accept any available employment. However, they could not compete with the non-indigenous population that had effectively entrenched itself in these sectors (Peil Reference Peil1974: 209).
THE DEPORTATION AND A NEW FRICTION BETWEEN INDIGENOUS AND NON-INDIGENOUS MUSLIMS
I argued above that economic factors motivated the deportation order. Nowhere was this more clearly evident than in the aftermath of the deportation, in the hostile relationship that developed between indigenous Ghanaian Muslims and their co-religionists from other parts of West Africa, with whom they shared the diaspora cultural identity described earlier. Immediately after the announcement of the deportation order, some aspiring northern Ghanaian traders pressured people of foreign origins to hand their businesses over to them, because the Deportation Act and the Ghanaian Business Promotion Act of 1968 had withdrawn the rights of non-indigenous people to trade in the country (Ahooja-Patel Reference Ahooja-Patel and Amin1974: 175; Peil Reference Peil1974: 201). In Koforidua (capital of the Eastern Region), for example, the two groups clashed over the ownership of the meat market. Though Hausa had built and operated the facility for several decades, some indigenous Muslims from the north argued that as aliens the Hausa butchers no longer had the right to operate in the market (The Ghanaian Times, 9.6.1970). In Bawku (Upper East Region), government officials gave non-indigenous butchers only one week to hand over their stalls to Ghanaian ‘citizens’ (Peil Reference Peil1974: 226–7). On 3 December 1969, the government issued a stronger directive further banning non-indigenous people from ‘petty trading and elementary buying and selling which [require] no special skills’ (The Ghanaian Times, 3.2.969: 1). A careful examination of the government's directives supporting the position of northern Muslims suggests that the deportation sought to provide new economic opportunities to northerners who had been neglected in colonial economic development, and migrants became the culprits. As new commercial elites emerged in the first decades of independence, they found the commercial sector dominated by non-indigenous people.
The deportation also emboldened indigenous Muslims to attempt to take over the leadership of Muslim religious institutions hitherto dominated by non-indigenous people, primarily Hausa. After the fragmentation of Muslim communities in the wake of the political activities of the 1950s, Nkrumah had encouraged the formation of the Ghana Muslim Representative Council to promote Muslims' interests and to coordinate Islamic activities (GMRC 1958). However, this institution was immediately opposed by some indigenous Muslims who reasoned that Nkrumah was perpetuating the historical dominance of migrants over indigenous Muslims in Islamic affairs (Schildkrout Reference Schildkrout1974). Consequently, the indigenous Muslims of Kumasi founded a branch of the Ghana Muslim Mission (GMM) in 1958 to represent their interests (Samwini Reference Samwini2006: 82–3).Footnote 12 The GMM in Kumasi explicitly excluded non-indigenous Muslims from its membership, though not all indigenous Muslims accepted its claims to represent them.Footnote 13 Most of the members of the GMM were converts from among the indigenous southern ethnic groups (Ga, Ashanti and Fante), who did not live in Zongo communities, though some northern Muslims threw their lot in with them because they shared a common identity as indigenous Muslims. The GMM offered both groups the opportunity to undermine the hegemony of non-indigenous people in Islamic affairs. By affiliating with the GMM and rejecting the legitimacy of the Ghana Muslim Representative Council, some northern Muslims formalised their separation from the diaspora Muslim cultural identity that they had earlier shared with the non-indigenous Muslims (Kobo Reference Kobo1999; Pobee Reference Pobee1993).Footnote 14 They now insisted on being called Ghanaians, even if they lived in the Zongo.
The GMM, which was banned by Nkrumah in 1959, re-emerged after 1966 to inspire an internal coup against the Hausa domination of Muslim affairs by supporting some northern Muslims who sought to take over the positions of imams of regional central mosques from aliens. One of these cases in Kumasi has been studied extensively by Enid Schildkrout. In this second largest city of Ghana, Hausa had always been selected as the imam of the Kumasi central mosque; but in 1969, Dagomba and other indigenous Muslims argued that the position was not a bona fide property of any particular linguistic group. Insisting that knowledge, rather than ethnic origin, should determine who occupied that position, members of the GMM demanded that the position be opened to other qualified contenders. They then presented their candidate, whom they argued was not only better qualified, but was a Ghanaian. In her study of this controversy, Schildkrout (Reference Schildkrout1974: 131) notes that people of Kumasi had regarded the imamate as ‘a traditionally Hausa office’, which the latter guarded jealously. The involvement of a powerful organisation such as the GMM exacerbated long-standing mosque disputes, as it encouraged indigenous Muslims to subvert Hausa dominance in the position of imams in the central mosques of several regional capitals (Kobo Reference Kobo1999).
The Aliens Compliance Order thus brought to the fore a simmering resentment against Hausa/migrant dominance in Islamic affairs and the commercial sector. How did Hausa attain this dominance? As a result of their experiences in Northern Nigeria, British colonialists considered Hausa to be more knowledgeable about Islam. They also considered Hausa to be more effective community leaders and commercial elites. Several studies of Hausas in Kumasi, for example, convinced British administrators that Hausa had settled in southern Ghana longer than any other ethnic group (Depuis Reference Depuis1824). Considering this alleged long-term residence among the indigenous populations, along with the favourable colonial attitude toward Hausas' administrative and commercial skills, British administrators often elevated Hausa over other ethnic groups. Though colonial administrators also encouraged the formation of ethnic leaders (tribal headmen in British colonial parlance), a Hausa was often selected to be the head of all the ethnic headmen. The Sarkin Zongo (chief of a Zongo community) was almost always a Hausa, and acted as the liaison between the migrant community and the local British administration. This favouritism, along with the large number of Hausa Qur'anic scholars, allowed Hausa to entrench themselves in Zongo political and religious leadership.
It is difficult to assess the success or failure of the deportation exercise due to lack of reliable data. According to official estimate, 213,750 foreigners left the country (Adomako-Sarfoh Reference Adomako-Sarfoh, Amin and Forde1974: 138). If the 1960 census estimate that there were about 574,000 foreign-born individuals in the country is accurate (which is doubtful given that most people would not identify themselves as foreign-born), about half of the population of migrants left the country. This estimate may not include those who were born in the country. In general, the police focused on petty traders in the rural areas for arrest and deportation, or simply for harassment, extortion and bribery. Many employers also obtained residence permits for their workers. Even the government offered residence permits to many of its employees who were in public construction and other menial jobs, because it was not clear that the indigenous population would accept such positions if the immigrants were expelled. Some employers, especially cocoa farmers who needed the services of seasonal workers, also ignored the expulsion order.
In the urban centres of the south, however, most individuals born in Ghana refused to leave on the grounds that they were born in the country, or because their parents were Ghanaians from the north, and public officials had to leave them alone because they could not verify such claims. In other words, the diaspora cultural identity shared with northern Ghanaians allowed many to escape deportation by claiming to belong to one of the northern ethnic groups. In some cases, extended kinship and marriage ties legitimised claims to be Ghanaian, not only by right-of-birth in Ghana, but also through other relatives connected to indigenous Ghanaians. While their inability to speak northern languages made it difficult for public officials to verify the claims of citizenship made by individuals of obvious foreign provenance, the absence of national identity cards and a poor or absent birth-record registry compounded the government's inability to enforce the deportation order. Moreover, the deportation targeted the mining towns, where foreigners were suspected of engaging in illegal diamond and gold prospecting. Many of these actually left only to return after the suspension of the deportation in 1972 (discussed below). One of those who experienced the deportation described his experience:
Within three weeks, what used to be a multi-ethnic community simply disintegrated and neighbours headed in different directions never to see each other again. Only death was known to be so divisive. Within three weeks, individuals who were once friendly neighbours and childhood friends became hostile to us and demanded we leave our properties to them. Within these three weeks, we moved from yankasa (citizens in Hausa) to baaki (foreigners or aliens in Hausa). And within those three weeks, some people lost everything that they and their parents, and in some cases their grandparents, had accumulated for decades. More concerned about our lives than our properties, many of us left whatever we could not take with us and embarked upon a journey to a destination we had only heard in our parents' conversations. On arrival in what was said to be our parents or grandparents' homelands, we were initially warmly received. But hostility soon replaced this warm reception. Here too, we became strangers, tabouse (those born abroad); unable to speak the local language and having brought very little money, we soon became a burden. One morning, after four months of sojourn in Benin, I told my wife and children that we had to return home. Ghana is home and to Ghana we returned.
(Alhaji Baako, personal communication, Akwatia, 24.7.1998)
The deportation order clearly did not solve the alien question as some public officials had envisioned. Blaming immigrants for the decline of the country's economy or for saturating the job market during a period of economic decline just seemed too facile to withstand the powerful porosity of the country's ethnic composition and emerging political culture of integration. Nonetheless, the deportation left a noticeable psychological effect on the people of the Zongo, and the ways in which they engaged in subsequent electoral politics. Further, the exercise demonstrated the ambiguity of post-colonial citizenship, because descendants of migrants soon learned they could not trust public laws to guarantee their rights to Ghanaian citizenship. In response, they constructed a more cohesive political identity that facilitated their formal integration into the post-colonial state.
While the process of indigenising Ghanaian citizenship reached a crucial threshold in the wake of the deportation order of 1969–70, the latter part of the regime of General I. K. Acheampong marked the climax of what would emerge as a Zongo/alien political identity. Unity replaced factionalism in strategising their role in Ghanaian politics, as their relationship with General Acheampong demonstrates.
GENERAL ACHEAMPONG AND ‘ALIEN’ POLITICAL IDENTITY
In January 1972, General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong overthrew the government of the Second Republic. From the beginning of his administration, General Acheampong declared his intention to protect the interests of aliens. Two weeks after the coup, he suspended the deportation exercise and announced that those traditionally considered aliens because of their foreign origins had now been given permission to work and trade in Ghana (The Ghanaian Times, 2.2.1972). With such a bold declaration, General Acheampong positioned himself as a friend of the Zongo. But he also antagonised many indigenous Ghanaians, including some individuals from the north who had welcomed the deportation order because it offered them a competitive advantage over alien Muslims. By overthrowing an Ashanti-sponsored civilian regime, Acheampong antagonised many powerful Ashanti leaders, even though he was himself an Ashanti. Since he was known to be a Nkrumah sympathiser and a former student of the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute, many Ashanti leaders saw the coup as an attempt to return Kwame Nkrumah to power (Adjei Reference Adjei1994: 286). For this, Ashanti supporters of Busia ostracised Acheampong and questioned his legitimacy to rule Ghana by declaring him a Yoruba from south-western Nigeria – in effect, an alien.Footnote 15 By classifying him among aliens, his opponents not only disowned him, but also led him to develop a tighter patron–client relationship with Zongo leaders, to whom he offered lucrative government contracts in exchange for their political support and spiritual blessings (Pobee Reference Pobee1993: 132–4). The resilience of this patron–client relationship was tested during the 1978 Union Government referendum.
Not only did Acheampong seek to maintain the political loyalty of the Zongo, he also reinforced this loyalty by consulting Muslim spiritualists for his success and, indeed, for solutions to Ghana's myriad political and economic crises. Under constant threat from his fellow army officers who sought to overthrow him, he became increasingly dependent on occult powers (Pobee Reference Pobee1993). Furthermore, Ghana's economic woes reached a new threshold during the 1970s, when a combination of the effects of debt crises, declining export revenue, and the high cost of imported fuel (following the OPEC oil embargo along with the Sahel drought that reached Ghana between 1977 and 1978), led to shortages of food and imported consumer goods (‘essential commodities’). His pet project, ‘Operation Feed Yourself’, designed to boost the agricultural sector and to reduce Ghana's dependency on imported food, was undermined by the drought and subsequent drying of irrigation projects. Acheampong donated money and animals to the imams of various Zongo communities to organise special prayers for rain, also known as namaz-e-istesqa, which Islamic traditions permit Muslims to perform during periods of severe drought. Prayers for rain became another instrument of patronage in Acheampong's relations with the Zongo migrant community. Curiously, but not unexpectedly, Muslim clerics (mostly from the north) who were seen as part of the opposition were not invited to participate in the ritual. During this difficult time, gifts from the government were an important source of economic sustenance for unemployed Muslim clerics, who traditionally devoted their time to religious services. The drought therefore offered Acheampong another opportunity to reinforce his patron–client relationship with the Zongo Muslims. In the same vein, his alliance with the migrant Muslim community further antagonised his relationship with some indigenous Muslims for whom the Busia regime had offered an opportunity to curtail the Hausa/migrant hegemony.
By the mid 1970s, a combination of debt crises, drought, political corruption and nepotism had made the Acheampong regime unpopular. Professional organisations mobilised to demand a handover of power to a civilian regime. Rather than organise an election to transfer power, Acheampong proposed a Union Government, which he declared would solve Ghana's increasingly ethnic-centred politics. He argued that multi-party democracy does not seem to work for Ghana because it often divides the nation along ethnic cleavages. The proposed Union Government, he insisted, would allow Ghanaians to develop a sense of national belonging and collective responsibility towards effective governance.
The Union Government was to comprise appointed military officers and elected civilian legislators. Party politics was to be banished and individuals were to contest for political positions outside the framework of the political party system, which General Acheampong and his supporters claimed compromised the unity that was crucial for nation-building. Obviously, Acheampong was looking for ways to extend his stay in power. Consequently, the major professional associations rejected the proposal and insisted on transferring power to a democratically elected civilian government. Opponents of the Union Government comprised mostly the educated elites – lawyers, university students and businesspersons – along with former supporters of the Busia regime from all social categories. As the opposition became more organised, General Acheampong organised a referendum in March 1978 to assess public reception of the proposed Union Government. Because of the dominance of former Busia loyalists in the opposition, the migrant Muslim community saw the referendum as a contest between Acheampong and the civilian regime he had overthrown, a regime they now considered their adversary. The referendum turned out to be a test of Acheampong's popularity among Ghanaians. While the general public sought a return to a civilian regime, the Zongo community remained one of Acheampong's most loyal supporters. During the climax of the campaign, local imams and other religious leaders not only prayed for Acheampong's success, but also campaigned for him during public gatherings. Ghanaian newspapers carried headlines on Muslim activities in support of the proposed Union Government. For instance, the front page of the Ghanaian Times on 2 February 1978 (barely two months before the referendum) had a headline that read: ‘Moslems Pray For Nation’. The paper noted that ‘Muslims in Kumasi have said special prayers for the head of state General I. K. Acheampong, members of the Supreme Military Council [the ruling government], and the entire nation’. The report included a striking picture of the Ashanti Regional Administrative Officer and the Ashanti Regional Commander (Commander G. E. Osei), coming out of the Kumasi Central Mosque after the prayers.
Sermons during Friday prayers highlighted the impending referendum and encouraged support for the incumbent regime. Many imams referred to sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad that recommend Muslims to remain firmly united in times of crisis, to encourage their followers to remain united behind the General, who was not only destined to win, but had remained the immigrants' most dependable ally since independence (Alhaji Rashid Shaaban, 2.8.1998; 11.6.2002). The National Chief Imam of Ghana, Imam Mukhtar Abbass, openly advocated support for General Acheampong during his sermons. On 5 January 1978, he urged Muslims to vote ‘yes’ on the day of election to ensure victory for the head of state (Ghanaian Times, 6.1.1978). Born in Ghana to Hausa immigrants, Imam Abbass (who was appointed the National Chief Imam by Kwame Nkrumah, even though he had been a member of the Muslim Association Party) stressed that Acheampong was divinely chosen to govern the country, otherwise he would not have remained in power for six years despite all the failed coups attempted against him (Ghanaian Times, 6.1.1978).
In February 1978, ethnic chiefs of Zongo communities held a private conference in Accra to discuss a common position on the referendum. At the end of the conference, they unanimously agreed to maintain their support for the incumbent in order to avoid the factional politics in previous elections that had made it possible for Ghanaian politicians to manipulate their differences (Ghanaian Times, 6.2.1978). Unity now replaced political rivalry. Arguing that Acheampong's failure would result in another deportation, these leaders called on their people to ensure Acheampong's victory by going to the polls and voting for him. ‘We concluded that Acheampong's victory was our only means of avoiding another deportation. His defeat would be our demise’, one of these leaders told this writer in 1998.
Wealthy Zongo leaders also organised to ensure Acheampong's victory. Alhaji Salifu Mainkankan and Alhaji Nagayya, two wealthy merchants of Hausa origin, founded the Ghana Peace and Solidarity Council (GPSC) to facilitate the reconciliation of Muslim leaders fragmented by earlier national political contests. The GPSC became an important instrument for galvanising support among Zongo residents for the incumbent regime. The GPSC sent messages to Zongo leaders throughout the country, encouraging them to ensure their followers voted ‘yes’ in the 30 March referendum.
Women's organisations that had been rivals since the 1950s also united for the first time to support the incumbent. One of these, the Zumumchi in Accra, composed songs praising Acheampong and the way he had restored Muslims' dignity. Part of this song warned Zongo residents against an impending peril if Acheampong lost the election. ‘Vote red and you will be deported. Your house will be seized; your market stall will be taken away. Your father's labour and your labour will be lost and you will be on your way to nowhere. Vote blue and you are yarkasa [Hausa, “native daughter”].’ The song ended with a long chorus that sarcastically repeated the word Ateigeri (Hausa, literally, ‘go back to your country’). Although only a few people in the Zongo understood what the referendum meant, they did understand (or rather, were made to understand) that their fate was tied to that of the incumbent. Therefore, they voted massively for the proposal, which for them translated into Acheampong's retention of power. Their inability to read English was not an obstacle; they had been instructed to cast the blue ballot and to throw the red one in the trashcan. The blue ballot was marked ‘Yes’, and the red ballot marked ‘No’.
Thus, Muslim clerics, wealthy businessmen, women's organisations and ethnic leaders used their positions to promote General Acheampong among the people of the Zongo. The memory of the Aliens Compliance Order remained the point of reference for encouraging a massive turnout at the polls. The official result was 60·11% affirmative votes and 39·89% negative votes. Though General Acheampong is widely believed to have rigged the referendum, the people of the Zongo claimed victory for themselves and their protégé, and celebrated their new unity after two decades of political rivalry.Footnote 16
The Acheampong era thus nurtured an emerging pattern in Zongo politics that was characterised by the rejection of individuals associated with the regime that had attempted to expel Zongo residents from Ghana. Under General Acheampong, they appropriated the negative stigma associated with being aliens to encourage collective support for a friendly regime. Moreover, the rumours of impending deportation during the 1969 election turned out to be a reality; from that point on, they took such rumours or threats of deportation seriously. The expulsion of immigrants in 1969 thus changed the political strategies of Zongo residents. The unity forged to support Acheampong during the 1978 referendum characterised the new political strategy of solidarity during subsequent national elections. On their part, many politicians saw Zongo residents as a crucial voting bloc that could not be taken for granted. Although their overall population was, and remains, relatively small, the clusters of Zongo communities in many constituencies throughout the country gave them the strategic advantage of determining the outcome of a tightly contested election.
The 1969 debacle inadvertently facilitated the integration of the migrant Muslim community into Ghana's political culture. It is possible that Kwame Nkrumah and leaders of the National Liberation Movement exaggerated the numerical strength of the migrant community. However, it is certain that the political vibrancy of the Zongo Muslim community, and its unwavering loyalty to political patrons, made it attractive to politicians. This was clear to Acheampong too, who considered the loyalty of the Zongo community a crucial political asset. Yet the consolidation of the citizenship claims of the descendants of the migrant population was facilitated by the intensification of Ghana's economic problems during the 1970s and 1980s. It was during this period of economic stagnation that Ghanaians flocked to Nigeria to take advantage of that country's economic growth, following its burgeoning oil revenues in the wake of the OPEC oil embargo. The ‘Agege exodus’, as Ghanaians termed their search for economic refuge in a country whose citizens had been deported from Ghana less than a decade earlier, marked the crucible of Ghana's economic woes. While more than a million Ghanaian professionals (teachers, accountants, etc.) as well as non-skilled workers concentrated in Nigeria, other West African countries including Côte d'Ivoire and Liberia also received sizable numbers of Ghanaian economic migrants. Thus, when Nigeria deported over a million Ghanaians in 1983 and quite a sizable number in 1985 when its economy could no longer sustain such a large influx of migrant workers, Ghana's economy hit rock bottom. The famine of 1983–4, which resulted primarily from the return of more than a million people at a time when the country had barely recovered from the drought of the late 1970s, provides the best evidence. With Ghanaians finding themselves guests of other African nations, along with political crises of the 1970s, resentments against people of foreign origin were muted, only to re-emerge during the political contests of the 1990s.
The coup of 4 June 1979, led by Flight Lieutenant J. J. Rawlings, that overthrew the Supreme Military Council headed by General Akuffo (who had ousted General Acheampong in late 1978) marked an important interlude in Ghana's politics. After a brief stay, during which three former military heads of state (Generals Afrifa, Acheampong and Akuffo, along with some of their colleagues) were executed, Rawlings organised a return to civilian rule. This brought to power Dr Hilla Limann, the only northerner to rule Ghana up to this point. Limann enjoyed the virtually unanimous support of the Zongo, along with non-Muslim northerners. While lacking charisma and virtually unknown in Ghanaian politics until his nomination by the People's National Party (PNP), which was founded by a former Nkrumaist Alhaji Umar Igala, Dr Limann did not have to work as hard as previous politicians to win the support of the Zongo; that support had already been well established by the Muslim background and popularity of his patron, Igala, who had been disqualified from participating in the election. The name Limann (which coincides with the Muslim spiritual title of ‘Liiman’, a local variant of the Arabic ‘imam’) also gave the wrong impression that he too was a Muslim. At this point, following the deportation debacle and the patterns established by General Acheampong, it seemed clear that the Zongo community was leaning increasingly towards the Nkrumaists. Acheampong was widely considered a Nkrumaist. Even those Zongo residents who had earlier affiliated with the Busia/Danquah configuration through opposition to Nkrumah, or who had supported Dr Busia' People's Party in 1969, avoided the Popular Front Party founded by former allies of Dr Busia during the 1979 election. Limann's PNP won 71 of the 140 legislative seats, while the PFP won only 42 seats. The remaining seats went to smaller parties and independent candidates.
This new pattern of Zongo voting, characterised by a preference for the Nkrumaists, had been consolidated by the time Flt Lt Rawlings organised the election for Ghana's Fourth Republic in 1992. Rawlings had seized power from Limann on 31 December 1981, and continued his revolutionary regime until 1992, when he was elected the first president of the Fourth Republic. Though Rawlings' sympathy for the old CPP is too ambiguous for us to argue firmly that he belonged to that camp, his populist appeal and his own partially foreign background (his father was from Scotland) made him receptive to Zongo residents.
Rawlings quickly cultivated the support of the Zongo community and established a strong relationship with the National Chief Imam, Sheikh Osman Shaributu, of Hausa parentage. The alleged remark during the 1996 election by the opposition candidate, the late Professor Adu Boahen, that he would deport migrants if he won the election (referred to earlier) delivered Zongo support straight to Rawlings' doorstep. Considering such a remark an affront, many Zongo people, especially the older generation who understood the implication of that threat, mobilised support for the incumbent and considered him a ‘saviour’. Rawlings was re-elected with 57% of the popular vote and his National Democratic Congress won 133 of the 200 parliamentary seats.
I have found no written evidence that Adu Boahen made such a remark, and am therefore inclined to believe, as many in Ghana do, that the allegation was a hoax intended to allow the incumbent to harvest most of the Zongo votes. If the rumour was a political hoax intended to dissuade Zongo residents from supporting Adu Boahen and the NPP, the experience of the 1969 deportation instituted by Dr Busia's Progress Party from which the NPP evolved validated the allegations. The NPP therefore inherited the burden of its parent party in the same way that descendants of colonial labour migrants inherited the burden of foreign provenance. Although it would be very difficult for any government to issue another deportation order without risking the country's political stability (as the case of Côte d'Ivoire reminds us), Zongo residents consider any reference to their foreign provenance an affront.
* * *
Like all new nations, African nations at the time of independence had to redefine citizenship. However, the case of Africa is complicated by the nature of kinship ties and nationality based on territorial belongingness. This African notion of belongingness rooted in kinship and customary ties sometimes conflicts with the modern notion of citizenship rooted in public law (de jure citizenship). In most of Africa, de jure nationality competes with de facto nationality, which has its foundation in ancestral territorial origins, and this occasionally becomes a source of political crisis when the indigenous population seeks to limit citizenship rights to de facto nationals alone.
In West Africa, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, the two largest recipients of colonial labour migration, were confronted by this contradiction most forcefully, when the descendants of colonial labour migrants considered themselves citizens of the post-colonial state. The Ivorian political crisis of 1998–2004 was a culmination of a long history of struggle over whether or not the descendants of colonial migrants belonged to the post-colonial Ivorian state. The outbreak of anti-immigrant sentiment after the death of Houphouët-Boigny, the Ivorian president from independence in 1960 until his death in 1993, demonstrates clearly the ambiguity of constructing a post-colonial nationality that recognises the legal and public acceptance of people of foreign provenance. Pursuing pan-francophone politics of fraternity by providing economic opportunities and political influences to francophone immigrants, Houphouët-Boigny astutely prevented the escalation of anti-immigrant sentiment, which had been brewing since independence, and averted a national crisis. However, because he also neglected to extend Ivorian citizenship to non-indigenous people, even those whose parents were born in the country, the problem degenerated into a national political crisis after his death. By failing to allow descendants of the migrant population to acquire Ivorian national identity cards and travel documents, and by continuing French policies which forced people to retain their ethnic names, the Ivorian leader reinforced their foreign provenance and inadvertently laid the foundation for the politics of exclusion pursued by Ivorian leaders that culminated in civil war (Geschiere Reference Geschiere2009).
In Ghana, on the other hand, descendants of migrants appeared to have been integrated more firmly into post-colonial Ghanaian society. Although a number of government policies sought to deny them Ghanaian citizenship during the first two decades of independence, their political activism, along with legal provisions that safeguarded their suffrage, forced many Ghanaian politicians to recognise migrants' descendants' rights to citizenship. The provision of de jure citizenship in Ghanaian constitutions, rooted in modern concepts of nationality, especially the 1992 Constitution, made it difficult for popular resentment against people of foreign ancestry to escalate into a national crisis, despite the resilience of the alien stigma associated with the descendants of the migrant population. From a legal point of view, Ghana is moving closer to eliminating the alien question at the formal level. At the popular level, on the other hand, the alien question reflects the reality of the complexity of post-colonial nationality, a reality rooted in the ambiguous relationship between modern pluralistic nationality and autochthony as the sole source of national citizenship. The post-colonial state is unique in terms of the pressure to adopt and nurture a new concept of nationality that reflects its ethnic composition beyond its claims to autochthonous nationality. In this context, Ghana has made a more profound stride towards the creation of a modern pluralistic state than its neighbour and fellow recipient of colonial labour migrants, Côte d'Ivoire, where indigenisation programme only resulted in the collapse of one of West Africa's most stable states and thriving economies.
