AWI Lunch Seminar: Light For Freedom: Intentionality, Sacrifice, Propaganda and the Volta River Project

This paper examines the Volta River Project as the engine of Ghana’s pursuit of economic sovereignty following political independence. Ghana’s postcolonial government envisioned political independence as incomplete without economic independence. I argue that the economic hardship, social dislocation, and environmental damage caused by the Volta River Project were not accidental by-products of modernization, but consequences that the Convention People’s Party (CPP) government anticipated and accepted as necessary costs of achieving economic sovereignty. By analyzing reports of the Preparatory Commission, the papers of Professor Arthur Lewis, and the correspondence of Eugene Black, president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, I show that Nkrumah and the Ghanaian government were well aware of the project’s potentially destructive consequences before its implementation. I then turn to government propaganda materials that emphasized the project’s anticipated benefits while recasting its disruptive and destructive effects as necessary contributions to Ghana’s broader developmental goals. In doing so, I examine how the government presented the project to Ghanaians and sought to make its social, economic, and environmental costs acceptable to the populations expected to bear them.

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