Black Power is part of the world rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, of the exploited against the exploiter. It operates throughout the African continent, in North and South America, the Caribbean, wherever Africans and people of African descent live. It is linked with the Pan-African struggle for unity on the African continent, and with all those who strive to establish a socialist society.
Kwame Nkrumah (Reference Nkrumah2001:426)In 1968, when he wrote the above words in an essay titled “The Spectre of Black Power,” Kwame Nkrumah, the former president of Ghana, was living in Conakry, Guinea, with the Guinean president Sékou Touré. In his essay, he defines Black Power as a “world revolution” to overturn capitalism, exploitation, and racism and grounds its meaning within the struggle of oppressed people in Africa and the diaspora. Nkrumah’s engagement with political movements across the continent and abroad is well documented. What is less well studied is how Black Power, the call that came from Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1966, became part of Nkrumah’s ideology. Tied to this query is a need to understand how Ghanaians in Accra responded to the race-centered core of Black Power.
Black Power in the US was innately tied to the country’s racist past and present, while in Ghana many would claim that race was not applicable as a framework for understanding local issues. However, as both Jemima Pierre (Reference Pierre2008, Reference Pierre2012, Reference Pierre2020) and Carina Ray (Reference Ray2014, Reference Ray2015) have shown, racialization was not a novel concept or experience in Ghana. Housing, leisure, and business segregation, policies aimed at restricting interracial relationships, and the intentional hierarchical categorization according to race and skin color in the British colonial system had secured white supremacy in the Gold Coast (see also Plageman Reference Plageman2013). In response to this internalized conflict and transnational outlook, Black Power resonated with many Ghanaians, and they channeled it through political organizing, print media, cultural exchange, and music. Even if the concept of Black Power changed with the needs and goals of intellectuals at the top, Ghanaian youths were active participants in the tangible application of the concept in their own country. To young Ghanaian students, musicians, and professionals, Black Power represented liberation. Young people sought to free themselves from strict governmental control, whether under an autocratic Nkrumah government or the military regimes that followed his ouster; they also harnessed Black Power and applied it to the production of popular culture to distinguish themselves from the previous generation.
While historians have demonstrated the importance of Black Power to people of African descent in the US, Britain, and the Anglophone Caribbean, attention to the concept’s range among intellectuals and ordinary people in Africa is necessary (Joseph Reference Joseph2006, Reference Joseph2009; Ogbar Reference Ogbar2019; Johnson Reference Johnson and Adi2019; Meeks Reference Meeks, West, Martin and Wilkins2009). Fanon Che Wilkins (Reference Wilkins2007), James Meriwether (Reference Meriwether2002), Brenda Plummer (Reference Plummer2012), and Benjamin Talton (Reference Talton2019) bookend the era of Black Power and African American political engagement with Africans, while Manthia Diawara (Reference Diawara2002) and Andrew Ivaska (Reference Ivaska2011) have illustrated how people in Bamako and Dar es Salaam, respectively, practiced Black Power through their engagement with and appropriation of music, fashion, and concepts of independence. Scholars have thoroughly documented African American contributions to decolonization in Ghana and other African countries, a significant example being Kevin Gaines, author of American Africans in Ghana (Reference Gaines2006). This article addresses how intellectuals, young students, musicians, and middle-class Ghanaians harnessed the global Black Power movement to balance the void left in the country after the 1966 coup d’état that removed President Kwame Nkrumah from power. Following years of policing and imprisoning by Nkrumah’s government in response to even the hint of threat, the coup was significant beyond Ghana because it threatened the efficacy of Black leaders to bring their nations well beyond decolonization and into an era of independence and inter-African cooperation. This article provides a necessary perspective on life in postcolonial, post-Nkrumah Accra, and it shows that Black Power offered a path to cultural liberation for young Africans.
Exploring a range of written and audio sources from the 1960s through the early 1970s, including political essays, archival documents, Ghanaian and African American print media, Ghanaian soul songs, a documentary film, and interviews, this article offers both a top-down and a bottom-up analysis of the diffusion of Black Power across Accra. Ghanaian-produced sources from this period are notably difficult to access due to the destruction of documents during and after the coups (Ntewusu Reference Ntewusu2017). Digitized sources and materials produced outside of Ghana help fill the gap left by regime change and other hazards to archiving. Using popular culture and popular rhetoric, this article demonstrates how ideas move, shift, and inspire people across geography and social class.
Many Ghanaians embraced Black Power and viewed it as an effective approach to advocating for civil rights for African Americans and for ending segregation in the US, but they also tied Black Power to their own Ghanaian context of colonialism and neo-imperialism, as well as to human rights abuses in other areas of Africa. The activities of Ghanaian actors and African American visitors to Ghana were critical to expanding the reach of political concepts and strategies from the African diaspora back to Africa. Like Pan-Africanism, Black Power was harnessed globally as a uniting strategy to overcome racist, neo-imperial systems. In Ghana, Black Power made a greater impact on ordinary people and their imagination of global equality and local manifestations of justice than at the upper echelons of society, particularly after Nkrumah’s government was overthrown.Footnote 1 Looking at Black Power in Ghana, outside of its US context, also illuminates how people harnessed popular culture as a necessary mode of resistance to global racism. The popularity of soul music in Ghana, more than any other genre of music, highlights the cultural and political intersection of African Americans and West Africans.Footnote 2 Soul traveled to Ghana through imported musical recordings and through touring musicians, but it also took hold of the country thanks to longer-term residencies of other West African and African American performers. The global success of soul music empowered African Americans and Ghanaians to directly engage social justice struggles, which they often did through print and audio media. Examining soul music enables a reading of everyday engagement between Africans and the African diaspora.
The years between 1966 and 1971 in Ghana began with the coup d’état that removed Nkrumah from office and its aftermath; this period witnessed an increased presence of Americans employed by the US government to work alongside the reactionary forces that controlled the country and culminated with the epic Soul to Soul concert in Accra’s Black Star Square. In the US, the crucial period of Black Power advocacy and organizing included the assassinations of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the rising rhetoric of Black Power among young African Americans, the fallout between Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panther Party, and the dispersal of soul music across the airwaves.Footnote 3 These five years saw major changes in both Ghana and the US in the political, social, and musical arenas.
As Black Power became a heated issue in the US and as the American presence in Ghana shifted from Black expatriates in the service of Nkrumah’s Pan-African project to white and Black Peace Corps Officers and workers in nongovernmental organizations, Ghanaians honed their own understanding both of Black Power and of globally entrenched racism. The concept of Black Power became increasingly salient while it evolved in both countries in response to local concerns. In this article, Black Power is analyzed as a broad term that accounted for the assertion of social power, race-centered leadership, and self-determination by people of African descent worldwide.Footnote 4 Ghanaian politicians, journalists, students, and musicians engaged each of these facets of Black Power and contextualized them locally (and widely across Africa), ultimately aligning Black Power with Pan-Africanism. First, it is important to examine how politicians and intellectuals employed and transformed Black Power to interrogate the many opportunities through which non-elite Ghanaians engaged with Black Power. After exploring the intellectual contributions of Ghanaians to the concept of Black Power, this article examines several exchange programs between the US and Ghana and their impact on the political awareness of young Ghanaians. It then discusses soul as a Black Power-inspired musical genre which Ghanaians readily engaged with and replicated, and which offers a window into how Ghanaians read Black Power and race within a local context.
The Transformation of Black Power
The concept of Black Power changed rapidly between 1966 and 1968, but it had been used over a decade earlier by Richard Wright in his study of decolonization in the Gold Coast. While Wright used the term differently than Nkrumah and Carmichael, his Black Power saw the potential for an African country truly run by and for Black people.Footnote 5 Ultimately, the definitions share some meaning, in that they both interrogate what a society would look like with Black people in charge.
Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) described Black Power in several ways after he exclaimed it during a speech in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1966 and redefined it through the lens of Pan-Africanism following his increased engagement with West African intellectuals. For a 1966 article in Ebony magazine, Carmichael spoke with Lerone Bennett, Jr., about his definition of Black Power and why it is meaningful. He argued:
Black Power is a means for the black poor to get together, define their needs and put people in power to achieve them…. Black Power is the massed political, economic, emotional and physical strength of the black community exercised in the interest of the total black community and not in the interest of the Democratic party, the Republican party, the Negro middle-class or the individual designated to represent the black community.Footnote 6
He emphasized that this is a class struggle as much as a racial struggle; the purpose of his call was to raise up impoverished Black Americans and to give them the power to live in the US.
The role of Africans was not raised during the interview. Pan-Africanism did not factor into Carmichael’s conception of Black Power at this early stage. However, Carmichael’s definition of Black Power shifted as he encountered West Africans during his travels to England and Tanzania in 1967 and to Guinea in 1969 (Reference Carmichael and Thelwell2003:573–80, 622–23). As an immigrant to the US from Trinidad and Tobago, Carmichael was aware of the global need for sovereignty, civil rights, and a seat at the proverbial table. However, based on his experiences as a young man in New York City, and then as a student at Howard University, his understanding of race relations and inequality matured. His political thought evolved further through his relationship with Nkrumah after the 1966 coup, his partnership with the South African singer, activist, and political refugee Miriam Makeba, and the tensions that developed in his relationship with the Black Panthers, each of which influenced Carmichael to redefine Black Power through the lens of Pan-Africanism. As one of the major architects of Pan-Africanism on the African continent, Nkrumah participated in the redefinition of Black Power.
By 1968, the phrase “Black Power” had expanded into the global arena. However, Fanon Che Wilkins (Reference Wilkins2007) argues that the ideas behind the phrase showed international engagement before 1966, particularly between African American students and young people in Africa. If Black Power was about the masses organizing and advocating for policies and leadership that would improve their quality of life and provide more opportunities to succeed, then Nkrumah had been participating in this project since 1949.Footnote 7 His success came through the mass support he enjoyed among youths, workers, and intellectuals. Ever since he launched the Convention People’s Party in 1949, he had advocated for disenfranchised, impoverished, colonized peoples to unite and demand freedom (Ahlman Reference Ahlman2017). Others have shown that African American and Caribbean intellectuals had influenced Nkrumah since the 1930s. It is also well documented that he continued to interact with and take advice from diasporic Africans into the 1960s (Gaines Reference Gaines2006; Meriwether Reference Meriwether2002; Talton Reference Talton2019). With Malcolm X’s visit to Accra in 1965 on his return from his pilgrimage to Mecca, just a few months before he was assassinated, the issues of racism in the US and the threat of neo-imperialism in Ghana truly resonated with the Ghanaian masses. Black Americans visiting Ghana years later would recall that Ghanaians were still talking about Malcolm X and his assassination, and judged those they met in relation to his politics.Footnote 8 While Ghanaians were familiar with the civil rights movement and Pan-Africanism before 1966, the term and the rhetoric surrounding Black Power did not become topics of everyday conversations until at least 1968 as a result of its coverage in Ghanaian newspapers and the tours and the music of African Americans.
Nkrumah’s essay “The Spectre of Black Power,” written in 1968 but published internationally in a 1973 collection of his writings following his death, argued that Black Power is aligned with the global movement against oppression (Reference Nkrumah2001:421–28). He placed neo-imperialism in Africa and racism in the US in the same category of struggle, and he further reinforced the troubling activities of the US by claiming that its power was historically tied not only to racism but to imperialism all over the world. Nkrumah took the additional step of admonishing the American civil rights movement for its failure to speak for the African American masses through its non-violent approach and its lack of engagement with African people and culture. As a result of this failure in the US and the fear of neo-imperialism globally, Nkrumah argued in favor of armed struggle, which he believed was necessary to achieve liberation, unity, and socialism. And while Nkrumah was no longer in power in Ghana and therefore could not truly speak for the “masses,” his essay reveals that Ghanaians, even those without his status and network, could interpret and refashion Black Power rhetoric in their own context. During his time as president, Nkrumah laid the foundation for this by hosting Pan-African conferences and inviting African Americans to Ghana. Although Nkrumah was no longer in Ghana, his influence and past work remained influential in the country. Ghanaian newspapers show that the issue of racism and civil rights in the US was a global problem, not only an American one.
Several articles framed these issues such that Black Power politics were not foreign to Ghanaians by the time they were being debated in 1968. In the Weekly Spectator, formerly the newspaper of Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, journalist Emmanuel Corletey asked, “Has the Black Man no rights on Earth?” Following the assassination of Dr. King on April 6, 1968, Corletey described the racial crisis disturbing the US. This report then reprinted a 1963 speech by the late US president John F. Kennedy about segregation and equality. After reminding readers of these words and promises by Kennedy, Corletey returned to the matter of “the cancer of racial discrimination” and listed some of the atrocities in which the US had participated, including white supremacy, the Vietnam War, enslavement (and how it made America the richest nation), and other instances of violence against Black Americans. The article ended with a call to “let all human beings, especially white men…examine their conscience.”Footnote 9 Corteley was not just reporting on the assassination of an African American minister and civil rights leader but also drawing attention to the long history of racism, violence, and inequality in the US for readers in Ghana, including for Black and white Americans working in the country following the 1966 coup. While not necessarily a sympathizer of Nkrumah and certainly not an advocate of armed resistance in the US, Corteley saw the implications of this assassination and of the American presence locally as trouble for Ghana. He followed this article with another speaking directly to the ways in which racism affects people everywhere.
In an exploration of racism across the world, Corteley asked “What’s Behind the World’s Racial Strife?” in a May 1968 issue of Weekly Spectator. Footnote 10 He listed the places in Africa that were in immediate danger due to racism: South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Southwest Africa, and Rhodesia. He also provided examples of racist legislation in Europe and questioned what the United Nations would do to address racial discrimination and apartheid. Moving across the Atlantic to South America, he explained the racial antagonism between communities in Guyana and in Peru before moving to the US, where he reported on a violent clash between Black and Jewish residents. Corteley illustrated that racism was not a problem only in the US or overseas, it was also a global cancer, with negative implications for Ghana. He asked, “what are the underlying reasons for all this racial strife?” Corteley explained that white people fear that as Black people have more freedom and power, their own property, power, and lives are at risk. Ghanaians and other Black Africans with freedom and power pose a threat to white supremacy, a sentiment that echoed Carmichael’s own discussion of Black Power in Ebony in 1966. Ultimately, Corteley turned in his article to Christian teachings, reminding his readers that Christian nations should be “genuine practisers, not theoreticians, of democracy,” and that racism makes a mockery of democracy and justice.Footnote 11
While these two articles did not directly discuss Black Power, they engaged the reasons white people found it so threatening. Corteley showed that racism and global white supremacy had made some countries much more powerful than others, and that the practices and policies in those countries would have repercussions elsewhere. White supremacy, he argued, was a threat to Ghana’s sovereignty. Corteley demonstrated to his readers that an imbalance of power and practices informed by white supremacy threatened Black lives as well as white lives. Following his argument, the global north’s continuing to perpetrate racist measures and to ignore apartheid in southern Africa would lead to eruptions of racial violence around the world, and Ghanaians, therefore, would not be safe. He contended that eleven years after their independence from British rule, Ghanaians were still not free from historically embedded structural racism.Footnote 12 As Nkrumah warned from the outside of the country and Corteley from within, global white supremacy hindered Ghanaian efforts to be truly sovereign and to exercise real Black Power.
By 1968, Black Power was on the minds of many Ghanaian and American journalists, former leaders, and even American diplomats who had participated in the 1966 coup. The American magazine Jet published a short news story highlighting the former US Ambassador to Ghana, Franklin Williams. He had been a classmate of Nkrumah at Lincoln University, but he had a falling out with the Ghanaian president while stationed in the country. Williams had a change of heart as a result of his experience in Ghana.Footnote 13 He admitted that his role as a representative of the US while opposition forces and the army deposed Nkrumah showed him what Black Power really meant. While he did not specify his role in the coup, he claimed that the US made a mistake by trying to destroy a Black community. Ghanaians had been living under a dictatorship, and Nkrumah prevented any opposition party from challenging him democratically. Similar to the narrative that Corteley presented in his articles, Williams insisted that the US could not represent democracy and civilization in Ghana if it backed illegal regime change abroad (in Ghana and elsewhere) and persecuted Black Americans (and others) at home. This statement of regret by someone who had served as a representative of the US shows the extent to which it was a widely held belief that Black Power was needed in Africa as much as in the US. A growing number of elite African Americans questioned the integrationist approach in the US and looked outward for a model for separatism.Footnote 14 When viewed from a Ghanaian perspective, it is logical that Black Power came to be associated with Pan-Africanism and continental liberation.
Throughout 1969, Ghanaian journalists continued to discuss racism and to debate Black Power and its significance to people outside of the US. In an article in Weekly Spectator, a writer identified as “A Correspondent” with the initials “SPR” published “Black Power Conference: A Threat to Bermuda’s Economic and Political Stability.” A combination of factors made this article unusual: its mysterious author, its long discussion of the conference, and the way that it tied Black Power to Cuban president Fidel Castro, claiming Black radical youths were “exploiting this [racial] divide to the detriment of the US.”Footnote 15 As Brian Meeks shows, Black Power spread to many different countries in the Caribbean, not just to Cuba, but also to Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Grenada, Guyana, and elsewhere (Reference Meeks, West, Martin and Wilkins2009:198). While it may have been written by a Ghanaian journalist, the article could have been written by an American working in Ghana, due to its strong rhetoric pinning blame on young Black people and stressing the connection between Black Power and a communist state.Footnote 16 The writer took the position that this conference would harm the tourist industry and was completely unnecessary in Bermuda: “[Black Power] has no real application in the Caribbean because political power is already largely concentrated in Negro hands.”Footnote 17 This article is stunning because it was published by the paper that was formerly associated with the Nkrumah government. After the 1966 coup, the paper’s political orientation shifted to placate the new government, but this article came out in 1969, only a year after Weekly Spectator published articles that condemned racism in the US and globally and declared racism to be a threat to everyone everywhere. The paper also published articles in support of Black Power, which reflected the fact that it was uncharacteristic of the paper to publish an article that condemned Black Power. Most likely, American influence or American writers were responsible for its publication. Ghanaian newspapers reveal the debate taking place around Black Power and its relevance to a world rife with racism. Even if some believed that Black Power was not a strategy necessary in a Black country, by debating it through this public forum, they were proving that it was indeed relevant to Ghanaians.
Definitions and popular conceptions of Black Power (and Pan-Africanism) continued to evolve over the years in both Ghana and the US. In a February 1971 Jet article, Stokely Carmichael stressed the importance of Pan-Africanism to Black Power.Footnote 18 He argued that staying in the US and trying to change American society, even if through the strategies of the Black Panther Party, was futile. Carmichael advocated that African Americans should embrace African culture and relocate to Africa. He also argued that Africans needed to change their own thinking about Black people and welcome them home. He firmly believed, as he stated, that “Pan-Africanism is the highest political expression of Black Power.”Footnote 19
At that time, Carmichael was living in Guinea as a guest of President Sékou Touré and former president Kwame Nkrumah, who had been named co-president of Guinea. He had changed his name to Kwame Ture in recognition of these two Pan-Africanist leaders. He also had a falling out with his former colleagues in the Black Panther Party and joined the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party.Footnote 20 Once seen as the architect of Black Power and responsible for its global expansion, by the 1970s and 1980s Ture had moved away from the concept to more fully embrace the Pan-Africanist project of African-diasporic solidarity, which he viewed as the only true path to Black people having power.
Black Power had evolved from a US-centered concept to an African-oriented one. Had the mysterious journalist for Weekly Spectator been correct in arguing that Black Power was not necessary in Bermuda, Ghana, or even in the US? The ways in which journalists discussed, promoted, and condemned Black Power reflects its global relevance.Footnote 21 At the same time, Ghanaians were engaging with and locating the concept of race in its global context, often connecting events in the US or the U.K. to local problems in Ghana or in southern Africa. Those who regularly read newspapers were frequently reminded of injustices abroad and how similar issues could gain relevance and destructive power at home. Turning to two other areas in which Black Power was introduced to Ghanaians, this article illustrates that Ghanaian youths, especially students and musicians, were more invested in the everyday application of the concept than the older generation of journalists.
Cultural Exchange Programs between the US and Ghana
Ghanaian and African American students participated in exchange programs in each other’s country for decades before and after Ghana’s independence. Nkrumah had been a student at Philadelphia’s Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania during the 1930s, and he ensured that African Americans had access to the University of Ghana, Legon, the Kwame Nkrumah University for Science and Technology, and the University of the Cape Coast during his leadership of the country and as Chancellor of the universities. Several scholars of African descent taught at these universities, new colleges, and elite schools throughout Ghana, and many African students enrolled in courses in Ghana. Beyond the formal education system, African Americans often visited Ghana while touring African countries, frequently to attend one of the Pan-African conferences hosted by Nkrumah.Footnote 22 The presence of African American intellectuals and students in postcolonial Ghana created a space for practicing Pan-Africanism, for engaging with political matters relevant to Ghana and the US, and for the growth of a highly respected, rigorous intellectual environment. Unfortunately, as Nkrumah began to place more limitations on students, faculty, and staff at the universities, the reputation of the country as welcoming, free, and progressive eroded during the early sixties (Asiedu-Acquah Reference Asiedu-Acquah2019; Nimako Reference Nimako2010; Van Gyampo Reference Van Gyampo2013; Ahlman Reference Ahlman2017; Bedasse Reference Bedasse2017). Because of this decrease in intellectual freedom, many African American scholars had left Ghana by 1960 and 1961 (Gaines Reference Gaines2006).
Following the 1966 coup, tours and exchange programs resumed operating between the two countries with renewed enthusiasm. Ghanaian students and performers visited the US on tours, such as when the Ghana Dance Ensemble performed in Chicago thanks to the generosity of Northwestern University’s Program of African Studies. The large group of 46 members were there to perform in five predominantly Black high schools in the fall of 1968.Footnote 23 Their visit made quite an impact, especially on a group of African American university lecturers, students, and performers who traveled to Accra in the summer of 1969. Among them was the dancer Darlene Blackburn, a member of the Chicago-based Affro-Arts Theater, which had been one of the hosts of the Ghana Dance Ensemble. Blackburn danced with the Ghana Dance Ensemble while they were in Chicago, and then danced with them again while she was in Accra.Footnote 24 Blackburn, Dr. Margaret Burroughs, and several other African American men and women performed dances, plays, songs, and poems for Ghanaian audiences.Footnote 25 These exchanges made an impact on Blackburn. She continued to participate in tours to West Africa during the 1970s, especially to Nigeria. The cultural exchange program to Accra in 1969 must have made a similar impact on her fellow travelers, because their enthusiasm had a documented impact on audiences in Ghana, including influencing their ideas about Black Power.
Even though Blackburn, described as a ballet dancer, was one of the show’s headliners, Ghanaian newspapers referred to the show as a “soul session with Afro Brothers.”Footnote 26 During their performance at Commonwealth Hall of the University of Ghana, Legon, in August 1969, these African American visitors entertained their audience of Ghanaian students and, notably, some US Peace Corps volunteers with many skits that illustrated the importance of Black Power and diasporic reconnections with Africa.Footnote 27 Articles in The Ghanaian Times described the theme of the poetry recited during these performances as “the struggle of African Americans for self-realization and his attempts at cultural identity with Africa.”Footnote 28 A play depicted a slave plantation in the US with a violent scene of racist beatings of men, women, and children, but with an ending in which enslaved individuals “overcome” their white masters. The playwright or actors explained the significance of the play: that all Black people should come together and fight “the enslaving white race.”Footnote 29 Perhaps remembering Nkrumah’s warnings about neo-imperialism in Africa, or because the audience was moved by the raw emotion that the play evoked, the actors received a standing ovation. That night, it was announced that a band from the exchange group would play at a “soul session” dance to benefit an elementary school in Legon. This dance made a great impression on The Ghanaian Times entertainment writer E.A. George, who danced that night with such “vitality” that he felt drained watching them “‘digging’ it.”Footnote 30 George was so moved that he decided to publish another article covering their performances about two weeks later. He added that there were other sets, including “The Duet” with a drum and chorus and a dance by a woman named Ferne Coalker.Footnote 31
In George’s coverage of these events, he stated that the purpose of their performances was to demonstrate how cooperation works between “Black people in America and their brothers on the African continent,” and the Ghanaian response reflected that. During the standing ovation at the end of at least one show, the audience shouted several familiar phrases, such as “Black Power,” “I am Black and Proud,” and “Black is Beautiful.”Footnote 32 While these articles do not detail the significance of Black Power to Ghanaians, these performances clearly achieved their goal: Ghanaian youths enthusiastically showed their support for their American Black brothers and sisters. One way to read the audience’s reaction is that they automatically repeated phrases used by the group on stage as participants in call-and-response, a common performance practice both in West Africa and in the diaspora (Barber Reference Barber1997). Another possible explanation is that they were enraptured, mesmerized, and changed by what they witnessed that night, and their reaction was a wholehearted embrace of the struggle against racial injustice everywhere. As explained above, Ghanaians, including university students, were already aware of the racism that affected African Americans, and many drew connections between racist policies in the US and neo-imperialism in Africa. The Ghanaian audience understood the importance and meaning of these ubiquitous phrases, and they were not using them merely as part of the entertainment.
Confident that Ghanaians would welcome them, other groups of African Americans visited Ghana, seemingly every few months. In November 1969, a group of five students from San Francisco returned to the US after spending two months in Ghana.Footnote 33 Led by their teacher Judith Borcher, who taught Black Studies at Woodrow Wilson High School and was a Red Cross youth advisor, the students would have been witness to the residual excitement of Ghanaians following the performances from earlier that summer. The students’ interest in Black Studies and in Africa would have reinforced the relevance of the struggle against racial injustice in the US and of Black Power to the people of Ghana.
Through their reporting on exchange programs and tours, Ghanaian and African American journalists contributed to the conversations that took place around Black Power, racism, neo-imperialism, and the diasporic-African connection. Whether they were sharing news of a cultural exchange group visiting Ghana or debating the relevance of Black Power to people outside of the US, newspapers reflected what was on the minds of Ghanaians, even if the news media was also invested in influencing public opinion in alignment with national or international politics. Articles in the Ghanaian press reflected an interest in diasporic collaboration and even encouraged Ghanaians to consider their ancestral ties to their “Afro Brothers” across the Atlantic.Footnote 34
These exchanges, whether short-term official tours or months-long programs, brought youths and adults of African descent into direct conversation with Ghanaians. There was often a musical or theatrical performance included in these programs, including a promise of the exceedingly popular soul music, which attracted even more Ghanaians. When African Americans demonstrated for Ghanaians that their history was connected through enslavement, imperialism, and racism, their Ghanaian audience heard their call for support and responded. As Jemima Pierre (Reference Pierre2012) has explored through her research on beauty, tourism, and politics in Ghana, the transatlantic slave trade, racism, and colonialism had deeply impacted how Ghanaians saw themselves and how they saw the diaspora, and Ghanaian journalists in the late sixties demonstrated this continuity. Even if African American visitors did not explicitly aim to show Ghanaians why American racism was a problem for those in Africa, Ghanaian youths connected the problem of race, the struggle for Black Power, and their own political and economic fears. Examining the prevalence of soul music in Ghana between the late sixties and the early seventies reveals that these ideas had permeated Ghanaian popular culture and political consciousness. However, it was an uneven process; Ghanaian soul songs did not directly reflect the politics of the Black Power movement until the 1970s. Instead, Ghanaians engaged with Black Power through themes and devices reflective of admiration, sovereignty, and pride.
Ghanaians Respond to Soul Music and Black Power
By the middle of the 1960s, soul and rock-and-roll music had invaded the Ghanaian airwaves.Footnote 35 Songs by artists as distinctive as The Isley Brothers, James Brown, and Sam Cooke could be heard on the radio, in dance clubs, or while one was walking down the street. While soul music shows and concerts in Accra were held in venues surrounding the city center which charged entrance fees, Ghanaian people could also enjoy wisps of a soul song for free from their neighbor’s window or at the chop bars on their streets.Footnote 36 Nightclub venues, both indoor and outside, had dress codes; audience members would have been turned away or would have felt out of place if they showed up to a dance in anything other than African formal wear (such as Kente) or a Western-style suit or dress. Neighborhood chop bars or a neighbor’s house would not have had a dress code. Although all venues were not accessible to all Ghanaians, soul music itself was. The same songs were played at clubs with entrance fees for middle class and elite dancers and on the radio of a local bar for working class patrons stopping by for a beer in the evening.
In the early and mid-sixties, Ghanaian soul music began as remakes of love songs in English with melodies appropriated from American and British bands. With its increasing popularity, the Ghanaian soul sound responded to changes in the music produced in the US and imported into Ghana. Ghanaian soul songs of the late sixties reflected the influence of artists such as James Brown and Wilson Pickett, and by the early seventies Santana’s unique blues-soul-Latin sound inundated Ghanaian soul. In addition to the impact of journalists and cultural exchange programs, African American musicians demonstrated to Ghanaians the importance of the diasporic-African connection and Black Power.Footnote 37 Ghana-based bands quickly embraced the music of the most popular US soul bands to please eager audiences in the country, which made the genre even more ubiquitous. According to some journalists, many Ghanaian bands had abandoned highlife and their Ghanaian identity to focus entirely on soul.Footnote 38 Optimistic for a sense of normalcy after three years of military rule and with the beginning of the Second Republic in 1969 under Prime Minister Dr. Kofi Busia, journalists attempted to control cultural change. However, the late sixties gave way to an even sharper increase in exposure to foreign music during the seventies, including soul, funk, rock, and reggae, thanks to the robust Ghanaian music industry supported by American and British interests, the promise of a democratically elected government, cultural exchange programs, and visits by performers of African descent.
In the US, soul music had become a vehicle for the transmission of Black Power ideology by the late sixties. It served a similar function in Ghana, but first, it needed to filter through Accra’s music scene. Political themes started to permeate Ghanaian soul songs due to the influence of musicians from other West African countries. Echoing the evolution of Black Power politics among intellectuals, journalists, and students in Ghana, soul music went through a transformation from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, during which two primary trends overlapped. Between 1966 and 1971, many Ghanaian bands covered foreign, romantic soul songs in English. From 1970 to 1973, soul songs in Ghana engaged Black Power politics directly through lyrics or indirectly using Ghanaian languages to demonstrate pride and freedom. Ghanaians engaged with a conceptualization of Black Power that made sense in their context but remained informed by incidents and trends from the US and other West African countries.
Some of the most popular soul bands in Ghana were made up of members from different countries in West Africa. The Black Santiagos, who would eventually play at the Soul to Soul festival discussed below, included members from Benin, Nigeria, and Ghana. At different times, they were based in each of these countries but were embraced as a local band by Ghanaians. Their 1966 song “Pretty Little Angel,” referred to as a “Twist and Shake” style and sung in English, reflected many of the genres that were popular in Ghana at the time: soul, rock, Latin, and jazz. Its quick, rock-and-roll-inflected, soul tempo opened with trumpets, drums, and keyboard, and broke into a rumba dance beat about two minutes in. The lyrics were sung over male crooners, and some lines were borrowed from foreign love songs. Credited to Emmanuel Asare, the band’s singer, lyrics such as “come on, come on, baby” and “cause I love you so” were borrowed from the Isley Brothers’ 1962 “Twist and Shout,” and the line “pretty little angel” and the background crooning came from Curtis Lee’s 1961 “Pretty Little Angel Eyes.”Footnote 39 Asare used a variety of love song devices to appeal to his young audience, as seen in excerpts from the song:
More obvious than the lyrics was the stark musical similarity between “Pretty Little Angel” and Sam Cooke’s 1960 “(What A) Wonderful World.”Footnote 41 The tempo is faster than Cooke’s song, but the melodic similarities are undeniable. It is easy to imagine each of these songs being popular among young Ghanaians at an afternoon “jump,” a typical teen-oriented dance. On the other hand, it is hard to tell which song would have brought greater numbers to the dance floor. The Isley Brothers, Sam Cooke, and other African American bands would continue to be a source of musical and lyrical inspiration for Ghanaian bands.
By the late sixties and early seventies, soul music had overwhelmed Ghana thanks to the demands of young audience members. One of Ghana’s greatest highlife bands during the 1960s and 1970s, The Ramblers Dance Band, reflects this trend. Their 1968 cover of Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood” was the only English-language song on their album The Hit Sound. Footnote 42 It mirrored Floyd’s version closely, starting with drums, a heavy bass guitar, and prominent horns, but finished with an extended instrumental break and chanting.Footnote 43 As another love song, it appealed to Ghanaian listeners of any age. Despite its release in 1968 when conversations about Black Power were taking place among Ghanaians, it did not reflect these politics. It was safe for the airwaves in Ghana and could garner praise from the band’s local fans and club owners. However, it reveals the power of soul to influence the music of even the most prominent highlife band. As the only soul song and the only English-language song on the Ramblers’ LP, it illustrates the demand for Ghanaian bands to embrace soul, even if superficially. Musicians and their producers could not deny the lucrative market for soul love songs, which came from multiple directions.
Born in Nigeria but with Sierra Leonean heritage, Geraldo Pino (along with his band) became one of the most popular soul musicians in Ghana. He spent years working in Ghana and, according to John Collins, “[Geraldo Pino Plus] the Heartbeats created a wake of soul-bands wherever they went in the late 1960s” (Reference Collins1992:60). In 1968, Pino published a song book titled Raw Soul, which contained the lyrics for over one hundred popular soul songs. The book included songs by US artists as well as Ghanaians, and despite its hefty promise, it was meant to be portable. Inspired by the 1967 album James Brown Sings Raw Soul, Pino’s book included several songs by Soul Brother No. 1 (James Brown), Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Wilson Pickett, likely without copyright permission.Footnote 44 It is unclear how many Ghanaian or West African musicians were included in the book besides Pino, but its publication indicates Pino’s interest in expanding the already thriving market for soul music in Ghana and placing the work of West Africans on equal footing with music by African Americans. Although “raw soul” would refer to unfinished or improvised music, publishing song lyrics requires some measure of finalized, edited versions. Though it does not reference Black Power, Pino’s book title is a metaphor for Ghanaians’ engagement with soul music.
Ghanaian musicians often innovated by combining soul with other foreign or local styles and instruments, and their lyrics reflected an attraction to African American culture. At the same time, Ghanaian soul music was expected to be respectable, apolitical, and refined. Innovation made it difficult to achieve that without the support of wealthy music producers, whether based in Ghana or overseas. Raw soul reflected the ways in which Ghanaians reacted to political change in their country. Perhaps Pino was commenting on the status of the Ghanaian spirit after the 1966 coup; the soul of the nation was raw and needed the healing balm of soul music to remind Ghanaians that they had once been at the vanguard of freedom and Pan-Africanism. Ghanaian soul music reflected the push and pull of politics but was not supposed to be overtly political.
In 1969, Ghanaian musicians and soul fanatics were focused on songs from Diana Ross and the Supremes, Eddie Floyd, Wilson Pickett, and James Brown.Footnote 45 Despite Brown’s position as a complicated man caught between his success with white audiences and the pressure to take a vocal stand for the civil rights movement, African Americans, Malians, and Ghanaians embraced him as the ultimate entertainer and as a critical source of inspiration (Diawara Reference Diawara2002). Deejays would play his records at dances and at special events, and the mention of his name or one of his new records would draw a huge audience response. For example, alongside a performance by Ghanaian highlife royalty E.T. Mensah, The Ghanaian Times promised that the audience could expect to dance to James Brown’s “The Popcorn” at Tip-Toe Gardens, a popular outdoor venue in Accra.Footnote 46 At this dance, held on a Saturday in October of 1969, other Ghanaian bands specializing in soul and rock music appeared for the audience’s pleasure, including The Black Santiagos, El Pollos, and the Barbecues. Entertainment columns published in Saturday’s newspaper reflected the excitement surrounding what must have been the best dance of the year with its mixture of highlife and soul. Such an evening demonstrated the status of James Brown among Ghanaian audiences, but it also signaled that soul in Ghana was a permanent fixture. By 1970, a new generation of Ghanaian bands had displaced the independence generation’s highlife musicians with music informed by African American and other foreign bands. Many of these younger bands brought highlife, funk, rock and roll, and soul together to create a uniquely Ghanaian blend.
A new but popular band in the early seventies, The Psychedelic Aliens is an example of this musical development. Their song “Biofon Yobi Wo Atale” on their self-titled album featured soul music but with a spotlight on the organ, which differentiated it from other African American music.Footnote 47 Other songs on their 1970 album either had no lyrics or were sung in English, and the overarching sound was highly comparable to the music made popular by Ike and Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett, and Santana, all of whom would visit Accra the following year for the infamous Soul to Soul festival, which took place in Accra on March 6, 1971, the fourteenth anniversary of Ghanaian independence. Although the festival is considered a turning point in Ghana’s musical encounter with the diaspora, The Psychedelic Aliens’ 1970 album and prior recordings and performances by other Ghanaian bands demonstrate that a lucrative market for soul music had already existed in West Africa for years. The 1971 festival was the climax of years of intensive collaboration between musicians, students, educators, and activists and resulted in increasingly politicized soul songs.
Even with an already vibrant soul scene, the Soul to Soul festival produced unparalleled excitement in Ghana and in the US. Although the festival was organized by “affluent West Coast whites” who wanted a West African “Woodstock” film, Ghana’s Arts Council was also involved in the production.Footnote 48 Soul to Soul brought together Ghanaian soul bands and iconic American performers for the first time, demonstrating the “many shades of soul” with the inclusion of Santana, whose members were of African and Latin descent who played music reflective of their diversity.Footnote 49 Ghanaian coverage of the festival reflects what was lacking in the American film and media coverage: that the Ghanaian performers were already famous and excelled at other genres in addition to soul music. The resulting film Soul to Soul, released in the US in 1971, showed few Ghanaian performances.Footnote 50 However, The Ghanaian Times discussed the important contributions of Charlotte Dada, backed by the Barbecues band; The Magic Aliens, also known as The Psychedelic Aliens; and the famous Ghanaian drummer Guy Warren, who would change his name to Kofi Ghanaba.Footnote 51 Journalist E. A. George felt that each American performance was excellent, explaining that these African Americans were doing their “thing” all in the name of “Afrodelic and black power.”Footnote 52
Decades later, Ghanaian audiences remembered the frenzy leading up to the show, describing how some scaled fences to gain entry and others climbed onto rooftops to better hear these famous artists.Footnote 53 Yet, the African American media described the Ghanaian audience as very reserved, presumably from “the British influence,” while also noting that Black American students in Ghana who attended the concert were extremely lively.Footnote 54 The film reflects the excitement of the American performers as they interacted with Ghanaians during a trip to Aburi in the mountains just north of Accra, but the camera rarely focused on Ghanaian performers or attendees (Collins Reference Collins1992; Jaji Reference Jaji2014).Footnote 55 Following the concert, Ghanaian bands showed more interest in different aspects of soul music, moving beyond cozy love songs in English to their own versions in Ga or in Twi, with a raw, innovative edge.
Between 1966 and 1972, the country experienced the instability of a coup d’état, military rule, and a short-lived democracy, as there was a coup that unseated Busia’s Second Republic in January 1972. The instability at home, the influence of Black Power, and the recognition of racism overseas meant that Ghanaians were politically engaged in new ways, and music released in the early seventies reflected the global reality of racial injustice and the renewed hope for freedom. Ever the pioneers, Geraldo Pino Plus the Heart Beats released a 1972 album, “Afro Soco Soul Live,” which captures this political and cultural shift. It featured a sound reminiscent of James Brown combined with Santana; funk, guitar, organ, electric keyboard, drums, and Latin maracas were all prominent. One song truly highlights the political concerns of the time: “Blackman Was Born to Be Free.”Footnote 56
In this song, Pino argued for the freedom and happiness of all Black men, making sure to include himself and the audience. The line “I was born to be proud” also highlights his awareness of the phrase “Black and Proud” and demonstrates that each of these social conditions are rights that Black people are born with. While many Ghanaian bands shied away from politics, Pino pushed Ghanaians and other West Africans to engage with them.
A 1973 article in The Ghanaian Times summarized the significance of soul and the importance of Black Power to Ghana. Discussing professor and journalist Phyllis “Phyl” Garland’s Reference Garland1969 book The Sound of Soul, the article recognized the problem of “white soul” and discussed how white soul singers have gotten “rich on styling themselves on the blacks.”Footnote 57 The article recognized how racism had permeated the music industry and had influenced what Ghanaians had been able to access. It acknowledged soul’s African ancestry traced back to the slave trade and advocated for “Black Power emancipation.”Footnote 58 Although it took several years of musical influence, African American visitors, and direct pronouncements, Ghanaian journalists, newspaper readers, musicians, and audiences ultimately acknowledged that Black Power was critical to understanding their own past, their musical tastes, and their experience with race.
Soul music recorded in 1975 and later reveals more songs in Twi, the continued influence of Santana, African American funk, Nigerian Afrobeat, and greater attention of musicians to politics. Discussions surrounding Black Power in the Ghanaian press started to wane by the mid-seventies, but the ideas behind the phrase had made a strong impact on Ghanaians through visits by foreign artists, horrific news of racist acts in the US and elsewhere, the dangerous reality of political instability at home, and the constant presence and evolution of soul thanks to West African bands. Not all Ghanaians were vocal participants in discussions surrounding race, but they demonstrated their pride through embracing and crafting a Ghanaian soul sound, creating new soul songs in Ghanaian languages, and producing songs that vocalized their connections with the diaspora.
Conclusion
In 1969, several African Americans and Ghanaians traveled to Algiers for the Pan-African Cultural Festival. As a result of the festivities, including the participation of Carmichael, the Black Panthers, Miriam Makeba, and a Ghanaian dance troupe, “Black Power” became such a powerful phrase that Algerian taxi drivers were heard shouting it (Hare Reference Hare1969:7). In many African countries, the concept had a meaningful impact on people who saw it as a means to express and reinforce their freedom from white imperialists and to show solidarity with African Americans and other subjugated people.Footnote 59 The belief that Africans and people of African descent could take power and hold it resonated across the African continent. Soul music, especially, made this political objective meaningful and audible for the masses. This article shows that it was a combination of initiatives targeting intellectuals, students, and musicians that reinforced Black Power’s relevance in Ghana.
What was audible in the 1970s started in the 1950s when Nkrumah created an environment for active collaboration between Ghanaians and African Americans during Ghana’s independence celebrations and Pan-African conferences. Considering Black Power as a movement built on the foundation of Pan-Africanism, it persisted even after the 1966 coup, thanks to Ghanaian and African American mutual interest in political and cultural cooperation. The importance of Black Power politics lies in how Ghanaians voiced pride in their blackness, even while politically Ghana felt sometimes as if it were falling apart. The Ghanaian soul sound took several years to reflect Black Power politics, but it ultimately shifted from a focus on romance to a wider political reach than the intellectuals, journalists, and exchange programs that had preceded it. As the rhetoric and endeavors of Ghanaians reveal, the concept of Black Power became a strategic tool that they employed to cultivate solidarity with the diaspora and to remain vigilant against global white supremacy.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to express appreciation for the productive feedback and questions shared by the anonymous reviewers, the ASR editors, particularly Benjamin Talton, and David Murdock. Any errors are solely the author’s.
