Representing Youth: School Dramas and Youth Authority in Ghana

Abstract

After Ghana’s independence from Great Britain in 1957, elements of “Ghanaian culture” began to be introduced into schools, themselves the product of historical encounters between European missionaries, British colonial officials, and African Christian teachers and students. As a result, the schools seemed contrary to the goals of Ghanaian independence and in need of decolonization. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the interactions between the state, teachers, and students became a mutually reinforcing feedback loop in which it was unclear who was galvanizing whom. Many teachers and students felt that state cultural initiatives spoke to or answered their own personal desires and identities. Recognizing themselves in the cultural programs that the state organized in and out of school, students and teachers were moved to promote culture in their own environments, encouraging the state to focus its organizing efforts on schools. The interaction between cultural activists in schools and state officials contributed to a hegemonic view that “Ghanaian culture” meant performances of drumming and dancing, showcased during schools’ ritual celebrations, like prize-giving days. Such activities reached their efflorescence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, surviving multiple coups and changes in democratic and military governments. During economic and state contraction in the late 1970s and early 1980s, practices of drumming and dancing were kept alive by dedicated teachers and students, who continued to organize singing, dancing, drumming, and dramatic competitions between schools, until school cultural activities—in and out of the classroom—were reinvigorated and revamped in the late 1980s by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government of J. J. Rawlings.