"Marching with the Times: Chronopolitics and Quantification in 1960s Ghana" 

In the early 1960s, the aspirations of postcolonial Africa encapsulated what Reinhart Koselleck labelled the 'acceleration of history'. As the first colony in Sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence from British rule, on 6th March 1957, Ghana came to incarnate the whole continent's hopes of economic, political and social transformation. This lecture looks at how numbers and different forms of economic quantification accompanied the new nation's 'march with the times'. This is achieved through a reconstruction of the role of development planning and financial auditing in shaping political iconographies. I suggest that these tools (and the numbers contained in them) did not simply inform and support practices of economic management. Instead, they contributed to the construction of alternative versions of postcolonial utopianism. The focus is on the last years of Nkrumah's socialist government, until he was overthrown by a military coup d'état in 1966, and on the brief experience of the National Liberation Council (NLC), the military junta that ruled over Ghana between 1966 and 1969. 

Inspired by François Hartog's analytical distinction between 'temporality' (defined with reference to an exogenous idea of measurable time) and 'historicity' (which weaves narratives reconceptualising the relationship between past, present and future), the paper argues that, while grounded in an idea of linear and homogenous time, the Nkrumaist Seven-Year Plan for National Reconstruction and Development and the financial audits resulting from the NLC's commissions of inquiry created qualitatively different 'regimes of historicity'. However, these become visible only by interrogating  how these 'dry' and technical documents were negotiated, contested, and recast in the public sphere. Drawing on archival evidence gathered in Ghana (Accra, Cape Coast, Ho) and Washington DC, and informed by ethnographies of planning and social studies of accounting, the paper calls for a more expansive view on what is 'political' about economic numbers.

Dr Gerardo Serra is Lecturer in Economic Cultures at the Department of  History, University of Manchester.