An Unscientific Postscript
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I am three years older than Ghana, where I grew up, and my father was very active in the movements that brought us our independence. My earliest memories of him are as a parliamentarian, working in the post-independence legislature, deeply committed, as a lawyer as well as a politician, to constitutional government. And make no mistake about it, my father loved Ghana. His autobiography was subtitled The Autobiography of an African Patriot—and, although he cherished Africa, which was, as a Pan-Africanist, his patria as well, his patriotism was fundamentally Ghanaian. At its heart was a commitment to self-government with a constitution that gave us rights and made us equal under the law. In my teens, after a period as a political prisoner, he specialized in taking the government to court to secure the rights of others. Since the first task of the state after empire was to try to expand welfare provision as well, his nationalism had the elements identified in this book as liberal: the state had to secure order for us, grant and protect our equal rights, and guarantee a basic level of education and welfare to us all. Redistributive solidarity was definitely an important part of the picture. The ‘us’ here was definitely not an ethnic ‘us’. For my father’s generation, one of the great challenges of independence was to build a united nation that nevertheless recognized and honoured our many ‘tribes’, as we called them, the various peoples the colonial state had brought together. Our diverse languages and cultural and political traditions produced a nation of enormous, often overlapping, forms of diversity. Like the other states on the Gulf of Guinea, we had many Muslims in the north, and a great diversity of Christians all over, reflecting the diverse missionary adventures of the region. But there was a long-established Muslim population in Kumasi, the capital of Asante, our hometown, which is in the centre of the country, as in the nation’s capital, Accra, on the coast. And there were countless shrines to hundreds of spirits in the multiple older customs of our country. We were definitely a nation of many religious traditions as well.
Source Publication
Liberal Nationalism and its Critics: Normative and Empirical Questions
Source Editors/Authors
Gina Gustavsson, David Miller
Publication Date
2020
Recommended Citation
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, "An Unscientific Postscript" (2020). Faculty Chapters. 96.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/96
