A few days ago, Hon. Eric Edem Agbana, the Member of Parliament for Ketu North and a member of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Education, raised a red flag that every Ghanaian parent, teacher, and citizen should pay attention to. He called out the “dehumanizing content” in one of our Social Studies textbook for Junior High School students- specifically, a section that attempts to list the “benefits” Ghana derived from colonization.
For far too long, our educational system has allowed a dangerous narrative to fester: the idea that while colonization was “tough,” it gave us roads, schools, and a legal system. This is a historical lie that we have swallowed for decades. It is a narrative that sanitizes a crime against humanity. To suggest that colonization had “well-intended benefits” is like thanking a thief for leaving a flashlight behind after emptying your house so he could see his way to the door. We must be clear: colonization was an extractive, dehumanizing business venture that was never meant to develop the African, but to deplete the African for the benefit of Europe. It is time we deconstruct this myth and take back the minds of our children.
Economic Exploitation: The Infrastructure of Extraction
The most common argument used to defend the colonial era is the infrastructure left behind. People point to the railways, the Takoradi ports, and the roads built by the British. But we must ask ourselves: why were they built?
If you look at the map of the colonial railway system, it doesn’t connect our people; it connects the resource-rich hinterlands to the coast. The railway was not built so that a trader in Kumasi could easily visit a relative in Accra. It was built to move gold, timber, and cocoa out of the country as fast as possible. The ports were not gateways for Ghanaian trade; they were exit points for our wealth.
This infrastructure was the machinery of a massive extraction project. To call these “benefits” is to ignore the motive. Like a farmer who fattens a chicken before the slaughter, the colonialists built only what was necessary to make the extraction of our riches more efficient. They didn’t prioritize local industries; in fact, they suppressed them to ensure we remained a market for their finished goods. This created a cycle of economic dependence that we are still struggling to break today. True development could have been achieved through equal cooperation and trade integration if the Europeans actually meant well, but their goal was expansion and domination, not partnership.
Social Disruption: The Birth of the Identity Crisis
Colonization did not just take our gold; it tried to take our soul. It disrupted the very fabric of our social structures and governance. Before the “District Commissioner” arrived, we had sophisticated systems of accountability and communal living. The British replaced these with foreign laws and an “Indirect Rule” system that often turned our own leaders into puppet proxies for the Empire.
The most damaging part of this social disruption was the war on our identity. This is where the deep-seated inferiority complex in our society began. Our agents of socialization- the schools, the churches, and the media-were used to tell us that everything African was “heathen,” “primitive,” or “backward.”
Think about the schools. Girls were forced to cut their hair to look “neat” according to Western standards, and our traditional clothing was demoted to “Friday wear” or something “informal.” We were taught to speak English with a certain accent to prove we were “civilized,” while our mother tongues were labeled as “vernacular” and students were punished for speaking them. This was a deliberate foundation for neocolonialism. It taught the Ghanaian to hate his own reflection and exalt the white man’s lifestyle. We are now living in a society with a massive identity crisis, where we idolize the American lifestyle and Western capitalism without realizing that these systems were often built on our backs.
A suicidal Liberal Democracy, Political Oppression and the Illusion of “Development.
Ghana’s liberal democracy, codified in the 1992 Constitution, is a neocolonial influenced document that forces the nation to adopt the political end-state of the West without its prerequisite economic foundation. Critically, no developed nation-from the United Kingdom and the United States to the “Asian Tigers” like South Korea and Singapore-achieved industrialization under a liberal democratic framework. Historically, these powers utilized centralized, one-party, or illiberal systems to enforce the structural discipline and long-term planning necessary for economic takeoff. They only adopted democratic pluralism after securing economic sovereignty.
In Ghana, however, this model was externally mandated through aid conditionalities, compelling the nation to “run” politically before it could “walk” economically. This has resulted in a “winner-takes-all” culture that fosters chronic “short-termism” and paralyzing polarization. While the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) is mandated by Act 479 to create long-term frameworks, these are routinely sacrificed for four-year electoral gains.
Successive administrations abandon vital national projects to satisfy partisan bases, ensuring that progress is perpetually reset with every change of government.
By clinging to this neocolonial relic, Ghana remains trapped in a cycle of dependency. The current democratic structure prioritizes procedural “good governance” over the radical, disciplined mobilization of resources required for true transformation. Until the nation reconciles its governance with the historical reality that development demands a period of concentrated, centralized focus, its full potential will remain suppressed by the very institutions designed to mirror Western ideals rather than Ghanaian realities.
Politically, Ghanaians were subjugated and denied basic rights in their own land. Any form of resistance was met with brutality. The “development” the colonial authorities spoke of was always biased. While they built schools like Achimota, the curriculum was designed to produce clerks, administrative assistants, and low-level officials-proxies who would help the British run the colony. They didn’t want to produce independent thinkers, engineers, or innovators who would challenge the system.
Even the infrastructure built in the hinterlands, which people often credit to the colonial government, was frequently the work of third-party altruistic groups like churches. And even then, much of it was tied to indoctrination- convincing the African that his salvation lay in a foreign culture.
The system was rigged from the start. Today, we hear people preaching about “willpower” and “hard work” as the only way to succeed. While hard work is good, we must realize that many of our systemic issues are not individual failures; they are systemic symptoms. People are struggling to make it in a system designed to hold them back. We have inherited a structure of “every man for himself” individualism that is the opposite of our communal roots.
This roadmap represents a radical departure from the neocolonial structures that have defined Ghana since the transition to the Fourth Republic. To reach our full potential, we must deconstruct the procedural “benefits” of a democracy that serves foreign interests and replace them with a decade of intentional mental liberation.
THE ROADMAP: A PERIOD OF MENTAL LIBERATION
- Radical Curricular Deconstruction: We must purge the educational system of colonial-centric narratives that prioritize Western triumph. In alignment with the Education Act, 2008 (Act 778), we must shift from rote learning to critical consciousness. Students must study the Pan-Africanism of Kwame Nkrumah, the dependency theory of Walter Rodney, and the revolutionary humanism of Steve Biko and Patrice Lumumba to replace individualistic capitalism with communal self-worth.
- Reclaiming Socialization Agents: Family, Religious and media institutions must be reoriented. Under Article 39(1) of the Constitution, the State is mandated to integrate customary values into national life. We must enforce proper family values, demand an end to the religious demonization of indigenous spiritualities and utilize the media to flood the public sphere with communal values, ensuring that the “agents of socialization” serve the national interest rather than foreign ideologies. This includes the strategic regulation of digital spaces-moving beyond the Electronic Communications Act, 2008 (Act 775)- to actively filter content that contradicts the national agenda of mental liberation and cultural protection.
- Decolonizing Teacher Pedagogy: Teacher training colleges must become laboratories for mental liberation. Teachers, as the primary architects of the national psyche, must be incentivized to deconstruct the “colonial mentality” that equates Westernization with progress. They must be the frontline soldiers in dismantling the psychological chains of neocolonialism.
- Communalism over Individualistic Monopolies: We must dismantle the “big man” culture and the neoliberal monopolies that exploit the masses. Our goal is to produce practical humanists- politicians, leaders, engineers, doctors, and artists who view their competence and skills as tools for communal upliftment rather than personal accumulation at the expense of their neighbors.
- Constitutional Indigenization: We must overhaul the 1992 Constitution to move beyond the “hybrid” Westminster-Washington model. This involves the formal integration of the Chieftaincy Act, 2008 (Act 759) into the legislative process, transforming the Council of State into a powerful chamber for traditional authorities to ensure that national laws reflect the indigenous “spirit” and ancestral wisdom rather than foreign legal transplants.
- Linguistic Sovereignty: Language is the carrier of culture. We must elevate Ghanaian languages from mere subjects to the primary media of instruction and official state business. By breaking the hegemony of English, we allow our people to think, innovate, and govern in the languages that carry our communal logic, thereby ending the alienation of the masses from the state.
- Economic Protectionism and Autarky: We must reject the neoliberal “open market” lies that keep us as raw material exporters. The state must aggressively protect local industries and prioritize intra-African trade, deconstructing the myth that “foreign direct investment” is the only path to prosperity. True potential lies in self-reliance and the strategic control of our own markets.
- The “enslaved psyche”
This is a colonial byproduct where “evolutionary thrift” triggers a cognitive bias toward familiar stagnation. This psyche clings to the 1992 Constitution, fearing the risk of radical change. However, uprooting these structures without a “map”-a rigorous transitional governance framework-invites “Hobbesian strife,” where a power vacuum leads to state collapse. To avoid anarchy, we must utilize the Chapter 25 amendment architecture to transition from liberal democracy to indigenous communalism. This “map” ensures that dismantling neocolonial relics is a structured evolution toward our ancestral identity, preventing the chaos of a vacuum-led revolution.
Conclusively, colonization was a scourge, not a blessing. The “roads and railways” were just the chains used to haul our wealth away. We owe it to the next generation to ensure they do not grow up with the same inferiority complexes that have hindered our progress for so long.
We must be the ones to restamp our own identity. Our toils might not result in a perfect system within our lifetime, but we must do the work. The “house” (the global class system) is rigged, but our answer lies in unity and a conscious, deliberate effort to shape what our children believe about themselves. As the 1992 Constitution of Ghana suggests in Articles 25 and 38, the state has a duty to provide education that leads to the “full realization” of rights and facilities. That realization is impossible if the mind is still in colonial chains. It is time for a total mental overhaul. Let us start by recalling those books.
Authored by
Frank Quaye
Legal Activist
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