Fifty years of independence for Africa's beacon state

His name is Reggie Rockstone. He is the godfather of hiplife. He is the new Ghana. No, more than that, he is the new Africa. Next week is the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the end of British colonialism.

On 6 March 1957, Ghana, the first African nation to gain its independence from the final crumbling of the British Empire, celebrates the glorious event.

At midnight on that day, half a century ago, the church bells rang across the city of Accra. The Union Flag was lowered in the square outside Parliament and the green, gold and red colours of a new nation were hoisted. Not far away, on what had been his former white masters' polo ground, Kwame Nkrumah, the father of pan-Africanism, did a little dance and spoke of a new dream, a new freedom, a new Africa.

Ghana's independence became a sign of hope for the entire continent, and the first breeze to the white colonials of what was to become what the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, later called "the wind of change". But the wind continued to blow, at times becoming a gale and even a hurricane, which the people of Africa could not harness. The story of Ghana became the story of a continent in microcosm, telling a tale which moved from colonialism, through state socialism, dictatorship by generals, obsessive free-market mania, and, hopefully, now emerging out the other side into a better world.

In the 1950s, the music in the colony, once known as The Gold Coast in recognition of its major export, was played by Africans but danced to the European colonial-class at parties to which the locals could only aspire. The music, too, tells the story of a journey.

It was called highlife, and dance orchestras played at it at the parties of the white elite. It was a strange, regimented parody of the fashionable jazz in the salons of Europe but eventually it began using native songs and kpanlogo rhythms. Then the African musicians took it home, and it became, in a further transmogrified form, adopted by the poor black rural guitarists of the Fante people.

In the decades that followed, while the newly independent black elite in the Ghanaian capital turned increasingly to Western music, highlife bubbled and brewed, incorporating elements of swing, jazz, rock, ska and soukous in a cultural fusion which was quite new. Now, in the decade that followed, it has melded with something else, hip-hop, to form something else: hiplife, a cross between highlife and rap, of which the aforementioned Reggie Rockstone is the king. He raps in both English and a key Ghanaian dialect, Twi. He draws massive crowds in their tens of thousands. The music's popularity has eclipsed all other styles and now surpasses western music in terms of airplay.

Music is a metaphor for much else. For, after suffering five decades of severe decline, in a fusion of socialism, military cronyism and neo-liberal capitalism, Ghana again appears to be on the upswing, with a slowly but steadily growing economy in what Patrick Smith, the editor of Africa Confidential, calls "one of the best functioning multi-party democracies in the continent".

It has been a long haul. At independence, Ghana had a substantial natural resources, a functioning economic infrastructure, a good education system, an efficient civil service and $481m in foreign reserves. Its economy was on a par with that of South Korea or Malaysia. "If you look at the trajectory between 1957 and now," says Patrick Smith, "it hasn't just not progressed; it has gone backwards." Such is the story of all Africa. When the sun began to set on Europe's foreign empires, and former colonies across the globe began in the 1960s to prepare themselves for independence, nobody was much worried about Africa. The anxiety was all for Asia. After all Africa was a place of great mineral riches and vast agricultural fecundity. Asia, by contrast, seemed to have only problems and population.

Five decades later, Africa is the poorest region in the world. Half of the population live on less than a dollar a day. Life expectancy is actually falling. People live, on average, to the age of just 46. Asia, it turned out, had hidden advantages. Colonies were not as ethnically divided as in Africa. Administrative systems in places like India were geared to government; in Africa they were geared only towards the extraction and export of raw materials. In Asia, the maritime geography meant transport was cheaper. It was easier to spread goods and technology. There was a flow of capital from Japan. Industrial developments, for a variety of reasons, gained a critical mass that helped them take off. But there were policy differences too. Asian states invested heavily in the education and health of their workforces.

In Ghana, the first president of the modern Ghanaian state was the anti-colonial leader, Kwame Nkrumah. For 10 years, this African idealist pursued a strategy of a state-directed economy. He invested in grand projects, such as the Akosombo Dam which created Lake Volta, the world's biggest man-made lake. But though the dam generated electricity for one major aluminium plant - now closed - it didn't do much for the local people, beyond exposing the new lakeside dwellers to waterborne diseases such as river blindness.

Nkrumah emphasised political and economic organisation, trying to increase productivity through co-operatives. He also introduced detention without trial for dissidents and censored the press. And he imposed heavy taxes on the country's one internationally competitive industry, cocoa production.

He articulated the dream of a united, independent Africa but he brought human rights abuses, corruption and economic decline. There was no general lamentation when he was overthrown in a CIA-assisted coup in 1966.

But the pattern that set was unfortunate. Coup after coup followed, bringing one general after another as president. Eventually, Ghana even ran out of generals and in 1981 a further putsch was staged by Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings after which even political parties were banned. It was a grim business. Scores of people who were led out of cells at night were not heard of again. In 1982, three judges and a retired army officer were abducted and killed gruesomely.

But if Rawlings came in like a lion he went out a lamb. After converting to Christianity, he took off his uniform, donned a suit, and introduced a new constitution, restoring multi-party politics, and calling presidential elections in 1992. Rawlings stood and won, of course, as he did in 1996. But when his second term ended, surprisingly, he respected his new constitution and stood down. He didn't even call in the army when his preferred successor was defeated and the present President, John Kufuor, was elected.

"You have to give it to Rawlings," says Richard Dowden, the director of the Royal African Society. "He did dig Ghana out of the pit. And though he came in with some odd Marxist notions he quickly abandoned them when confronted with political reality, and set about some unattractive economic reforms."

"It's hard to say what made Ghana different in all this," says Patrick Smith. "It's success is partly down to the political good sense of its people. The political divide inn Ghana has always been ideological - between left and right - not ethnic, between different tribes. And it also has a strong educated middle class."

Ghanaians have, since colonial times, had comparatively easy access to good schools. But this has been boosted under President Kufuor. In the past decade he has spent between 28 per cent and 40 per cent of Ghana's annual budget on education.

"So much so that one of Ghana's key exports is its people," says Smith. The international civil service is full of Ghanaians of whom Kofi Annan, until recently at the top of the UN is only the most prominent example. The African Development Bank, the UN's Economic Commission for Africa and the African Union have far more Ghanaians in senior posts than almost any other African nation. "You'll find Ghanaian doctors all over the US, Europe, India, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia," says Smith.

This is a double-edged sword. Africa loses an average of 70,000 skilled personnel a year to developed countries in this brain drain. Sadly, African countries who tried to train more were told to replace them were told slash these budgets in the late 1970s to early 1990s by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

It was the World Bank which told Rawlings to sack half the civil service, causing the brain drain of the educated Ghanaian classes. Such economic obedience won Ghana debt relief. But compliance with IMF policies has done little to promote sustainable economic growth. Nor has all this done much to diversify the Ghanaian economy. The industries it had in the 1970s when, says Smith, it had a growing manufacturing sector, producing things like own sleeping mats, mosquito nets and coils, ropes (now all imported from Indian and China) and even pharmaceuticals and a small vehicle production industry have all gone.

"The middle has fallen out of the economy and it is once again reliant again on gold and cocoa," the Africa Confidential editor says. Reliance on primary commodities leaves the country vulnerable to wild fluctuations in commodity prices. Africa's export prices are nearly four times more volatile than those of developed countries.

Education pays some dividends. Ghana now has a growing IT and service sector. Exploiting time differences and cheap labour costs, it processes parking tickets for New York and does the health sector administration for much of east coast America. Services now represent 25 per cent of the economy, which continues to revolve around subsistence agriculture, which accounts for 40 per cent of GDP and employs at least 60 per cent of the workforce. life expectancy is now 58 years.

Ghanaians, Patrick Smith says, lack entrepreneurial flair. "The government is not energetic or inspirational though not particularly corrupt," he says. Indeed, Ghana ranks in the top half of Transparency International's last Corruption Perception Index, one of the best countries in Africa. Africa's economic powerhouses, Nigeria and Kenya, by contrast has plenty of business drive but abjectly corrupt political systems.

Still, on balance, that is reason to be cheerful, says Myles Wickstead, who headed the secretariat for the Commission for Africa. "Ghana is doing extremely well. It has gone through the transition process and settled down. Its president is well-respected internationally, as was shown when he was elected chair of the African Union recently. The review process known as the African Peer Review Mechanism has shown that Ghana is now doing a lot of the right things. Its people are outgoing, focused, articulate, and purposeful."

Small wonder that next week the country begins a year-long series of Ghana@50 celebrations. Reggie Rockstone has made a record, with Beenie Man, to mark the achievement.

"It's very ring-a-ting-ting music," he says. "but they like that, and who am I to tell them to change? Africans celebrate life and music." Zagga zow.

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