Voluntariness, Decolonisation, and the Regulation of Labor in (Post) Colonial Ghana

The project focuses on voluntarism in times of decolonisation and thus a political principle of (post-)colonial governance. Using the example of the British Gold Coast/Ghana, the aim is to explore how voluntary action constituted the political and social order in the transition between late colonial "indirect rule" and post-colonisation, and how voluntarism became a political and social norm and resource. The significance of voluntary labour will be at the centre of attention.

The project explores the call to participate as citizens in the construction of a new Ghana and a new Africa. It also examines selected state programmes, such as the Builder's Brigades, which have deployed citizens to realise development goals and at the same time shape them into new (post-)colonial subjects. It explores the question of how the new regime conceived self-mobilisation through work and also differentiated it from unemployment. The question is whether and to what extent this form of voluntary labour was regarded by the actors involved as a constitutive component of Western action and thought or whether it instead pointed beyond this - for example as a driving force of a future African modernity.

The project explores the dimensions of voluntary practice and its colonial history; also of interest are the political entanglements with pan-African movements and with the new socialist states, especially the GDR. The project ties in with demands for a social and cultural history of decolonisation research. By focusing on the nexus of decolonisation and voluntarism, it contributes to extending the historical and systemic significance of voluntarism as a mode of political and social action beyond liberal societies of the Western type.

In the spirit of governmentality research, the project asks how people are governed through voluntarism and how they are moulded into new political subjects through the interplay of external and self-government. In terms of subjectivisation theory, the project is interested in how and in what specific ways voluntary action in (post-)colonial settings was combined with leadership and self-leadership. With recourse to contemporary social anthropological studies, it is also important to ask how voluntarism became an object of social scientific observation and how this may have had an impact on political practice and shaped it.

Funding:  Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
The research project is a sub-project of the research group "Voluntariness".

_{Image: A formation of the "Ghana Young Pioneers" near Aburi/Ghana with both flags, 23 October 1964 © Wikimedia Commons/Wieland Koerbel}