Soldiers and Politics: The Case of Ghana

The politics of the succession of military coups d'état in Ghana represent an illuminating case of militarization processes in an underdeveloped society. The paper shows that the main reasons why Nkrumah's 'anti-imperialist' regime fell (1966) were to be found in the inner dynamics of Ghanaian political, tribal, and class contradictions, strengthened by personal rivalries. External interests — at that stage Western imperialist quarters notably — were however more than sympathetic to the overthrow, the new regime more than willing to accomodate to the policy of these quarters, and the coup thus represented a major change in the ideological Great Power struggle over Africa. With Ghana's decreasing international significance, external factors also came to represent a decreasing influence over successive internal conflits and repeated military coups. The paper shows in some detail the dynamics of these coups. It practically refutes the assumption about the military as 'modernizing developers'. And it shows how the civilian-military distinction in the process of struggle and changing administrations becomes blurred. According to the author, the distinction is generally much overemphasized: the civilian-military relationship in reality is a matter of various mixes with distinct interests, civilian and military, behind each interest.