This is of course not just true in Ghana. Many if not most Africans have more immediate and relavent categories in their lives than the national. I don’t have any experience living in Zimbabwe, so I don’t have a direct sense of how that compares. The point that my friend was making was that in his view, because Ghana arrived at independence primarily through negotiation and pressure (as well as limited strike actions) rather than armed struggle, the struggle for independence as such doesn’t have a lot of meaning for most people. People still have definite opinions about Nkrumah (thank goodness, says my dissertation) and while there remain a certain percentage of commited Nkrumahists, Ghanaian politics today is largely defined by the rivalries between the ruling NPP, who call on the heritage of Nkrumah’s opponents, Danquah and Busia, and the NDC in the shadow of Jerry Rawlings.

Again, I’m not sure that my friend is right, either in Ghana’s case or comparatively, but I understand the intuitive appeal of the idea that it makes a difference to have gone a through a period of collective struggle (even if in a highly differentiated way) rather than a brief period of mass nationalist organizing which is then diffused into a hand-over by stages.

BTW, what were you thinking of for Appiah? It seems to me that while he certainly identifies as Ghanaian, he uses that identity either to make the point that Africans are different from one another (though I don’t think he argues this along national lines as such) or to reference more particular issues of culture (Ghanaian as an intermediate stand-in for Asante). More recently he has tended to argue against nationalism, in both state and pan-African forms, in favor of cosmopolitanism.

I wouldn’t at all view Ghana as lacking in national consciousness compared to Zimbabwe–that seems a really odd sentiment to me, actually. I also would not at all see Zimbabwe as bearing out Fanon’s proposition about the cathartic effects of anticolonial violence, in fact, quite the opposite.

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Ivory, I don’t think HIV-AIDS played really any role in the end of apartheid, but it’s definitely a significant problem with the “new” South Africa, including with the way that the state operates.

BTW, I’m sure that you’re right about the relative military irrelevance of Umkhonto we Sizwe in South Africa, but my understanding is that the same could not be said for the role of ZANLA and ZIPRA in ending white minority rule in Zimbabwe (or is this not correct?). Of course there are clearly costs for that struggle that people there have paid and continue to pay both individually and collectively. A Ghanaian friend of mine in discussing the relative lack of national consciousness in Ghana relative to Zimbabwe referred to Fanon’s point about the instructive role of violence in the struggle. He may be right on that narrow point, but it seems an awfully high price to pay.

The primary sources on dissident thinking are accessible and reasonably short–an advantage of samizdat circulation. Here I’m thinking mainly of Havel, Michnik and Gyorgy Konrad. All three went on to play prominent (though different) roles in post-transition public life, so their more recent works will have the advantage of comparing practice with theory.

The difference between replacing one autocrat with another and what has happened in ECE also shows the advantage of having nearby multinational liberal institutions that states can aspire to joining.

I’ll have a look at my own disorganized book collection and see if I can offer anything helpful.

There was also a big fad in the early 1990s for talking about the “winds of change”, and democratization as inevitable shift in the global zeitgeist, etcetera. That, thankfully, has slunk under the bed in embarassment. It’s not just what we’re dealing with now, but things like the big elections in Zambia that Africanists got briefly excited about until they realized that replacing the old autocrat with a new autocrat in a multiparty election is not a screamingly huge achievement. That’s about where Fareed Zakaria’s book on illiberal democracy entered the picture.

If there’s a good, rigorous comparative study out there, I would very much like to hear about it, though.

As for the relationship with your original slippery-slope argument, the leaders of the oppositions essentially came to the conclusion that the way they came to power meant at least as much as the fact of coming to power at all. I’d have to go back through my Havel and Michnik et al. to give chapter and verse, but that’s my overall impression. And I think it’s one of the internal things that’s made a difference in progress toward their relative success in the decade and a half since. (Efforts at creating a parallel society, in Poland for example, did not go as far as ungovernability in SA, but did lead to a clear separation from an authoritarian state that made near-total claims for its citizens.)

Anyway, I think there’s good stuff in comparing the changes, and I wonder if it’s done among Africa specialists.