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In the midnight hour: anticolonial rhetoric and postcolonial statecraft in Ghana

ABSTRACT When Ghana gained its independence from colonial rule in March 1957, there was a midnight ceremony, and the new Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah, delivered a speech. Nkrumah’s Midnight Speech is an act of rhetorical invention adapted to postcolonial political foundation and, with Ghana as the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence, an available model of transfigurative politics for decolonizing Africa and its diaspora. I use the four constituents of Ghana’s independence ceremony—the crowd, Nkrumah, the Old Polo Grounds on which they gathered, and the midnight timing—to outline salient elements of emergent Ghana’s rhetorical culture. First, I argue that the crowd was the manifestation of the mass public of Ghana and a catalyst of colonial freedom. Next, I examine how Nkrumah personified the mass state that was caught between forms of anticolonial organizing and the media of the postcolonial state. Then, I analyze the Old Polo Grounds to focus on how Nkrumah’s rededication of national becoming to pan-African union sought to avoid the perpetuation of neocolonial dynamics. Finally, I argue that the liminal potential of midnight projected a new social imaginary that transfigured both present routines and prior traditions.