Conclusion

Abstract

During the African Revolution in the mid- to late twentieth century, one of the primary and most daunting tasks of the immediate postcolonial era was the construction of new national identities. This reinvention of African identity was not only targeted toward creating a unique national identity that was distinct from colonial notions of who Africans were. It was also a project to realign precolonial ethnonational identities into national ones. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah grappled with both the theoretical and the practical implications of nations and nationalism, which has preoccupied nationalists and scholars before and after him. This treatise has demonstrated how the administration of Kwame Nkrumah, since the late 1950s until his ouster in 1966, had sought to construct a national identity for newly independent Ghana by developing various symbols on nationhood. I have also argued that during his time in office, as well as in the immediate aftermath of, and long since Nkrumah’s demise, other governmental and political players have sought to reject, reconstruct, and reassess the symbolic legacy of the Nkrumah state with their own nationalist, ethno-nationalist, and Pan-Africanist symbols.