The traffic between Africa and Canada during the 1960s — sponsored by governments, churches, service clubs, and universities — spoke of an infectious desire to be involved in the changes sweeping the continent. And it went both ways. Those bringing the best of African youth to Canada hoped to help train the next presidents, senior civil servants, doctors, lawyers, etymologists, and engineers of post-independence African nations. Some, like John Bentum-Williams, returned home to bolster the leadership pool. As the continent struggled, however, many other African elites began to stay abroad, the start of a problematic but ongoing bonanza for Canada. What persuaded growing numbers to leave their homes, friends, and families? How did Africa get from the heady days of independence to a continent that many in Canada perceive only as a place of despair? In the bad, as eventually in the good, Ghana showed the way.

After the coup, the military government initially set about putting the country on a democratic foundation, promoting the candidacy of Kofi Busia, a diminutive, scholarly sociology professor, representative of the right-of-centre elite, who had fled the country under Nkrumah’s rule. He was elected prime minister, and the Western world rejoiced. Canada quickly invited him to pay a state visit, which he did in November 1970. By this point, I had returned to Canada, and the first task of my first real job in what was then the Department of External Affairs was to hold Busia’s briefcase as he was rushed from Rideau Hall to the Office of the Prime Minister, from parliamentary question period to talks with top Canadian International Development Agency officials about more Canadian aid. Though continued Canadian funding for Ghana was certainly forthcoming, the trip was not entirely successful. Busia and his entourage looked askance at having to brave a cold winter rain to plant a commemorative tree in the gardens of Rideau Hall. They rushed away from Canada early to attend French president Charles de Gaulle’s funeral, as much impressed by the dreariness of Ottawa in November as by the generosity of Canadian hospitality and our support for African development.

Back home in Ghana, Busia didn’t last long. His promises of good government went unfulfilled, the economy continued to decline, and he acquired many of the habits that had been Nkrumah’s undoing. Ghanaians quickly grew disillusioned with his inability to put more money in their pockets, and suspicious of his apparent ties to the United States and Britain. They were incensed when he sharply devalued Ghana’s currency; they were irritated by his flashy motorcades and ostentatious security. For most Ghanaians, life in Busia’s “Western” democracy was no better than it had been during Nkrumah’s socialism.

Like so many other Africans, Ghanaians had become ensnared in the Cold War trap, pulled in opposite directions by the ideological proxy battles being waged across the continent by the Soviet Union and the United States. Newly independent nations like Ghana found themselves playing one side against the other to win more aid; imposing trade and business controls; and silencing opposition instead of developing a capacity for independent policy formulation and effective government. The heroes of freedom struggles across Africa eventually became all too proficient at this game, winning Soviet or Western military support and often-self-serving aid, but sacrificing much of the independence they had fought for. To maintain their hold on power, they exploited the pull of petty local nationalism and maintained an enveloping government media. And so Africa sank into an abyss of inflation, corruption, one-party states, dictatorships, conflict, and coups. When Busia was tossed out in another military putsch, in 1972, it was no surprise to my friends from the University of Ghana — or to me, in my new post as a junior officer with the Canadian High Commission in nearby Lagos, Nigeria.

As always with the military governments that drove out so many of Africa’s early leaders, the new Ghanaian regime only accelerated the state of decline. Much the same had happened in Nigeria. We had arrived in Lagos as a newly minted embassy family in 1971, with the country still reverberating from the bloody civil war that had pitted the central government and much of the country against a doughty but soon all-but-destroyed Biafra (Nigeria’s former Eastern Region). We drove frequently over the next few years from Lagos to Accra, relying on our two small children to win the hearts of the customs and police officers who manned the countless roadblocks and border crossings. Amid near-universal economic collapse, these petty officials were bent mainly on collecting a “dash” from defenceless travellers making their already unpleasant journey from Nigeria through Dahomey (now Benin), across Togo, and into Ghana.

Once in Accra, the financial straits were no less distressing. Looking for a way to take their minds off the seeming dead end of life in Accra, some of my friends from Legon had opened up rudimentary disco bars to replace the traditional under-the-palms clubs of earlier, more prosperous years. But even the most lively music and dancing could not disguise the decline of life in Ghana. The military government was stumbling toward seven years of continued economic strife. Inflation climbed; professionals and students went on strike. Rural Ghanaians in particular grew poorer as the country’s farmers, faced with shortages of fertilizers and pesticides, and forced to sell their crops at well below market value, smuggled their cocoa across the border to Togo and Côte d’Ivoire. Another military leader replaced the old one. As far as my Ghanaian mates were concerned, life in those years was truly a descent into hell. They had been betrayed by greedy politicians, a dissipated civil service, and corrupt business leaders. Post-colonial pride and rhetoric had transmogrified into bitter disillusionment.

y family left Nigeria in the midst of this, in 1974, sailing from Lagos via Ghana. We were among a faded, rather colonial group sharing one of the final voyages of the Elder Dempster passenger liner Aureol. It was a sad trip: the days of ship travel were over, and as we called at Tema in Ghana and then at Freetown in Sierra Leone, we were bluntly reminded that we were leaving West Africa in worse trouble than we had found it. Our own high hopes at independence had turned to despair. I was on my way to a legal job in Ottawa, and then, in one of those quirks of the foreign service, to a three-year posting in the Philippines.

While I was still in the Philippines, in June of 1979, a young, impetuous Ghana Air Force flight lieutenant named Jerry John Rawlings led a coup d’état against his own officers, installing himself as head of a self-styled “revolutionary council.” His first acts were to establish a people’s court, destroy the main market in Accra, order men and women publicly flogged for alleged corruption, and execute the generals who had led Ghana’s earlier, abrupt changes in government. Then, rare among coup leaders, he did as he had promised: in September 1979, he handed the government back to elected politicians.

It took no time for them to outstay their welcome, however, and, frustrated with the newly elected government’s inability to resolve the country’s economic drift, Rawlings pounced again. On the last day of 1981, he staged a comeback. He had lost none of his fervour, praising Castro and Gadhafi, abjuring the West, and denouncing politicians and business leaders alike.

In 1982, I was assigned to the Canadian High Commission in London, once again to be in close contact with African issues, and with many of our friends, now either in self-exile in London, or, like a fortunate few from Nigeria, recently wealthy enough to afford substantial homes in Chelsea or The Bishops Avenue in Hampstead. For the rest at home — both my Legon mates and the working-class Atingas of the country — life during the ’80s was to be at best a challenge, and at worst a constant fight.

Many of my friends were dismayed that their country was once again controlled by an unelected military junta, but they were more optimistic than most Ghanaians, who were fed up with government of any sort. Instead of the proud “Black Star of Africa” Nkrumah had promised, Ghana had descended into a country where nothing worked: health and education had fallen from among the best in Africa at independence to among the most neglected; food supplies were unreliable; and production of cocoa, timber, and gold had fallen disastrously, destroying Ghana’s ability to earn foreign exchange for imports. Rawlings seemed unlikely to provide the leadership Ghana needed. But then, to everyone’s surprise, he did.

During all of Ghana’s strife, donors had not given up on the country. It remained the site of one of Canada’s biggest and longest-standing aid programs in Africa and the Middle East; we worked there hopefully, in tandem with the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US. Still involved, too, were the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Throughout the early years of Rawlings’ rule and into the 1990s, the two global finance institutions attempted to rescue a number of all-but-bankrupt African nations.

To be eligible for this essential financial help, governments had to agree to implement a demanding “structural adjustment program,” which sought to eliminate tariff and exchange controls; cut civil service, health, and education expenditures; and emphasize free market over government-led economic policies. These saps were politically dangerous: they offended notions of African sovereignty, appearing to some to be a new manifestation of Western imperialism; they went against the inclinations of those who had cut their political teeth on socialist economics; they were untried; and, as some prescient leaders and finance ministers noted, they carried with them the risk of social upheaval. But to Western aid experts at the World Bank — and at the Canadian International Development Agency — social and political concerns were less immediate than the need to save Africa from bankruptcy by restraining government spending and opening up markets.

Selling the concept was no easier in Ghana than in most other African countries, in particular because of Rawlings. Like many of Africa’s military leaders and “big men,” he was accustomed to getting his way. Even as a junior officer in the military, he had established himself as a formidable personality. When I first met him, back in the mid-1970s, he was still in the barracks at Burma Camp in Accra. It was fashionable then to be radical, to admire strong socialist leaders, to drink whisky, and to talk tough. Rawlings was frighteningly good at all of these. He prided himself on speaking forcefully and directly, and on taking fast action to right perceived wrongs. Once at the head of Ghana’s government, he paid little attention to most of his ministers, and even less to government bureaucrats. He was also suspicious of his country’s increasingly affluent middle class, which was building huge gated houses on land around the university that had traditionally been the preserve of poor migrants from Ghana’s neglected north. He was more comfortable leading teams to clean out Accra’s gutters than fraternizing with the country’s rising bankers, industrialists, and importers.

Nor was Rawlings given to policy subtleties. His decisions, demands, and actions often appeared bizarre, even embarrassing. At one well-attended commemoration in Black Star Square — speaking before the full diplomatic corps, his ministers, the international media, and a huge crowd of supporters — he called his vice-president a traitor. At a university convocation, after delivering a few appreciative, scripted words thanking the university’s largest private donor, he suddenly turned against the honouree, shouting, “The man’s a crook! Everything he has given the university has come straight from the taxpayers’ pockets!”

Thus, when the World Bank and the imf arrived, preaching structural adjustment, Rawlings was ill disposed toward them. He saw them as an imposition from abroad — one that would weaken his control over patronage and make the economy the fiefdom of Western politicians and businessmen. Only when the economy continued to deteriorate toward complete collapse in 1983 was he persuaded to move, reluctantly, from his populist radicalism to something closer to liberal realism.

Much of the credit for this conversion must go to Rawlings’ reticent finance minister, Kwesi Botchwey. A Legon Hall graduate, once known as much for his charm and love of the good life as for his wisdom, he had matured into a dab hand at economics and political strategy. He, often alone among government ministers, was willing to take Rawlings on, working deftly and against considerable odds to persuade a skeptical president with little background in economics that Ghana had to enter into a devil’s pact with the imf.