Politics in Asunafo*

In the days of the Septennial Act, the English (as Rousseau mordantly suggested) were free once every seven years. ¹ On current showing the Ghanaians will be doing well if they are free more than once every fifteen. The election of 1969 was the first unequivocally free national political act on the part of the unorganised populace since the election of 1954, the first election, that is, in which the coffers of the state did not enter sharply into the political choices of voters. To understand what most voters were doing when they went to the polls on this occasion is to understand something as central to the politics of Ghana as the operation of the machinery of government—it is to understand what the people of Ghana attempt to do politically when they are free. ² Whatever they may have brought about, the action which they performed in choosing in this way retains its moral status. No doubt the Ghanaian electorate was confused and ignorant, and no doubt its wills were as particular as the next nation's. ³ But abstract though it was and politically null as it soon turned out to have been, there is to be read in its choices, as there may perhaps be in the choices of all nations allowed the privilege of choosing, the shadowy outlines of a Volonté Genéralé. Elections in Africa by now may be closer to rituals of affliction than to concrete embodiments of freedom, but the sentiments to which they give transient and paradoxical shape are no less profound for their failure to exemplify the assurance of a mastered world. In order to recapture some vague outline of these sentiments, this chapter attempts to discuss two separate issues: the question of what happened in the election campaign in the Asunafo constituency, and the question of what was meant by what happened.