Against the dominant tendencies to either overlook the interwar period, or to dismiss it as dead-end conservative nationalism irrelevant to the important history that will unfold after WWII, this chapter reveals it as an engagement with problems of ongoing relevance in Ghana. Resting on different ideas about Akan culture and political values, thus chiefs, the debates are conscious of contemporary thinking in the wider world, and based on different opinions about how to go forward. It is a defining moment in time when the notion of Akan homogeneity enmeshed debaters in personality squabbles, factional and party rivalry. The chapter employs Emma Hunter’s insight about other liberalisms, arguing that the debaters had a vision that employed an older but still relevant communal, group rights liberal vision. This connects them to the contemporary, and removes them from the place they are often placed: as backward looking and refusing to think constructively.

This chapter reads the essay form as key to the consolidation of the Gold Coast intelligentsia in the early twentieth century, when Anglo-Fante public intellectuals including J.E. Casely Hayford, S.R.B. Attoh Ahuma, and J.W. de Graft Johnson sought to persuade their London audience of Africans’ capacity for self-determination. In using the essay form to negotiate the relationship between national and Christian leadership qualities, they also tested the boundary between neutral practices of observation and religious experience. Casely Hayford’s 1915 essay ‘William Waddy Harris’, on a prominent West African evangelist, is an especially rich case study in how to reconcile a premium on facticity with a new openness to direct communion with God. In this way, Gold Coast anti-colonial intellectuals introduce an anti-secularising vector to the history of the essay form as well as to the rise of the African nation state.

Examining media and historical texts as well as interviews with activists and business-owners, Chapter 1 describes the uproar that ensued when Ghanaian politicians, clerics, and journalists conspired to circulate claims about a supposed “homoconference” that was alledgedly planned by a local LGBTI activist. It lays out the cultural, political, and historical landscape in which (homo)sexuality has been called into discourse. It then considers the failed activist attempts to form a self-identified lesbian group and shows how same-sex desiring women resist, re-signify, or perform the global language of sexual rights activism and human rights. These women’s reluctance to label and “out” themselves in sexual terms, a practice deemed essential to empowering LGBTI subjects across the globe, calls for a close consideration of the indirect language of allusion, spoken within the informal networks of female friends and lovers, who may or may not identify as lesbian.