Economic Inequality and Political Imagination in Ghana: J.B. Danquah on Poverty, Land and Community

This article reconstructs the discourse on economic inequality in the writings of Ghanaian lawyer, philosopher and politician J.B. Danquah. A focus on economic inequality (broadly defined to include not only the distribution of wealth and income, but also considerations of moral economy, class differentiation and land tenure) allows to challenge simplistic characterisations of Danquah as a champion of individualism and free markets, and provides an entry point into the entanglements of economic and political thought in colonial and early postcolonial Ghana. The article argues that Danquah’s reflection on economic inequality fulfilled three functions. Firstly, it indexed his attempts to theorise a social order characterised by a harmonious complementarity of individualism and communitarianism. Secondly, it shaped his critique of colonial and postcolonial state intervention in the cocoa industry. Finally, it underpinned Danquah’s commitment to disentangle Akan land tenure institutions from Eurocentric stadial histories. Through these discursive threads, Danquah contested colonial and postcolonial rulers, reappropriated notions of ‘socialism’ and ‘liberalism’, and mobilised indigenous cultures and institutions to imagine Ghana’s future.