Democracy Ascendant In States of West Africa

Supporters of opposition presidential candidate John Atta Mills celebrate in Winneba, an Atlantic coast town near Ghana's capital, Accra, after learning that rumors of Mills's death were false. (By Craig Timberg -- The Washington Post)
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In 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African nation to win independence from its colonial ruler, Britain, and ever since has seen itself in the vanguard of the continent's progress. In only half a century, the nation has had a British-style parliamentary system, a U.S.-style presidential system, one-party rule, socialism, capitalism, brutal coups and an extended period of military rule.

The results varied. In the early 1980s, Ghana was so destitute that its neighbors, weary of the nation's economic refugees, ordered millions of Ghanaians to return home. The resulting migration has been immortalized across the region in the name of a cheap but sturdy piece of luggage, the woven nylon "Ghana-Must-Go Bag," still favored by poor West Africans on the move.

Throughout years of trouble, Ghanaians remained uncommonly patriotic in a continent whose national borders, most drawn by European powers in the 19th century, frequently are dismissed as colonial remnants bearing little relationship to natural ethnic boundaries. Ghana's national flag, with red, yellow and green bars and a black star in the middle, decorates taxi windshields, T-shirts and countless billboards. Rows of the flags flap on the streets in Accra, the capital, in the sultry ocean breeze.

For this Ghanaians credit their first liberation leader, Kwame Nkrumah, who in nearly nine years before a coup toppled him in 1966 outlawed regional or ethnically based parties and espoused a revolutionary creed, Pan-Africanism, whose unifying spirit still animates public discourse. Freedom of speech, political activity and the press have grown steadily since military ruler Jerry Rawlings stepped aside in 2001, after about 18 years in power that included the first steps toward restoring democracy.

"What I like about this country is people will not keep quiet," said Kwesi Jonah, a political science professor at the University of Ghana. "They will talk so the subject stays fresh in the public consciousness, in the public mind, for a very long time."

Ghana has managed tensions between its poor, dry, Muslim northern regions and richer, wetter, more Christian southern ones far more successfully than most of its neighbors, Jonah added. Development aid, along with free education through the university level, have eased the toxic regional rivalries that long have fueled trouble in Nigeria and Ivory Coast.

Yet Ghana is not without potentially volatile ethnic divides. Despite Nkrumah's battle against regionally based political parties, the ruling New Patriotic Party of President John Kufuor is widely seen as rooted in the Ashanti region, in southwestern Ghana. The National Democratic Congress, meanwhile, is supported more heavily in the north and the east.

One barrier to conflict, Ghanaians said, is the experience of power alternating among the major parties. When Kufuor won in 2000, his opposition party became the ruling party, and the ruling party of Rawlings became the opposition.

Rawlings's handpicked successor was Mills, his vice president, but Mills lost in 2000 and 2004. Though his supporters claim that those votes were not entirely free and fair, they accepted the results and regrouped for 2008. In December, he will face Nana Akufo-Addo, the former foreign minister to Kufuor. Political analysts say they have no idea who will win -- a rarity in African elections.

That made addressing recent rumors about the demise of Mills all the more urgent. His campaign officials said the reports resulted from his weakness after recent cataract surgery, and some aides favored resting the candidate. But political momentum had begun to sag. So they accelerated the schedule to resume "retail" campaigning, even though the vote was still nine months away.

In between meetings with traditional chiefs and party loyalists, Mills is making stops in roadside towns such as Kasoa, on the far western fringes of Accra.

After touring the narrow dirt alleyways of a boisterous market there, he grabbed a white megaphone from a campaign aide and shouted to the surging crowd, "I'm alive!"