The first part of this paper focuses on gendered citizenship in the new Ghana. It asks why a programme of national legislation was formulated as the necessary solution to what were perceived as longstanding ‘problems’ of marriage and the family; and why women parliamentarians regarded themselves – and were seen by many others – as key advocates of legal reform. In order to answer these questions, we must go beyond generalised descriptions of the challenges of newly independent governments. The Convention People’s Party (CPP) government of Kwame Nkrumah did indeed face the challenge of meeting heightened expectations for solutions to ‘social problems’ whilst operating through the institutional infrastructure bequeathed by colonialism. But this government also had particular ways of framing and responding to this challenge.
The scholarship of Gordon Woodman, along with that of Ghanaian legal experts, can help us to understand how the Nkrumah government approached the colonial legacy of ‘deep legal pluralism’ and how the justice system was ‘decolonised’. A shift from ‘deep legal pluralism’ to ‘state law pluralism’, however, interacted in particular ways with the CPP’s formulation of guiding statements on the equality of the sexes under socialism, its identification of particular women to serve as parliamentarians, and with Nkrumah’s investment in them of the authority to identify, describe and seek redress for ‘social problems’ – even to the chagrin of many other party members.
In order to highlight these interactions, the second part of this paper focuses more narrowly on the arguments made by women parliamentarians during the debate that ensued from the second reading of the Maintenance of Children Bill in May 1965. I have chosen this Bill partly because it passed through parliament and thus entered the realm of statutory law – something which cannot be said for the Marriage, Divorce and Inheritance Bill. Ironically, the very failure of the latter Bill kept ‘problems’ of marriage, divorce and inheritance at the heart of popular, political and legal debate. The earlier failure to pass legislation was frequently cited by the next generation of scholar-activists, who established new campaigns for family law reform during the 1970s and 1980s. These gave rise to the passage of PNDC Laws 111-114, on which a great deal has been written (by Gordon Woodman, Takyiwaa Manuh and others).
The Maintenance of Children Act, on the other hand, has received less attention. A handful of sociologists explored the operationalization, instrumentalisation or obstruction of the Act in the particular regions of Ghana (Jones-Quartey 1974, Lowy 1976, Mikell 1997). But given that objections to the Bill were numerous and bitter, it is perhaps surprising that it passed through parliament and entered the statute books at all. This paper asks how the Bill became law in the first place, how it sat with the government’s wider programme of family law reform, and what this might tell us about the discursive production of new gendered categories of citizenship in post-Independence Ghana and under single-party socialism.