The Mother, the Mistress, and the Cover Girls

Abstract

When Ghana Television began in 1965, its first director, Shirley Graham Du Bois, explicitly devised it as an anticolonial and pan-African indigenous television system. Likely the first Black woman to head a national station, Graham Du Bois’ prominence, along with Genoveva Marais as head of programing, suggests that in its nascency Ghana Television was an exceptional place for women. Yet each woman’s relationship with Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, shadowed their professional lives and legacies. Rumors situated them along female archetypes with a powerful man firmly at the center: Graham Du Bois as Nkrumah’s mother and Marais as his mistress. In this article, I argue that while Graham Du Bois and Marais’ media practice rarely addressed gender inequality specifically, their work as female broadcast leaders set a precedent for decolonial feminist futures even as the coloniality of gender extended into Ghana broadcasting during the independence period.