New Media, Neo-Media: The Brief Life of Socialist Television in Ghana

Abstract

Television in Ghana was born at a radical time when Africans across the continent were boldly inventing systems of governance resistant to imperialism and racial inequality. Alongside the formation of the new state, the new medium was designed to help realize visions of Pan-Africanism and African socialism promoted by Kwame Nkrumah. With the February 24, 1966, coup d’état seven months after its first broadcast, Ghanaian socialist television ended. Based on archival research and interviews with Ghanaian television pioneers, in this essay I argue that this Afrofuturist segment of Ghana's media past provides a counternarrative to new media discourse from the colonial era that positioned Africa as the passive receiver of television. I show how transnational influences were actively adapted to theorize the new medium in opposition to racial capitalism and propose that media archaeologies attuned to Afrofuturism may reorient the field toward social and political justice in the present.