In 1957 Ghana became the first sub‑Saharan state to gain independence from Britain, but political emancipation did not erase colonial legacies. MIT political scientist Noah Nathan and co‑authors built a dataset of 11,702 civil servants from 1897‑1955 using British National Archives records (6,879 Ghanaian, 4,805 European). To assign ethnicity they matched names in the archive to a baseline derived from 13.8 million contemporary voter names and the 2010 census.
They found that the Ga and Fante—together only 14 % of the population—occupied more than 70 % of public‑sector posts in the 1950s. Comparing civil‑service exam scores with hiring outcomes showed almost no correlation; ethnicity and social ties dominated placement. Differences in education attainment, school geography, or proximity to ministries could not explain the skew. The authors argue that the colonial hiring process was highly decentralized and that British officials knew little about local societies, allowing entrenched networks to funnel jobs to their own groups.
Consequently, the Ghanaian state at independence inherited a bureaucracy steeped in patrimonialism rather than a Weberian merit‑based system. Nathan stresses that this legacy shaped post‑independence ethnic competition and challenges the view that independence created a clean break from the past.
Review: The paper demonstrates the power of granular archival data to overturn broad narratives about African state‑building, and it opens a methodological path for similar investigations in other former colonies.