The privileging of representation as a means of securing epistemological or ideological systems has been regarded as a Western phenomenon. The employment of cultural exhibitions, documentaries, and spectacle to advance systems of authority, however, is also characteristic of African political systems in the pre- and postcolonial eras. This article examines cultural exhibitions, documentary films, representations of Nkrumah, and commissioned “national” art in the context of independence-era Ghana. It employs existing archival records to trace the positioning of discursive representations as mechanisms of social indoctrination, and as paradigms of the construction of the political subject in the postcolonial era.