At the present time, Accra--eighty years the seat of Gold Coast administration, and fifteen years the capital of an independent Ghana--stands atop an urban system that is relatively well developed by Black African standards. In several years the municipal population will reach the million mark, notwithstanding the fact that less than 5 per cent of the labor force is employed in modern manufacturing industries. Unlike most large cities in the West which expanded in response to the needs of industry, Accra grew despite a dearth of secondary industries. Foremost among its competitive advantages during the colonial period were its traditional role as a port, its administrative importance as a political capital, and its fortuitous location vis-à-vis the earliest cocoa-producing districts. It is proposed that this latter advantage was the primary determinant of the urban growth and spatial organization of Accra during the second decade of the present century, a seminal phase in its commercial development.

In this paper I would like to discuss the impact of the early years of the cocoa trade, first, on Accra in relation to the emerging urban system and, second, on the changing pattern of commercial land use within the town. Most of the discussion refers to those years between 1908, when the first significant cocoa exports occurred, and 1921, by which time the townscape of Accra clearly displayed the impress of the cocoa trade. During this brief but eventful period the economic shock waves released by the revolutionary new crop set up a condition of disequilibrium within the colonial space-economy. Centers, such as Accra, which serviced the cocoa trade flourished, while many other languished. The paper focuses, then, on cocoa as a primary influence on the economic geography of Accra, at a time when its leadership in the urban hierarchy was being consolidated.

The passing of the colonial order from much of Africa left a complex geopolitical environment within which to confront the problems of modernization. Since 1960 African states have had to cope with a confused mosaic of competing sovereignties bequeathed by the colonial scramble and the breakup of the colonial federations. In spite of the appeal of pan-Africanism to many African intellectuals, diversity and differentiation rather than unity have been the rule in the post-colonial era, both within most African states and in their international relations. Despite similar legacies and many common problems, African governments have found it difficult to transcend their colonial boundaries either in the name of political ideology or apolitical efficiency.

A number of African leaders have devoted considerable effort to changing this situation. Seme, of whom Kwame Nkrumah is perhaps the most familiar example, have stressed the achievement of continental political unity as the most effective approach to reorganizing the inter-African system. Others, of whom Leopold Senghor is a prime example, have emphasized regional projects based on cooperation in economic and technical domains without regard to political unity. Senghor's approach reflects the functionalist notion that there are relatively noncontroversial matters which provide a foundation for the gradual development of international institutions. Senegal's inter-African diplomacy under Senghor, therefore, provides a framework within which to evaluate functionalism as a strategy of international organization in the context of contemporary Africa.

Welcoming the English translation of Bernard Dadié's Climbié-- some fifteen years after its publication in French--Ezekiel Mphahlele commented:

It is a fact that the artificial barriers erected throughout Africa by the colonial structure in the course of the nineteenth century are still in existence and the many works dealing with African literature published in the last ten years or so--ever since the emergence to independence--still reflect a situation which, one hopefully assumed, was to end with colonialism. The French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish “cultural” empires carved in Africa seem to have maintained their autonomy, and there does not seem to be much interpénétration between the various components of the African continent.