Ghana’s post independence colonization

When Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain independence in 1957, it inherited a civil service in which two ethnic groups—the Ga and the Fante—held more than 70 percent of public-sector positions despite making up just 14 percent of the population combined, according to a new study published in the American Political Science Review.

The findings, detailed in “The Seeds of State Capture: Merit and Patrimonialism in the Colonial Bureaucracy,” challenge a long-standing narrative that British colonial administrators built a rational, merit-based bureaucracy that post-independence African leaders later corrupted. Instead, the research suggests the colonial civil service was already deeply captured along ethnic lines—and that Kwame Nkrumah’s government inherited a system rife with patronage rather than a Weberian ideal .

“At the moment of independence, you have a state that is not meritocratic, and is highly captured by certain ethnic groups,” said Noah Nathan, a Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT and co-author of the paper. “You can imagine the politics that creates, which are demands to equalize access to state power and state authority. And things start off on this foot of ethnic political competition over the state. That is in part a legacy of colonial state-building” .

The study’s co-authors include Sarah Brierley and George Kwaku Ofosu, both associate professors at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Tingxuan Zhu, a recent MIT PhD graduate .

Digging Into the Archives

To reconstruct the ethnic composition of the colonial bureaucracy, the researchers digitized individual employment records for 11,702 bureaucrats from the British National Archives, spanning 1897 to 1955. The dataset included 6,879 Ghanaian civil servants and 4,805 European civil servants .

Determining ethnicity from historical records required an innovative methodological approach. The scholars first analyzed 13.8 million names of registered voters from contemporary Ghana alongside localized ethnicity data from the 2010 census to establish a baseline relationship between names and ethnic identity. They then applied this model to the historical civil servant names to infer ethnic backgrounds .

The results were striking: by the eve of independence, the Ga and Fante held a share of civil service jobs five times greater than their proportion of the population. At the senior bureaucratic level, the imbalance was even more pronounced—the two groups accounted for 83.1 percent of senior Ghanaian bureaucrats by 1948, with the Ga alone holding 54.2 percent of such positions despite being just 3 percent of the population .

Ruling Out Alternative Explanations

The researchers systematically tested and rejected several seemingly logical explanations for the ethnic skew.

Education gaps? The scholars geolocated every school in the country dating to the 1890s and measured access to education across ethnic groups over time. While the Ga and Fante may have had early advantages, by the 1930s many other groups had caught up in educational attainment—yet continued to be shut out of civil service hiring through the 1950s. The data also showed no evidence that Ga and Fante areas had systematically better-funded schools; if anything, the Fante had among the colony’s worst-funded schools despite dominating hiring .

Geographic proximity? The capital moved from Cape Coast to Accra in 1877, potentially favoring the Ga, who are indigenous to Accra. But the Fante, whose population centers lie farther from the capital than several other groups, also dominated. Moreover, Ga and Fante bureaucrats were overrepresented in field-based jobs spread throughout the colony, not just desk jobs in the capital. Government teachers from these groups were hired in excess of the proportion of government schools located in their communities .

British ethnic preferences? The researchers found no documentary evidence in hundreds of archived hiring and promotion files that British officials explicitly favored the Ga or Fante. Both groups were pre-colonially centralized—unlike the “weak” groups that some theories suggest British administrators preferred to elevate .

What Actually Happened

The likeliest explanation, the authors argue, is “bureaucrat-led insider capture.” Once Ga and Fante officials established a foothold in the civil service, they used their social connections and decentralized hiring authority to bring in more people from their own groups. The British, with limited knowledge of local societies and weak incentives to monitor hiring closely, created an information asymmetry that allowed this dynamic to flourish unchecked.

“If you were from the right ethnic group, you were going to get a job, even if you did pretty poorly on the civil service exam,” Nathan said. “And people from disfavored ethnic groups who did much better on the exam were not getting the same positions” .

The scholars obtained individual-level civil service exam results and found little correspondence between scores and hiring outcomes—further evidence that merit was not the primary criterion.

Implications for Postcolonial Politics

The study reframes a central debate about African state-building. A common narrative holds that Nkrumah and other post-independence leaders introduced patrimonialism into otherwise functional bureaucracies. The new research suggests the opposite: Nkrumah inherited a bureaucracy already captured by specific ethnic networks, which he then adapted to his own political purposes.

“The ministry of finance in Ghana in 1957 isn’t some new thing that’s created from scratch,” Nathan said. “It’s the colonial ministry of finance that’s been in place for 60 years, and the bureaucrats in it showed up to work the next day in the same jobs” .

The paper’s title— “The Seeds of State Capture”—reflects this continuity. As the authors write, “Postcolonial central bureaucracies were not blank slates upon which new leaders built. Instead, many leaders inherited packed bureaucracies” .

The research contributes to a growing body of data-intensive scholarship on colonial legacies. Ada Johnson-Kanu, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, has conducted similar work on Nigeria’s bureaucracy. Nathan said he hopes other scholars will pursue archival research of this kind.

“There is just incredibly rich archival evidence out there in the world for a lot of countries,” he said. “I think this is a really fun way to do research” .

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Publication details: “The Seeds of State Capture: Merit and Patrimonialism in the Colonial Bureaucracy” is published in advance online form in the American Political Science Review. Authors: Sarah Brierley (LSE), Noah Nathan (MIT), George Kwaku Ofosu (LSE), and Tingxuan Zhu (MIT PhD ’26).