Ghana Must Go: Nativism and the Politics of Expulsion in West Africa, 1969–1985

Abstract Beginning in the late 1960s, the Nigerian and Ghanaian governments staged a series of massive forced removals of one another’s nationals. The first was in Ghana in 1969, and the largest was Nigeria’s 1983 deportation of over one million Ghanaians. A further expulsion from Nigeria happened in 1985, and smaller ones took place in the years that followed. Each was an enactment of the state’s sovereign right to define its national community — and a devastating blow to the principle of free movement in Africa. Using records from Nigeria and elsewhere, ‘Ghana Must Go’ places the expulsions in the longer history of law and nationality policy in the British Empire. Mass expulsions were made possible by colonial-era jurisprudence that tied political membership to indigeneity, often through codified, neo-traditional ‘customary’ laws. The mass deportations of the 1960s–1980s were underwritten by this jurisprudence, even though their immediate causes lay in economic resentment, the failure of regional co-operation, and Ghana and Nigeria’s rocky diplomatic relationship.