Youthful Bodies as Mnemonic Artifacts: Traversing the Cultural Terrain from Traditional to Popular Dances in Post-independent Ghana

Ghana’s independence led by Kwame Nkrumah on 6 March 1957 opened the Ghanaian cultural gate to a whole gamut of opportunities and influences by the global and the traditional worlds. The impact of colonization and its accompanying colonial doctrine of tabula rasa caused the nascent Ghanaian government to embark on a Pan-African campaign in a quest to decolonize its people. A section of the Ghanaian populace responded by proclaiming their identity through the traditional arts and culture, most significantly through music and dance, while the other section, made up of mostly the youth, embraced the foreign influences. This new development saw the creative comingling of Ghanaian indigenous artistic narratives with the hegemonic and ‘pseudopodic’ Western art forms that resulted in the birth of music and dance styles such as kpanlogo and the advancement of the already existing highlife. The Ghanaian popular dance and music terrain, characterized by the global-local problematic, has often produced hodgepodge artistic encounters, resulting in the creation of some popular music and dance types. In post-millennial Ghana, therefore, popular dances such as azonto included movements that were transmuted from Kpanlogo, Gome and Agbadza—dances akin to the Ga and Ewe indigenes of Ghana. This chapter examines some of Ghana’s post-independent dance narratives that exist as archival mnemonic materials and which drive the popular dance agenda, constantly chaperoned by socio-cultural exigencies. The chapter seeks to investigate how Ghanaian youth appropriate traditional dances in contemporary times.