Cocoa and compliance: How exemptions made mass expulsion in Ghana.

‘Mass expulsion’ was rarely so ‘mass’ in its application. It was often enforced through exceptions as much as the rule, through the ad-hoc actions of individual citizens and migrants, as much as by the executive branches of independence-era governments. On November 18, 1969, Kofi Abrefa Busia, the newly elected Prime Minister of Ghana, issued the Aliens Compliance Order, requiring all undocumented immigrants, those without valid residence permits, to leave the nation within fourteen days. Since mass expulsion orders are enacted by decrees such as Busia’s, they are overwhelmingly analyzed as tool of executive authority. But this analytical glossing lends too much authority to the state’s executive branch, overlooking the role of West African peoples’ thoughts, expressions, and interpretations in the process of mass expulsion. Petitions for exemptions to the expulsion order in Ghana’s cocoa industry, the nation’s leading export crop, reveal how various segments of the Ghanaian government (cabinet ministers, union leaders, and members of regional security councils) and society (Ghanaian chiefs, farm owners, and alien laborers) pried open the Order’s contradictions to shape both the targets of expulsion and the ad-hoc means by which it was carried out. Mass expulsion was a relational process; not a singular event but an iterative renegotiation of political mobilities. This article turns our attention, more broadly, to how diverse members of African societies at independence shaped ‘state’ policies as well as the meaning and measure of African citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]