African Affairs Advance Access published online on May 2, 2008
African Affairs, doi:10.1093/afraf/adn019
The United States, Ghana and Oil: Global and Local Perspectives
T. C. McCaskie (tm2{at}soas.ac.uk; tmccaskie{at}aol.com) is Professor of the History of Africa at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. He is the author of State and Society in Pre-colonial Asante (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995), Asante Identities: History and modernity in an African village 1850–1950 (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2000), and many articles on Asante history. This article is one of a series in press or in preparation dealing with contemporary Ghana.
The context of this article is United States military and energy security policies as regards the offshore oil potential of what Washington terms Africa's ‘New Gulf’, the Atlantic littoral from Morocco to Angola. The focus is the operation of deepwater oil exploration companies offshore of western Ghana, and their discovery in 2007 of potentially valuable oil deposits. This article considers local Ghanaian and wider global reactions. Ghana's government and opposition both claim credit for discovering oil, while each asserts it can best invest oil revenues to benefit Ghanaians. At the same time Ghanaians are aware of the equivocal status of oil wealth as national ‘blessing’ or ‘curse’, and they debate this in a framework of ideas of providence, prosperity and the occult derived from Pentecostalist Christianity. The oil find has also raised the stakes in Ghana–United States relations, and current developments in this area are outlined in the conclusion.