Coming of Age in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

This is the text of an inaugural lecture at University of Cape Coast. The Professor of History focuses on the first twenty-five years in the history of Ghana, 1957-1982, as it is symptomatic of the problems of coming of age which were experienced by the newly independent states. He examines the thesis that given the circumstances in which the newly emergent nations found themselves, they could not have performed much better than they did.