THE ABONGO ABROAD: MILITARY INTERNATIONALISM, TRAVEL, TRAINING, AND PEACE IN ...

377 Pages·2014·2.01 MB·English

by  John Clune

THE ABONGO ABROAD: MILITARY INTERNATIONALISM, TRAVEL, TRAINING, AND
PEACE IN GHANA AND THE UNITED STATES, 1960-1992
By
John Valentine Clune

Submitted to the graduate degree program in History and the Graduate Faculty of the University
of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

________________________________
Chairperson Sheyda F. Jahanbani
________________________________
Anton Rosenthal
________________________________
Elizabeth L. MacGonagle
________________________________
Marie G. Brown
________________________________
Holly T. Goerdel

Date Defended: May 1, 2014
The Dissertation Committee for John Valentine Clune
certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

THE ABONGO ABROAD: MILITARY INTERNATIONALISM, TRAVEL, TRAINING, AND
PEACE IN GHANA AND THE UNITED STATES, 1960-1992

________________________________
Chairperson Sheyda F. Jahanbani

Date Approved: June 17, 2014
ii
Abstract

This dissertation searches the global commodities of military education and training assistance
and international peacekeeping missions between the 1960s and 1980s for the meaning people on
both the sending and receiving ends made of the international experience. For Ghanaian soldiers
and their families and for American communities around large institutions for military education,
training and service abroad paradoxically eroded national identities while creating new global
citizens, within limits, as individuals and families developed transnational friendships and reaped
social and financial benefits from the exchange. It argues that all participants in the global
system of military-sponsored international travel approached the act with different ideas about
what the travel signified, what opportunities it presented, and what change it intended to bring
about, but all participants believed the travel inspired or revealed a new psychological orientation
capable of transcending national boundaries and actualizing a global identity, which I call
Military Internationalism. States and national policymakers appealed to such a transnational
identity when forming, sustaining, and justifying international military exchanges (including
education, training, and peacekeeping). Policymakers in both the United States and Ghana
assumed that international travel, especially for military elites or potential elites, could yield
corporate transformation and modernization to recipient states’ entire societies, via the military.
Those advancements only occurred after individual transformations. Individual actors manifested
Military Internationalism when they imagined themselves part of a global community that was
sometimes smaller, sometimes larger than their respective nation-states. Around American
institutions for military education, the community structures that evolved to welcome, instruct,
and socialize visiting military personnel and their families flourished on their unofficial status.
American women, especially, thrived in the environment which specifically discounted the role
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of the state while elevating values of hospitality, internationalism, and world peace. Ghanaian
families on military-sponsored courses abroad also employed international education to exercise
a global social imaginary based on entrepreneurial travel to relieve economic and political
stresses in Ghana. Finally, large numbers of Ghanaian soldiers and their spouses integrated the
trials and danger of international peacekeeping both for the benefits they provided and with a
genuine faith that their service nurtured an authentically better world.
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Acknowledgments

As all historians know, large projects like dissertations are community efforts. I thank my
graduate committee, including Anton Rosenthal, Elizabeth MacGonagle, Marie Brown, Brent
Steele, Holly Goerdel, and especially my primary advisor, Sheyda Jahanbani, for carefully
guiding this project in reasonable ways without dampening my enthusiasm. Professors Beverly
Mack, Theodore Wilson, Jeffrey Moran, Jennifer Weber, Yacine Daddi Addoun, and Robert
Schwaller at the University of Kansas encouraged me as a student more than they know.
Librarians Carmen Orth-Alfie and Sara Morris provided rapid assistance whenever I called.
Special thanks to Alan Clune and Amanda Schlumpberger for their countless hours editing and
clarifying my work.
Thanks to the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Department of History, especially Colonel
Mark Wells, for sponsoring my graduate fellowship and the Air Force Institute of Technology’s
Civilian Institution section for administrative support. I thank the U.S. Air Force Academy’s
Directorate of Education, which sponsored my research in Ghana, and Brian Bartee, the U.S. Air
Force attaché who coordinated my meeting with his Ghanaian counterpart, Derrick Attachie.
Lieutenant Colonel Attachie arranged interviews with former Ghanaian officers, provided
transportation to the Ghana Armed Forces Military Academy and Training Schools, the
Command and Staff College, and introduced me to the Ghana Armed Forces Director of Public
Relations, M’Bawine Atintande. Colonel Atintande provided a workspace and gave me free run
of his library while his deputy, Eric Aggrey-Quashie, scoured the Directorate of Public Relations
to create the most complete collection of AF News papers and peacekeeping journals ever
assembled for my research. At Ghana’s Public Records and Archives Administration, Josiah
Okyere’s attentive assistance helped me navigate collections with no finding aid to find
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documents to make my time there productive and exhilarating. Thanks to the University of
Kansas’ College of Humanities for sponsoring my research at the United Nations archives, and
to the United Nations Archives and Record Management Section’s amazingly attentive and
patient archival staff. Finally, special thanks to my wife Jessica and children, for giving me a
quiet space and a reason to work. It is to them and in honor of the one hundred Ghanaian soldiers
who gave their lives as United Nations peacekeepers that I dedicate this work.

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Table of Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1
The Case for Ghana ..................................................................................................................... 7
Identities: Transnationalism, Military Internationalism, Modernity, and Diaspora .................. 14
Part I ............................................................................................................................................ 36
Chapter 1: Modernization Ideology and the United States Military Assistance Program .. 36
Introduction: International Military Education in the Decade of Development ....................... 36
Mutual Security Program Reform as Ideological Reform ........................................................ 43
The Modernization of Military Modernization ......................................................................... 52
Modernization Theory Becomes Policy .................................................................................... 70
Military Modernization’s Eclipse.............................................................................................. 82
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 88
Chapter 2: Independence and Internationalism: Ghana’s National Military and American
Assistance Policy ......................................................................................................................... 91
Introduction: Three Boxes ......................................................................................................... 91
Training and Education, Integration and Isolation; U.S. Assistance Policy to Ghana before
1966 ........................................................................................................................................... 97
Ghanaian Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Military Internationalism in the early 1960s ... 107
American Assistance and Ghanaian Internationalism after 1966 ........................................... 122
Ghana’s Return to Military Rule and the Limits of American Military Education ................ 136
The Ghana Armed Forces Staff College and Military Internationalism for Export ................ 148
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 156
Chapter 3: “I Think They Would Be Better Off If We Took Them On A Tour Of Disney
World:” Continuity and Change in International Military Education and Training ........ 159
Introduction: Momentum or Inertia? ....................................................................................... 159
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The Informational Program in 1971: Inertia, Ideology, and Military Internationalism .......... 166
Military Internationalism, Human Rights, and the Indestructible International Military
Education and Training Program ............................................................................................ 176
The Elastic Rhetoric of International Military Education and Training: The Ghanaian Case 196
Momentum or Inertia in the 1980s .......................................................................................... 204
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 213
Part II ......................................................................................................................................... 217
Chapter 4: “Baled-Hay Diplomacy:” Military Internationalism in Kansas City ............... 217
Introduction: Cultural Diplomacy versus Military Internationalism....................................... 217
The Informational Program: Cultural Diplomacy, Military Assistance, and More ................ 225
How International Officers’ Families and the Town of Leavenworth Kansas Came to Know
Each Other ............................................................................................................................... 231
“And All of Us Such Nice People:” People-To-People and the International Officer ........... 250
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 277
Chapter 5: Writing for Peace: International Men and Women of the Ghana Armed Forces
..................................................................................................................................................... 279
Introduction: Makana’s Fanara Diary ..................................................................................... 279
“We Know the Sea That Washes Our Shores:” The Politics of International Service ........... 288
Internationalism Accessed through UN Service ..................................................................... 303
Writing for Peace .................................................................................................................... 321
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 331
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 335
Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 343

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Introduction
A few ardent Muslims have been able to make their pilgrimage to Mecca, thus becoming alhajis
while on ‘Op Sunrise.’ From time to time, a few of the officers and men with an interest in
agriculture express a wish to visit some kibbutzim to acquaint themselves with Israeli farming
techniques and know-how, which are well known to be among the best in the world . . . In short,
the Ghanbatt participation in ‘Op Sunrise’ has been immensely beneficial. The troops have
benefitted professionally by operating alongside so many other national contingents, and the
travel to other parts of the world far from home is in itself a great education. Our officers and
men went to the Pyramids of Giza, the sands of Sinai and the holy places they had heard of at
Sunday School.
– Lieutenant General Emmanuel Erskine, Mission with UNIFIL: An African Soldier’s
Reflections1

After most folks had eaten the fried chicken or whatever, the music changed. Kenny
Shuttleworth of Kansas City called square dance instructions to several hundred hardy dancers,
from many score countries, some of whom didn't even understand English. That proved no
problem. Dancers from Colombia, Finland, Thailand, Japan, and on and on, joined in Do-Si-Do’s
and Aleman Rights as if they had been doing them for years.”
– John Reichley, The Leavenworth Times, July 30, 19872

In Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony
Appiah defends ordinary citizens on both the sending and receiving sides of the great projects of
cultural imperialism in the twentieth century. They are not “blank slates on which global
capitalism’s moving finger writes its message, leaving behind another homogenized consumer as
it moves on,” he argues.3 That attitude, he says, “is deeply condescending. And it isn’t true.”4
People distinguish the good from the bad that they see, and the lessons they take from
“Westernization” are not necessarily the same ones “cultural imperialists” try to sell.5 Instead,
Appiah reflects, “people in each place make their own uses for even the most famous global
commodities.”6 Even more significant than the differences in power or wealth they reveal,

1 Emmanuel A. Erskine, Mission with UNIFIL: An African Soldier’s Reflections (London: Hurst, 1989), 158.
2 John Reichley, “Do-Si-Do in 70 Languages,” Leavenworth Times, July 30, 1987, 4, Leavenworth Public Library.
3 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Issues of Our Time (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2006), 111.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 113.
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exchange in global commodities also exposes participants’ obligations to one another and
provides opportunities for individuals to create new ties—“Beyond,” Appiah suggests, “those to
whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared
citizenship.”7 The global commodities of military education and training and international
peacekeeping offered those opportunities and exposed those obligations. This dissertation
searches military educational exchanges and United Nations peacekeeping missions between the
1960s and 1980s for the uses people on both the sending and receiving ends had for the
international experience. It explores how military education and service abroad paradoxically
eroded national identities while creating new global citizens, within limits, as individuals and
families developed transnational friendships and reaped social and financial benefits from the
exchange. It also suggests that we need a different way to account for and describe the new
identity that emerged.
Several different groups interact in this account: American social scientists, diplomats,
and foreign policy planners in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, who tried to employ American
military assistance to achieve American political objectives while delivering economic
development to some other parts of the world. Ghanaian military-turned-political leaders who, in
the three decades after independence in 1957, tried to leverage internationally-available military
training programs and Ghana’s own moral authority as a pan-African leader for their political
purposes. American civilian volunteers who served military families from abroad as “sponsors,”
teachers, and friends during their stay in the United States and sometimes for longer after in
communities around the United States’ institutions for educating and training military officers.
Ghanaian officers and their families in communities around military training institutions abroad.
And Ghanaian soldiers of all ranks who served in United Nations peacekeeping operations in the

7 Ibid., xv.
2