Article: Building blocks of soft power: a sociopolitical history of Western schools in Ghana

20th August 2025 | Third World Quarterly

Building Blocks of Soft Power: A Sociopolitical History of Western Schools in Ghana

Why is Western and Western-style education thought of as part of "soft" power in Africa? How did Africans go from being hostage students in European castles that traded in enslaved humans beings, to becoming people who highly desire and pursue Western + Western-style education?

This article grapples with these questions - arguing that the "soft" power of Western education in Ghana is undergirded by historical hard power, exercised through and reinforced by the architecture of schools.

Abstract

Western education is touted as a crucial soft power resource, yet it first came to the African continent as a tool of political conquest, social domination and religious control. The first physical spaces for schooling were within the same forts and castles that traded in enslaved human beings. Yet from those coercive foundations, Africans came to see Western education as key to navigating colonial society and thus actively built, contributed to and advocated for schools throughout the colonial period and to the present day. Within the puzzle of this trajectory from brutal beginnings to eventual enthusiastic embrace is the main argument that this article makes: that the soft power of education in Africa is undergirded by historical hard power, exercised through and reinforced by the architecture of schools. As part of a broader study on ‘The Architecture of Education in Ghana’, this article (re)constructs a sociopolitical history of education through an exploration of school building(s) throughout the country’s history using archival and field research methods to determine the origins of the attractiveness central to the contemporary soft power of Western education in Ghana.