And so Ghanaians are slowly becoming a people, drawn together over a few decades, as the Scots have been over centuries, by living together under a single government. It’s this process that matters. For my father, then, national consciousness wasn’t a mineral to be excavated, like bauxite; it was a fabric to be woven, like—well, like kente. He would have agreed with Svevo’s observation that “inventing is a creation, not a lie.”28 National identity doesn’t require that we all be already the same. Still, for the purposes of government, citizens need to have languages in common. In developing
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