What Fethullah Gülen left in Ghana, and who inherits it in West Africa
Fethullah Gülen died in a Pennsylvania hospital in October 2024, seventeen months before this piece was written, having spent a quarter of a century directing a global movement from exile without ever returning to the country of his birth. In Ghana, as across much of West Africa, the question his death leaves behind is not who succeeds him as a spiritual figure, but who now controls the schools, networks and goodwill his movement built before Ankara turned against it.
Two inheritances, not one
Gülen's death produced two distinct legacies in Ghana, and it is important not to conflate them. The first is the physical and institutional legacy: the school buildings, teacher-training methods and alumni networks that his Hizmet, or "Service," movement planted in Accra decades before the 2016 coup attempt in Türkiye.
The second is the political liability that same infrastructure became once Ankara branded the movement a terrorist organisation and pressed Ghana, alongside dozens of other African states, to hand its schools to a Turkish state-run replacement. These two legacies now belong to different owners entirely.
The schools Hizmet built, and who holds them now
Before 2016, Gülen-inspired education in Ghana operated much as it did across the continent: privately funded schools offering rigorous Cambridge-class curricula, often at fees lower than comparable international schools, staffed partly by Turkish teachers and framed as apolitical civic service. Ghana Galaxy International School was among the institutions identified in compilations of schools linked to the movement worldwide.
Ankara's response to the failed coup changed that landscape permanently. Türkiye's parliament was told in 2018 that five FETO-linked schools were still active in Ghana, and the Maarif Foundation, the state body created that year to dismantle Hizmet's overseas network, reported that talks over handing Ghana's schools to state control had reached their final stages, part of a continental campaign that had already produced closures or transfers in more than a dozen African countries.
The institutional heir to that inheritance in Ghana today is not Hizmet. It is the Turkish state itself. The Maarif International School in Accra, opened under the direct patronage of Türkiye's embassy and its ambassador, now occupies the space Gülen-linked education once held, teaching the same Cambridge curriculum but under Ankara's supervision rather than any independent trust. A foundation established explicitly to fight Gülen's influence has become, in a real sense, his most durable institutional successor in Ghana, simply repurposed under new ownership.
Who runs what remains of Hizmet itself
Outside Türkiye's reach, the Gülen movement's own leadership question is murkier. Gülen had stepped back from active direction of the movement well before his death, and the Alliance for Shared Values, the New York-based umbrella body that promotes his ideas in the United States under executive Alp Aslandoğan, said a circle of longtime advisers who had counselled Gülen for decades would carry the work forward rather than any single successor. No comparable figure or formal structure has emerged to direct Hizmet's remaining activities specifically in West Africa.
What persists instead is diffuse: alumni of the old schools now working in Ghanaian business, medicine and academia; informal networks of former teachers who stayed on after ownership changed hands; and sympathetic civil society contacts who were never registered members of anything but absorbed the movement's emphasis on education and interfaith dialogue.
Recent reporting on Ankara's broader campaign against Gülen-linked property abroad describes a pattern of aggressive administrative pressure, deportations and litigation across multiple continents, underscoring how thoroughly Türkiye has worked to sever any organised leadership abroad rather than merely close a school here or there.
A contested and quietly diffused legacy
For Ghana, the practical legacy of Gülen's movement is now closer to a memory than an organisation. There is no West African headquarters, no regional director, no successor claiming Gülen's mantle across the subregion the way Maarif claims the schools.
What Ghana inherited was, in the end, a decade of educational goodwill followed by a decade of diplomatic pressure to dismantle it. Ankara's rivalry with a movement it once tolerated forced Accra to make consequential judgment calls about long-standing local institutions under pressure from a foreign government, a pattern this column has argued West African states should watch for in any relationship where one foreign patron dominates a civic sector.
Gülen's actual legacy in Ghana, then, is less a network still awaiting a new leader and more a cautionary lesson in how quickly transnational soft power can turn into transnational liability for the states that hosted it.
References:
CNN, "Fethullah Gulen, Turkish cleric once blamed for failed coup attempt, dies at 83" https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/21/middleeast/fethullah-gulen-turkish-cleric-dies-at-83-intl/index.html
The Hill, "Self-exiled Turkish spiritual leader Fethullah Gülen dies in the US" https://thehill.com/homenews/ap/ap-international/ap-self-exiled-turkish-spiritual-leader-fethullah-gulen-dies-in-pennsylvania/
Anadolu Agency, "Turkey: Deputy speaker calls for end of FETO in Ghana" https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/turkey-deputy-speaker-calls-for-end-of-feto-in-ghana/1056769
Daily Sabah, "Hard times ahead for FETÖ in Africa, the Balkans" https://www.dailysabah.com/war-on-terror/2017/06/10/hard-times-ahead-for-feto-in-africa-the-balkans
Maarif International School Ghana https://gh.maarifschool.org/
C.A.S.I.L.I.P.S., "Gulen Schools Worldwide List" https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/gulen-schools-worldwide-list/57439825
Alliance for Shared Values, Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Shared_Values
Nordic Monitor, "Erdogan's global school network drives a radical overseas political agenda" https://nordicmonitor.com/2026/07/erdogans-global-school-network-drives-a-radical-overseas-political-agenda/
The New Arab, "Senegal closes dozens of schools linked to Turkey's Gulen" https://www.newarab.com/news/senegal-closes-dozens-schools-linked-turkeys-gulen
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