as well as by the intertwined imperatives of economic scarcity, emotional suffering, and political optimism. Whether as contested truths or complicated lies, these stories are analytically valuable. In them, Ghanaians reflect on the series of moments or the sequence of days that ruptured the relationship between citizen and state.
On History and Democracy
My description of the Ghanaian NRC as a public history project that evades the disciplining of nationalist historiography veers away from the assessment of many historians who have been suspicious of TRCs as attempts to paper over the vulgarities of nation building with the moralistic language of human rights and truth seeking.35 In a 2009 issue of the American Historical Review, Elazar Barkan exhorted his fellow historians to engage with transitional justice instruments despite the clear tension between academic history and government-sponsored commissions seeking a presumably incontestable “truth” about the past.36 When historians steer clear of this emerging field, Barkan warned, they risk ceding critical public-history sites to ideologues and raw nationalists. Accordingly, historians have usually played a corrective role by illuminating the crevices (and chasms) between TRC truth and historical understanding.
Greg Grandin and Thomas Klubock, looking primarily at South America’s transitional justice experience, place truth commissions squarely among the “myths and rituals of nationalism [that] sacramentalize violence into a useful creation myth.”37 Mahmood Mamdani has roundly criticized the groundbreaking South African TRC for pursuing truths that obfuscate the history of apartheid’s violence. By focusing on individual victims and perpetrators, Mamdani claims, the South Africa TRC masked the structural violence of apartheid by writing this history as a matter of individuals who were kidnapped, imprisoned, or murdered.38 Substituting this moral tale of good and evil may have cleared the path for a relatively smooth transition beyond the apartheid state and garnered Nobel Peace Prizes along the way, but it did not serve as a sufficiently robust historical analysis of the ways apartheid devastated South African lives.39 By pursuing versions of the past that are “inseparable from a humanist project,” TRCs inevitably limit their interpretive outcomes.40 What of the voices, narratives, and interpretations of apartheid that are not amenable to the Rainbow Nation’s reconciliation project? “Profound obstacles to the production of historical truth” arise when the past becomes a means to a particular social or political end.41
Nevertheless, the Ghana NRC archive cannot be reduced to the nationalist striving for a collective identity nor the humanistic reconciliation imperative. Although the NRC final report and the sponsoring government’s public rhetoric did hew to a patently reconciling narrative, these are portions of a broader, more complicated archive. Citizen petitions, in particular, resist the neat, moralistic fable of past violence, present reconciliation, and future prosperity. The NRC archive is shaped both by the sponsoring government’s mandate and by citizens who presented stories in voices that did not always conform to the official agenda. This productive cacophony is evident only when different parts of this capacious NRC archive—the petitions, commentary, media reports, and public statements—are juxtaposed against one another. Observers and scholars who attend only to the public hearings may easily misread the Ghanaian truth commission (and most other TRCs) as sites where the “elite control and manipulation” of state power prevails.42 Madeleine Fullard and Nicky Rousseau similarly urge scholars of the South African TRC to look beyond the highly publicized public hearings in order to see the limits of the much-touted Rainbow Nation-building narrative of forgiveness.43 Even in South Africa, some citizens openly rejected the forgiveness imperative embodied by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Describing the expansive and conflicted NRC archive as democratized historiography depends on establishing that Ghana’s truth commission was first, a site for the expression of the public will (democracy) and second, a site in which the past was curated, preserved, and written (history). Can TRCs be counted among the “new democratic spaces” where new visions of citizenship are forged?44 After all, diverse and sometimes unexpected political outcomes follow on the heels of truth and reconciliation. When Morocco’s King Mohammed VI created the Instance Equité et Réconciliation (Equity and Reconciliation Commission) it was not a sign that the Moroccan monarchy was crumbling before the forces of democracy. If anything, Morocco’s commission signaled the opposite—the monarchy’s ability to adapt to the new international climate of human rights and state accountability.45 Indeed, the Equity and Reconciliation Commission may have further legitimized the Moroccan monarchy by allowing a new king to disassociate himself from the excesses of prior monarchs and thus, restore trust in the system.46 Even when TRCs do not anchor liberal democracy, there is the matter of the records they generate and preserve.
The archive produced by Ghana’s NRC must be counted among the new, heterogeneous, democratic spaces that Andrea Cornwall and Vera Coelho locate on the border of state and society.47 Truth commissions are part of a new and expanding “participatory sphere” where governments, civil society organizations, and international donors invite people (often marginalized communities) to lend their voices as witnesses to social, political, and economic dilemmas. Coelho and Cornwall astutely ask whether this expansion in democratic expression actually shifts power relations or translates into public policy.48 Truth Without Reconciliation approaches this question of outcomes slightly aslant: I describe the production of new histories as the locus of the NRC’s power.
History writing is powerful. Both “that which happened” and “that which is said to have happened,” constrain the political imagination.49 As states wield history as a weapon, marginalized populations have learned to also approach the task of representing the past as a battlefield. These days, national governments openly acknowledge the partiality and oversight of the official record and so may call for a truth commission to gather up the voices of the discontented. There is a risk, as Grandin, Klubock, and many others warn, that this apparent opening will ultimately reinforce the state’s power over historical representation and political imagination. However, there is also possibility when TRCs dictate that the self-described victims of the past—unemployed pensioners, dispossessed and frail citizens without wealth or standing, petty traders, and uneducated youth—possess historical insight to which the nation must attend.
The NRC archive differs from academic investigations into the past. Participation in the NRC was profoundly shaped by desire. Citizens raised their voices in pursuit of economic gain, social rehabilitation, and an elusive national progress. Likewise, the government sponsored the commission as part of its political agenda. The stories at the center of this study are instrumental; truth commission testimony is a currency that can be exchanged for political, economic, or social goods. However, academic history also does not spill from the pen clean of self-interest and bias.50 Relinquishing the myth of objectivity in history allows a reconsideration of the relationship between truth-commission testimony and the historical record. Can “people’s stories, notwithstanding all their problems … somehow expand, stretch the definitions and boundaries of history and find a place in it”?51 In authoring, editing, and revising stories of political violence that might better serve them, Ghanaian citizens created an archive in which everyday people are, at once, historical actors and history writers determined to influence how their country’s past is known and remembered.
Revising National History: Beyond Big Men and Partisanship
For much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Ghanaian politics has been shackled by a fierce partisanship that dates to the days of decolonization. Ghana’s two main political parties, the NPP and the NDC, situate themselves as the descendants of competing political traditions established in the closing years of the Gold Coast colony.52 Above, I described a Ghana NRC archive that often spilled beyond the constraints imposed by the official, state-appointed architects of national reconciliation. Challenging this tradition of partisan politics is one of the ways that this citizen-curated public-history project exceeded its context. As citizens made their experiences central in
