and recovers a modern history in which torture, incarceration, and intolerance of dissent have been weapons of choice for multiple regimes and in various time periods. This ecumenical vision of political violence is significant because it is so rare.
The NRC stories, rooted in the soil of individual experience and local history, veer away from the elite figures that dominate public narrations of Ghanaian politics. These are not the “big man” versions of the national past that continue to dominate Ghanaian textbooks and public political consciousness.53 In the NRC, Ghanaians placed themselves and their families at the center of the national story. By thrusting their local experiences onto the national platform, Ghanaians shifted the terrain on which Ghana’s politics is known and discussed.
Despite the supposedly stabilizing force of partisanship in Ghanaian democracy, a divided politics also hamstrings political transformation. Consider the critique of Ghana’s partisan politics articulated by political cartoonist Selorm Dogoe, a.k.a. Vinnietoonist.
The image is entitled “The Secret of Ghana’s Peace.” Two men representing the NPP and NDC are locked in conflict. Each has one hand wrapped around his adversary’s throat; in the other hand he gingerly holds a single egg. A shared thought bubble hovers above their heads: “Can’t break his egg without breaking mine.” Ghana’s much-lauded peace, the cartoon suggests, is not based on the absence of conflict but on the constant antagonism of two parties locked in perpetual contest. There is equilibrium, but there is also a maddening stagnancy.
Figure 1. The Secret of Ghana’s Peace. Cartoon courtesy of Selorm Dogoe, 2017.
Portions of the NRC archive echo this critique of stultifying and combative partisanship. Consider the petition of Patrick Gyimah Danso, who reported that his cousin Kofi Gyamena was killed by soldiers in 1996 for political reasons. “The truth of the matter” was that Gyamena was an NPP activist, but he joined the NDC in 1996 because the party was ascendant, and party affiliation was the metric by which public sector (and often private sector) work was distributed. By joining the NDC, Gyamena obtained a license to work at the Takoradi Harbor as an exporter of finished timber products and yet he continued to make “huge contributions” to the NPP. On August 16, 1996, a soldier arrived at his residence and shot and killed Gyamena and his two children. “I am convinced,” Danso wrote, “that it was because of his involvement in both parties.”54 Partisanship, Danso insists, has casualties and takes victims from among the people. For Gyamena, the soldier who ended his brother’s life was guilty, but so too was the policy that distributes employment and other necessary goods along party lines. Moreover, partisan analysis—believing that political violence is the domain of only one party or tradition—masks the suffering that Ghanaians have endured throughout and despite the rapid-fire transitions in political regimes. The violence that runs through the citizen petitions make it plain that the critical question for tracing human rights abuses in Ghana is not which regime was guilty (read: all of them), but which communities were targeted at any given moment. In displaying how partisan analysis obfuscates the accumulated and abundant suffering of Ghanaian people, particularly those who are poor or otherwise marginalized, the national reconciliation experiment extended beyond the expectations of the sponsoring NPP government.
There is a growing literature describing transitional justice mechanisms as readily “hijacked,” in the words of Jelena Subotic, by international and domestic interests. Truth commissions in the Balkans, Subotic shows, were handily repurposed by elites to perpetuate the nationalist mythologies that spurred violence in the first place.55 Similarly, Rosalind Shaw and Lars Waldorf, in an excellent collection on transitional justice, describe transitional justice mechanisms as increasingly “evaded, critiqued, reshaped and driven in unexpected directions” by the people they are supposed to serve.56 Unlike those studies, which lament that TRCs are corrupted in the transition from rhetoric to practice, Truth Without Reconciliation suggests that local manipulation of transitional justice instruments is not a fatal flaw but a saving grace. When Ghanaians seized the framework of truth and reconciliation for their own ends, they challenged the narrowness of a transitional justice agenda and the elitism of Ghanaian political analysis.
The following chapters display how the NRC’s review of Ghanaian history deftly sidesteps nationalist heroes and party legacies in order to expose a national past that has yet to be reckoned with. This multivocal accounting of Ghana’s politics memorializes the voices, sufferings, and desires of a broad cross section of citizens and challenges the exclusions of African political history rendered as a procession of “big men” vying to construct the nation through charismatic presence, speeches, and development programs. The revelation of Ghana’s dance with the TRC form extends beyond national borders and into the global arena.
Domesticating a Global Discourse: Localizing Human Rights
International human rights has been pilloried as an aspirational rhetoric for a world in desperate need of practical solutions.57 Faced with the wreckage of the late twentieth century, Kenneth Cmiel famously asks, “What good did the expanded human rights agenda do for Afghani women under the Taliban, for the unemployed of Argentina, for the mentally ill now incarcerated in the American jails, for the Kurds in Iraq or Turkey?”58 Casting an eye across the African continent, the situation appears equally grave. The existence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and its progeny of progressively hopeful conventions, declarations, and resolutions have not been able to stamp out hunger, to abolish or even contain civil wars, or to render human life protected or sacred. Whither the UDHR’s “right to work” when general unemployment in Zimbabwe exceeds 80 percent? How does the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women apply to the victims of the Congo War’s sexual violence epidemic? Do the Rights of the Child apply to the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram?
And yet international human rights, with its multiple manifestations as law, rhetoric, and practice, is fecund and stunningly diverse; it continues to evade those who would entomb its political potential. First of all, there are those in the academic and activist community who vigorously resist the narrative that human rights law and practice have not produced positive outcomes. Kathryn Sikkink is among these champions of human rights, claiming that the prosecution of powerful world leaders constitutes the beginning of a “justice cascade” which may prevent future violence. Sikkink gives credit to a battery of organizations working under the banner of human rights for improving life expectancy, infant mortality, and other conditions worldwide.59
But critics, particularly those looking toward Africa, insist that tracing the impact of international human rights requires looking beyond the mouths fed, schools opened, dictators dragged to The Hague, or elections held. Human rights consists of a “contradictory welter of instruments, documents, statements, cases, and treaties, covering a vast array of subjects,” and yet troubling patterns exist regarding how Africa is represented and ultimately, served by human right organizations.60 International human rights’ third rail is the problem of African political agency, or more specifically, the tendency for human rights practice and theory to promote policies and practices that constrain the self-determination, autonomy, and power of African nation-states and peoples. African intellectuals who excoriate the perpetuation of the blighted Africa narrative have not successfully altered the practices of the human rights community which still plies images and narratives that tread well-worn ground by suggesting that Africa is exceptionally broken and its people primarily needy. Chinua Achebe reminds the international development community that “Africa is people,” and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns against the danger of a single story about Africa.61 Teju Cole exposes the “White-Savior Industrial Complex,” and Binyavanga Wainaina satirizes the “children of the human rights age,” to whom Africa consists of “many small flares of wonderfulness and many small flares of utter horribleness that occasionally rise in a flat and benign world.”62
The
