how the story was recorded and read. From spelling and punctuation to emphasis and inflection, these statement takers shaped the contents of the NRC archive. As parts of the NRC bureaucracy, these statement takers also added notations and postscripts about their own perceptions of the veracity, emotional distress, and clarity of the participating citizens and influenced how the citizen statements would be henceforth understood. These marginalia are also intimate glimpses of the NRC bureaucracy at work, interpreting, judging, and shaping citizen presentations of the past. Clifford Marko’s statement at the Accra office was a harrowing account of his hospitalization in a Ghanaian psychiatric facility. Marko submitted a crowded handwritten document that complained of “spiritual surveillance hired to climb up spiritually to fight and follow to bar my way in everything I do.”34 Marko described involuntary hospitalization and imprisonment as one and the same. His petition focused on the judge’s ruling, the handcuffs clapped on this body, and most of all, the use of force: “The only question I ask was … am I a criminal?” Marko’s petition also described the stigma associated with mental illness in Ghana. “I have been treated unfairly and also my image had been tarnish [sic]…. I am now known as a lunatic and a criminal in the country … just for the simple reason that I have been sent to the Psychiatric Hospital.”35 Marko’s depiction of mental illness as a criminalized status, marked by unjust social dislocation, was judged by the statement taker as irrelevant to the NRC’s work of reconciling the past. Marko, according to the statement taker, was “incoherent and evidenc[ing] signs of psychiatric distress.” Thus, Marko’s story, an illuminating look at psychological disability and its aftermath in Ghanaian history, was not recommended for the public hearings.
Similarly, the NRC public hearings were also sites for both the expression of citizen voices and the display of NRC bureaucracy. These hearings were the means by which most Ghanaians encountered the NRC and were covered regularly by the news media. They were open to the public and were well attended, particularly at the beginning of the process.36 The nine commissioners, the listening audience, the witness, a translator when necessary, and sometimes the accused perpetrator and his/her legal team were all part of these hearings. Together, they created the versions of the national past that ultimately emerged. The hearings were multilingual, with alleged victims, accused perpetrators, and the commissioners using the most common Ghanaian languages, including English, throughout. In this setting, some of the petitioners were brought forward to tell their stories in the hearing of the nation. One of the defining moments in the public hearings was the death of Joseph Kwadwo Ampah, a barrister-at-law living in London who traveled to Ghana expressly to participate in the NRC.37 On June 5, 2003, while beginning his public testimony in Accra, Ampah collapsed and died. This event shocked the nation and changed the commission’s practice. Instead of a simple wooden chair, witnesses now used a “restful cushioned chair.” Counselors were positioned next to the testifying witness to provide comfort during the testimony. Ambulances were also stationed outside the venue, ready to rush people to the hospital if necessary.38 Joseph Kwadwo Ampah’s death was a corporeal reminder of the uncertainty and risk associated with the NRC’s work. Inasmuch as delving into the past could create restoration and renewal, it might also reap disorder and even destruction.
The nine commissioners were guides and arbiters in these public hearings. They questioned witnesses, urging calm when anger threatened to erupt, scolded the audience, and offered their sympathies and words of wisdom.39 Faced with a sobbing witness, a commissioner might advise counseling and urge that he “forget the past, forge ahead and build a bright future, instead of dwelling on the pain.”40 Confronted with a recalcitrant witness who would not answer the NRC summons, the commissioners could levy a fine.41 Since Kufuor had personally appointed all the commissioners, criticism of their comportment or objectivity was laid at the feet of the president.42 A Ghana Review article described a scene during the Accra hearings when the commissioners “descended heavily” and “expressed their disgust” at the actions of an ex-military man accused of brutally beating a market woman.43 There were moments when the commissioners’ tone and comments drew disapproval from some quarters; eventually the NDC party officially filed a complaint stating that supporters of their party were rushed, humiliated, and generally treated poorly during the NRC hearings.44
Beyond this partisan critique, civil-society organizations also expressed concerns that the public hearings “inappropriately resembled courtroom proceedings.”45 The nine commissioners sat on a raised dais peering down at witnesses, who transported the conventions of the Ghanaian courts to the NRC and addressed the commissioners formally as “my lord.” Lawyers could participate in the proceedings, and high-profile and affluent witnesses, accused persons, and victims often retained an attorney. Individuals who had been named or implicated in a prior presentation were given the right to cross-examine witnesses. As such, accused perpetrators were given the right to publicly question alleged victims. This, according to the commissioners, ensured that those Ghanaians who were skeptical or hostile to the NRC’s work would trust in the fairness of the process. However, when the accused perpetrator was a military men or business owners with wealth and standing, a well-heeled lawyer might publicly harangue nervous victims armed only with their words and convictions.46 This was what befell Aku Sabi, a petitioner who described suffering a miscarriage due to the brutality of hired soldiers paid to enforce a company’s privatization of disputed land. At the NRC, the company lawyer publicly cross-examined Sabi, at one point blaming her for the miscarriage and saying that “she did not take good care of [the pregnancy].”47 Although the psychological and social consequences of subjecting alleged victims to this manner of public cross-examination has not yet been reckoned with in Ghana, there is a growing recognition that TRC practices may reproduce and reinscribe trauma.48
By cottoning to this veneer of legalism, the NRC seemed to imply that the truth it pursued was similar to that utilized in Ghanaian courts.49 In reality, accessing the past’s violence through individual human rights testimony is inevitably a journey into the vagaries of memory and representation. People’s recollections and stories are based on the life they are currently living. Their perspectives on the past are shaped by the present’s desires, secrets, and hopes. In valorizing victim testimony as a way of knowing the past, truth and reconciliation commissions cannot also adhere to the strict evidentiary standards that prevail in courts of law. And yet, because legal scholars and practitioners have been central to the global TRC phenomenon, the pretense that TRC truths are or should be objective continues to stand. Truth commissions should stick to “facts, which can be proved,” says José Zalaquett, a lawyer and member of the Chilean truth commission; “this is not the place for an historical analysis of class struggles.” “Let historians take over later” is how Susan Slyomovics reads Zalaquett’s legal positivism, “and let them talk to each other.”50 The problem with this approach, of course, is that the historians are already involved. In Ghana, everyday people were acting as historians, interpreting and analyzing the past as they lodged petitions and presented testimony.
In the introduction we met Joseph Kwadwo Nuer, the former soldier who subverted the commissioners’ demands for evidentiary truth by cheekily explaining that Ghana’s grinding poverty had destroyed material evidence that would corroborate his story. Given Ghana’s economic situation, Nuer explained, most of his documents had long been used as toilet paper.51 The message is clear: attempting to fit the NRC archive into the mold of evidentiary fact and public proofs is a misstep. Knee-deep in this capacious NRC archive, the deceptively simple mandate to find out the truth about past human rights violations and abuse becomes a riddle.52 What is the single knowable truth amid the multiple and divergent stories about the past? If anything, this archive telescopes just how difficult it is to find consensus about what happened to whom, and why, in the Ghanaian past.53
Oral-history theory is a way to navigate the NRC archive without falling prey to the sterile debates about the veracity of individual stories. Antjie Krog’s dizzying observation that the truth is closest at the moment when the lie rears its head is a guide for reading these newly proliferating human rights archives.54 Historians, Luise White insists, should approach
