glasses, sitting before the high table, answering questions about human rights abuse, was visually powerful. Indeed, he had been compelled to appear. Having successfully created this illustration of accountability, the NRC quickly extracted itself from this encounter, careful not to tread on the tail of a tiger.
Indeed, the “truth” revealed by this moment was Rawlings’ enduring power and the limitations of the commission’s desire to pursue rigorous historical accountability. In Ghana, all those watching this exchange would have received the message loud and clear: the violence of the past could not reliably be contained by the present. Digging too deeply was still risky business. Rawlings’s day at the NRC displayed the constraints of historical justice in twenty-first-century Ghana. Indeed, Rawlings himself scolded the commissioners like schoolchildren, insisting that they must take the context of revolution into account when assessing the Ghanaian past. “You’ve got to appreciate the degree of tension that was existing then…. It’s a complex thing … when you’re talking about a revolt, the thing erupts from the bottom, and it takes time to restore command and control. And it can be very devastating. And that’s what we presided upon. This is a different subject. If you people are interested, we can deal with that later, ok? For now, let’s deal with some of your pertinent allegations.”70
Within the NRC archive, victims of violence rejected this solipsism where “revolution” is description, explanation, and justification of the violence that ordinary Ghanaians faced during these years. The stories of Ghanaians illuminate the scores of men, women, and children injured, stunted, and damaged by agendas and policies that they did not choose and which did not benefit them. “Revolution” does not adequately explain the brief life of Seidu Nombre, shot in the head at Kokompe for answering back to soldiers during the December 31 coup, nor does it contain the grief of his father, Salifu, who testified at the NRC.71 Revolution does not assuage the anguish of the family of Yaw Fosu Munufie, whose two-year-old niece died in a ditch when soldiers shot her father for breaking curfew.72 Revolution cannot erase the words of ex-sergeant Abraham Kwaku Botchwey, who suffered torture and begged his captors to fire one bullet and end his life.73 The narratives of citizen suffering challenge this claim that the ends justify the means in Ghanaian politics.
At the intersection of human rights testimony and life history, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith see an opportunity for the creation of insurgent narratives. “Through acts of remembering,” they claim, “individuals and communities narrate alternative or counter-histories coming from the margins, voiced by other kinds of subjects—the tortured, the displaced and overlooked, the silenced and unacknowledged.”74 Ghanaians thrust forward troubling versions of the truth that did not easily align with the government’s hope to use the truth commission as an instrument of closure. Nonetheless, this democratized historiography was delivered in jars of clay. The NRC bureaucracy, which questioned just how much truth telling Ghana could bear and survive, actively contained these insurgent narratives.
Conclusion
The NRC was created in response to Ghana’s polarized politics, but it became more than a referendum on the nation’s parties and leaders. It was created to bring “healing” to a nation wrestling with postcolonial violence, but its archive maps the economic, political, and social fault lines that persist within Ghana. The NRC was supposed to unearth, finally, the truth about the national history, but its cacophonous archive resists any effort to distill a unified or singular narrative. The truth that emerges most clearly is about the salience and politics of difference within Ghana. Why, and how, does the Ghana’s NRC archive so persistently transgress the boundaries of its creation? Answering this question requires consideration of the volatility of individual testimony as a tool of public history.
The TRC format—in South Africa, in Canada, even in Greensboro, North Carolina—is based on the assertion that the voices of ordinary people have been overlooked and are necessary when pursuing the past. However, no one knows what people will actually say. In valorizing individual testimony by seeking out, publicizing, and preserving people’s voices, Ghana created a complex and contradictory archive marked both by citizen desire and government power. Of course, as described above, neither the petition-making process nor the public hearings allowed for the unconstrained expression of citizen voices. Structural constraints, from economic need to gendered fears, limited citizen participation. Statement takers transmitted and translated citizen stories, often marking (sometimes physically) the documents that the NRC preserved. In the hearings, citizen stories were judged, disbelieved, and sometimes dismissed. Nevertheless, the power of people’s voices within Ghana’s public history-writing project cannot be overlooked. As people ventured forth to tell these stories despite all manner of risk, oral history’s rejection of the truth/lie dichotomy in favor of considering all the ways citizen testimonies speak volumes is a guiding thread.
CHAPTER 2
Human Rights and Ghanaian History
[Ghana’s history] has been chequered with little improvement in the welfare of the ordinary people who have borne the brunt of maladministration and incompetence of their successive leaders, leaders who promised heavens but found it difficult to make even the earth a comfortable place to live in.
—Lord Cephas Mawuko-Yevugah “Who’s Playing Politics with National Reconciliation” December 3, 2001
On March 6, 1957, when Gold Coast threw off the cloak of British colonialism, the country was both harbinger and hope of what the “winds of change” sweeping across Africa might wreak.1 Far beyond its own borders, the West African nation’s political independence was both a triumph and talisman. “Ghana tells us that the forces of the universe are on the side of justice,” thundered Martin Luther King Jr. “It symbolizes … that an old order is passing away and a new order is coming into being.”2 In South Africa, antiapartheid activists looked to the newly independent country as a source of succor, both existential and material.3 If Ghana’s birth “demonstrate[d] … the ability of people born and bred in Africa and native to her ancient soil to govern themselves with efficiency and the dignity of democracy,” what should be made the country’s post-colonial political troubles?4 In its turbulent passage through the twentieth century Ghana has been a “particularly poignant” emblem of both the hope and disillusionment of African independence.5
This chapter briefly sketches the contours of Ghana’s national history. Unlike other accountings, I place the question of human rights abuse and the stories gathered by Ghana’s National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) at the center of this narration. Approaching Ghana’s story in this way seems to fly in the face of the country’s contemporary image as a place of peace and stability. As in the past, Ghana continues to be a potent political symbol—but the prevailing narrative is no longer about Pan-African liberation but about the possibility of African “success” in the global neoliberal economic order. From the New York Times’s declaration of Ghana as “a good kid in a bad neighborhood” to the World Bank’s insistence that the country is poised to join the ranks of middle-income countries to the flood of articles about Accra as a cosmopolitan, creative hub, Ghana’s star is on the rise.6 (Apparently, “Accra’s Jamestown is electric—it’s like Hackney Wick on steroids.”7) Without undermining Ghana’s considerable achievements, this praise—comparative, marked by low expectations, and based on neoliberal rubrics of progress (GDP, consumption, friendliness to global capital)—eludes the experiences of the majority of Ghana’s people. A human rights history, on the other hand, excavates the human suffering that has accompanied Ghana’s story and uses it to interrogate the national political trajectory.
Table 1. Governments of Ghana after Independence
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