Rudyard Kipling described colonization as a heaven-sent burden for white men, and the British imperialist Frederick Lugard insisted that colonialism would save Africa from itself, namely “the awful misery of the slave trade and inter-tribal war, to human sacrifice and the ordeals of the witch-doctor.”63 The images of Africa that often proliferate in human rights campaigns appear to be a renewal of Joseph Conrad’s obsession with the continent as the heart of darkness.
Moving beyond discourse and imagery, other scholars register their critique of human rights’ relationship to Africa as a matter of self-determination and democracy. Here, human rights’ Africa problem is not a matter of Western origins or cultural imperialism but, instead, is found in the limited role assigned to Africa’s people in the interventions and development initiatives grouped under the human rights banner.64 For Adam Branch, human rights, in its interventionist idiom, is an engine of dependency. Branch describes human rights as a sort of false consciousness that “embeds itself in the political imagination, transforming people’s understanding of their social and political worlds” and leads them to seek rescue by the hands of an intervention from beyond.65 Ironically, the language and practice of human rights, manifest in the humanitarian intervention imperative and in the proliferation of civil society organizations with scant local accountability, may actually undermine the practice of democracy in Africa. Is it reasonable to expect that Africa’s freedom and progress will be plotted, imagined, and ultimately won by technocratic experts procured by the United States Agency for International Development, the Gates Foundation, and the UK Department for International Development?
The net consequence of human rights discourse in Africa, Michael Neocosmos warns, may be a narrowing of the space of political freedom. “External forms of intervention—whatever their intentions—rather than turning Africans into subjects of their own history, have over the years frustrated their agency … In the long run they have systematically transformed most Africans into victims whose main feature has been passivity, not agency.”66
Nevertheless, human rights practice, media, theory, and law have never been and are not yet a monolith. As “flexible, ambiguous, and often contradictory” concepts, human rights “can be drawn on to construct a wide array of different discourses” and “can mobilize, legitimate or constitute radically different modes of political practice.”67 There is innovation occurring under the human rights banner.68 Ghana’s NRC is a glimpse of the alternative futures that are possible when international human rights is domesticated and transformed by marginalized communities on the African continent. If international human rights can be redeemed in Africa—that is, if it will assist in the work of unspooling the imbricated violence of repressive national leaders and a rapacious international economic order—the hope is found in the moments when African people commandeer, repurpose, and transform rights talk in order to challenge the known world and imagine new futures.
Dialectical notions of global and local inadequately represent the work of human rights work in the world.69 Conceiving of two separate, discrete spheres misunderstands the multiple forms of connection across scales—theoretical, philosophical, financial—that create the practice of human rights. “The global and the local are always present in human rights—always in tension yet mutually constitutive.”70 This entanglement is particularly evident within TRCs. Yes, Ghanaian citizens made their cultural frameworks, languages, preoccupations, and bodies central in the national reconciliation exercise. The commission was also a creature of the international community: it was partially funded by the Open Society Initiative for West Africa, and experts from the United States and South Africa trained the NRC staff utilizing examples from Sri Lanka, Peru, and El Salvador. Following Mark Goodale’s theorization, I describe the NRC as a locale: a site where the interaction between global and local unveils new possibilities for a mutable human rights regime.
Over the past two decades, the human rights community’s enthusiastic embrace of “localization” has not succeeded in altering the hierarchies of leadership and decision-making that enable international experts—so designated by formal education, passport, language, and multiple axes of power—to organize and interpret human rights practice.71 The vaunted local participation “may be hollowed out and amount only to an invitation to conform to norms imagined by experts or to fill an assigned role.”72 In her discussion of the “vernacularization” of human rights, Sally Engle Merry describes a world where “indigenous people, ethnic minorities, and women” are “using human rights languages and techniques” in ways that exceed the “Western” foundations of rights ideology. And yet, she notes, they are often dependent on intermediaries, persons who “translate ideas from the global arena down and from local arenas up,” and thus play a powerful role in shaping the practice of human rights.73
Part of the innovation of the NRC, I claim, is that diverse Ghanaian citizens stepped into this interstitial role, simultaneously asserting victimhood, citizenship, and expertise as they marshaled the language of human rights. At the NRC’s Accra public hearings, for example, the former policeman Joseph Kwadwo Nuer was not content to play the role to which he was assigned. After hearing Nuer’s story of torture at the hands of soldiers during the 1979 Armed Forces Revolutionary Council uprising, Commissioner Sylvia Boye requested proof of his story. Where were the hospital documents about the harms he had suffered? Where was the official letter granting him leave to recover from the abuse? Nuer’s deft response challenged the basic premise of her question: “My Lord, in the course of time, I thought I was never going to have the opportunity for redress and my economic situation was not the best so I used that letter and other documents as toilet papers.”74 As the audience at the Old Parliament House erupted into laughter, Nuer’s point was clear. Who has time to preserve important documents when struggling to meet his basic needs? Why would a person jealously protect documents attesting to a victimization that was common and widespread in those times? Where do external expectations of evidentiary and legal truth fall short when assessing Ghana’s history of violence? The public hearings were marked by moments like these, times when Ghanaians subtly or explicitly challenged the intimations or questions of the commissioners in order to more firmly control their testimony. Citizens did not only display flayed flesh or gaping need. By interpreting, explaining, and analyzing Ghanaian political history, they went beyond the role of informant and acted as experts.
In the NRC archive, Ghanaian victims reveal themselves as citizen experts who are a bridge between the past’s troubles and a desired future. In their own voices, they reflect on many of the continent’s most confounding dilemmas. What is the impact of state violence? What should be done for those who have suffered unjustly? What is the way forward for individuals and communities still bearing the wounds of the violent twentieth century? These foundational questions have been and continue to be vigorously debated by technocrats, development experts, scholars, public intellectuals, and politicians. In these discussions, however, the voices of African people are often included only in refracted and mediated form. The NRC is the rare locale in which the Ghanaian people, most of whom do not have the world’s ear, speak for themselves about the country’s political past, present, and future. In so doing, they do not only bear witness to pain, they dissect the limitations and possibility of Ghana’s national politics. The NRC archive’s lively historical and political critiques display human rights victims as experts in their own right whose stories are worthy of being heard, wrestled with, organized around, and ultimately remembered.
In this role, Ghanaian shared stories that collectively resist the narrative of exceptional African suffering. Those who come to this study expecting only a woeful tale of atrocities visited upon black bodies will find themselves sorely disappointed. Ghanaians marked as human rights abuse not only the spectacular atrocities that so often populate the international rhetoric but also the mundane economic and social deprivations that produce banally atrocious outcomes—the varied events that unjustly and irrevocably limited a person’s destiny. Instead of the sensationalist images of African suffering, Ghanaians highlight the diverse conditions that devastated lives. Although commissioners and Ghanaian media often trained their attention on stories of arresting physical violence,
