NRC narratives into the historical review, this chapter uses citizen stories to disrupt the elitism, patriarchy, and other exclusions common within Ghanaian nationalist historiography.
The next two chapters consider patterns in how the self-described victims of Ghanaian politics utilized the NRC to represent the national past. Chapter 3, “Kalabule Women,” interrogates the notion of the “human rights victim” by focusing on a collection of petitions by Ghanaian market women about the intersection of gender violence and political violence. At the NRC, market women thrust their broken bodies before the nation, exposing the violence that occurred at the intersection of sex and social identity. In so doing, their stories brush against the abundant images of African women’s suffering that freely circulate within global media representation of international human rights abuse. This chapter considers the national and global consequences of the NRC as a site where Ghanaians stepped into the public identity of the “human rights victim”—to ambivalent ends.
Chapter 4, “Family Histories of Political Violence,” explores the narratives of estrangement, divorce and separation, unhappy homes, and broken promises that animate the NRC archive. Here, I consider the consequences when NRC participants describe human rights abuse as that which withered Ghanaian families. By counting the costs of national political violence through the loss of intimate and filial ties, Ghanaians illuminate the domestic, private sphere as a site of political violence. Both chapters confront the risks (both personal and political) of publicly donning the mantle of victimhood in a TRC and place gender at the center of Ghana’s history of political violence.
Chapter 5, “The Suffering of Being Developed,” focuses on two collections of citizen narratives, both officially deemed nonjurisdictional and placed outside the mandate of Ghana’s NRC. The first collection consists of individuals and communities who were displaced and resettled as part of the construction of the Volta River Project’s Akosombo Dam. The other collection focuses on the violence that accompanied the privatization of salt production on the Songor Salt Flats. In both, Ghanaians scrutinized development initiatives that displaced and impoverished rural communities. The costs of both nationalist and corporate development approaches are immortalized in stories about how marginalized citizens were brought low by initiatives ostensibly meant to build the country up.
Chapter 6, “Soldier, Victim, Hero, Citizen,” interrogates both the ubiquity of suffering and the images of resistance present in the NRC documents. Instead of coming forward to request absolution, most Ghanaian soldiers came to the NRC to insist that they, too, were victims. Similarly, the archive is marked by stories of ambivalent heroes and inadequate acts of courage that result in imprisonment, exile, assault and other ills. Together, these stories undermine a moralistic understanding of African political violence as a matter of clearly demarcated categories of victims, perpetrators, heroes and evildoers and invite a reconsideration of the contours and consequences of resistance to political violence. This complexity, I argue, is productive; it propels us past moral dichotomies and toward a vision of historical justice that recognizes the breadth, depth, and diversity in how human beings suffer, survive, and resist violence.
The importance of nonjurisdictional petitions is also evident in Chapter 7, “Time of Suffering / Time for Justice.” Here, Ghanaians describe the continuing impact of colonial violence in today’s Ghana and challenge the notion that democratic elections marked the end of state human-rights abuse. Political violence, in citizens’ reflections, was cyclical and compounded. The days that caused destruction in the past also set a course for risk in the future. By refusing to consign state violence safely to the past, Ghanaian reject analyses of contemporary African politics that ignore the colonial past and assume the innocence of neoliberal democratic present. These temporally transgressive petitions and testimonies highlight the analytical rigor of an NRC archive rooted in citizen experiences and perspectives.
The conclusion, “The Brief Afterlife of Ghana’s Truth Commission,” returns to the question of consequences by criticizing the language of success and failure as a constraint on our comprehension of Africa’s TRC phenomenon. Truth commissions are neither inherently politically moribund nor implicitly liberating; they are vessels that can be exploited for diverse ends. If the “political consciousness and imagination of African societies” is the fertile ground on which justice struggles must be built, processes that do not immediately result in explicit gains but which do change minds, shift allegiances, expose state hypocrisy, and frighten us out of exhaustion and complacency should not be overlooked.86
CHAPTER 1
Making the NRC Archive
Truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) may not immediately extract justice, peace, or reconciliation from the brokenness of the past, but they always and everywhere produce records of human suffering. Narratives of human rights violation are being gathered all over the world—from Canada to Liberia to East Timor—but after the tears have been shed and the speeches made, what becomes of the stories that have been amassed? Ghana’s National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) functioned as a public history-writing project. A diverse cross section of the national population presented, analyzed, and interpreted Ghana’s history of political violence in full earshot of the world. The consequent archive is a revelation, but this does not make it an uncomplicated, transparent, or free site where all Ghanaians had their say. The contentious birth of the NRC in the first years of the twenty-first century is the firmest foundation from which to understand the complexity of the stories that Ghanaians shared. The tensions that marked the NRC’s genesis and functioning are echoed in its archive.
When I began reading the NRC file folders at the University of Ghana’s Balme Library, the contents were immediately arresting. In these stories, marked by colloquialism, analogy, and innuendo, Ghanaian people held forth. At first, I read these documents as rich primary sources in which Africans were “speaking for themselves” about the past.1 Six months later, after reading one-third of the NRC’s 4,240 petitions, I had come to a slightly different conclusion. These records were more profitably read as histories: complex, deliberate, and artful representations of Ghana’s past. These citizen stories are not mirrors to the past; they are fabrications reflecting the hand of the authors, forged within a particular season and deliberately crafted to illuminate particular aspects of Ghana’s march through the twentieth century. The term “fabrication,” as used here, is not a slight on the veracity or accuracy of the archive’s contents. Its Latin root, faber, gestures toward artisans and describes the work of constructing with one’s own hands—utilizing sweat and skill to create. Citizen participation in the NRC occurred on these terms; Ghanaians were making histories, deliberately crafting versions of the past that might serve.
For a process that was supposed to locate the truth about political violence in Ghana, the NRC archive’s most striking revelation is the impossibility of establishing a unitary narrative about the past’s turbulence. Between the citizen petitions, public hearings, NRC staff legal opinions, and news media reports, there are different images and understanding of human rights abuse in Ghanaian history. What happened to particular populations during different political regimes and under diverse leaders? When did state violence rise to the level of human rights abuse? How might we assess and compare the human impact of different policies? In responding to these questions, Ghanaians produced a multitude of accounts that, when juxtaposed, make it plain that the country’s political journey must be written as a history of difference.
The contents of the NRC archive include letters, photographs, land-use maps, funeral programs, dismissal letters,
