1 Introduction
The current reflexive turn in African studies calls for a look back at some of the field’s past endeavours and trajectories. But rather than conceiving of African studies as too “global” and monolithic an entity, this chapter approaches this task by considering geographical and temporal specificities, as stressed throughout this volume. In the decades immediately following independence, the local and certain foreign scholars who made up Africa-based African studies urgently set out to make their mark on a biased and unequal field. They used a multitude of channels and practices to do so while remaining overwhelmingly globally engaged. But although their approaches were heterogeneous and, at times, contradictory, research and philosophising typically coexisted with the aim of society-wide transformation and empowerment.
While until fairly recently people were convinced that the past was closed and fixed and the future was open to change, we are now experiencing that the past is constantly changing and the future proves to be heavily determined by the past. The past appears to be no longer written
ASSMANN 2008: 57in granite but rather in water; new constructions of it are periodically arising and changing the course of politics and history.
This observation, inescapable in the field of memory studies, is also becoming more widely established in historiography.
When recalling schools of historical thought, historians have typically foregrounded individual professional historians, if not individual history departments. In the case of Africa in the decades immediately after independence, this positioning has reinforced the notion of African studies/History in Africa as a mere discipline. In contrast, this chapter shines light on the diverse intellectual community – professional historians, history practitioners, chiefs and lawyers, and men and women – who made up the fabric of the “Legon School of History”. With this demographic composition in mind, and in defiance of the image of the always-aloof historian, the chapter is particularly curious about the change imagined in regard to the contemporary relationship between science and society at the two moments in Ghana’s past under investigation.
Founded in 1951, the Historical Society of Ghana placed itself (and continues to place itself) at the critical intersection of public outreach and scholarship. It has published everything from journals and books to documentaries and sponsored dissertations, in the hope of instilling historical awareness in Ghanaian society. This chapter begins by revisiting the society’s endorsed production of the past in Ghana Notes and Queries during the 1960s and 1970s. It then recalls a key moment of institutional memorialisation for the society during the celebration of Ghana’s fiftieth anniversary of independence. Different ways of knowing the past appear inside and outside the academy, along with their possibilities and limitations, interactions and incommensurability.
2 Historiography in Ghana Notes and Queries
Ghana Notes and Queries (GNQ) is an underappreciated, though certainly not unique, historical example of what is possible when editors embrace their creative capacity. Every publication has its readership, and in the 1962 editorial of the Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, the fifteenth issue of this publication, professional historians Albert Adu Boahen and Ivor Wilks introduced their readership to GNQ, which was “intended as a ‘clearing house’ for the ideas and comments of historians both professional and amateur” (Boahen and Wilks 1962: V). “When Ghana Notes and Queries was founded, we
… is there an archaeological site in your neighbourhood, and do you wish to know more about it? Have you noticed statements and works on Ghanaian history with which you disagree? Do you have information which the author clearly did not have? Do you possess family papers or relics which are more than, say 50 years old? Do you have access to oral tradition in respect of your lineages, town, tribe or state question?
IRWIN 1961: 3
With that said, it is indisputable that these contributions were eventually filtered through scientific processes of critique. Irwin, for one, worked under the assumption that nonprofessional historians necessarily wanted to “know more about methods of historical research” (Irwin 1961: 3). In this way, as we still see today, epistemic inclusivity within the framework of science typically morphed into a debate about methodology. And yet, through this process, new sources and other approaches to knowing the past entered the pantheon of the human sciences, inevitably having global implications for historiography itself, including its underlying practices (and thus challenging current understandings of human history).
Covers of the first two issues of Ghana Notes and Queries, both from 1961; Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany.
IMAGES TAKEN BY CASSANDRA MARK-THIESEN
Next to ensuring the flow of information between Ghana’s history practitioners, the editors of GNQ initially also tried to overcome disciplinary boundaries. This was so coveted an achievement that when the fifth edition of the journal was printed in 1963, they celebrated with, “No historian is represented here” (GNQ 1963: 3). Instead, the issue featured an economic geographer, an agricultural scientist and a sociologist. Generally speaking, the editors solicited notes “on general archaeological, ethnographical and historical topics”
The decision to publish nonprofessional and professional historiography side by side may seem odd from the perspective of today’s academy. But it was perfectly in keeping with the Historical Society’s ambition to serve a broad spectrum of society, from the public arena to the quaint centres of scholarship. The society’s ambition to bridge a widening gap between the production of written history within the university and that in the wider society, albeit remarkable, lasted just under one decade.
GNQ appeared between 1961 and 1972. After publishing three separate issues in its first year, the journal became an annual publication. It grew from around 17 pages in 1961 to roughly 40 pages in the early 1970s. During this period, the cover price rose from 1 shilling 6 pence to 1 cedi per issue (roughly the price of two daily newspapers), after the introduction of new legal tender in the late 1960s. But the editors were soon to target an even more specialised audience. The annual general meeting of 1972 brought with it the crucial decision to merge the Historical Society of Ghana with the Ghana History Teachers Association, crystallising the society’s focus on teacher training. According to one interviewee, who I communicated with via email and who referred to the journal as Ghana Notes and Queries and Teachers Journal, it eventually served primarily as a scholarly forum for secondary school history teachers.1
2.1 Flattening Difference through Teaching
The “imagined community” of the Ghanaian nation figured prominently in the society’s work from a very early stage. However, when Irwin insisted in his 1961 editorial that the success of the journal “will depend on the support of the public of Ghana”, there was no specific reference to teachers (Irwin 1961: 3). Indeed, the only mention of history teaching in the very first issue of the journal was as a topic at the Leverhulme History Conference. This was held at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, in Salisbury (Southern Rhodesia), in September 1960, and was attended by a number of historians from African universities.
By 1963, however, educating teachers had become an important part of the journal’s mission. Mass education through teachers’ colleges aimed to feed the country’s public education system with the new genre of African history.
During this shift, the society thus cemented its place as a central force linking various institutions within and outside the government to address postcolonial, national and pan-African, cultural and intellectual themes, many of which would be echoed in the society’s self-commemoration several decades later. In the 1963 issue of the journal, readers learned that the society was “planning to organise a conference on the Teaching of History in Secondary Schools and Colleges in Ghana from 5th to 8th April 1963” (GNQ 1963).
A series of lectures at the Legon campus raised three issues surrounding contemporary history education. The first was the need to review existing structures and resources for teaching history. Emerging from colonial rule, there was little debate about the urgent need to develop “appropriate textbooks” for the independent Ghanaian state (GNQ 1963: 28). Indeed, the overwhelming consensus was that there were as yet “no suitable textbooks written from the African rather than the European standpoint” (GNQ 1964 1). Secondly, a revised syllabus would give greater weight to African history without neglecting “World, European and English history” (ibid.). “We are convinced that this change in emphasis is proper and indeed long overdue”, stated the editors (ibid.). The third theme was a review of trends in African historiography (GNQ 1963: 28). To this end, the conference invited representatives from “the Ministry of Education, the West African Examinations Council, The National Council of Principals of Training Colleges, Conference of Heads of Assisted Secondary Schools, The Ghana Academy of Sciences” to join the conversation (GNQ 1963: 28). A large number of school principals and senior masters of history from various secondary schools and training colleges also took part in the debates.
African studies today is largely seen as the realm of scholars, as a result of professionalization processes, also advanced by historical societies. In contrast, the importance of teaching, especially on the continent, has been largely overlooked. However, the Historical Society maintained a longstanding interest in not just historical research but also nation-building via the teaching of history in secondary schools and colleges. Articles dealing with the challenges of the history classroom had already featured in early issues of Transactions (see, for example, Conton 1958).
In the 1960s and 1970s, the stakes were simply too high to keep the new genre of African studies knowledge at arm’s length. Against the backdrop of
He wanted a socialist order in Ghana heading the African revolution to drive every vestige of imperialism out of Africa and to liberate the colonially occupied portions of Africa. He wanted Legon to become the intellectual centre of the African revolution, of socialist Ghana, and of international study of Africa’s past and future as one of the world’s great continents and not as an appendage of western history, culture, economy and civilisation.
HYMAN BASNER, cited in Biney 2011: 116
It may well be, however, that the growing repression of the Nkrumah administration, or “negative Nkrumahism”, a few years later, marked by a growing mistrust of the academy as it was, simply made public history too politically sensitive an arena for the Historical Society to engage in (Mazrui, cited in Biney 2011: 174).
How did the society’s sense of futurity change between the tumultuous 1960s and 2000s? And can an analysis of its media output, which includes different forms of historical narrative, help us to answer such questions more accurately? Low-cost journals became the most important tools for forging intellectual communities across borders and for disseminating national historical consciousness within individual nations immediately after independence. Revisiting the production and movements of history journals published by the Historical Society gives us some insight into a set of ambitious nation-building practices that had a restricted scope nonetheless. The Historical Society’s second-most important periodical in the immediate post-independence
3 Self-Commemoration and the Historical Society of Ghana 50 Years after Independence
In 2007, as Ghana celebrated its “Golden Jubilee”, the Historical Society of Ghana under the leadership of historian Irene Odotei was ready and able to address the local public. It organised a series of roundtable events, at which scholars, politicians and civil society groups were invited to reflect on the country’s past, present and future 50 years after independence. The subthemes of the two-day conference included good governance, institutional and political stability, economic growth and the civil service, to name a few. The proceedings of the event on the day of its opening, on December 17, were partially captured in a report published by the digital news and entertainment outlet Ghanaweb (GNA 2007).
Inevitably, this moment called for a certain amount of self-commemoration on the part of the Historical Society itself. The result was a leaflet, which was first circulated prior to the event for fundraising purposes and was later reproduced in various corners of the Internet – from the full version found on the webpage DutchCulture, an organisation aiming to strengthen Dutch international cooperation in the areas of culture, media and heritage, to abbreviated versions located on JSTOR.
At one point during the roundtable discussions, Professor Odotei made the point that history has a role to play in charting a course for the nation’s future. She noted that “Without knowing where we have been we cannot understand why we are where we are; and without understanding why we are where we are, we cannot properly determine where we ought to go” (GNA 2007). While sounding somewhat trite given the obvious reference to the sankofa principle (see, for instance, Schramm 2010), which also features on the group’s logo, the statement perfectly encapsulated the continuing role of the organisation. At that time, the Historical Society was involved in training historians at all levels of education, in parallel with hosting public events relevant to Ghanaian history. Furthermore, its members forecasted a future in which they could both “whip up students’ interests in history” and build a bridge between the university and society by “establish[ing] a history village where academics and the general public could interact on a regular basis and share ideas on
3.1 Flattening Difference through Memory
According to Lentz and Budniok (2007), the overwhelming focus of the celebrations that marked “Ghana@50”, scattered throughout the year as they were, was pride and unity. This priority facilitated ironing out underlying tensions over who “the ‘heroes’ to be honoured for their efforts towards Ghana’s independence” actually were. Were they, for instance, the government in power or parties loyal to Nkrumahism? the marginalised North or the politically dominant South? the people or the VIP s? (Lentz and Budniok 2007: 534). This was hardly a moment for the kind of complexity or awkward facts that only a critical empirical historian could provide in a moment of national remembrance (Burke 1989: 110). Therefore, in addition to presenting concrete evidence in the form of the date of the founding of the society in 1951, the date of its dissolution in 1983, and the year it finally rose from the ashes in 2001, the leaflet emphasised the presentation of content affective enough to make “the nation manifest in the hearts and minds of [Ghanaian] citizens” in line with the many other events taking place in celebration of “Ghana@50” (Lentz and Budniok 2007: 531). In sum, the leaflet’s author(s?) crafted a bold narrative about the organisation’s continual cohesion against a backdrop of intellectual pluralism.
The text recalled the “founding fathers” of the society as John D. Fage, Alexander Adum Kwapong, Albert Adu Boahen, J.B. Danquah, Kobina Sekyi, Nana Kobina Nketsia “and others”, all recognisable and highly influential players in the echelons of Ghanaian historiography across time. More importantly, those familiar with the field of Ghanaian historical studies would register the broad, even contentious, political and intellectual spectrum represented by the men named, in the context of an early post-independence Ghana. Their opinions differed widely in debates about what kind of history writing and education the newly independent state needed in the first place: emancipatory, empirical or something in between. There was, for example, Nana Kobina Nketsia, the paramount chief and political activist who was closely associated with Nkrumahism in the 1950s, so much so that he was the only chief to be imprisoned for the Positive Action Strike led by the Convention People’s Party (CPP) under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah in January 1950, a campaign often cited as a precursor to the struggle for independence (Nkrumah 1949). Kobina Sekyi, on the other hand, stood out for his insistence that an independent Ghana should return to a political system rooted entirely in precolonial Akan-Fanti institutions and values (Saah and Baku 2011). According to R.L. Okonkwo, “Sekyi became an isolated figure in Ghana as his concerns were
The remaining four – Boahen, Danquah, Kwapong and Fage – were considerably more closely aligned in their anticolonial politics, while standing for variations of cosmopolitanism and “deploring the civil liberties excesses of the [Nkrumah] regime” (Lewis 1999: 57). In addition, it is important to know that the men mentioned had not in fact simultaneously held leadership roles within the society, and certainly not from the organisation’s start, nor at the moment of Ghana’s independence. The constructed lineage of “founding fathers” thus reflected an alignment between the society’s institutional values and the national priority of democratic unity and pride.
The society presented an image of a socially engaged, internationally conscious organisation that had long catered for a wide range of intellectual and political thought.2 On closer inspection, however, the silence in these practices of remembrance deserves some attention. (Science has entered the room!) Whether as a result of the author of the pamphlet’s own gender bias or because the pamphlet was aimed at a readership with the means to make generous donations (which was therefore likely to be predominantly male), or for some other reason altogether, it is staggering that women were completely excluded from this founding narrative, echoing Kiprop’s observations in this volume. This is despite the fact that a minimal amount of empirical research would have unearthed stories such as that of the British academic Margaret A. Priestley, who was a lecturer in history at the University College of Ghana (later Legon) and who served on the publications committee of the Historical Society for several years from 1957 (after the annexation of British Togoland). While such a story would have endeared the organisation to many, it was not prioritised as the most pertinent to tell at the time.
4 Conclusion
Ongoing debates about inequalities in global knowledge production have drawn considerable attention to the differences and inequalities that characterise African studies globally, including at the intersections of class, gender, race and nationality. A central point of contention is the situatedness of knowledge (Kessi, Marks and Ramugondo 2020; Mignolo 2009;
This chapter has looked at the production of history and memory by the Historical Society of Ghana. In both cases, it has explored its sense of futurity and practices of nation-building (e.g. through teaching and memorialisation). The society’s print publications, situated between society and scholarship, provide an excellent basis for exploring the organisation’s ventures between academia and public opinion, historiography and memory, past and future. In addition to showing how the Historical Society’s members sought to activate these spheres in 2007, through the much simpler publication of a leaflet, the chapter has focused on its periodicals from the 1960s and 1970s, Ghana Notes and Queries being a history journal aimed at history practitioners and professional historians. These documents need to be read as having emerged with different purposes in mind. The question of how and among whom these narrations of the past were intended to travel, and what happened once they were in motion, cannot be underestimated in this context. However, as the chapter has shown, different ways of knowing the past can also serve important complementary functions where holistic knowledge is a priority.
The Historical Society, with its inbuilt sense of the future, emerged with a firm understanding of the need to preserve heritage and the important role that history should play in the regeneration of (African) society. As part of this reappraisal, both teaching and the promotion of engagement between the university and the academy emerged as the society’s two main areas of activity. Within the academy, it sparked diverse discussions of global relevance about historiographical methods as well as of the African, postcolonial and human past.
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It was made up of lecturers and students from the five public universities, including the University of Ghana, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, the University of Cape Coast, the University of Education, Winneba, and the University of Development Studies, Tamale, as well as teachers from secondary schools and training colleges.