Truth Without Reconciliation: A Human Rights History of Ghana

by Abena Ampofoa Asare

Overview

Although truth and reconciliation commissions are supposed to generate consensus and unity in the aftermath of political violence, Abena Ampofoa Asare identifies cacophony as the most valuable and overlooked consequence of this process in Ghana. By collecting and preserving the voices of a diverse cross-section of the national population, Ghana's National Reconciliation Commission (2001-2004) created an unprecedented public archive of postindependence political history as told by the self-described victims of human rights abuse.

The collected voices in the archives of this truth commission expand Ghana's historic record by describing the state violence that seeped into the crevices of everyday life, shaping how individuals and communities survived the decades after national independence. Here, victims of violence marshal the language of international human rights to assert themselves as experts who both mourn the past and articulate the path toward future justice.

There are, however, risks as well as rewards for dredging up this survivors' history of Ghana. The revealed truth of Ghana's human rights history is the variety and dissonance of suffering voices. These conflicting and conflicted records make it plain that the pursuit of political reconciliation requires, first, reckoning with a violence that is not past but is preserved in national institutions and individual lives. By exploring the challenge of human rights testimony as both history and politics, Asare charts a new course in evaluating the success and failures of truth and reconciliation commissions in Africa and around the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812295276
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	06/15/2018
Series:	Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Abena Ampofoa Asare teaches Africana studies and history at Stony Brook University.

Read an Excerpt

Preface

In 2007, when I located the records of Ghana's National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) at the University of Ghana's Balme Library, my access was limited and closely monitored. Although I could read these records and take notes, the library staff did not allow photocopies or digital reproductions; they kept a close eye on my progress. I wended my way somewhat haphazardly through the overstuffed boxes of files, stopping at times to close the folders and catch my breath. In those days, I would leave the Balme Library feeling disoriented. As I passed by the James Fort Prison, I would no longer look at the sea. Instead, I would stare at the building's small windows and imagine what it would be like to be detained there indefinitely. While shopping for cloth at Makola Market, a vision of the market aflame would flash before my eyes. When I rode the government transport bus, a sheen of sweat would cling to my back: What would I do if army men boarded the bus? What would I say? Reading the NRC stories day in, day out changed the geography and landscape of my Accra; the past seemed separated from the present by only the thinnest of cotton.

As part of the Ghanaian diaspora, I am no stranger to the country's political history. My own family's story of transatlantic migration in the 1980s is tied to the turbulent history of Ghana's birth and growing pains. However, the library documents described violence of a different magnitude and scope. Although I had heard stories of politicians detained behind prison walls, disappeared high court judges and public executions of former heads of state, I did not know about the taxi drivers, market traders, and security guards who entered and exited Nsawam Prison or Ussher Fort Prison without the fanfare or public regret bestowed on their better-known counterparts. The documents at Balme Library suggested that the trouble in Ghanaian history was both more devastating and more mundane than fixed flashpoints of egregious physical loss. Here, the road to destruction was broad. Violence did not begin with a single soldier named Jerry John Rawlings, but instead with years of grinding economic scarcity and obdurate government. The inability to pay school fees, joblessness, watching a child suffer because of lack of health care—Ghanaians also counted these as grievous wrongs that produced exile, family dissolution, and even death. Moreover, Jerry John Rawlings was only one of many national leaders who presided over the suffering of citizens. No political regime or leader emerged unscathed—not the visionary anti-colonialist Kwame Nkrumah, or the liberal jurist Kofi Abrefa Busia, or even then president John Agyekum Kufuor.

I assumed that the impact of these stories—the way they changed the ground on which I walked—was a factor of my distance, youth, and ignorance. As I began to talk with Ghanaian colleagues and family members about the contents of the NRC files, however, my own beginning assumptions were echoed back to me. "No one who was minding his own business was affected." "Only during the Rawlings years did people suffer like that." "As a peace-loving people, Ghanaians just allowed the soldiers to run roughshod over them." There was a disjuncture between the contents of the NRC folders and the public discussions about national political violence. This difference, the space between these representations of Ghana's past, emboldened me to write this book.

When I began, the library staff's concern about who might access the NRC files seemed out of place. After all, Ghanaians furnished these documents within a public history project. Why should the public then be kept away? Exposure was not an unexpected eventuality; it was central to the purpose of the NRC records. Looking back now, I understand much better the Balme Library staff's protectiveness, their desire to guard against the unknown futures of these documents. These are stories that should not be uncoupled from the logic of their production. Ghanaians entrusted their words and narratives to the commission as an act of hope. Individuals brought their bodies and voices to the NRC, sometimes borrowing money for transportation, standing in long lines, and defying illness, old age, and cynicism, because they believed this experiment would create something positive. Participating in the NRC was a means to an end. Some citizens came to set the story straight, to seek the government's help in sorting a land claim, or to request specific monetary remuneration and aid. Amid this diversity of purpose, the common ground is that the NRC participants willingly offered up versions of their past with the expectation that their lives might somehow be transformed.

Back in 2007, I tried to explain to the Balme Library staff that my intention was not to appropriate these documents, but to learn from them. In the years since, I have come to see the NRC records as an image, albeit imperfect, of the expanded political agora made possible when diverse individuals and communities speak—and someone is there to listen. I take the NRC documents seriously because within them, members of the Ghanaian community who rarely have a public platform insert their insights, complaints, and hopes into the historical record. The language, images, and logic of the NRC participants were central to my research process and analysis and I have, accordingly, made them central in the text. As the truth and reconciliation commissions make their way around the world, they also generate new archives worthy of sustained study. I have benefited from the insight and courage reflected in these documents and I would encourage future researchers to seek out these sources. There is much more story to be told.


I am grateful to the library staff who allowed me to do this research without knowing exactly what the outcome would be and to the participants in Ghana's truth and reconciliation process who dreamed of a better future and dared to speak of the past.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. Making the NRC Archive
Chapter 2. Human Rights and Ghanaian History
Chapter 3. Kalabule Women
Chapter 4. Family Histories of Political Violence
Chapter 5. The Suffering of Being Developed
Chapter 6. Soldier, Victim, Hero, Survivor
Chapter 7. Time for Suffering / Time for Justice
Conclusion. The Brief Afterlife of Ghana's Truth Commission

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"Truth Without Reconciliation is a difficult book; it is also an extremely powerful book . . . a must-read for any student of Ghanaian history, as well as those interested in the history of human rights. It is one of those rare books whose theoretical and methodological interventions are equally matched by their empirical rigor."

Africa Today

"[A]n excellent, timely,and timeless addition to scholarship on Ghana's political history, and an important scholarly and policy resource on human rights. Truth Without Reconciliationreveals a true national narrative told in ordinary voices: truth borne in souls, hearts, memories, and on skins of citizens; truth about postcolonial statecraft and nation-building; but, truth that failed to meet the aspirations of and engender true reconciliation for a survivor people."

African Studies Quarterly

"Through an examination of the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC), Abena Ampofoa Asare paints a nuanced history of Ghana, one in which Ghanaian citizens themselves narrate the violence of the country's past. These testimonies enlightened me, one or two even made me laugh, and, many times, I had to pause and look away, horrified at the scale of terror people suffered. By presenting the NRC in all its contradictions and in giving voice again to everyday Ghanaians, Asare's Truth Without Reconciliation makes us critically consider the image of Ghana as a peaceful country and reminds us that there are human rights abuses we as a nation still have to confront."

author of The Hundred Wells of Salaga Ayesha Harruna Attah

"The empirical detail is stunning. Abena Ampofoa Asare makes use of the entire NRC archive to bring out stories that often go unheard in the media and in most traditional justice-related publications. Let us hope that Truth Without Reconciliation will inspire more researchers to do the same around the world."

Seattle University Onur Bakiner

"Truth without Reconciliation is a thoughtful, well-written meditation on global truth and reconciliation commissions through the optic of Ghana's postindependence politics. The book pushes us toward a fuller reconsideration of Ghanaian and African postindependence history. By turning our attention to the lived experiences of the multitudes who suffered and who survived state and corporate violence, human rights are less ethereal concepts than victim-filled faces and scarred bodies."

African Studies Review

"A welcome addition to the literature on postindependence Ghana. Abena Ampofoa Asare achieves a thorough historical reconstruction with an emphasis on everyday people, showing the challenges that result from the Ghanian state's policies and practices. The individual testimonies she presents alone make this book worth the read."

Temple University Benjamin Talton

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2018

"Truth without Reconciliation is a thoughtful, well-written meditation on global truth and reconciliation commissions through the optic of Ghana's postindependence politics. The book pushes us toward a fuller reconsideration of Ghanaian and African postindependence history. By turning our attention to the lived experiences of the multitudes who suffered and who survived state and corporate violence, human rights are less ethereal concepts than victim-filled faces and scarred bodies."—African Studies Review

"[A]n excellent, timely,and timeless addition to scholarship on Ghana's political history, and an important scholarly and policy resource on human rights. Truth Without Reconciliationreveals a true national narrative told in ordinary voices: truth borne in souls, hearts, memories, and on skins of citizens; truth about postcolonial statecraft and nation-building; but, truth that failed to meet the aspirations of and engender true reconciliation for a survivor people."—African Studies Quarterly

"Truth Without Reconciliation is a difficult book; it is also an extremely powerful book . . . a must-read for any student of Ghanaian history, as well as those interested in the history of human rights. It is one of those rare books whose theoretical and methodological interventions are equally matched by their empirical rigor."—Africa Today

"Through an examination of the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC), Abena Ampofoa Asare paints a nuanced history of Ghana, one in which Ghanaian citizens themselves narrate the violence of the country's past. These testimonies enlightened me, one or two even made me laugh, and, many times, I had to pause and look away, horrified at the scale of terror people suffered. By presenting the NRC in all its contradictions and in giving voice again to everyday Ghanaians, Asare's Truth Without Reconciliation makes us critically consider the image of Ghana as a peaceful country and reminds us that there are human rights abuses we as a nation still have to confront."—Ayesha Harruna Attah, author of The Hundred Wells of Salaga

"The empirical detail is stunning. Abena Ampofoa Asare makes use of the entire NRC archive to bring out stories that often go unheard in the media and in most traditional justice-related publications. Let us hope that Truth Without Reconciliation will inspire more researchers to do the same around the world."—Onur Bakiner, Seattle University

"A welcome addition to the literature on postindependence Ghana. Abena Ampofoa Asare achieves a thorough historical reconstruction with an emphasis on everyday people, showing the challenges that result from the Ghanian state's policies and practices. The individual testimonies she presents alone make this book worth the read."—Benjamin Talton, Temple University

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