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

      The NRC was not the first (nor the last) time when citizens used the language of international human rights as a lens through which to parse the substance and content of freedom in Ghana. The first part of this chapter explores the way human rights was utilized by Ghana’s government, labor unions, journalists and others during the first ten years of national independence. Human rights was and still is a mutable language deployed for myriad ends by different communities within Ghana and beyond. Its power was and still is in the attempt to mobilize a supra-national moral standard to describe, challenge, and condemn political violence. “Rights talk” in Ghana’s early independence period was inherently politically fraught; it was an invitation to consider if, when and how state violence become untenable—and what to do about it. Accordingly, a human rights history of Ghana is not a narrative of moral absolutes and bright lines; we are not entering the “world