Truth Without Reconciliation. Abena Ampofoa Asare
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conventions of transitional justice, beyond the tropes of nationalist renderings of Ghanaian history, and beyond the limitations of the human rights “Africa problem.” Truth Without Reconciliation insists that TRCs may be more than they seem. And yet, are they enough? Even the most cursory glance at Ghana’s twenty-first-century politics reveals that the NRC did not transform the country’s political or economic structures. What, then, is the value of this citizen-curated public political history? To begin, the assumption that the NRC’s value is tied to immediately quantifiable and measurable outcomes misunderstands the relationship between history writing and political change. In the conclusion, I consider the astigmatism of assessing global TRC outcomes as a matter of participant satisfaction, the expansion of legal codes, positive government rhetoric or any other discrete factors that do not take into account the long and winding road between historical consciousness and political change. Better that we recognize, as Moses Chrispus Okello, Chris Dolan, and others suggest, the “ongoing labor” that “unfolds slowly over time and space, needing the healing and repair work of several generations.”81 Nevertheless the question of consequences is unavoidable; after all, the disappearance of the NRC from public view is the conundrum that began this study.
Political movements wrestling with the ideological violence of colonialism and neocolonialism affirm that historical consciousness is central in forging new African futures.82 “The settler makes history and is conscious of making it,” Fanon wrote. Decolonization, then, requires that a marginalized people thrust themselves under the “grandiose glare of history’s floodlights,” and recognize their struggle as epic. More recently, Michael Neocosmos has suggested that pursuing freedom in Africa requires first, thinking freedom. And this, he warns, is a skill in short supply.83 Hemmed in by disappointing national leadership, by multinational companies whose trumpeted corporate social responsibility programs will not bring back the fish or the richness of the soil, and by climate change and brain drain, the horizon of political progress is reduced to individual accumulation and more efficient global consumption. However, for “the excluded themselves … the issue of freedom remains on the agenda.”84 It is those who are suffering the most—like the urban shack dwellers in South Africa, or the Ghanaians who traveled miles to stand in line and lodge a petition at an NRC office—who are pursuing, headlong, political justice. Neocosmos points to South Africa’s Abahlali BaseMjondolo, the Shack Dwellers’ Movement, as an example of how marginalized groups, not the middle classes or academic elites, form the vanguard of freedom-oriented political action and theory in contemporary Africa. It is the shack dwellers who dream beyond acquiring a greater share of the liberal democratic dispensation, whose vision turns away from a limited progress and toward emancipation.85
The stories of the NRC must be added to this ongoing accounting of African peoples who seize the rhetoric and rituals of political progress as an opportunity to publicly remind their nation (and the world) of both their presence and their suffering. The NRC’s accounting is vital as a site where Ghanaian peoples’ historical and political thought is gathered; but like all archives, its material consequence depends on how it is used. The potential of the NRC is tied to whether anyone—fellow Ghanaians, diaspora Africans, transitional justice scholars—bothers to listen to the stories that were shared. There are many ways to listen; I am speaking here of taking seriously the critiques raised by the country’s citizen experts. If this has not yet happened, perhaps it will in the future. This is, after all, an archive; the documents are preserved, their full audience has not yet been born.
In any case, we must step away from the misplaced hope that TRCs will be a salve for broken societies. Dwelling with these stories is profoundly unsettling; this is as it should be. The violence described is not quarantined to the past; the fault lines that have before flared into atrocity remain active. Human dignity is still rationed by whether your family can pay school fees, whether your mother has the opportunity to receive proper maternal care, or whether you might be able to acquire a job. As a public meditation on the continuing obstacles to justice, freedom, and progress in Ghana, perhaps it is no wonder that the NRC archive has been so efficiently ignored.
Embracing this cacophony is more than a guide into Ghana’s history, it is also central to the country’s political future. The variety in Ghanaian people’s perspectives is neither a failure nor a weakness but instead an impetus to build a politics that recognizes the stratification of the Ghanaian nation and acknowledges the voices of the many. From the communities in Old Fadama to the elites gathered at Ridge Church to the petty traders in Tamale Market, all are part of Ghana and all must be included in the dream for Ghana’s future. Against a backdrop where the road to a brighter future in Ghana is described as a matter of clearing slums, privatizing education, and restricting the movement of poor people, the voices of Ghana’s diverse constituencies in the NRC create an opportunity to consider a political agenda that does not depend on erasing or ignoring difference. Although unity is central to national political progress, this study argues that cacophony, too, creates a road forward.
Truth Without Reconciliation delves into this rich NRC archive, using citizen petitions and testimonies as historical examples, guides for analysis, allegories, and sites of comparison. Following this introduction, Chapter 1, “Making the NRC Archive,” discusses the genesis and trajectory of the National Reconciliation Commission from its beginnings as a campaign promise in the 2000 electoral season, through the rancorous partisan parliamentary debates that established the National Reconciliation Act (2002), the submission of the final report to the government in 2004, and the disbursement of a reparations program in 2007. Defining a capacious NRC archive and interrogating its competing logics, this chapter considers the extent to which Ghanaians were able to seize national reconciliation as a site for democratic expression.
Chapter 2, “Human Rights and Ghanaian History,” traces the course of twentieth-century Ghanaian political history from the waning days of British colonialism through the 2000 presidential elections. By weaving the 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.