Jean Allman

'Hewers of Wood, Carriers of Water': Islam, Class, and Politics on the Eve of Ghana's Independence

The publication of Michael Crowders “Whose Dream Was It Anyway?” in January 1987 marked the opening of what promises to be a challenging era of revision and re-evaluation in African historiography. With the benefit of three decades of historical hindsight and armed with recently declassified colonial documentation, historians are beginning to grapple with the complexities of national struggle in late colonial society, beginning with Ghanas march to freedom in 1957. It is as a part of this process of revision and re-evaluation that the following examination of the Muslim Association Party [MAP] of the Gold Coast is offered. The MAP was a comparatively small organization which was and is easily overshadowed by the turbulence of mass nationalist politics in the years 1950 thru 1957. Yet its unique blend of religious, class, and ethnic appeals—appeals too often misunderstood or dismissed outright as vestiges of tribalism, traditionalism, or religious fanaticism—reveals much about the antinomies of nationalist struggle in the Gold Coast. Political scientists concerned with the dynamic rise of Gold Coast nationalism in the decade after World War II (and those few historians who dared venture into the recent past) focused primarily on Kwame Nkrumahs Convention Peoples Party [CPP], its early split from the United Gold Coast Convention [UGCC] and its ultimate domination of nationalist politics from 1951 to 1957 (Apter, 1955; Austin, 1964; Bourret, 1960; Bretton, 1966; Fitch and Oppenheimer, 1968).

Nuclear Imperialism and the Pan-African Struggle for Peace and Freedom

IN 1962 PROFESSOR ST. CLAIR DRAKE PREPARED A PAPER FOR THE ACCRA ASSEMBLY on the World without the Bomb—a high-profile international gathering in Ghana’s capital of nearly a hundred activists, statesmen, scientists, teachers, and clergy opposed to nuclear armament.1 Drake, a renowned Pan-Africanist and then professor of anthropology at Roosevelt University, served as the head of the Department of Sociology at the University College of Ghana from 1958–61. In his paper, “The African Revolution and the Accra Assembly” Drake predicted: “History will record a significant fact about the African Revolution, that it was led by men who always exhibited an unusual concern for minimizing the violence of the revolutionary struggle, for seeking solutions through the United Nations wherever possible; and who were always concerned to insulate the revolution from Cold War politics so that Africa would not run the danger of becoming the spot from which WorldWar III—the nuclear war began.”2 Regrettably, Drake—an extraordinarily incisive and prescient social critic—was not on target with this particular historiographical prediction. By and large these are not the “facts” of the “African Revolution” that history has chosen to remember. While we have heretofore managed to avoid World War III (an accomplishment increasingly imperiled with each passing day), the achievements of the “African Revolution” have, for the most part, been buried beneath the detritus of coups and counter-coups, debt, civil war, and structural adjustment.

Be(com)ing Asante, be(com)ing Akan: thoughts on gender, identity and the colonial encounter

The issues tentatively explored in this chapter1 — gender, identity and the colonial encounter in Asante — can be framed by two extraordinary, though very different, photographs, taken approximately forty years apart. The first (Figure 5.1) is of the king of Asante, Asantehene Agyeman Prempe I, and the Queenmother, Asantehernaa Yaa Kyaa, seated with a small group of retainers. The picture was taken in Elmina shortly after their arrest in Kumasi by British forces early in 1896. It is one of the few photographs we have in which the (in)famous Asantehemaa appears. Reviled by her eventual captors as ‘influential and unscrupulous’, ‘wicked but astute’, Yaa Kyaa opposed any accommodation to British interests in the years preceding her arrest. The photograph in question, which has been republished numerous times, signifies in very dramatic, gendered ways the British colonial ‘capture’ of Asante.2

Gender, Colonialism, and Feminist Collaboration

The graduate seminar “Gender and Colonialism” that we have offered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), both jointly and individually, over the course of the past six years is very much the product of a long-term process — a feminist collaborative that is difficult to capture with a single syllabus. The syllabus we present here is a freeze-framed version of that process, the 2003 iteration of the course as we first taught it collaboratively. What follows is an account of how we came to develop a relationship with each other, with our respective fields and intellectual commitments, and with the limits and possibilities of the transnational as a historical concept and a feminist analytical tool in the context of thinking through what the combination — via collision and collusion — of gender with colonialism might mean. Burton developed this course in the spring of 2001 in response to curricular imperatives in the graduate field we call “comparative women’s and gender history” at UIUC. At the time “Gender and Colonialism” was itself a comparatively new rubric. While the concept of transnationalism had scarcely come into view as an analytical approach, let alone as a methodological procedure, Burton can see now that she was trying to combine questions of empire and colonialism with a transnational approach. She did this by taking what she had identified as major conceptual questions at the heart of imperial studies and colonial scholarship — domesticity, sexualities, subalternity, citizenship, medicine, commodity capitalism, race, and the

The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana@@@Murder and Politics in Colonial Ghana

Bearing the traditional symbol of the Asante nation, the porcupine, the National Liberation Movement (NLM) stormed onto the Gold Coasts political stage in 1954. The movement mounted one of the first and most significant campaigns to decentralise political power in an Africa undergoing the process of decolonisation. This is a case study in the social history of African politics. Situated within the context of so much theoretical and historical literature on class, ethnicity and nationalism, its significance is aimed beyond the borders of Asante, and of Ghana.