The Ghana Reader: History, Culture, Politics

"This book is designed for a number of audiences. It’s designed for historians, for business people, for study-abroad students, for a range of people who may have either a deep or curious interest in Ghanaian history, politics, and culture. It was a way to bring five hundred years of history, politics, and culture into one place through very important yet accessible primary sources. They’re all framed, put into context, and accompanied by wonderful artwork and illustrations. There are things ranging from Caribbean festivals that are now part of the Ghanaian cultural fabric, to cooking, as well as deep readings and historical sources in Arabic and Portuguese and Dutch and Danish, the range of European-supplied source materials. In one place, you’ll find very accessible, very digestible information, framed in a way that the newcomer or the experienced learner or scholar or student will find enriching. Our Own Way in This Part of The World is a biography at three scales. I call it a communography, which is a term that I created and flesh out in the introduction. It’s the story of a healer named Nana Kofi Dɔnkɔ, whose life cuts across the entire 20th century, with a back story in the 19th century. That’s the chronological arc of the book. It tells his story and that of his family and his community, and the Gold Coast colony and nation of Ghana. It weaves these three scales—individual, township, nation—and tells the story of all three through the lens of this healer and his family in Takyiman (Techiman), central Ghana. Methodologically, I do a number of new things. I move the focus away from the coast (because a lot of historians focus on the coast) and say there’s a lot of intra-African history, meaning history that’s created amongst and between African peoples without a European interlocutor or a Muslim interlocutor or any other interlocutor. I wanted to use a crossroads town, Takyiman, that sits between the north and south of Ghana, right in the center of Ghana, to say that there are some deeply important histories and perspectives if we think about the arc of Ghana’s history from there. What kind of history do we get when we look at Ghanaian history from the center, from the interior, rather than from the coast? In other words, moving away from the Europeanized view of the coast and saying, let’s look from the interior and see what new insights we get. What happens then is a very textured, layered story that gives us individual, community and national development and all three get entangled in this idea of the Republic of Ghana. The story ends in the 1990s when Kofi Dɔnkɔ passes away. For those who are either afraid or hesitant about history being dry and only about facts, it will give them a lot to digest. It’s a very readable account that can give them those three stories in one place. Empires of Gold is really the story of the modern world, but I use the case of the first European seaborne empire in the modern era, which is Portugal, and the Gold Coast, because the two of them met in the 1470s and their encounter help set off a chain of events through which we can trace the contours of the modern world. In fact, little is known of those early decades, from the 1470s to the 1530s. Throughout those six decades, the Gold Coast had funded the rise of Portugal into a seaborne empire. I use the relationship between the two to talk about how the modern world took shape in the way that it did, rather than in another way. I take us away simply from economic explanations or political explanations, as other histories have offered, and show that we need to move away from whether Spain or Portugal should be credited for creating the modern world, and look at how African regions like the Gold Coast were integral to the exchanges and interconnections that essentially bled or led into this thing we now call the modern world; and how very seminal ideas about race, religion, and economic and political power took shape through this region that hosted all European seaborne empires. One of the legacies of that history is that the Ghanaian coast of some 350 miles has the most European fortresses of any nation in the world—I think it’s about forty-nine or fifty. It shows that even today, there are these mnemonic devices or relics or ruins that are statements of how this region was a global hotbed. This real estate was a global magnet, and what I argue is that the world was shaped by global empires, and global empires were, in turn, shaped by their relationships with this region."