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 the 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 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.
Introduction
I happened to be in Accra in June 2005, not long after Ghana’s National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) concluded its public hearings. I watched, mesmerized, as Ghana (colloquially called the Black Star nation because of its pioneering role in African independence) publicly reckoned with its passage through a violent twentieth century. I was initially skeptical of Ghana’s decision to embrace a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC). As “official, temporary, non-judicial fact-finding bodies” built on the premise that communities can escape history’s undertow by investigating, revealing, mourning and redressing past violence, TRCs are stunning in their political optimism.1 They are also complex instruments that consistently evade the expectations of historical revelation and political change embedded in their very name.2 With Ghana facing a substantial national debt burden and government policies that pursue “growth without economic transformation,” what could a toothless truth commission produce for Ghanaian people?3
The decision to join the growing community of African nations using TRCs to wade into the past was part of the competition between the country’s two major political parties: the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC). For the newly elected NPP, calling for a truth and reconciliation process christened its recent electoral success a moral victory on the order of the end of apartheid in South Africa or the defeat of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. For the outgoing NDC, a Ghanaian truth commission was an attack on the person of Jerry John Rawlings, the dictator-cum-democrat whose authoritarian leadership (1979–2000) is, for better or worse, central to the story of Ghana’s reconfiguration as one of Africa’s hardiest electoral democracies.4 In this arena, truth and reconciliation appeared to be political theater as usual. The NRC was expected to rattle the national skeletons again before laying them to rest; however, the past was not so easily buried.
In the transition from campaign promise to national reality the NRC became an unprecedented review of Ghanaian political history. In order to avoid allegations of partisan bias, Ghana’s Parliament was compelled to broaden and extend the NRC mandate. Eventually, the commission was charged with recommending “appropriate redress for persons who have suffered any injury, hurt, damage, grievance, or who have in any other manner been adversely affected by violations and abuses of their human rights arising from activities or inactivities of public institutions or persons holding public office.”5 Moreover, the vast majority of the national history—the years from independence in 1957 to the democratic transition of 1992—was placed under investigation.
Although Ghana today is the quintessential African success story, political violence pockmarks the country’s past. Civilian governments have left political dissidents to die behind bars, expelled thousands of migrants, purged the civil service, and jailed journalists. Military leaders have paraded disgraced politicians in cages through the capital, publicly executed former heads of state, and unleashed marauding soldiers on vulnerable citizens. On at least five separate occasions since independence, the Ghanaian army has intruded into the country’s politics, each time declaring the utter brokenness of the political system. All of this fell under the NRC’s expansive mandate and victim’s stories were the guide through this turbulent past.
In 2005, while listening to portions of the NRC public hearings rebroadcast on the national news, the voices of the Ghanaian people stopped me in my tracks. To my ear, Ghana’s history emerged as a vast field populated by thousands of individuals, each with her own troubles and desired futures. This was a version of Ghanaian history that I had yet to hear. The self-described victims included market women assaulted by soldiers, army men whose missing pensions rendered them unable to provide for their elderly relatives, and children left behind when a father crossed borders because of fear, hunger, or both. Human rights abuse included the brutality meted out to inmates by prison guards, the devastating pairing of high school fees that were too costly and jobs that were too scarce, and the lack of appropriate medical care at government hospitals. These stories were not easily corralled into a triumphalist transitional-justice narrative of violence vanquished and conflict overcome. They also did not fit easily into the framework of discretely separated perpetrators and victims. Soldiers were also casualties of state violence; prison guards reported the violence of the country’s carceral institutions. These representations of political violence display the “contradictions and complexity of victim identity” and elude party lines.6 What was the “appropriate redress” that the NRC would recommend in response to this multifarious and complex truth? What might these narratives of the suffering awaken in twenty-first-century Ghana?
Ghana’s truth and reconciliation experiment involved a sequence of structured interactions between citizens, the government-appointed commission, and the state. Citizen complaints, articulated in written petitions and public testimony, would allow the NRC staff, led by nine esteemed commissioners, to recommend a course of action; subsequently, the government would respond. When I returned to Accra in August 2007 the NRC was decidedly over. Almost three years had passed since the end of public hearings and the submission of the National Reconciliation Commission Report (hereafter final report), and the government had made provisions for limited reparations payments. To the degree that the NRC still garnered public comment, the focus was on Rawlings’s bombastic public testimony, or on whether the appointed commissioners acted objectively. The lasting image of the NRC was as a site of partisan contest, not citizen testimony. Even locating the thousands of pages of NRC petitions and supporting documents was difficult; the headquarters were closed and the records moved to an unknown location.7
The brief afterlife of a national TRC originally billed as a catalyst for individual, social, and national transformation seemed to confirm my earlier skepticism. Moreover, I began to doubt my own memory of the NRC. These stories had struck my ear as novel because they featured everyday Ghanaians—not the politicians, military men, traditional rulers, and elites of public record—as the agents, subjects, and objects of the national history. How had these kaleidoscopic narratives of Ghanaian people been overshadowed by a single story reducing national reconciliation to another site of partisan striving by political elites?
Still and all,