of archives requires that we attend to the power relations that shape how history is organized, preserved, and interpreted.25 Kirsten Weld uses the language of archive profitably in her analysis of Guatemalan secret police records. Dating from the 1970s, these documents were originally weapons of state “surveillance, social control and ideological management” used to terrorize the Guatemalan activists and citizens. Later, these same documents were recovered and used within historical justice initiatives toward very different ends. Considering that the same documents may be used for variable, shifting, even conflicting political agendas requires, in Weld’s estimation, “archival thinking:” interrogating how and why documents exist as an assemblage. In this way we may discern the “archival logics”—the organizing principles, reasons for being—that exist beyond a document’s material substance.26
Multiple and varied political imperatives fueled and shaped the contours of the NRC’s review of Ghana’s human rights history. The NPP first proposed a truth and reconciliation process as part of its party manifesto for the national elections in the year 2000.27 Accordingly, the rival NDC party insisted that the NRC was actually a “Nail Rawlings Commission,” designed to besmirch and delegitimize the legacy of the party’s founder.28 Veering away from this partisan context, sponsoring Ghanaian president John Agyekum Kufuor described the NRC as a step forward in the country’s battle against poverty, its “greatest enemy.” Kufuor’s insistence that at truth commission would generate positive goods like economic development, unity, and political progress for Ghana, reflects what Pierre Hazan calls transitional justice’s “ambitious gamble”: the idea that delving into the past supposedly creates a desired future.29 Although Ghanaian participants shared this sense of optimism about the NRC’s impact on the future, their ambitions were often slightly different. For many Ghanaians reconciliation was not about achieving neoliberally defined, broad, national concepts (read: democracy, progress, development) but about achieving distinctively local goals: land reallocation, educational welfare, small-business seed capital, and the like. Consider the words of Edward Yeboah Abrokwah, a farmer and former police corporal who came to “plead with the commission … to ensure that I am either reinstated into the police or I receive my pension to be able to make ends meet.” In the NRC records such entreaties abound. For Abrokwah, his forced unemployment in 1980 was both an injustice (he had not committed any offense) and an act of violence (two of his ten children had died as a result).30 While President Kufuor justified the NRC as the first step in a journey that would lead from TRC to national unity to political will and thus to economic growth, Abrokwah’s stated aims—a pension or a job—were entirely more local. Although both men looked to the NRC for economic transformation, their dreams were positioned at very different scales. The multiple archival logics of the NRC records reflect the complexity of state initiatives that are also havens for citizen political consciousness.
On the Value of Cacophony
In the NRC records, the self-appointed victims of violence spoke and the result was a remarkable cacophony, a conflicted and disorienting clamor of narratives. The acts of aggression, neglect, and omission that Ghanaians marked as state violence range from land alienation to torture at the hands of border guards, inaccessible health care, and even public execution. Dueling petitions and testimonies exist; there are stories that directly contradict one another. Some self-described victims wrote one thing in their petition and then publicly testified to something different. Others refused to testify at all, submitting a petition and then taking themselves out of the public review. On its face, this openly riotous record is a shortcoming, another marker of failure for a commission charged with producing reconciliation rather than division. What, and where, is the truth among these contested and contradictory stories? How do we come to know the past, Urvashi Butalia asks, apart from the ways it is handed down to us?31 There is value in national history that is handed down as cacophony; the pursuit of truth that does not produce reconciliation is, perhaps, the beginning of justice in postindependence Africa.
After all, homogenization and exclusion are the violent undercarriage of modern nationalism. “Cleansing the sacred space of the nation,” Gyanendra Pandey explains, requires containing or disciplining difference, which is perceived as an “impure element.”32 History writing is often complicit in these nationalist purification rites. By marking particular communities as “minorities” and rationalizing borders, nationalist historiography often imagines a past in alignment with a mythically-cohesive contemporary nation.33 The TRC, this government-directed public-history project garbed in a vivid moralism, appears at first glance, to be nation-building as usual. However, the cacophony of citizen testimony complicates the nationalist narrative. These dissonant voices are not evidence of failure but a glimpse of the ways truth commissions may allow citizens to push against the imperatives of nationalism’s cleansed and streamlined histories.
The variety and complexity of the records produced by Ghana’s NRC give rise to this productive cacophony. Aligned with Annelies Verdoolaege’s expansive description of the material components of the South African TRC archive, I describe a Ghanaian NRC archive that is not limited to the citizen petitions and testimonies and also includes the documents produced about the commission, including media reportage, staff reports, investigations, correspondence, commentary and speeches.34 Betwixt and between these different documents, an archive emerges—and it is the site of passionate debate about the past, present, and future of Ghanaian politics. The citizen petitions and testimonies alone make it plain that Ghanaian citizenship has never been a unitary experience. Political violence has been mediated by identity. Geographic and social location—profession, wealth, gender, family names, social networks—shape how people have experienced and survived the political transformations of Ghana’s twentieth century. These records illuminate the fault lines crisscrossing the body politic; there are multiple histories of state violence and diverse experiences of any particular regime or leader. Although the NRC archive is limited, it gestures toward the innumerable narratives that exist beyond its relatively small cohort of participants by displaying the yoke between identity and political experience.
Cacophony, then, is the hallmark of what I call the NRC’s democratized historiography. A complicated, riotous archive is evidence of the ways Ghanaians used the TRC to present, revise, and interpret their country’s political history for diverse ends. Here, then, is the assertion at the center of this study: the NRC participants as history writers, and their stories as artful representations of the past. Claiming these stories as carefully articulated histories, as I do, is a step away from the barren preoccupation with whether these narratives are objectively true. Inevitably, they are not—or rather, they cannot all be, according to the evidentiary standards that prevail in most courts of law. In the NRC, Ghanaians sought to display versions of the past that might better serve them in the present. Their narratives were influenced by failures of memory and courage, as well as by the intertwined imperatives of economic scarcity, emotional suffering, and political optimism. Whether as contested truths or complicated lies, these stories are analytically valuable. In them, Ghanaians reflect on the series of moments or the sequence of days that ruptured the relationship between citizen and state.
On History and Democracy
My description of the Ghanaian NRC as a public history project that evades the disciplining of nationalist historiography veers away from the assessment of many historians who have been suspicious of TRCs as attempts to paper over the vulgarities of nation building with the moralistic language of human rights and truth seeking.35 In a 2009 issue of the American Historical Review, Elazar Barkan exhorted his fellow historians to engage with transitional justice instruments despite the clear tension between academic history and government-sponsored commissions seeking a presumably incontestable “truth” about the past.36 When historians steer clear of this emerging field, Barkan warned, they risk ceding critical public-history sites to ideologues and raw nationalists. Accordingly, historians have usually played a corrective role by illuminating the crevices (and chasms) between TRC truth and historical understanding.
Greg Grandin and Thomas Klubock, looking primarily at South America’s transitional justice experience, place truth commissions squarely among the “myths and rituals of nationalism [that] sacramentalize violence into a