Institute of African Studies

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    VISITORS WITHOUT BORDERS? Concords and Discords among National Communities in the Visitors’ Books
    (University of Ghana, 2020-03-12) Akpabli, K.
    Since the Government of Ghana declared 2019 as the Year of Return, visitations to the former slave dungeons of Cape Coast and Elmina have significantly increased. As they trudge through the doors and corridors of these monuments of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, visitors are taken through the harrowing experiences - which enslaved Africans suffered centuries ago before they were shipped to the various countries mainly in the New World. Together, these two sites have a long and varied history, and although they are places of incontestable human tragedy, they are equally spaces of contention. This paper explores how visitors to Cape Coast and Elmina castles coalesce or disagree on issues raised in the visitors’ books. Using contextual analysis, the research pays attention to, and attempts to draw the line between nationality and positionality. How, for example, does nationality affect observation, opinion or themes expressed? The paper contextually analyses a two month-long collation of visitors’ impressions, gathered around the period of the celebration - in Cape Coast - of PANAFEST/Emancipation Day which also marked 400 years of the start of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Data gathered from the two monuments tend to support the position of scholarship on visitor studies, which states that as they engage in the collaborative enterprise of reading and logging their own comments, visitors contribute to the building of communities around specific subject matters raised on the pages. Though some research have been conducted on the representation of both castles, not much has been done on visitor comment and citizenship. While paying close attention to how comments are framed, the research attempts to piece together correlations between the issues visitors inscribe vis-a-vis the politics of their national identities. Recognising that over their centuries-long history, the two monuments have been built and owned by at least, five different nations, the study deconstructs their respective visitors’ books as inter-cultural sounding boards of consensus and contention.
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    Sports: Levelling the Playing Field.
    (2020-02-06) Damion, T.
    Sports matter far beyond the playing field. This lecture explores how the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture uses sports as entry points into larger social, cultural, and political conversations affecting U.S. race relations.
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    Materiality and Real Estate: Evolving Cultural Practices of Security on the Urban Gold Coast in the Nineteenth Century
    (2018-11-15) Hesse, H.W.
    Historians of the African Atlantic world have increasingly emphasized cultural transformations and insecurity arising from the slave trade and Afro-European trade in urban settings. Whilst acknowledging the importance of these earlier studies, this research will argue that in participating in Atlantic commerce, nineteenth century Gold Coast merchant families transformed and deployed material culture – stone households, heirlooms and otherwise inalienable sacred objects into forms of collateral that could be used in real estate and other commercial transactions. In so doing, Gold Coast merchants expanded the cultural repertoire and commercial value of materiality in ways that gave meaning and form to the political and urban realities of the West African coast. In focusing on five prominent Gold Coast merchant families – the Brew, Bannerman, Hansen, Ankra and Richter establishments this paper will analyze the shifting discourses and cultural practices relating to security, power, vulnerability and materiality in the transition away from the slave trade and legitimate commerce to colonialism in the nineteenth century. By emphasizing evolving cultural understandings of security as evident in the investments in stone households/buildings, “trinkets”, heirlooms, family deities and ancestral veneration this study emphasizes how West African merchants materially expressed their vulnerability and declining power in an emerging British colonial economy by the second half of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, this study will make the point that West African merchants transformed their cultural understandings about the materiality of power, security and the sacred – rooted in their merchant households and transactional and cultural practices– into other forms of value to meet the exigencies of an Atlantic and emerging (proto) colonial economy and legal framework on the urban Gold Coast.
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    Geopolitics in Contemporary Africa: African Wealth still targeted by the West.
    (2018-11-22) Bakunda, P-C.; Amanor, K.
    The geopolitics of contemporary Africa lead us first to consider ancient Africa and evaluate the legacy of slavery, colonialism, and the post-colonial era. the geolocation of Africa has not changed, but its geopolitical and geostrategic behaviour evolve from period to period. The African continent has always been in the sights of the colonizer who was inspired by the golden rules of "divide to better rule" and exploit the African continent and his inhabitants then considered savage. The African continent has been humiliated and despoiled by Westerners seeking to enrich themselves to the detriment of the African peoples. In order to firmly establish their influences and not to fight on the African soil, they gathered in the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 to define how to divide Africa into separate parts. Thus, 14 countries were present at this Conference and made resolutions to which the Kings and Chiefs of the African people were not associated. The Euro-African relationship was never balanced because some considered themselves masters while others were servants in their own countries. At present the African continent remains the target of foreign hidden hands or neocolonialists who do not care about the inhabitants whose fate is severe poverty, malnutrition, diseases, lack of safe drinking water, etc. due to unfair geopolitics both internal and external, Africa has been on the dinner table for too long and Europeans have been at the same table to enjoy her wealth that they do not even share with most Africans.
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    Being Black in post-apartheid South Africa
    (2018-11-28) Phadi, M.
    As the state of South Africa matures, questions attached to meanings of being ‘Black’ have become more pervasive, and the promised freedom is embroiled in sharpening contradictions and paradoxes. The construction and reconstruction of Blackness developed within capitalism, which is the cornerstone of structural racism. Inferiority complexes emanate from the process of construction, and the overlap between old and new structural contexts reconstructs Black ontology. The article uses grounded experiences of people and the meanings they attach to their realities to stretch ideas of race and class, expanding on Du Bois’ theoretical and empirical scholarship, which pioneered interweaving the relationship between capitalism and how it molds the notion of being Black. I engaged with eight ‘elites’ and forty-six ‘ordinary’ people. ‘Elites’ are those who influenced the intellectual and political landscape, and the term ‘ordinary’ is used, not in an ignominious sense, but as a category of distinction from the ‘elites’. The article argues that being Black in post-apartheid South Africa produces multiple consciousness. Multiple consciousness has multiple folds which interact to disrupt the collective history of oppression. This consciousness does not operate outside capitalism, but it is embedded within its structures.
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    Cold War and Cultural Diplomacy: Musical Dialogues between Cuba and West Africa (1960s-1970s)
    (2017-01-20) Djebbari, E.; Quayson, A.
    Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archives research, the paper will analyse the political and musical issues revealed by the crisscrossing and the transnational journeys of Malian and Cuban musicians in the light of the new cultural exchanges initiated between Cuba and newly independent socialist African countries within the Cold War. In this particular political context, the role of music as a key component of cultural diplomacy and policies will be explored, particularly through the cultural conventions signed between Cuba and several African countries in the 1960s. In this frame, I will mainly address the creation of the band Las Maravillas de Mali by young Malian sent to Cuba to get train in music in the 1960s. In parallel, the tours made in Africa from the 1970s by famous Cuban orchestra Orquesta Aragón will complement the analysis grid of these transatlantic political exchanges
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    Are we doing enough in Diabetes Care? Lessons from a Hermeneutic Phenomenological Investigation
    (2018-11-01) Ekotto, F.; Frehiwot, M.
    In this documentary, Marthe Djilo Kamga takes us along as she engages in fruitful conversations with four other African female artists who, like her, know exile as well as how necessary it is to transmit to younger generations what they have learned as their multiple identities have evolved and fused. The original score that accompanies the voices of these three generations of women is an active part of the adventure, a witness for the future. The conversations are connected by key themes of cultural heritage, historical memory and how images shape personal and collective memories. Vibrancy of Silence: A Discussion with My Sisters is the first installment of Frieda Ekotto’s visual research project Vibrancy of Silence: Archiving the Images and Cultural Production of Sub-Saharan African Women on African women as the unsung heroines of artistic and cultural production. Indeed, their immense cultural and creative contributions remain underrepresented and inexplicably invisible. She is resolved to affirm and archive her own story and thus participate in a rereading of the “Colonial Library” with new kinds of narratives by and for women
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    The impact of transformational leadership and a series of organisational factors on employee performance – a survey of organisations in ghana
    (2017-08-24) Bempong, B.F.; Asumeng, M.A.
    Within global competitive markets, some developing economies (e.g. Ghana) lag behind those of developed countries (e.g. the UK), resulting in a widening economic gap. The growing disparity between the developed and the developing economies has caused great concern among political leaders, organisat­ional leaders, management researchers, and other world bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Such disparity raises the question as to what factors account for the differences in performance between developing and developed economies. How do firms and organisations in developed economies obtain higher levels of performance than firms and organisations in developing economies? Research indicates that factors such as transformational leadership, organisational culture, organisational climate, organisational commitment, and national culture can influence performance in the western economies. However, such evidence does not exist in the developing economies like Ghana. This thesis therefore explores whether these western concepts similarly apply in the developing economies like Ghana. Five hundred and eighteen (518) employees were sampled from fourteen (14) organisations in Ghana in a cross-sectional survey. Multi-varied analysis of the data revealed significant relationships amongst the research variables: Significant differences across research variables also exist between organisations from the different sectors. Analyses through structural equation modelling indicated that transformational leadership (stimulating leadership, and supportive leadership), organisational commitment, organisational climate, and organisational culture (innovative culture, tranquil culture, and bureaucratic culture) adequately explained the variance in employee performance. It was concluded that factors that affect employees in the western economies also apply, with some variation, in the developing economies like Ghana. Suggestions and recommendations were made for future research.
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    On writing biography: my experience with george james christian
    (2017-06-02) Rouse-Jones, M.D.; Ansah, M.A.
    The presentation will describe my experience of writing the following book: Returned Exile: A Biography of George James Christian of Dominica and the Gold Coasts, 1869-1940. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press and Republic Bank Limited, 2016, 320p. It will consider the following themes: 1 Data Gathering from Personal Papers 2 Creating other Source Materials: Collection of oral sources 3 Outline of A Life 4 From Source-Material to Story 5 Importance of the Scholarly Review Process 6 Timelines for the Process
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    The creation of a Ghanaian identity through half a century of Modernist paintings (ca 1950s – 1990s)
    (2017-03-15) Labi, K.A.; Ampofo, A.A.
    Ota Benga, a pygmy from the Congo recruited for the Saint-Louis of 1904 and subsequently exhibited at the Fair and the Bronx Zoological Park in New York City, symbolizes the tragic fate of Africans targeted by conquering Western States in search of new resources and territory. The body of Ota Benga was literally and symbolically caught in the network of the colonial machinery that speaks both the language of raw exploitation and humanitarianism. Ota Benga, the “dark skin stranger from 10.000 miles away” (New York Tribune, October 7, 1906), “represents the missing links between the higher man and the chimpanzee” (Chicago Tribune, Sept. 23, 1906). Benga eventually killed himself with a gun in Lynchburg, Virginia. It was in 1916. His tragic fate writes the story of the vanquished pre-colonial African State, the moral legitimation of the Imperialist European State, but also prefigures the future failed State of the Postcolonial Age. Dr. Philip Verner brought Ota Benga from the Congo to the United States. He subsequently invented many fictions to explain and justify his association with Ota Benga. Out of these fictions stood the story of rescuing Benga, with the help of Belgian army officers, from a death at the hands of cannibals. The reader also learned that “his second wife died from the sting of an African viper, a beautiful snake” (Chicago Tribune, Sept. 23, 1906). I argue in this presentation that it is significant that while Benga is kidnapped and exposed in a monkey’s cage in the United States of America, a snake that is redeemed as beautiful by the Western imagination rhetorically victimizes his wife. The beautiful snake stands in metaphorically as the drive towards the massive and long-lasting dispossession of Africans undertaken under the guise of nature conservation. In 1903, the British Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire came into existence. Africans have been seen displaced from their habitat to provide room for the “darlings of the animal kingdom.” Western NGOS operating in area of the protection of the environment reproduce what I have termed elsewhere the Humanitarian Misunderstanding. In remaining deaf and blind to their colonial genealogies, these NGOS fail to challenge the dubious practices of the eugenics movement, amplifying what some have termed the “greening of hate”. Unlike Ota Benga was displayed in a monkey’s cage at the beginning of the 20th century. In this contemporary moment, radical western ecologists, armed with a dubious ecocentrism, have managed to displace Africans from the wild, making them unfit for the monkey’s cage.