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CHAPTER 1

Making the NRC Archive

Truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) may not immediately extract justice, peace, or reconciliation from the brokenness of the past, but they always and everywhere produce records of human suffering. Narratives of human rights violation are being gathered all over the world—from Canada to Liberia to East Timor—but after the tears have been shed and the speeches made, what becomes of the stories that have been amassed? Ghana’s National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) functioned as a public history-writing project. A diverse cross section of the national population presented, analyzed, and interpreted Ghana’s history of political violence in full earshot of the world. The consequent archive is a revelation, but this does not make it an uncomplicated, transparent, or free site where all Ghanaians had their say. The contentious birth of the NRC in the first years of the twenty-first century is the firmest foundation from which to understand the complexity of the stories that Ghanaians shared. The tensions that marked the NRC’s genesis and functioning are echoed in its archive.

When I began reading the NRC file folders at the University of Ghana’s Balme Library, the contents were immediately arresting. In these stories, marked by colloquialism, analogy, and innuendo, Ghanaian people held forth. At first, I read these documents as rich primary sources in which Africans were “speaking for themselves” about the past.¹ Six months later, after reading one-third of the NRC’s 4,240 petitions, I had come to a slightly different conclusion. These records were more profitably read as histories: complex, deliberate, and artful representations of Ghana’s past. These citizen stories are not mirrors to the past; they are fabrications reflecting the hand of the authors, forged within a particular season and deliberately crafted to illuminate particular aspects of Ghana’s march through the twentieth century. The term “fabrication,” as used here, is not a slight on the veracity or accuracy of the archive’s contents. Its Latin root, faber, gestures toward artisans and describes the work of constructing with one’s own hands—utilizing sweat and skill to create. Citizen participation in the NRC occurred on these terms; Ghanaians were making histories, deliberately crafting versions of the past that might serve.

For a process that was supposed to locate the truth about political violence in Ghana, the NRC archive’s most striking revelation is the impossibility of establishing a unitary narrative about the past’s turbulence. Between the citizen petitions, public hearings, NRC staff legal opinions, and news media reports, there are different images and understanding of human rights abuse in Ghanaian history. What happened to particular populations during different political regimes and under diverse leaders? When did state violence rise to the level of human rights abuse? How might we assess and compare the human impact of different policies? In responding to these questions, Ghanaians produced a multitude of accounts that, when juxtaposed, make it plain that the country’s political journey must be written as a history of difference.

The contents of the NRC archive include letters, photographs, land-use maps, funeral programs, dismissal letters, and other information that petitioners submitted as corroborating evidence. Witnesses to violence, who were often neighbors, family or friends, also offered supporting statements. Each file also includes documents created by the NRC staff (legal opinions, investigation reports, etc.) pertinent to the case file. There are video and audio records of the public hearings as well as considerable national media coverage. In reading all these documents together, my goal was not to ascertain the veracity or fallacy of any of these accounts, but instead to place them into a dialogue with each other and with other narratives and ways of knowing Ghana’s past. To this end, I spoke with a limited number of NRC employees, including commissioners, the executive secretary, and the head of the psychological unit. I spoke with members of the sponsoring government and Ghanaian politicians, as well as with nongovernmental organizations. I compared the content within the NRC stories with documents about political violence stored in the Ghanaian National Archives in Accra and Cape Coast.

Describing the NRC’s diverse petitions, testimonies, videos, reportage, investigations, and reports as an archive speaks to the complexity of the commission’s relationship to Ghanaian history. Recording the past is only part of the TRC mission. These commissions endeavor to work with the past: to smooth out the rough edges, perform resolution, and create a platform for a future of peace, stability, and prosperity. Recognizing that these commissions pursue both the past and the future, Annelies Verdoolaege describes the South Africa “TRC Archive” in the Foucaultian sense—as a site where power is expressed. Both remembering and forgetting are part of the TRC’s work, these documents seek to establish the truth (i.e. “what can and cannot be said”) about historical violence.² Similarly, the Ghana NRC archive is a site imbricated within state power. The sponsoring Ghanaian government shaped both the NRC’s practice and its records. How human rights abuse was defined and classified, which stories were publicly shared, how these documents were preserved and publicized—all of these were shaped by the government-appointed NRC bureaucracy. And yet, Ghanaian citizens themselves also shaped this archive. Their stories were strategic, intentional and often pushed beyond the limits set by the NRC officials. In substance and contour, the NRC archive reflects this bureaucratic web. The voices of the self-proclaimed survivors of history emerge opaquely, in a mediated form. Reading these documents together reveals multiple points of disagreement and rupture; the tensions among individual accountings, and between Ghana’s citizen stories and the NRC bureaucracy, are apparent. Inasmuch as the NRC archive reflects state power, it is also a site of citizen struggle and must be navigated as such. In telling the story of Ghana’s national reconciliation experiment and its accompanying archive, this chapter reveals the nuance and contingency of both state power and citizen voice in postindependence Africa.

Creation Story

The story of the Ghana NRC begins during the historic 2000 campaign season, when the New Patriotic Party (NPP; one of Ghana’s two dominant political parties) calls for a truth and reconciliation commission. The NPP manifesto, “Agenda for Positive Change,” described national reconciliation as a way to secure Ghana’s political progress. “The festering sores within the body politic must be healed. This is necessary so that the nation can look confidently and boldly into the future.” As described in this manifesto, the national reconciliation exercise would “consider all surviving cases of human rights abuse and award appropriate compensation for the victims.” Seized properties would be restored, Ghanaians living in exile would be granted unconditional amnesty to return and tell their stories, and persons imprisoned for “politically-related offenses” would be released.³

When the NPP triumphed at the ballot box in 2000, the dream of a Ghanaian TRC became a reality. The newly elected president, John Agyekum Kufuor, publicly championed a Ghanaian truth commission as an antidote to the “culture of silence” that had been created when “people were killed, properties were confiscated … some destroyed … and people were denied their say.”⁴ This would be, ultimately, a collective renewal project. Meeting with the Western Regional House of Chiefs, Kufuor described the commission as an “exercise to recapture the country’s lost soul,” and a way for the country to regain the “spirit of showmanship and wealth,” tarnished by the violence of the past.⁵ Missing in this government rhetoric about the NRC as a site of healing was any recognition that this process might exacerbate, not alleviate political tension in Ghana.

After all, Ghana’s successful transition from military rule to electoral democracy had occurred almost a decade prior (1992). The newly-elected government’s call for the NRC was itself an assertion that the earlier democratic transition engineered by the rival National Democratic Congress (NDC) had been inadequate. J. J. Rawlings, the military leader who had twice seized control of the state apparatus, exercised authoritarian leadership for more than a decade, and then—under international and domestic pressure—transformed himself into a democrat, had overseen Ghana’s return to constitutional rule. The constitution which returned Ghana to democracy also included an indemnity clause that prohibited the prosecution of persons who participated in the past decade’s military government at all levels. Nobody in Ghana could be “held liable either jointly or severally, for any act or omission during the [previous] administration.”⁶ The excesses of the period of military rule could only be addressed informally and voluntarily. Although Rawlings himself had proffered apologies, these previous mea culpas were of “dubious validity and international acceptance,”⁷ and generally, “low key … opaque, piecemeal and selective.”⁸

Given this context, it was not surprising that former president Rawlings and his National Democratic Congress (NDC) party cried foul when the NRC bill arrived in Parliament.⁹ The NRC, they claimed, was a “Nail Rawlings Commission” designed to attack the legacy of former president Rawlings, and the legitimacy and prospects of his party.¹⁰ However, the TRC format was well suited for Ghana’s context both because of what it promised and what it could not possibly deliver. The NPP’s call for a truth commission—a form utilized in response to atrocities like South African apartheid and Guatemalan civil war—was a bold assertion that atrocities occurred on Ghanaian soil and that justice had not yet been done. At the same time, the NPP’s call was pragmatic. The accountability that the NRC could provide was limited. No one would be sent to jail because of the NRC or even forced to part with money or property. Reconciliation was the central imperative; truth would be pursued only to the extent that it supported this agenda. President Kufuor made the outcomes clear: persons found to be perpetrators would not face material consequences; they would just have to live with their consciences.¹¹ And so Ghana’s reconciliation experiment remained within the boundaries of the country’s fragile political equilibrium.

In the public’s perception, the NRC could not step out of the shadow of its partisan beginnings.¹² This was partially because the terms of the 1992 transition made it politically taboo to publicly confront the violence of the Rawlings years, but other aspects of the commission’s genesis also fueled the sense that national reconciliation could only be a partisan project. The NPP claimed the NRC as a way to burnish its party legacy. “The NPP solemnly promised the people of Ghana that it would undertake a soul-searching investigation of those human rights violations and abuses if granted the privilege of leading the nation,” piously intoned the government’s white paper in response to the NRC. “This pledge is not surprising, since the NPP is committed to the promotion of the Rule of Law, respect for human rights, and eradication of the culture of impunity.”¹³ If national reconciliation was evidence of the NPP’s human rights credibility, how could a politically polarized nation rally around it?

Moreover, the version of the NRC bill that President Kufuor presented to the Ghanaian Parliament was based on the premise that human rights violations occurred only under military regimes, so only military regimes would be scrutinized. A more expansive time frame would have been more “in keeping with the spirit of the commission’s goal” and have rendered the bill “more conciliatory and inclusive.”¹⁴ Immediately, the NDC parliamentarians grumbled that their leadership and political tradition were being unfairly targeted. This temporal restriction made it appear that the NRC was just vulgar politics in a more virtuous form, and the NDC ministers walked out en masse when asked to vote on this version of the NRC bill.¹⁵ Ghanaian democracy building and human rights organizations saved the day by officially requesting an expanded temporal mandate. “The credibility of the Commission to a large extent depends on public perception of its independence,” they explained.¹⁶ If the NRC was to transcend accusations of partisan bias, it could not, from the outset, proclaim that only particular regimes were guilty of violence. The final version of the National Reconciliation Commission Act (Act 611) included a broad temporal mandate that reviewed the majority of the national history from independence in 1957 through the reestablishment of political democracy in 1993.¹⁷

Ghanaian civil-society organizations also challenged President Kufuor’s proposal to appoint all the commissioners himself. The parliamentary committee proposed that both the Council of the State and the Parliament should have a hand in appointing commissioners. This advice was ignored; President Kufuor himself appointed all nine commissioners. The people chosen as National Reconciliation commissioners represented the legal community, academia, traditional leaders, religious leaders, trade unions, and the military.¹⁸ Three of the nine were women. While the commissioners held diverse regional and ethnic affiliations, their unilateral appointment suggested that the much-ballyhooed transparency and accountability of the NRC went only so far.¹⁹

One of the central arguments of this study is that Ghana’s NRC generated a breathtaking collection of citizen testimonies about the national past, present, and future. What should be clear from the above section is that before the NRC was a haven for citizen voice, it was a catalyst for partisan political wrangling. This context, in which reviewing historical violence was also a matter of partisan competition, influenced all that followed—from how citizen stories were composed and shared to the commissioners’ reactions and recommendations.

Similarly, the nuts and bolts of the NRC’s institutional practice, what I call the NRC bureaucracy, also influenced the expression and transmission of citizen voices. The choice of who was hired as a statement taker, how the room was arranged for the public hearings, which stories were valorized and called for hearings and which were dismissed as irrelevant—all of these shape the contents of this archive. Layers of translation, transmission, and transcription mediate the space between petitioners and their audiences. The NRC bureaucracy was a web that constrained and colored the stories that Ghanaians shared. And yet, the voices of the Ghanaian people shone through. With deliberation and intention, the so-called victims of Ghanaian history came forward with stories about the distressing past and the expected future. The NRC bureaucracy publicized the existence and purpose of the NRC, but ultimately individual citizens had to come forward and join in the “healing process.”²⁰ This was no easy task.

Bringing one’s voice and body to the NRC inevitably involves a calculation of risk and benefit. What good (personal, familial, moral, national, political) can this initiative create, and how does this compare to the possible negative consequences? Following this assessment, Ghanaians then had to travel to one of five zonal offices spread throughout the country to lodge a petition. Mobility, however, was not equally accessible among the self-described victims of human rights abuse. When Benjamin Amin submitted his petition to the zonal office, he specifically asked not to be called to Accra for the public hearings. “Old age and ill-health” made full participation a barrier for this former soldier. “I am now 69 years, very weak and sick that it would not be easy to travel from Boadua near Akwatia to Accra…. I would have to urinate about 8 times before I reach Accra [which] I believe no … commercial driver would tolerate.”²¹ This pitiful description is a sharp reminder of the economic and physical barriers that many Ghanaians had to overcome to answer the NRC’s call. Other NRC records illuminate how fear itself was a critical obstacle. After lodging his petition about the military government’s repression of religious organizations during the 1980s, a pastor associated with the Nyamesompa Healing Church wrote “to inform the NRC that, due to numerous threatening telephone calls that I have received about my life … I have voluntarily decided not to give any evidence at the Commission.”²² The callers warned him that “after the 2004 election NDC will come back to power and [he] will be arrested and killed.” His letter, included in the NRC file, was dated April 9, 2003: “This is my personal decision and obligation, which I expect the commission to accept.”²³

Official NRC statistics report that women lodged only 19 percent of the total petitions.²⁴ Commissioner Henrietta Mensa-Bonsu described the pains that the NRC took to make itself more accessible to Ghanaian women, who, because of higher rates of illiteracy and “intimidation,” were less likely to “come before official processes.”²⁵ However, women’s limited participation in the petition making, public hearings, and follow-up surveys is best understood in the context of a broader societal restriction on women’s lives. The expectation that scores of Ghanaian women would participate in a public, government-backed forum with uncertain material outcomes may have been overly optimistic.²⁶ Some women lodged petitions but then refused to appear at public hearings, citing the disgrace that would come to their families.²⁷ Others, like a number of women in Tamale, deliberately missed their hearing dates because they feared their public testimony could be held against them in the event of another regime change. It took a reassuring radio announcement from the NRC chairman before the women of Tamale came forward.²⁸ The risk-benefit calculation was different for women, who occupy a generally more precarious social, economic, and political position within Ghana.²⁹ Individual participation in the NRC was fundamentally an act of optimism; good might yet come from engaging with the government’s initiative. The good that citizen participants hoped for, however, varied. One witness entirely eschewed the idea of monetary compensation, claiming that he came before the commission to “set the record straight” and to relieve his psychological burden. Another would bring a detailed chart requesting thousands of US dollars as reparations for harms done and damage sustained. The various hopes that led Ghanaians to risk health, comfort, and public esteem in order to tell their stories, are recorded in the petitions they submitted.

In September 2002, the five zonal NRC offices began accepting petitions and statements. The Bolgatanga office served the Upper East and Upper West Regions, Ho served the Volta and Greater Accra Regions, Kumasi served the Eastern and Ashanti Regions, Sekondi-Takoradi served the Western and Central Regions, and Tamale served the Brong-Ahafo and Northern Regions.³⁰ Beginning in January 2003, for a period of twenty-two months NRC public hearings were held in Accra, Tamale, Kumasi, Takoradi, and Koforidua. By June 2004, a total of 4,240 statements had been submitted to the NRC. About 50 percent of the collected petitions were listed for public hearings.³¹ It was in the petition-taking offices and the public hearings that Ghanaians transformed the NRC from a partisan contest into a space for citizen voices.

Petitions and Public Hearings

On the morning of September 3, 2002, a queue had already formed in front of the NRC’s temporary headquarters in Accra’s Independence Square. This was the first day that Ghanaians could lodge statements with the NRC, and by 5 a.m., more than sixty petitioners were waiting; the first had arrived as early as 3 a.m.³² Upon arrival at a zonal office, an individual was met by a trained statement taker, who first gathered a battery of demographic data including age, ethnicity, language spoken, religion, and profession. The demographic data form also included a yes/no question about whether the petition maker believed that the harm they suffered was political in nature. The statement taker would also transcribe the citizen’s story, in English, onto a text form. Translation was frequently a part of this process, as statement takers would listen to a story told in Twi, Gaa, Hausa, Fante, Wala, Ewe, Dagaari, Sisali, FraFra, or any of the other Ghanaian languages and write it down in English, asking clarifying questions when necessary.³³ Statement takers were directed to read the petition back to the petitioner to ensure the individual’s satisfaction with the contents. If satisfied, Ghanaians signed their name or left their mark on the petition. Sometimes, alongside or instead of a statement taken at the NRC office, Ghanaians brought prepared petitions with them. Handwritten or typed out in advance, sometimes with the help of a lawyer or family friend, these petitions were often lengthier and more formal than the statements taken on the spot.

The interaction between statement taker and petitioner undoubtedly influenced how the story was recorded and read. From spelling and punctuation to emphasis and inflection, these statement takers shaped the contents of the NRC archive. As parts of the NRC bureaucracy, these statement takers also added notations and postscripts about their own perceptions of the veracity, emotional distress, and clarity of the participating citizens and influenced how the citizen statements would be henceforth understood. These marginalia are also intimate glimpses of the NRC bureaucracy at work, interpreting, judging, and shaping citizen presentations of the past. Clifford Marko’s statement at the Accra office was a harrowing account of his hospitalization in a Ghanaian psychiatric facility. Marko submitted a crowded handwritten document that complained of “spiritual surveillance hired to climb up spiritually to fight and follow to bar my way in everything I do.”³⁴ Marko described involuntary hospitalization and imprisonment as one and the same. His petition focused on the judge’s ruling, the handcuffs clapped on this body, and most of all, the use of force: “The only question I ask was … am I a criminal?” Marko’s petition also described the stigma associated with mental illness in Ghana. “I have been treated unfairly and also my image had been tarnish [sic]…. I am now known as a lunatic and a criminal in the country … just for the simple reason that I have been sent to the Psychiatric Hospital.”³⁵ Marko’s depiction of mental illness as a criminalized status, marked by unjust social dislocation, was judged by the statement taker as irrelevant to the NRC’s work of reconciling the past. Marko, according to the statement taker, was “incoherent and evidenc[ing] signs of psychiatric distress.” Thus, Marko’s story, an illuminating look at psychological disability and its aftermath in Ghanaian history, was not recommended for the public hearings.

Similarly, the NRC public hearings were also sites for both the expression of citizen voices and the display of NRC bureaucracy. These hearings were the means by which most Ghanaians encountered the NRC and were covered regularly by the news media. They were open to the public and were well attended, particularly at the beginning of the process.³⁶ The nine commissioners, the listening audience, the witness, a translator when necessary, and sometimes the accused perpetrator and his/her legal team were all part of these hearings. Together, they created the versions of the national past that ultimately emerged. The hearings were multilingual, with alleged victims, accused perpetrators, and the commissioners using the most common Ghanaian languages, including English, throughout. In this setting, some of the petitioners were brought forward to tell their stories in the hearing of the nation. One of the defining moments in the public hearings was the death of Joseph Kwadwo Ampah, a barrister-at-law living in London who traveled to Ghana expressly to participate in the NRC.³⁷ On June 5, 2003, while beginning his public testimony in Accra, Ampah collapsed and died. This event shocked the nation and changed the commission’s practice. Instead of a simple wooden chair, witnesses now used a “restful cushioned chair.” Counselors were positioned next to the testifying witness to provide comfort during the testimony. Ambulances were also stationed outside the venue, ready to rush people to the hospital if necessary.³⁸ Joseph Kwadwo Ampah’s death was a corporeal reminder of the uncertainty and risk associated with the NRC’s work. Inasmuch as delving into the past could create restoration and renewal, it might also reap disorder and even destruction.

The nine commissioners were guides and arbiters in these public hearings. They questioned witnesses, urging calm when anger threatened to erupt, scolded the audience, and offered their sympathies and words of wisdom.³⁹ Faced with a sobbing witness, a commissioner might advise counseling and urge that he “forget the past, forge ahead and build a bright future, instead of dwelling on the pain.”⁴⁰ Confronted with a recalcitrant witness who would not answer the NRC summons, the commissioners could levy a fine.⁴¹ Since Kufuor had personally appointed all the commissioners, criticism of their comportment or objectivity was laid at the feet of the president.⁴² A Ghana Review article described a scene during the Accra hearings when the commissioners “descended heavily” and “expressed their disgust” at the actions of an ex-military man accused of brutally beating a market woman.⁴³ There were moments when the commissioners’ tone and comments drew disapproval from some quarters; eventually the NDC party officially filed a complaint stating that supporters of their party were rushed, humiliated, and generally treated poorly during the NRC hearings.⁴⁴

Beyond this partisan critique, civil-society organizations also expressed concerns that the public hearings “inappropriately resembled courtroom proceedings.”⁴⁵ The nine commissioners sat on a raised dais peering down at witnesses, who transported the conventions of the Ghanaian courts to the NRC and addressed the commissioners formally as “my lord.” Lawyers could participate in the proceedings, and high-profile and affluent witnesses, accused persons, and victims often retained an attorney. Individuals who had been named or implicated in a prior presentation were given the right to cross-examine witnesses. As such, accused perpetrators were given the right to publicly question alleged victims. This, according to the commissioners, ensured that those Ghanaians who were skeptical or hostile to the NRC’s work would trust in the fairness of the process. However, when the accused perpetrator was a military men or business owners with wealth and standing, a well-heeled lawyer might publicly harangue nervous victims armed only with their words and convictions.⁴⁶ This was what befell Aku Sabi, a petitioner who described suffering a miscarriage due to the brutality of hired soldiers paid to enforce a company’s privatization of disputed land. At the NRC, the company lawyer publicly cross-examined Sabi, at one point blaming her for the miscarriage and saying that “she did not take good care of [the pregnancy].”⁴⁷ Although the psychological and social consequences of subjecting alleged victims to this manner of public cross-examination has not yet been reckoned with in Ghana, there is a growing recognition that TRC practices may reproduce and reinscribe trauma.⁴⁸

By cottoning to this veneer of legalism, the NRC seemed to imply that the truth it pursued was similar to that utilized in Ghanaian courts.⁴⁹ In reality, accessing the past’s violence through individual human rights testimony is inevitably a journey into the vagaries of memory and representation. People’s recollections and stories are based on the life they are currently living. Their perspectives on the past are shaped by the present’s desires, secrets, and hopes. In valorizing victim testimony as a way of knowing the past, truth and reconciliation commissions cannot also adhere to the strict evidentiary standards that prevail in courts of law. And yet, because legal scholars and practitioners have been central to the global TRC phenomenon, the pretense that TRC truths are or should be objective continues to stand. Truth commissions should stick to “facts, which can be proved,” says José Zalaquett, a lawyer and member of the Chilean truth commission; “this is not the place for an historical analysis of class struggles.” “Let historians take over later” is how Susan Slyomovics reads Zalaquett’s legal positivism, “and let them talk to each other.”⁵⁰ The problem with this approach, of course, is that the historians are already involved. In Ghana, everyday people were acting as historians, interpreting and analyzing the past as they lodged petitions and presented testimony.

In the introduction we met Joseph Kwadwo Nuer, the former soldier who subverted the commissioners’ demands for evidentiary truth by cheekily explaining that Ghana’s grinding poverty had destroyed material evidence that would corroborate his story. Given Ghana’s economic situation, Nuer explained, most of his documents had long been used as toilet paper.⁵¹ The message is clear: attempting to fit the NRC archive into the mold of evidentiary fact and public proofs is a misstep. Knee-deep in this capacious NRC archive, the deceptively simple mandate to find out the truth about past human rights violations and abuse becomes a riddle.⁵² What is the single knowable truth amid the multiple and divergent stories about the past? If anything, this archive telescopes just how difficult it is to find consensus about what happened to whom, and why, in the Ghanaian past.⁵³

Oral-history theory is a way to navigate the NRC archive without falling prey to the sterile debates about the veracity of individual stories. Antjie Krog’s dizzying observation that the truth is closest at the moment when the lie rears its head is a guide for reading these newly proliferating human rights archives.⁵⁴ Historians, Luise White insists, should approach secrets and lies as opportunities to observe how information is constructed, valorized, and marshaled within a particular social imaginary.⁵⁵ If “the invented account is at least as good as the accurate one,” the unruliness of TRC records need not be reframed as legal evidence in order to be read or respected.⁵⁶ As Alessandro Portelli reminds us, the importance of oral testimony “may lie not in its adherence to fact, but rather in its departure from it, as imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge. Therefore, there is no ‘false’ oral source.”⁵⁷ After all, the past is always being reconstructed and reframed according to the changing social and psychological needs of individuals and communities.⁵⁸ At the intersection of human rights and history, these scholars challenge the premise that narratives produced from within the belly of conflict must be objective to be useful.

Civil society and legal practitioners have been slower to step away from the vision of TRC history as a corrective to propaganda, error, and erasure. Zalaquett’s legal positivism echoes Michael Ignatieff’s quip that truth commissions may, at least, reduce the number of lies that are able to circulate unchallenged in public.⁵⁹ However attractive this vision of setting the historical record straight may be, in reality, TRCs around the world have been unable to banish the lies that power tells. The minimalist, facts-only approach ignores the reality that in the house where conflict lives, consensus is out of the question. No bare rendition of evidence, no profusion of tears, can convince some of us of histories that we cannot emotionally assimilate or psychologically bear. Even now there are those in South Africa who cannot accept the weight of the TRC testimony about the violence of apartheid. Still they insist “we didn’t know, we didn’t intend.”⁶⁰ For these skeptics, individual testimony can be only partial, emotionally manipulative, calculated, exaggerated, or myopic. Oral history’s methodology directs us to the truths that emerge within this lack of consensus: we are urged to ask who is rejecting stories of apartheid suffering, on what grounds, and why? The stories offered in the NRC archive elide, skirt, and flit in the spaces between fact, memory, rumor, and lie. They contradict one another, sometimes directly and vehemently. Nevertheless, the archive’s narrative is still “true” as a mapping of the versions of the Ghanaian past deemed useful by citizens at a particular moment. Instead of seeking to adjudicate between conflicting petitions, approaching the NRC archive as the work of many authors pursuing diverse goals renders the disputes comprehensible and legible.

On February 12, 2004, J. J. Rawlings appeared at the Old Parliament House to testify before the NRC. The whole of Accra seemed to stand still. In the streets, pedestrians, hawkers, and shopkeepers clustered around their nearest television screen to watch the former president’s questioning by the commission. Undoubtedly, this was one of the NRC’s most dramatic days. The period of Rawlings’s rule covered by the NRC mandate (1979–1992) included heinous crimes of torture, assault, and murder. Twice, Ghanaian families came to the NRC begging for help to locate and exhume the remains of their relatives lost during these years. Rawlings, as a name and an icon, animated many of the NRC petitions; some petitioners wondered whether Rawlings himself was aware of all the atrocities that had taken place under his leadership.⁶¹ Others remembered begging Rawlings for clemency when some of his soldiers committed brutalities.⁶² Others told stories blaming the chairman for the era’s violence.

For all these reasons, the country waited on tenterhooks when Rawlings was called as a witness to the NRC’s investigation of the high-profile kidnapping and murder of three high court judges and an army officer in 1982. Rawlings’s role in this particular crime had already been the subject of speculation within the NRC.⁶³ The former president strode into the Old Parliament House amid clapping, hooting, and raucous cheering. Justice Amua-Sakyi warned the crowd to “comport themselves” appropriately or risk being ejected from the proceedings. This was only the beginning. The commissioners’ encounter with Rawlings was stilted: an awkward dance including timid questions from the NRC about the whereabouts of videotape recordings and the bravado of the former president, who blustered and lectured his way toward admitting that he could neither produce nor locate the tapes in question. Abruptly, the commissioners dismissed Rawlings, saying that their questions were finished and they were satisfied with his responses. Amid cheers and laughter, Rawlings made his way out of the chambers, joined the crowds of supporters thronging around the Old Parliament House, and marched peacefully back to his central Accra residence.⁶⁴

The limited exchange between Rawlings and the commissioners was anti-climactic, to say the least. As one reporter stated, “It took longer for him to come and go than to answer their questions.”⁶⁵ The factual truth of his testimony was almost beside the point. In the détente between Rawlings and the NRC, the former president’s determination to control the story represented a sharp public rebuke to all who presumed that a national human-rights review could bend Rawlings to its will. In the words of one US State Department analyst, “The Commission’s focus on carefully structured proceedings may, this day, have missed the mark.”⁶⁶ Hardly anyone who observed the February 12, 2004, hearings would conclude that the truth of Rawlings’s role in past political violence had been determined. Oral-history methodology, however, urges us to consider that silence, stilted speech, avoidance, and rumor often speak eloquently. There is a richer transcript of the détente between former president Rawlings and the commissioners at the NRC.

First, the palpable silences in this exchange speak volumes. The commissioners’ laser focus on the whereabouts of certain tapes is a determined evasion of the numerous other questions that could have been put to Rawlings about human rights abuse. Indeed, as described above, some NRC petitioners directly accused Rawlings and/or his wife, Nana Agyeman Konadu Rawlings, of culpability for heinous crimes. Numerous other petitions and testimonies insisted that the order created by Rawlings’s rule was toxic, a breeding ground for soldier violence. Despite citizen stories about the role of the Rawlings family, the commission focused exclusively on the whereabouts of tapes recording soldier confessions about a few high-profile acts of violence and rigorously avoided much of the controversy produced by decades of Rawlings’ rule. At moments, it appeared that the only one willing to approach the violence of the past was J. J. Rawlings himself. Sitting before the NRC, he hinted at the limitations of the NRC’s shallow questions.

NRC: Is there any other information at all on these video tapes, being referred to now, that you’d like to give to the Commission?

RAWLINGS: [Pause] Lots of them. But um …

NRC: Please go ahead.

RAWLINGS: No, if you have specific questions, I’ll deal with them.⁶⁷

Similarly, when the NRC Chairperson, Justice Amua-Sakyi, abruptly dismissed the former president, Rawlings opened his eyes wide in surprise and quipped, “Oh, Sir, why? … Is that all?⁶⁸ The insinuation was that the commissioners had not yet completed their work, that they had ended the interview too early and had not yet managed to confront Rawlings on anything of substance.

The silence of the commissioners when presented with the opportunity to publicly question Rawlings was deafening. In the NRC final report, the commissioners were bolder, going so far as to blame “the highest Executive authority in the land” for igniting the violence that suffused Ghanaian public life;⁶⁹ however, at the public hearings, the commissioners deliberately treated Rawlings with kid gloves. Wise or not, this choice wordlessly revealed the ongoing power of Ghana’s former president as a volatile force in national politics.

From the moment he set foot in the Old Parliament House surrounded by jubilating crowds, the NRC’s dilemma was apparent. Ignoring Rawlings completely by never seeking his participation would have undermined the entire initiative; however, delving too deeply into Rawlings’s past was also risky. A rigorous engagement with Rawlings might confirm the skepticism of those who insisted that the NRC was a partisan enterprise or a threat to the country’s equilibrium. If the only purpose of the hearing was to ask a few questions about a tape, presumably, Rawlings could have submitted his responses in writing. However, a decision to never call the former president into hearings would also have damaged the NRC’s reputation. The encounter gave the commission the appearance, if not the substance, of political authority. The image of Rawlings, in his signature dark glasses, sitting before the high table, answering questions about human rights abuse, was visually powerful. Indeed, he had been compelled to appear. Having successfully created this illustration of accountability, the NRC quickly extracted itself from this encounter, careful not to tread on the tail of a tiger.

Indeed, the “truth” revealed by this moment was Rawlings’ enduring power and the limitations of the commission’s desire to pursue rigorous historical accountability. In Ghana, all those watching this exchange would have received the message loud and clear: the violence of the past could not reliably be contained by the present. Digging too deeply was still risky business. Rawlings’s day at the NRC displayed the constraints of historical justice in twenty-first-century Ghana. Indeed, Rawlings himself scolded the commissioners like schoolchildren, insisting that they must take the context of revolution into account when assessing the Ghanaian past. “You’ve got to appreciate the degree of tension that was existing then…. It’s a complex thing … when you’re talking about a revolt, the thing erupts from the bottom, and it takes time to restore command and control. And it can be very devastating. And that’s what we presided upon. This is a different subject. If you people are interested, we can deal with that later, ok? For now, let’s deal with some of your pertinent allegations.”⁷⁰

Within the NRC archive, victims of violence rejected this solipsism where “revolution” is description, explanation, and justification of the violence that ordinary Ghanaians faced during these years. The stories of Ghanaians illuminate the scores of men, women, and children injured, stunted, and damaged by agendas and policies that they did not choose and which did not benefit them. “Revolution” does not adequately explain the brief life of Seidu Nombre, shot in the head at Kokompe for answering back to soldiers during the December 31 coup, nor does it contain the grief of his father, Salifu, who testified at the NRC.⁷¹ Revolution does not assuage the anguish of the family of Yaw Fosu Munufie, whose two-year-old niece died in a ditch when soldiers shot her father for breaking curfew.⁷² Revolution cannot erase the words of ex-sergeant Abraham Kwaku Botchwey, who suffered torture and begged his captors to fire one bullet and end his life.⁷³ The narratives of citizen suffering challenge this claim that the ends justify the means in Ghanaian politics.

At the intersection of human rights testimony and life history, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith see an opportunity for the creation of insurgent narratives. “Through acts of remembering,” they claim, “individuals and communities narrate alternative or counter-histories coming from the margins, voiced by other kinds of subjects—the tortured, the displaced and overlooked, the silenced and unacknowledged.”⁷⁴ Ghanaians thrust forward troubling versions of the truth that did not easily align with the government’s hope to use the truth commission as an instrument of closure. Nonetheless, this democratized historiography was delivered in jars of clay. The NRC bureaucracy, which questioned just how much truth telling Ghana could bear and survive, actively contained these insurgent narratives.

Conclusion

The NRC was created in response to Ghana’s polarized politics, but it became more than a referendum on the nation’s parties and leaders. It was created to bring “healing” to a nation wrestling with postcolonial violence, but its archive maps the economic, political, and social fault lines that persist within Ghana. The NRC was supposed to unearth, finally, the truth about the national history, but its cacophonous archive resists any effort to distill a unified or singular narrative. The truth that emerges most clearly is about the salience and politics of difference within Ghana. Why, and how, does the Ghana’s NRC archive so persistently transgress the boundaries of its creation? Answering this question requires consideration of the volatility of individual testimony as a tool of public history.

The TRC format—in South Africa, in Canada, even in Greensboro, North Carolina—is based on the assertion that the voices of ordinary people have been overlooked and are necessary when pursuing the past. However, no one knows what people will actually say. In valorizing individual testimony by seeking out, publicizing, and preserving people’s voices, Ghana created a complex and contradictory archive marked both by citizen desire and government power. Of course, as described above, neither the petition-making process nor the public hearings allowed for the unconstrained expression of citizen voices. Structural constraints, from economic need to gendered fears, limited citizen participation. Statement takers transmitted and translated citizen stories, often marking (sometimes physically) the documents that the NRC preserved. In the hearings, citizen stories were judged, disbelieved, and sometimes dismissed. Nevertheless, the power of people’s voices within Ghana’s public history-writing project cannot be overlooked. As people ventured forth to tell these stories despite all manner of risk, oral history’s rejection of the truth/lie dichotomy in favor of considering all the ways citizen testimonies speak volumes is a guiding thread.