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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, I could not forget the vibrancy of the voices of Ghana’s survivors. When I found the commission’s documents stored at the University of Ghana’s Balme Library, I immersed myself in the 4,240 petitions that Ghanaians brought to the NRC, eventually processing approximately 1,020 of these files. I also listened to digital recordings of the public hearings held in the Balme Library and in the Human Rights Archive at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In the decade since beginning this research, I have come to believe that the stories called into being, preserved, and organized by the truth and reconciliation imperative are simultaneously the most valuable and the most frequently overlooked product of Ghana’s NRC.

This national truth commission did not produce unimpeachable truths. Nor did it fix the country’s politics. But it did lead to an unprecedented public accounting of Ghana’s past, by Ghanaian people, at the turn of the twenty-first century. Although more than a decade has passed since the NRC began its work, the stories remain as glimpses of Ghanaians’ political and historical consciousness. The testimonies and petitions banished to the stacks are more than partisan wrangling, more than sentimental catharsis, and more than the jockeying of citizens for scarce goods. Each of these assumptions—that the Ghana NRC was simply a place to cry, to lie, or to play politics—masks the richness of the stories therein. When the tour guides into the past are the self-described victims of the state’s machinations, they fix the spotlight squarely on Ghana’s people, the approximately twenty million human beings who survived the tumult of the first fifty years of postcolonial independence.

It has been said that until the lion writes history, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. This study amends the proverb—until the gazelles, the weaver birds, the baobab trees, and even the tsetse flies write history, the story of the savannah will always be a tale of the hunt. The NRC stories teach us that when historical production is democratized, there is a fundamental shift in the subject and content of political history. In Truth Without Reconciliation, I hold the NRC records up to the light, turn them this way and that, and consider what was created and what was undone by Ghana’s encounter with the TRC. In this public human rights review, participants shared stories about the moments that shattered their intimately held aspirations for self, family, and nation. Entering Ghanaian political history in this way, as a matter of particular moments, people, and places, ushers us past “big men” and political parties toward a meditation on the relationship between citizen and state in Ghana. How did diverse people experience the turbulence of the past half century? How did they survive? The NRC records create a people-centered narrative; Ghanaians locate national political turmoil within individual, family, and local histories of suffering. Against a backdrop where politicians, traditional rulers, and wealthy families have usually been at the center of the national politics, these citizen stories of harm across scales mark a shift in Ghana’s public record.⁸

Beyond Ghanaian borders, these records also suggest new possibilities for the language and practices of international human rights that are utilized, domesticated, and transformed in local soil. Here, human rights victims are more than objects of pity or rescue, they are experts whose voices illuminate the dilemmas of poverty, inequality, violence, and injustice in Ghana. Critics, especially those sympathetic to the inequalities of the international political and economic order, challenge the moral solidity of human rights initiatives that reflect the imperatives, priorities, and epistemologies of powerful global actors.⁹ Truth commissions that amplify and preserve citizen voices complicate this picture. This study asserts that the potential of human rights is not contained in a parade of sterile documents delineating abstract ideals but, instead, is hidden in the mouths of everyday people gripping tightly to human rights as a sturdy platform from which to narrate their past, present, and futures. Only as local communities breathe life into the hollowness of human rights—claiming it as a method of organizing people, a means to combat marginalization, and a language with which to debate the premises and content of political justice—does “rights talk” find roots and wings.¹⁰ Below, I use concepts of archive, cacophony, and democracy to sketch the contours of Ghana’s encounter with the truth and reconciliation commission.

The TRC Phenomenon

This is the conundrum from which this study began: How could a truth commission that drew out thousands of statements and petitions have such limited political impact? How could this remarkable public review so swiftly and effectively disappear? A sense of intertwined possibility and deficiency extends beyond the Ghana case and troubles the TRC phenomenon at large. In the past twenty-five years, thirteen (and counting) of Africa’s fifty-four countries have used these quasi-judicial instruments to confront diverse experiences of historical violence.¹¹ The TRC has become “all but obligatory” in the effort to enshrine peace, democracy, and stability in the aftermath of conflict.¹² The United Nations, regional organizations like the African Union, and institutional donors champion and support these commissions as a matter of global policy.¹³ Truth and reconciliation commissions are rooted in an ascendant international human rights framework and the part displays the contradictions of the whole.

TRCs capture the world’s imagination by suggesting that alignment of the political and moral order is possible. If the Nuremberg trials anchored the principle of global accountability for atrocity, South Africa’s TRC promised that the evils of modernity might yet be made whole.¹⁴ It was, in the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a “beacon of hope” for a “tired, disillusioned, cynical world hurting so frequently and so grievously.”¹⁵ By publicly condemning the devastation of apartheid and simultaneously safeguarding political stability, a “barbaric society” might “become minimally decent.”¹⁶ An element of magical thinking has always shadowed the TRC dream of formulaically substituting a ghastly past for a bright future. With the proliferation of commissions around the world, the gap between rhetoric and reality has begun to first yawn and then gape. A palpable whiff of disappointment has come to surround the truth commission ideal of extracting forgiveness, remorse, and political progress from the ashes of historical violence.

In the last years of the twentieth century, Michael Ignatieff quipped that the sum of a truth commission’s power was simply to reduce the number of lies that circulate unchallenged in public. At the time, this notion was a corrective to the starry-eyed optimism holding that TRCs would battle impunity, knit together deeply divided political communities, heal and relieve victims, and establish definitive accounts of historical violence.¹⁷ Two decades later, scholars and victims challenge even this minimalist vision of what TRCs may accomplish in South Africa and beyond.¹⁸

The supposed catharsis that victims of violence gain from TRC public testimony has proven elusive.¹⁹ The Khulumani Support Group, a community of South African survivors of apartheid violence, perhaps put it best: “At the end of so much digging for the truth in the TRC so many people found themselves still bleeding from open wounds.”²⁰ A number of empirical studies also challenge the assumption that TRCs always expand the public record; by commissioning truth, transitional justice instruments may actually construct silences.²¹ Even the premise that TRCs guard against political impunity by levying a cost on leaders who oversee atrocity now seems naïve. The scenario in Liberia, where political elites condemned and dismissed a freshly-released TRC report, appears much more likely.²² Freed from the deluge of a priori and optimistic praise, the TRC is a form both politically and analytically contingent, with uncertain futures and complicated outcomes. From this vantage point, the disappearance of Ghana’s NRC is less of a mystery; a government that is invested in creating a truth commission may also be decidedly uninterested in that commission’s conclusions. Still, there are the voices. In Ghana, the thousands of stories gathered up by the national reconciliation experiment are the remnant that is more valuable than the whole.

On the TRC as an Archive

If “people study history in order to participate in contemporary politics,” they write history for much the same reasons.²³ We gather up, represent, and inscribe the past in order to carve out new futures for our family, community, and nation. In TRCs, diverse individuals enter into this history work. By describing the NRC documents as an archive, I highlight the historical relevance of the records; this designation also illuminates the complex mechanisms of “inclusion, exclusion, forgetting, remembering, construction and reconstruction” that shape how Ghanaians parsed the past in public.²⁴ Speaking 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 useful creation myth.”³⁷ Mahmood Mamdani has roundly criticized the groundbreaking South African TRC for pursuing truths that obfuscate the history of apartheid’s violence. By focusing on individual victims and perpetrators, Mamdani claims, the South Africa TRC masked the structural violence of apartheid by writing this history as a matter of individuals who were kidnapped, imprisoned, or murdered.³⁸ Substituting this moral tale of good and evil may have cleared the path for a relatively smooth transition beyond the apartheid state and garnered Nobel Peace Prizes along the way, but it did not serve as a sufficiently robust historical analysis of the ways apartheid devastated South African lives.³⁹ By pursuing versions of the past that are “inseparable from a humanist project,” TRCs inevitably limit their interpretive outcomes.⁴⁰ What of the voices, narratives, and interpretations of apartheid that are not amenable to the Rainbow Nation’s reconciliation project? “Profound obstacles to the production of historical truth” arise when the past becomes a means to a particular social or political end.⁴¹

Nevertheless, the Ghana NRC archive cannot be reduced to the nationalist striving for a collective identity nor the humanistic reconciliation imperative. Although the NRC final report and the sponsoring government’s public rhetoric did hew to a patently reconciling narrative, these are portions of a broader, more complicated archive. Citizen petitions, in particular, resist the neat, moralistic fable of past violence, present reconciliation, and future prosperity. The NRC archive is shaped both by the sponsoring government’s mandate and by citizens who presented stories in voices that did not always conform to the official agenda. This productive cacophony is evident only when different parts of this capacious NRC archive—the petitions, commentary, media reports, and public statements—are juxtaposed against one another. Observers and scholars who attend only to the public hearings may easily misread the Ghanaian truth commission (and most other TRCs) as sites where the “elite control and manipulation” of state power prevails.⁴² Madeleine Fullard and Nicky Rousseau similarly urge scholars of the South African TRC to look beyond the highly publicized public hearings in order to see the limits of the much-touted Rainbow Nation-building narrative of forgiveness.⁴³ Even in South Africa, some citizens openly rejected the forgiveness imperative embodied by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Describing the expansive and conflicted NRC archive as democratized historiography depends on establishing that Ghana’s truth commission was first, a site for the expression of the public will (democracy) and second, a site in which the past was curated, preserved, and written (history). Can TRCs be counted among the “new democratic spaces” where new visions of citizenship are forged?⁴⁴ After all, diverse and sometimes unexpected political outcomes follow on the heels of truth and reconciliation. When Morocco’s King Mohammed VI created the Instance Equité et Réconciliation (Equity and Reconciliation Commission) it was not a sign that the Moroccan monarchy was crumbling before the forces of democracy. If anything, Morocco’s commission signaled the opposite—the monarchy’s ability to adapt to the new international climate of human rights and state accountability.⁴⁵ Indeed, the Equity and Reconciliation Commission may have further legitimized the Moroccan monarchy by allowing a new king to disassociate himself from the excesses of prior monarchs and thus, restore trust in the system.⁴⁶ Even when TRCs do not anchor liberal democracy, there is the matter of the records they generate and preserve.

The archive produced by Ghana’s NRC must be counted among the new, heterogeneous, democratic spaces that Andrea Cornwall and Vera Coelho locate on the border of state and society.⁴⁷ Truth commissions are part of a new and expanding “participatory sphere” where governments, civil society organizations, and international donors invite people (often marginalized communities) to lend their voices as witnesses to social, political, and economic dilemmas. Coelho and Cornwall astutely ask whether this expansion in democratic expression actually shifts power relations or translates into public policy.⁴⁸ Truth Without Reconciliation approaches this question of outcomes slightly aslant: I describe the production of new histories as the locus of the NRC’s power.

History writing is powerful. Both “that which happened” and “that which is said to have happened,” constrain the political imagination.⁴⁹ As states wield history as a weapon, marginalized populations have learned to also approach the task of representing the past as a battlefield. These days, national governments openly acknowledge the partiality and oversight of the official record and so may call for a truth commission to gather up the voices of the discontented. There is a risk, as Grandin, Klubock, and many others warn, that this apparent opening will ultimately reinforce the state’s power over historical representation and political imagination. However, there is also possibility when TRCs dictate that the self-described victims of the past—unemployed pensioners, dispossessed and frail citizens without wealth or standing, petty traders, and uneducated youth—possess historical insight to which the nation must attend.

The NRC archive differs from academic investigations into the past. Participation in the NRC was profoundly shaped by desire. Citizens raised their voices in pursuit of economic gain, social rehabilitation, and an elusive national progress. Likewise, the government sponsored the commission as part of its political agenda. The stories at the center of this study are instrumental; truth commission testimony is a currency that can be exchanged for political, economic, or social goods. However, academic history also does not spill from the pen clean of self-interest and bias.⁵⁰ Relinquishing the myth of objectivity in history allows a reconsideration of the relationship between truth-commission testimony and the historical record. Can “people’s stories, notwithstanding all their problems … somehow expand, stretch the definitions and boundaries of history and find a place in it”?⁵¹ In authoring, editing, and revising stories of political violence that might better serve them, Ghanaian citizens created an archive in which everyday people are, at once, historical actors and history writers determined to influence how their country’s past is known and remembered.

Revising National History: Beyond Big Men and Partisanship

For much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Ghanaian politics has been shackled by a fierce partisanship that dates to the days of decolonization. Ghana’s two main political parties, the NPP and the NDC, situate themselves as the descendants of competing political traditions established in the closing years of the Gold Coast colony.⁵² Above, I described a Ghana NRC archive that often spilled beyond the constraints imposed by the official, state-appointed architects of national reconciliation. Challenging this tradition of partisan politics is one of the ways that this citizen-curated public-history project exceeded its context. As citizens made their experiences central in the national human rights review, they created an eclectic archive that pushes past leaders and legacies and recovers a modern history in which torture, incarceration, and intolerance of dissent have been weapons of choice for multiple regimes and in various time periods. This ecumenical vision of political violence is significant because it is so rare.

The NRC stories, rooted in the soil of individual experience and local history, veer away from the elite figures that dominate public narrations of Ghanaian politics. These are not the “big man” versions of the national past that continue to dominate Ghanaian textbooks and public political consciousness.⁵³ In the NRC, Ghanaians placed themselves and their families at the center of the national story. By thrusting their local experiences onto the national platform, Ghanaians shifted the terrain on which Ghana’s politics is known and discussed.

Despite the supposedly stabilizing force of partisanship in Ghanaian democracy, a divided politics also hamstrings political transformation. Consider the critique of Ghana’s partisan politics articulated by political cartoonist Selorm Dogoe, a.k.a. Vinnietoonist.

The image is entitled “The Secret of Ghana’s Peace.” Two men representing the NPP and NDC are locked in conflict. Each has one hand wrapped around his adversary’s throat; in the other hand he gingerly holds a single egg. A shared thought bubble hovers above their heads: “Can’t break his egg without breaking mine.” Ghana’s much-lauded peace, the cartoon suggests, is not based on the absence of conflict but on the constant antagonism of two parties locked in perpetual contest. There is equilibrium, but there is also a maddening stagnancy.

Figure 1. The Secret of Ghana’s Peace. Cartoon courtesy of Selorm Dogoe, 2017.

Portions of the NRC archive echo this critique of stultifying and combative partisanship. Consider the petition of Patrick Gyimah Danso, who reported that his cousin Kofi Gyamena was killed by soldiers in 1996 for political reasons. “The truth of the matter” was that Gyamena was an NPP activist, but he joined the NDC in 1996 because the party was ascendant, and party affiliation was the metric by which public sector (and often private sector) work was distributed. By joining the NDC, Gyamena obtained a license to work at the Takoradi Harbor as an exporter of finished timber products and yet he continued to make “huge contributions” to the NPP. On August 16, 1996, a soldier arrived at his residence and shot and killed Gyamena and his two children. “I am convinced,” Danso wrote, “that it was because of his involvement in both parties.”⁵⁴ Partisanship, Danso insists, has casualties and takes victims from among the people. For Gyamena, the soldier who ended his brother’s life was guilty, but so too was the policy that distributes employment and other necessary goods along party lines. Moreover, partisan analysis—believing that political violence is the domain of only one party or tradition—masks the suffering that Ghanaians have endured throughout and despite the rapid-fire transitions in political regimes. The violence that runs through the citizen petitions make it plain that the critical question for tracing human rights abuses in Ghana is not which regime was guilty (read: all of them), but which communities were targeted at any given moment. In displaying how partisan analysis obfuscates the accumulated and abundant suffering of Ghanaian people, particularly those who are poor or otherwise marginalized, the national reconciliation experiment extended beyond the expectations of the sponsoring NPP government.

There is a growing literature describing transitional justice mechanisms as readily “hijacked,” in the words of Jelena Subotic, by international and domestic interests. Truth commissions in the Balkans, Subotic shows, were handily repurposed by elites to perpetuate the nationalist mythologies that spurred violence in the first place.⁵⁵ Similarly, Rosalind Shaw and Lars Waldorf, in an excellent collection on transitional justice, describe transitional justice mechanisms as increasingly “evaded, critiqued, reshaped and driven in unexpected directions” by the people they are supposed to serve.⁵⁶ Unlike those studies, which lament that TRCs are corrupted in the transition from rhetoric to practice, Truth Without Reconciliation suggests that local manipulation of transitional justice instruments is not a fatal flaw but a saving grace. When Ghanaians seized the framework of truth and reconciliation for their own ends, they challenged the narrowness of a transitional justice agenda and the elitism of Ghanaian political analysis.

The following chapters display how the NRC’s review of Ghanaian history deftly sidesteps nationalist heroes and party legacies in order to expose a national past that has yet to be reckoned with. This multivocal accounting of Ghana’s politics memorializes the voices, sufferings, and desires of a broad cross section of citizens and challenges the exclusions of African political history rendered as a procession of “big men” vying to construct the nation through charismatic presence, speeches, and development programs. The revelation of Ghana’s dance with the TRC form extends beyond national borders and into the global arena.

Domesticating a Global Discourse: Localizing Human Rights

International human rights has been pilloried as an aspirational rhetoric for a world in desperate need of practical solutions.⁵⁷ Faced with the wreckage of the late twentieth century, Kenneth Cmiel famously asks, “What good did the expanded human rights agenda do for Afghani women under the Taliban, for the unemployed of Argentina, for the mentally ill now incarcerated in the American jails, for the Kurds in Iraq or Turkey?”⁵⁸ Casting an eye across the African continent, the situation appears equally grave. The existence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and its progeny of progressively hopeful conventions, declarations, and resolutions have not been able to stamp out hunger, to abolish or even contain civil wars, or to render human life protected or sacred. Whither the UDHR’s “right to work” when general unemployment in Zimbabwe exceeds 80 percent? How does the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women apply to the victims of the Congo War’s sexual violence epidemic? Do the Rights of the Child apply to the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram?

And yet international human rights, with its multiple manifestations as law, rhetoric, and practice, is fecund and stunningly diverse; it continues to evade those who would entomb its political potential. First of all, there are those in the academic and activist community who vigorously resist the narrative that human rights law and practice have not produced positive outcomes. Kathryn Sikkink is among these champions of human rights, claiming that the prosecution of powerful world leaders constitutes the beginning of a “justice cascade” which may prevent future violence. Sikkink gives credit to a battery of organizations working under the banner of human rights for improving life expectancy, infant mortality, and other conditions worldwide.⁵⁹

But critics, particularly those looking toward Africa, insist that tracing the impact of international human rights requires looking beyond the mouths fed, schools opened, dictators dragged to The Hague, or elections held. Human rights consists of a “contradictory welter of instruments, documents, statements, cases, and treaties, covering a vast array of subjects,” and yet troubling patterns exist regarding how Africa is represented and ultimately, served by human right organizations.⁶⁰ International human rights’ third rail is the problem of African political agency, or more specifically, the tendency for human rights practice and theory to promote policies and practices that constrain the self-determination, autonomy, and power of African nation-states and peoples. African intellectuals who excoriate the perpetuation of the blighted Africa narrative have not successfully altered the practices of the human rights community which still plies images and narratives that tread well-worn ground by suggesting that Africa is exceptionally broken and its people primarily needy. Chinua Achebe reminds the international development community that “Africa is people,” and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns against the danger of a single story about Africa.⁶¹ Teju Cole exposes the “White-Savior Industrial Complex,” and Binyavanga Wainaina satirizes the “children of the human rights age,” to whom Africa consists of “many small flares of wonderfulness and many small flares of utter horribleness that occasionally rise in a flat and benign world.”⁶²

The deleterious consequences of this narrative of suffering Africa date back at least to the days when Rudyard Kipling described colonization as a heaven-sent burden for white men, and the British imperialist Frederick Lugard insisted that colonialism would save Africa from itself, namely “the awful misery of the slave trade and inter-tribal war, to human sacrifice and the ordeals of the witch-doctor.”⁶³ The images of Africa that often proliferate in human rights campaigns appear to be a renewal of Joseph Conrad’s obsession with the continent as the heart of darkness.

Moving beyond discourse and imagery, other scholars register their critique of human rights’ relationship to Africa as a matter of self-determination and democracy. Here, human rights’ Africa problem is not a matter of Western origins or cultural imperialism but, instead, is found in the limited role assigned to Africa’s people in the interventions and development initiatives grouped under the human rights banner.⁶⁴ For Adam Branch, human rights, in its interventionist idiom, is an engine of dependency. Branch describes human rights as a sort of false consciousness that “embeds itself in the political imagination, transforming people’s understanding of their social and political worlds” and leads them to seek rescue by the hands of an intervention from beyond.⁶⁵ Ironically, the language and practice of human rights, manifest in the humanitarian intervention imperative and in the proliferation of civil society organizations with scant local accountability, may actually undermine the practice of democracy in Africa. Is it reasonable to expect that Africa’s freedom and progress will be plotted, imagined, and ultimately won by technocratic experts procured by the United States Agency for International Development, the Gates Foundation, and the UK Department for International Development?

The net consequence of human rights discourse in Africa, Michael Neocosmos warns, may be a narrowing of the space of political freedom. “External forms of intervention—whatever their intentions—rather than turning Africans into subjects of their own history, have over the years frustrated their agency … In the long run they have systematically transformed most Africans into victims whose main feature has been passivity, not agency.”⁶⁶

Nevertheless, human rights practice, media, theory, and law have never been and are not yet a monolith. As “flexible, ambiguous, and often contradictory” concepts, human rights “can be drawn on to construct a wide array of different discourses” and “can mobilize, legitimate or constitute radically different modes of political practice.”⁶⁷ There is innovation occurring under the human rights banner.⁶⁸ Ghana’s NRC is a glimpse of the alternative futures that are possible when international human rights is domesticated and transformed by marginalized communities on the African continent. If international human rights can be redeemed in Africa—that is, if it will assist in the work of unspooling the imbricated violence of repressive national leaders and a rapacious international economic order—the hope is found in the moments when African people commandeer, repurpose, and transform rights talk in order to challenge the known world and imagine new futures.

Dialectical notions of global and local inadequately represent the work of human rights work in the world.⁶⁹ Conceiving of two separate, discrete spheres misunderstands the multiple forms of connection across scales—theoretical, philosophical, financial—that create the practice of human rights. “The global and the local are always present in human rights—always in tension yet mutually constitutive.”⁷⁰ This entanglement is particularly evident within TRCs. Yes, Ghanaian citizens made their cultural frameworks, languages, preoccupations, and bodies central in the national reconciliation exercise. The commission was also a creature of the international community: it was partially funded by the Open Society Initiative for West Africa, and experts from the United States and South Africa trained the NRC staff utilizing examples from Sri Lanka, Peru, and El Salvador. Following Mark Goodale’s theorization, I describe the NRC as a locale: a site where the interaction between global and local unveils new possibilities for a mutable human rights regime.

Over the past two decades, the human rights community’s enthusiastic embrace of “localization” has not succeeded in altering the hierarchies of leadership and decision-making that enable international experts—so designated by formal education, passport, language, and multiple axes of power—to organize and interpret human rights practice.⁷¹ The vaunted local participation “may be hollowed out and amount only to an invitation to conform to norms imagined by experts or to fill an assigned role.”⁷² In her discussion of the “vernacularization” of human rights, Sally Engle Merry describes a world where “indigenous people, ethnic minorities, and women” are “using human rights languages and techniques” in ways that exceed the “Western” foundations of rights ideology. And yet, she notes, they are often dependent on intermediaries, persons who “translate ideas from the global arena down and from local arenas up,” and thus play a powerful role in shaping the practice of human rights.⁷³

Part of the innovation of the NRC, I claim, is that diverse Ghanaian citizens stepped into this interstitial role, simultaneously asserting victimhood, citizenship, and expertise as they marshaled the language of human rights. At the NRC’s Accra public hearings, for example, the former policeman Joseph Kwadwo Nuer was not content to play the role to which he was assigned. After hearing Nuer’s story of torture at the hands of soldiers during the 1979 Armed Forces Revolutionary Council uprising, Commissioner Sylvia Boye requested proof of his story. Where were the hospital documents about the harms he had suffered? Where was the official letter granting him leave to recover from the abuse? Nuer’s deft response challenged the basic premise of her question: “My Lord, in the course of time, I thought I was never going to have the opportunity for redress and my economic situation was not the best so I used that letter and other documents as toilet papers.”⁷⁴ As the audience at the Old Parliament House erupted into laughter, Nuer’s point was clear. Who has time to preserve important documents when struggling to meet his basic needs? Why would a person jealously protect documents attesting to a victimization that was common and widespread in those times? Where do external expectations of evidentiary and legal truth fall short when assessing Ghana’s history of violence? The public hearings were marked by moments like these, times when Ghanaians subtly or explicitly challenged the intimations or questions of the commissioners in order to more firmly control their testimony. Citizens did not only display flayed flesh or gaping need. By interpreting, explaining, and analyzing Ghanaian political history, they went beyond the role of informant and acted as experts.

In the NRC archive, Ghanaian victims reveal themselves as citizen experts who are a bridge between the past’s troubles and a desired future. In their own voices, they reflect on many of the continent’s most confounding dilemmas. What is the impact of state violence? What should be done for those who have suffered unjustly? What is the way forward for individuals and communities still bearing the wounds of the violent twentieth century? These foundational questions have been and continue to be vigorously debated by technocrats, development experts, scholars, public intellectuals, and politicians. In these discussions, however, the voices of African people are often included only in refracted and mediated form. The NRC is the rare locale in which the Ghanaian people, most of whom do not have the world’s ear, speak for themselves about the country’s political past, present, and future. In so doing, they do not only bear witness to pain, they dissect the limitations and possibility of Ghana’s national politics. The NRC archive’s lively historical and political critiques display human rights victims as experts in their own right whose stories are worthy of being heard, wrestled with, organized around, and ultimately remembered.

In this role, Ghanaian shared stories that collectively resist the narrative of exceptional African suffering. Those who come to this study expecting only a woeful tale of atrocities visited upon black bodies will find themselves sorely disappointed. Ghanaians marked as human rights abuse not only the spectacular atrocities that so often populate the international rhetoric but also the mundane economic and social deprivations that produce banally atrocious outcomes—the varied events that unjustly and irrevocably limited a person’s destiny. Instead of the sensationalist images of African suffering, Ghanaians highlight the diverse conditions that devastated lives. Although commissioners and Ghanaian media often trained their attention on stories of arresting physical violence, the archive is dominated by narratives such as that penned by an unemployed citizen whose complaint was devastatingly simple: “I need a job. That’s all.”⁷⁵ Ghanaians testified eloquently about the violence of economic injustice, a suffering that is rooted in both the international economic order and national failures.

In the 1980s, Godfred Odame Kissi’s father died. “As a result of my father’s death I have not been able to attend school and this is what hurts me the most. I don’t mind about the assets. I don’t have any good occupation due to inadequate education.”⁷⁶ Consumed by grief, Kissi plotted murder against the person he blamed most for his lot. “At that time I was so hurt that I planned with my friend to kill Rawlings’ children who were then at Achimota School…. We didn’t succeed because he took them to London,” he quickly noted.⁷⁷ In Kissi’s petition, the presence and absence of education is, quite simply a matter of life and death. He joined a number of petitioners who connected their inability to consistently attend school to the policies of J. J. Rawlings. In the 1980s, under the tutelage of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Rawlings oversaw austerity measures that sought to “devolve national public responsibility for the financing of education” and ultimately ended up limiting Ghanaian youth’s access to school.⁷⁸ Nowadays, even the global lending institutions express regret for these stringent loan policies that closed classroom doors for scores of African children. “In hindsight,” a 2009 World Bank report muses, “insufficient attention was given to the impact of these fees and related costs on family budgets, on the spending choices of the poor, and on children’s right to education.”⁷⁹ Testimonies like Kissi’s publicly revisit the violence of structural adjustment at a time when Ghana is still gingerly navigating its course through globalization’s economic imperatives. In these types of petitions, Ghanaians utilize an internationalist discourse to publicly reconsider a past which “is not even passed.”⁸⁰ They mark out a history which might yet be a touchstone for the future.

Conclusion

Above I have sketched the political dimensions of an archive, which in its cacophony and democratized historiography constitutes an excess, a prodigal extension beyond the conventions of transitional justice, beyond the tropes of nationalist renderings of Ghanaian history, and beyond the limitations of the human rights “Africa problem.” Truth Without Reconciliation insists that TRCs may be more than they seem. And yet, are they enough? Even the most cursory glance at Ghana’s twenty-first-century politics reveals that the NRC did not transform the country’s political or economic structures. What, then, is the value of this citizen-curated public political history? To begin, the assumption that the NRC’s value is tied to immediately quantifiable and measurable outcomes misunderstands the relationship between history writing and political change. In the conclusion, I consider the astigmatism of assessing global TRC outcomes as a matter of participant satisfaction, the expansion of legal codes, positive government rhetoric or any other discrete factors that do not take into account the long and winding road between historical consciousness and political change. Better that we recognize, as Moses Chrispus Okello, Chris Dolan, and others suggest, the “ongoing labor” that “unfolds slowly over time and space, needing the healing and repair work of several generations.”⁸¹ Nevertheless the question of consequences is unavoidable; after all, the disappearance of the NRC from public view is the conundrum that began this study.

Political movements wrestling with the ideological violence of colonialism and neocolonialism affirm that historical consciousness is central in forging new African futures.⁸² “The settler makes history and is conscious of making it,” Fanon wrote. Decolonization, then, requires that a marginalized people thrust themselves under the “grandiose glare of history’s floodlights,” and recognize their struggle as epic. More recently, Michael Neocosmos has suggested that pursuing freedom in Africa requires first, thinking freedom. And this, he warns, is a skill in short supply.⁸³ Hemmed in by disappointing national leadership, by multinational companies whose trumpeted corporate social responsibility programs will not bring back the fish or the richness of the soil, and by climate change and brain drain, the horizon of political progress is reduced to individual accumulation and more efficient global consumption. However, for “the excluded themselves … the issue of freedom remains on the agenda.”⁸⁴ It is those who are suffering the most—like the urban shack dwellers in South Africa, or the Ghanaians who traveled miles to stand in line and lodge a petition at an NRC office—who are pursuing, headlong, political justice. Neocosmos points to South Africa’s Abahlali BaseMjondolo, the Shack Dwellers’ Movement, as an example of how marginalized groups, not the middle classes or academic elites, form the vanguard of freedom-oriented political action and theory in contemporary Africa. It is the shack dwellers who dream beyond acquiring a greater share of the liberal democratic dispensation, whose vision turns away from a limited progress and toward emancipation.⁸⁵

The stories of the NRC must be added to this ongoing accounting of African peoples who seize the rhetoric and rituals of political progress as an opportunity to publicly remind their nation (and the world) of both their presence and their suffering. The NRC’s accounting is vital as a site where Ghanaian peoples’ historical and political thought is gathered; but like all archives, its material consequence depends on how it is used. The potential of the NRC is tied to whether anyone—fellow Ghanaians, diaspora Africans, transitional justice scholars—bothers to listen to the stories that were shared. There are many ways to listen; I am speaking here of taking seriously the critiques raised by the country’s citizen experts. If this has not yet happened, perhaps it will in the future. This is, after all, an archive; the documents are preserved, their full audience has not yet been born.

In any case, we must step away from the misplaced hope that TRCs will be a salve for broken societies. Dwelling with these stories is profoundly unsettling; this is as it should be. The violence described is not quarantined to the past; the fault lines that have before flared into atrocity remain active. Human dignity is still rationed by whether your family can pay school fees, whether your mother has the opportunity to receive proper maternal care, or whether you might be able to acquire a job. As a public meditation on the continuing obstacles to justice, freedom, and progress in Ghana, perhaps it is no wonder that the NRC archive has been so efficiently ignored.

Embracing this cacophony is more than a guide into Ghana’s history, it is also central to the country’s political future. The variety in Ghanaian people’s perspectives is neither a failure nor a weakness but instead an impetus to build a politics that recognizes the stratification of the Ghanaian nation and acknowledges the voices of the many. From the communities in Old Fadama to the elites gathered at Ridge Church to the petty traders in Tamale Market, all are part of Ghana and all must be included in the dream for Ghana’s future. Against a backdrop where the road to a brighter future in Ghana is described as a matter of clearing slums, privatizing education, and restricting the movement of poor people, the voices of Ghana’s diverse constituencies in the NRC create an opportunity to consider a political agenda that does not depend on erasing or ignoring difference. Although unity is central to national political progress, this study argues that cacophony, too, creates a road forward.

Truth Without Reconciliation delves into this rich NRC archive, using citizen petitions and testimonies as historical examples, guides for analysis, allegories, and sites of comparison. Following this introduction, Chapter 1, “Making the NRC Archive,” discusses the genesis and trajectory of the National Reconciliation Commission from its beginnings as a campaign promise in the 2000 electoral season, through the rancorous partisan parliamentary debates that established the National Reconciliation Act (2002), the submission of the final report to the government in 2004, and the disbursement of a reparations program in 2007. Defining a capacious NRC archive and interrogating its competing logics, this chapter considers the extent to which Ghanaians were able to seize national reconciliation as a site for democratic expression.

Chapter 2, “Human Rights and Ghanaian History,” traces the course of twentieth-century Ghanaian political history from the waning days of British colonialism through the 2000 presidential elections. By weaving the NRC narratives into the historical review, this chapter uses citizen stories to disrupt the elitism, patriarchy, and other exclusions common within Ghanaian nationalist historiography.

The next two chapters consider patterns in how the self-described victims of Ghanaian politics utilized the NRC to represent the national past. Chapter 3, “Kalabule Women,” interrogates the notion of the “human rights victim” by focusing on a collection of petitions by Ghanaian market women about the intersection of gender violence and political violence. At the NRC, market women thrust their broken bodies before the nation, exposing the violence that occurred at the intersection of sex and social identity. In so doing, their stories brush against the abundant images of African women’s suffering that freely circulate within global media representation of international human rights abuse. This chapter considers the national and global consequences of the NRC as a site where Ghanaians stepped into the public identity of the “human rights victim”—to ambivalent ends.

Chapter 4, “Family Histories of Political Violence,” explores the narratives of estrangement, divorce and separation, unhappy homes, and broken promises that animate the NRC archive. Here, I consider the consequences when NRC participants describe human rights abuse as that which withered Ghanaian families. By counting the costs of national political violence through the loss of intimate and filial ties, Ghanaians illuminate the domestic, private sphere as a site of political violence. Both chapters confront the risks (both personal and political) of publicly donning the mantle of victimhood in a TRC and place gender at the center of Ghana’s history of political violence.

Chapter 5, “The Suffering of Being Developed,” focuses on two collections of citizen narratives, both officially deemed nonjurisdictional and placed outside the mandate of Ghana’s NRC. The first collection consists of individuals and communities who were displaced and resettled as part of the construction of the Volta River Project’s Akosombo Dam. The other collection focuses on the violence that accompanied the privatization of salt production on the Songor Salt Flats. In both, Ghanaians scrutinized development initiatives that displaced and impoverished rural communities. The costs of both nationalist and corporate development approaches are immortalized in stories about how marginalized citizens were brought low by initiatives ostensibly meant to build the country up.

Chapter 6, “Soldier, Victim, Hero, Citizen,” interrogates both the ubiquity of suffering and the images of resistance present in the NRC documents. Instead of coming forward to request absolution, most Ghanaian soldiers came to the NRC to insist that they, too, were victims. Similarly, the archive is marked by stories of ambivalent heroes and inadequate acts of courage that result in imprisonment, exile, assault and other ills. Together, these stories undermine a moralistic understanding of African political violence as a matter of clearly demarcated categories of victims, perpetrators, heroes and evildoers and invite a reconsideration of the contours and consequences of resistance to political violence. This complexity, I argue, is productive; it propels us past moral dichotomies and toward a vision of historical justice that recognizes the breadth, depth, and diversity in how human beings suffer, survive, and resist violence.

The importance of nonjurisdictional petitions is also evident in Chapter 7, “Time of Suffering / Time for Justice.” Here, Ghanaians describe the continuing impact of colonial violence in today’s Ghana and challenge the notion that democratic elections marked the end of state human-rights abuse. Political violence, in citizens’ reflections, was cyclical and compounded. The days that caused destruction in the past also set a course for risk in the future. By refusing to consign state violence safely to the past, Ghanaian reject analyses of contemporary African politics that ignore the colonial past and assume the innocence of neoliberal democratic present. These temporally transgressive petitions and testimonies highlight the analytical rigor of an NRC archive rooted in citizen experiences and perspectives.

The conclusion, “The Brief Afterlife of Ghana’s Truth Commission,” returns to the question of consequences by criticizing the language of success and failure as a constraint on our comprehension of Africa’s TRC phenomenon. Truth commissions are neither inherently politically moribund nor implicitly liberating; they are vessels that can be exploited for diverse ends. If the “political consciousness and imagination of African societies” is the fertile ground on which justice struggles must be built, processes that do not immediately result in explicit gains but which do change minds, shift allegiances, expose state hypocrisy, and frighten us out of exhaustion and complacency should not be overlooked.⁸⁶