Making Men in Ghana

Epilogue: “No Condition Is Permanent”

199 EPILOGUE: “NO CONDITION IS PERMANENT” “No Condition Is Permanent” is one of the popular slogans painted on lorries and buses in southern Ghana. Understandings about masculinity were not permanent either in twentieth-century Ghana but were fluid and changing . R. W. Connell has suggested that the spread of European empires and ideologies brought a “global gender order” and a “prospect of all indigenous gender regimes foundering under this institutional and cultural pressure.”1 This book refutes such an interpretation by utilizing the theoretical to situate the local. Although different institutions introduced new notions of masculinity in colonial Ghana, this did not lead to a collapse of an indigenous gender system. Rather, Akan ideas of adult masculinity, elderhood, and bigman status proved to be resilient while also subject to reformulation and contestation. Individual actors creatively engaged with old and new gender ideals, and adapted them to changing contexts according to their needs. Novel ideas like Presbyterian masculinity—promoted by missionaries and mediated by their African agents—went through a process of naturalization. Kwawu men and women adjusted this innovation selectively. Missionary ideas about patrilineal inheritance and compulsory education seemed at first remarkable and foreign, yet by the middle decades of the twentieth century, those living in former Basel Mission settlements had partially accepted patrilineal descent without completely neglecting matrilineal ties. An increasing demand for Western education moved beyond missionary spheres of influence . In the early twentieth century the new social category of akrakyefoɔ was unusual, reserved for a few. With school enrollment growing in the 1920s, and more rapidly in the 1950s, akrakyefoɔ, as a social group, ceased to be exceptional. By the 1970s teachers, as well as their profession generally, had lost much of their status.2 Nevertheless, akrakyefoɔ kept their aspirations. As one anthropologist reported from Larteh, Akuapem, the “ ‘scholar’ has ar- 200 Making Men in Ghana rived on the social scene, established in a new role the significance of which is shown by the frequent singling out of scholars in a special category.” In towns of southern Ghana with old Presbyterian congregations, Twi speakers had introduced a specific response, “yaa owura” (hello Mister), as the “appropriate answer to a scholar’s greeting.”3 Yet, while David Brokensha focused on education as an agent of change working on society, here the objective is reversed: How did akrakyefoɔ reconstitute their subjectivities by narrating their experiences with Western education and their lives as middle figures, negotiating between various, at times competing, notions of masculinity ? The recollections of the eight men featured in this book speak to the grand sweep of historical forces that transformed Kwawu and, on a larger scale, the worlds of colonial and postcolonial Ghana. The changes and innovations over the past hundred years, such as increased personal mobility, expanded roads and railways, migration to urban centers, Western education, monetization, and new economic opportunities in cash crops like cocoa and trade, provide the context and are reflected in the men’s stories. At times their memory privileged different occurrences from conventional histories. For example, World War II and the emerging Ghanaian nationalism led by Kwame Nkrumah touched most of these lives only at the edges. A. K. Boakye Yiadom did not dwell on historical markers like Ghana’s independence in his autobiographical writing. Instead, personal challenges were more salient. He and others foregrounded individuals, events, and processes that interacted directly with their lives: childhood role models, education, marriages , and the long path of reaching senior masculinity. The objective of achieving ɔpanyin status remained constant throughout the twentieth century ; what changed were the available resources. In these lives, hardship was not merely expressed in the worsening economic conditions of Ghana since the 1960s but in a multitude of responsibilities and expectations which the men struggled to fulfill. The eight men’s stories uncovered how they reworked notions of self in relation to personhood, understood as moral achievement and filtered through memory. These men constructed selves while narrating their engagement with ideals of masculinity at different life stages. They shared with an immediate and intended audience the experiences of their life’s accomplishments and joys, as well as disappointments and pains. Reflecting on our conversations, I was less interested in reconstructing “truths” and identifying what “really happened.” Instead, I looked for analytical spaces in which subjectivities come to the fore and the meaning of the past for the present can 201 Epilogue...