Making Men in Ghana

Prologue and Personae

xv Prologue and Personae I first visited Ghana at the end of a trans-Sahara journey in 1989. During this trip I not only became painfully aware of my ignorance and Eurocentric education but was taken with West Africa, particularly with its warm, hospitable people. In contrast to my ignorance of Africa, the Africans I met were extremely knowledgeable about my European world. I decided to learn more by pursuing graduate studies in African history. In 1991 I returned to Ghana looking for a research site where I could use archival material from the Basel Mission, an abiding interest of mine through family history. In November 1992, the day after J. J. Rawlings’s election as the first president of Ghana’s Fourth Republic, I landed in Accra with my partner Lane Clark for an extended stay of thirteen months. We based ourselves in Abetifi, Kwawu. While Lane worked on a video documentary about Akan proverbs, I conducted historical research about what it meant to be a man in a West African society since the nineteenth century. I wanted to explore how ideas of masculinity had changed under colonialism, how men had dealt with conflicting cultural ideals. I hoped such questions would provide a fuller understanding of the working of gender. I faced a crucial problem: how can we learn about changing constructions of masculinity in an African society? Although I consulted documentary sources in archives in Ghana, Britain, and Switzerland, asking men directly about their personal experiences and gathering their life histories became the heart of my research. Reading government and missionary reports , court records, Presbyterian Church diaries, chronicles, and minutes, ethnographic writings, and newspapers enabled me to situate men’s life histories in larger historical contexts.1 I took my time conducting interviews. To improve my Twi I enrolled at the Abetifi Divine Word Language Center, whose highly qualified teachers, Yaw Douglas Asomani, Kwame Fosu, and Joseph Kwakye, later became my research assistants. Learning Twi opened xvi Prologue and Personae many doors. Exploring Abetifi, greeting elders, and engaging in small talk became my daily routine. I requested an interview only after several visits. I looked for men and women, born early in the twentieth century, with fine memories and a willingness to share their recollections. Some of them had attended (mainly) Presbyterian schools and had become clerks and teachers; others had no school experience but worked as farmers, petty traders, and artisans. I also conduced a few interviews with retired teachers in Akuapem. It is difficult to pose questions about an abstract concept like masculinity. Instead, I asked about childhood, gendered games, sexuality, marriage, child rearing, work, and migration, as well as involvement in hometown communities while becoming elders. I inquired about expectations from parents and uncles. I requested my interview partners to identify role models whom they emulated. I asked about their hopes for their children, nieces, and nephews . Finally, I solicited advice for young people. Such open questions produced elaborations that allowed me to distill their gender ideals. Over 110 interviews were recorded on tape, transcribed, and, those in Twi, translated; about half of them were in English. When not working with a tape recorder, I took notes during or after conversations. By 1994 I had identified the cohort of eight men at the center of this study. I selected them based on the richness of our initial conversations and the quality of our personal rapport. I was also concerned about a range of life experiences and differences in socioeconomic status. As elders, some lived in poverty with small or no pensions. Others had secure resources owing to personal or inherited wealth, or to reliable pensions or well-positioned children or both. Within Kwawu, these men belong to two clusters. E. K. Addo, Rev. E.K.O. Asante, E. F. Opusuo, J. A. Wahyee, and A. K. Boakye Yiadom were members of the Presbyterian Church and lived in the Christian Quarters of Abetifi and Pepease; C kyeame Kwabena Asante, Kofi Ankoma, and Kwaku Marfo were involved with the Pepease Tegare shrine. Increasingly our conversations on specific stages of their life cycle drew my attention to forms of self-presentation. My interview partners switched oral genres, depending on whether we met informally, just the two of us, or whether I conducted a taped interview with the help of a research assistant. The latter often attracted an audience: the narration became a performance. There are indeed “complex connections between genre and the construction...