Making Men in Ghana (review)

In the expansive literature on personal life narratives and oral historical method, Stephan Miescher's Making Men in Ghana distinguishes itself in terms of creativity and originality. Miescher pursues the lives of eight Kwawu (Akan) elders, deploying a chronological narrative structure that highlights key stages in men's lives. In so doing, his purpose is to explain the vernacular fabric of a masculinity operational in southern Ghana.

Miescher's approach marks two important shifts in the Africanist literature of lives and orality. The monograph itself constitutes the first study of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa. I struggled to find comparisons while reading, but I was frequently reminded of the revelations unveiled by Charles van Onselen's epic life of Kas Maine in The Seed Is Mine (New York: Hill and Wang 1996). Perhaps more importantly, however, the book decenters the strong female bias in life historiography, which, from its inception in the 1960s and 1970s, was motivated by a critical urgency to excavate the masculinist narratives of African historical literature. Few scholars could today argue that women's lives and livelihoods remain underrepresented in new African historical and anthropological literature. Scholarship on the complexity and mutability of constructions of masculinity in Africa, however, is only beginning to constitute a subfield in its own right.

The book can be divided into two parts and reads like a screenplay in some regards. The dramatis personae are introduced in approximately fifteen pages, enabling a fungible familiarity, or at least a working knowledge. Miescher then provides a manageable introduction to the themes of gender and masculinity studies, Akan ethnography, and life histories. The second part consists of the acts of the drama. Miescher sees five periods of importance, each of which coincides with a key developmental phase in a southern Ghanaian male life. The five phases are childhood, schooling/ apprenticeship, employment, marriage and paternity, and seniority. Miescher's actors cover a variety of socioeconomic levels and achievements, but they are remarkably coincident with respect to their lives and outlook on life. The men's lives begin during the mature colonialism of the Gold Coast and all conclude (some are still living) in the post-Rawlings Fourth Republic.

What does it mean to be a man in Ghana? How does manhood unfold as men grow and their lives change? These are complex questions, the answers to which underscore the intimacy and kinship which must have characterized the relationship between Miescher and his elders. Miescher's employment of the classical vehicle of social anthropology—participant observation—indicates the depth of his commitment to restoring his friends' subjectivity in the narratives as they appear in print. In this regard the book is to be compared to work of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, in In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), or Charles Piot's Remotely Global (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

But what do we learn from Miescher and his Kwawu elders? Among many observations, we learn that from eight lives it is possible to narrate a broad sweep of Ghanaian life as it unfolded through the twentieth century. We learn that moral achievements anchor historical memories of the role of the notion of self and its relation to personhood. We learn that male subjectivity and masculinity were impaired, indeed denied, by colonial powers in equally compelling and complex ways to the silencing of womanhood and femininity. And as if to underscore the continued relevance of Sara Berry's unique blend of historical anthropology, we learn that no condition of masculinity is permanent in Ghana, but that changes worthy of further research continue to unfold.