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Alice Wiemers, "Village Work: Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth-Century Ghana" (Ohio UP, 2021)
00:55:51
An interview with Alice Wiemers
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welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Eliza Prosperity. Today I'm excited to be talking with Professor Alice Wiemers about her new book, Village Work, Development and rural statecraft in 20th century Ghana. Village Work is really hot off the press. It was just published in 2021 by Ohio University Press as part of the prestigious New African History series. Alice is an associate professor of history at Davidson College in North Carolina. Her work has appeared in several journals including the Journal of African History, World Development, International labor, and Working Class History. Alice, welcome to the podcast.
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A
Thank you for having me. This is really exciting.
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B
I'm delighted to talk with you and particularly so because it's the summer and we can kind of leisurely take our time and relax into this great book. So tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get interested in becoming a historian and then a historian of rural Ghana?
- [02:02]
A
Yeah, so you know, my story is a pretty academic one. I was my interest in becoming a historian really came out of my experience as an undergraduate studying both history and economics, um, and then a small stint. And this ties into my interest in development. Working in international development following college and I really turned to history. I had been interested in in Africa and certainly working in the development world presented a series of pretty confounding both ignorances and kind of studied ignorances about Africa that were really pervasive in the development world. And contrasting that with what I Had learned in African history classes, presented me both with a. A desire to become a historian, but I think also very much are the seeds of the. Of the work I ended up doing in rural Ghana focusing on the history of development, not just as something that is conceived kind of by development economists, but as. By. As something that is experienced by people as. As government and as statecraft.
- [03:14]
B
So this is great. All of us who are teaching African history or teaching development courses, we might have someone in our classes who wants to compare what we did in the classroom with what they're seeing in the world and perhaps going on to write a book about it. So this book is located in this village in northern Ghana called Pasimpe. And, you know, I think all of our listeners will know that when we think about Ghanaian history, 99% of what's being written and read is focused on the south of Ghana. So how did your research take you to the north of Ghana and particularly to this place?
- [03:54]
A
Yeah. So, you know, there's a really interesting disconnect, I think, in. In terms of historians. Yes, right. Like thinking about Ghanaian historiography very much centered in the south, Very sort of thinking of the north as a periphery to that kind of scholarship, Even though scholars of the north have, of course, established its centrality to various networks over many decades. However, when you hang out with development people who are interested in West Africa, there are these places, northern Ghana being one of them, that become persistent concerns of developers. Right. Persistent areas that developers return to because they spark this sort of imaginary of future progress, a place that is seen as undeveloped. And so while that also hung on this idea of northern Ghana as a sort certain kind of periphery, it also made it very central to development practice. And so I was interested in going to places where wave after wave of developers had sort of seen this as a space of development. So that's sort of what took me to Tamale, the regional capital of northern region, and which is also where the northern regional archives are. And it was really through reading and then simultaneously speaking to development practitioners in Tamale that I became interested in kind of the second layer of this peripheral yet central dynamic of looking at places, districts, and then ultimately villages or clusters of villages that had again surfaced again and again as sort of areas where development practice had clustered. And so Pasimpe turned out to be one of those places that emerged both in my archival research and in my. In my work in Tamale. And then in the regional district capital of Waliwale, which is about 30 kilometers more. 30 kilometers away from. From Pasimbe and on the central road, which is really what makes things central in Northern Ghana. Yeah.
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B
So you. You open the book with kind of taking the reader, I guess, to Pasimpe along the road that is going to feature, you know, strongly in. In the first chapter. And then you're going to see a clinic and you're going to see a school. And all of these development projects are going to tie into your. One of your kind of central themes about the extraction of local labor as being really central to all of the processes of development throughout the 20th century. So I wondered how you. How you came to that way of opening the book that taking the visitor very kind of physically through the town.
- [06:46]
A
So, I mean, I struggled a lot with how to open a book. You rewrite your introduction a thousand times. Right. And figuring out how to kind of. Yeah. Encapsulate for the reader some of the major themes of the book. But now that you're sort of reciting it back to me, I realize that it's also one of my research methods. I was interested in things even in Pasimpe, Right. That were, I thought, very central to its history, but also very mundane in people's lives. Right. Like the school, the road, like the clinic. Right. Not things that people are thinking of, the big historical stories in town. And so one of my research methods was sort of like just walking around and being like, oh, like, what about that? Like, that looks like an old building. And it was like, oh, yeah, that was the colonial courthouse. And then it was the first school. And then it was. Right. And, oh, there looks like there's an old bridge there. Like, what happened with that? And so in many ways, I think, thinking about taking the reader into town, but taking the reader into a very particular view of town. Right. Which is thinking about the built environment, thinking about the labor that went into that built environment, and thinking about how to make this very, in some ways, mundane history that would be easily kind of glossed over by a visitor. Seem to have a history. Right. Which is sort of what I want to take people into in the book.
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B
So on the one hand, you have this, you know, the particular stories associated with these really super specific places that the school, the clinic, the road. And on the other hand, what is kind of discursively interesting to you is how Pasimpe is. Seems to be presented as a place that is interchangeable with another generic village. How do you play with this tension between the very particular and the extremely local? And then this discursive idea of the generic and interchangeable which I think, you know, as scholars of Africa, is a tension that we, you know, we. We. We feel and. But up against so frequently because it feels very much like something that, you know, that reduces complexity. And everything that we're doing are always trying to add that complexity.
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A
Yeah. This is. I mean, it's a great question, and it's something that I think I. I say I'll talk about this a little bit in the introduction to the book, but it. It certainly was this, like, fear hanging over me as I designed this project and as I wrote the project. So the simple answer of why it is that I couldn't figure out a way. I'm not artful enough, I think, as a historian, I couldn't figure out a way to define my scope without glossing over some central dynamics any bigger than, like, one very particular place, right. Like, who do I interview? I was like, well, I can interview, like, most of the people over the age of 45 or 50 in this small place, right. Like, I couldn't figure out how to make the choices about where to go and who to talk to and what projects to follow, except for by delimiting in space. So that is, like, the simple answer as to why it's just one space for a minute. Like, I really wanted to. I kept wanting to do work in the town across the river Kungwa, which has a very different history, but is very linked into the history that I'm telling. And it just. Like, I couldn't imagine doing this kind of work in two different places. So that. That's the sort of methodological answer in terms of the relationship between that. Why it was so scary is that I think there's a way that books like this that focus on one place can sometimes function for the reader as a generic African village. Even as they try to contest that idea, they end up being a book on a shelf. It's the book about the village. It's a book about the village and development. And so Passimpe becomes this village, right? That's like all of the other villages. And what's, of course, you know, upsetting about that is that the book, like the whole book, is about trying to challenge that central idea that is not just a sort of problem for historians, but is central to social scientific research and development, right? The. The fundamental insight I think about, or one of the fundamental insights of the book is this idea that the idea of the village has not just been a kind of homogenous one that imagines that villages are consensual, but that relies on the Idea that villages are interchangeable because developers, policymakers, no one conceives of villages as anything but interchangeable places to do projects given the limited scope of the work that they want to do. And so the project of the book is really to use the particularity of Pasimpe and contrast it with and. And yet figure out how it's connected to the way that Pasimpe is treated both by local officials, then by national officials, and then by international agencies. And to think about how people in town and people who were networked from town beyond dealt with the gap between how the village was perceived and how policy was made for the village and these very particular local dynamics in such a way that was sometimes very clever and sometimes very tragic. Right, so that a long answer to
- [12:05]
B
a short question, but it's a central question. And I think that. I really think that if people are interested in how do you kind of take the postmodern critique and historicize it, that this is a really excellent example of that. How do you dismantle the idea of the village? While seeing the work that the idea of the village has done historically? That seems to be really, for me, one of the kind of key thrusts here. So let's kind of. We haven't talked about the time span of the book book. It's really the. The 20th century. And this also is something unusual in development history, which tends to really zero in, usually in the colonial or on maybe the immediate post colonial. And here we have a story that goes from, you know, the dual mandate era, the 1920s or so, all the way through to the 1990s. And it's in this era of the. The 1920s inter war colonialism, where it seems to me you argue that kind of the idea of the village, you know, comes into being as separate from understanding space as differentiated by ethnicity or tribe. So tell us about how the idea of the village gets born and also what kind of work it does in this early period for interwar colonial development agendas.
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A
Yeah, thank you. I think there's sort of two ways of answering that, and I would say so. One is the kind of intellectual history of the idea of the village, which there is you know, really excellent, robust scholarship on for northern Ghana. Carollo Lentz has said, you know, sort of sprinkled a bit of this into various of her work, thinking about ideas of sort of nascent ideas of community development, but also this kind of British ideal of the village that kind of comes really into practice sort of in the late 20s and the 30s. And what I started discovering When I was reading district commissioners diaries from the nineteen teens and the early nineteen twenties, is that even though the ideology of the village, the kind of idea of what a village should be or how it might be a unit of government, had not really entered their imaginary at the time, nonetheless, this basic technology that they used all the time, which was lists of villages that were under. Under. In their parlance, different jurisdictions of different chiefs, it was how they ordered space in a really cheap and simple way. Right. At the same time that they were discovering that figuring out boundaries was going to be a whole other can of worms. Right. And that's. So there's a rich scholarship about land in northern Ghana, much of which I, you know, I. I don't deal with in this book, in part because so much of the. Of the statecraft that went on in that period, and particularly the statecraft around labor, was really just interested in, like, who can. I requisite, you know, who could they requisition laborers from, and which chief did they have to go to in order to make that happen? And so they just had these kind of senses that, yeah, the village remained this kind of remainder in their policy rather than something that really took up statecraft.
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And.
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A
And although that alters ideologically over time. Right. The village layers on in the 1930s and then in the 1940s, and then in the Nkrumah era, and then in the 1970s with new ideas about what a village could be and what it should be and all this sort of stuff. This basic idea that villages are interchangeable and that this is like a cheap and sort of simple way to do statecraft really continues, I would argue. I mean, the book stops in 92, but I think that there's a legacy. Of What? Of the 20th century, even in much policymaking that we see now. Okay.
- [15:51]
B
So we have the district commissioners using this cheap technology of really just listing places that they're imagining our villages or what they're associating these names on paper with. But then we have the progressive chiefs who are in some ways imbuing this technology of the village with, you know, with actual. I'm not sure exactly how you might talk about it, but. But with governance, with. With. With power and with meaning. So this, you know, idea of progressive chieftaincy that's. That's. Those aren't two words that you hear, you know, put together very often in the literature. What does the idea of progressive chieftaincy do for you as you're unpacking the concept of the village?
- [16:37]
A
Yeah, And I would add, you know, hopefully, Also unpacking the idea of progress and progressive as well a little bit. I mean, this is a. This is a terminology that is used by administrators a lot and is also taken up by chiefs themselves and taken up in historical memory of people talking about kind of like different ways that you could be a chief over the course of the 20th century. And so I'm interested in one of the ways that I saw development projects or state interest in infrastructure and really just any involvement with the state clustering in both the early part of the century. But then, as I argue in the book, consolidating in the 40s, 50s and 60s was around the position of chiefs who remain very central to governance in northern Ghana. You know, despite successive governments having a lot of different ways of seeing chiefs, that chiefs remain really central to governance. And there's a lot of different ways of being a chief. Right. There's lots of different ways of gathering power and of creating bonds of obligation and reciprocity with constituents. So not all chiefs choose to use development or chose to use development, but some did. And this idea of, or this sort of role script of progressive chieftaincy became a way for a variety of chiefs. I profiled two of them early in the book, the Sandemnab Ezantilo, who was from the area just north of Pasimpe and is in many ways a model for the Wuubanaba Sebiam, who is the chief of Pasimpe. From 1942 to 1992. I profiled two of them to talk about how certain chiefs came to harness and play with and capitalize on this sort of new political economy of development as it was emerging over time.
- [18:33]
B
Well, let's get concrete. Let's. Let's talk about Sadayam. He's really a fascinating figure. I think he's the main character in a lot of ways of this book. And he's in power for 50 years, so. So you have a lot of continuity and you really get to use him as a way to trace change over time. But, you know, in a way that I think is very easy for the reader to follow because it's this one kind of larger than life character sometimes. So who is he when he kind of comes into his own as a chief in 1942? And then I'm very interested in asking you about his children and in particular his eldest two children, a boy and a girl.
- [19:16]
A
Yeah. So the book ends, you know, you know, if you think about where this book came from, like this book came from me as an undergraduate and then working in Development, thinking about the state, thinking about, you know, discourses of development. And it was really as I did the work that there, you know, I, I hope that the book reflects my own understanding of the multitude of social processes that are involved in reproducing the developmentalist state. And so one central one in this book is the idea of family. Right. And the way that I trace that, again, I just couldn't get my head around doing it other than by tracing an individual family. And, and in part because this one family in Pasimpe, the, the family of, of Sebiam was, you know, by all accounts, basically, you know, anyone you spoke to about Pasimpe and also all of the archival records tended to center either on Sebi or on his network of children who, as I talk about in the book, like almost all entered the civil service. So he is a. And he unfortunately died in 1992. And so. And Azantila, who I speak a bit about in the book, died in 2006. So I wasn't able to interview either of them. Right. And it's a kind of, it's a hole in this, in this book. And so some of the larger than life aspects of Sebia may come from the historical memory of people who, who really associate him with this long mid century period. Right. So he became a chief as a young, a young man in, in 1942. There's some conflicting stories about how he became chief. There's, there's some complexity there that is sort of beyond the scope of the book. But it's very clear that he does not have a lot going for him in terms of what he's gonna, what he's gonna be and do in 1942. Um, and you know, I kind of imagine in the book, but I'm hoping that it, it reflects something of reality that he's kind of, you know, he's kind of casting about for like, what, what is the point of chieftaincy in 1942, right. And he turns out it's just a zealot for change, right? He just, he, in the early part of his agency, before the colonial state, really gets involved with anything. He's inviting teachers to come from, from Boku, which is, you know, pretty far away. He invites like the, you know, the first Muslim immigrants. He like thinks about enskinning an imam in the area. Like, he's very interested. There's all these migrants coming back from the south and he's like, you know, what, what can you bring of your knowledge of the South? And so he's doing all this stuff and the colonial state just ends up having some cash in the 1940s and the 1950s. And he figures out pretty quickly, I think, that one of the ways to get things to happen in Possente is to, you know, talk development to this new round of district commissioners that come in in the 40s and the 50s, and also to get local people to, in a kind of, you know, fascinating way to be willing to give labor to build things in the shadow of 30 years of forced labor. Right? 30 years of forced road building. So this is not an easy sell in the, in the 40s and the 50s. And so much of what I'm interested in about Saebyam is both as himself, as this sort of local, larger than life local boost who was just completely zealous about transforming this town. And the way that then through compulsion, persuasion, sheer force of personality, he's able to make this new, this, this labor 2.0 system happen in, in, in the late colonial and early independence period.
- [22:58]
B
And this Labor 2.0, it gets rebaptized, right? It's no longer is it local initiative and the kind of colonial jargon, and it becomes in Nkrumah's time, more something like self help.
- [23:12]
A
Yeah, yeah. And so actually, so the book traces, I think, kind of like two lineages here. So one is the way that the colonial state tries to rebrand labor in the, in the late colonial period. And this is, there's a, you know, excellent new scholarship about labor and forced labor both in Ghana and elsewhere. You know, Kwavana, Akron, Perry Ferghana, you know, Benedetta Rossi. There's a variety of people who are working on, Sorry, Opala Kia on Kenya, working on this idea of like how forced labor enters into the development space in the 1930s and the 1940s and that Ghana's story is very similar. Like the colonial state calls it communal labor because there's an exception in the international Labor Organization's ban on forced labor for anything called communal. It makes this giant hole for so called village development, right? And so there's that kind of process, this rebranding and then, and then in the mid century it becomes this sort of global idea about self help that Nkrumah picks up on. There's this, that history and then there's this, this sort of connected, but in some ways much more improvised process that happens on the ground as people actually try to raise labor. Right. And who they're raising labor from and what that's going to look like changes, I would say, just as much over time. Even as this continuity is knitted together over the decade.
- [24:35]
B
So Sabiam has figured out how to corral or extract labor for his kind of development agenda. He's also reinvesting that development agenda in his family. Right. So who are Nabila and Pura?
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A
So yeah, the, the book profiles. Well I should say at first that so, so Sebiam, you know, one thing you know about, you learn about Sabion is that he was interested in development. The other thing you learn about Sebi on very quickly, right. Is that he had over 60 children and that he sent all of them to school. That's sort of the, you know, one of the lore about him, girls and boys. And so the book profiles tries to follow both the wives and brothers that worked on his compound and these generations, these sort of successive generations of children that were born from the, the early 1940s through the late 1970s. One anchor of the book then is, is two of, well, one of Sebion's children, Nabila and his sister Pura, who are part of the first class of children who go to the elementary school in Pasanpay and both of whom have these very long careers in, in the civil service. Professor Nabila eventually becomes an MP and then he becomes a Minister of State. He then simultaneously becomes a professor at the University of Ghana where he's still a professor. And then ultimately at sort of the end of the book, he becomes chief. He's now he's the current Wooluddunaba and lives sort of between Accra and Pastimpe and has this very, very interesting way of linking local, so called local work, local work, you know, possum pay work with, with a larger development agenda in Ghana. And then his sister Pura or I'm sorry Sabiam's sister Pura, who I mean she fortunately was alive when I, when I started my work and was also an incredibly larger than life character, just tenacious, long term career in, in the civil service, worked in social welfare and also became one of the places that a ton of Serian's children ended up living as they did their schooling throughout Ghana. So I try to profile both Pura and Nabila both to, to highlight the, the sort of circuitous ways that people, people who were educated in the 1940s sort of worked through the Ghanaian state. Also to highlight the ways that women and men navigated those, those structures differently. Right. And again I work with this. I don't want them to be representative, but I think they are illustrative of the kinds of Dynamics, opportunities and constraints that that kind of biography gave them.
- [27:34]
B
So on the one hand you have, you know, all of Sebiem's children go to school, which is a pretty incredible thing to behold. And a lot of these children get connected to the developmental estate through the civil service and they're able to pull development projects to Pasinte. They're able to continue the, the development work. At the same time there must be a tension with the people who are providing a lot of the labor for this work and aren't going to school and aren't having the same ability to kind of hook into these, these, these national, translocal, even international networks of development. And, and that seems to be particularly fraught space for you as a researcher to go in and have conversations with people. And I know you did, you know, 100 interviews really and over many years. So what was it like to talk to both Sebyan's family and people who are not part of Sebyong's family about this history? Yeah.
- [28:48]
A
Thank you. So the class differentiation in Pasimpe as well as differentiation sort of by lineage and migration history is one that is, is very central to many dynamics in town. One thing I want to just point out about Possum because I think it's very easy because I profile this one high profile family to kind of see them as sort of the only elites in town. And one thing I, you know, that became very clear to me as I did my research was like there's lots of different ways that people get networked to larger systems in Ghana. And so it doesn't even really come in to the book. But the current vice president's mother is from Pasimpe, right. So there's this whole, you know, there's family networks in Pasimpe that are linked in in different ways to the Ghanaian state that are not the family that I, that I profile. That said, the, the distinctions between those who went to school and those who didn't and those who lived in Possum Fe for quite some time. So, you know, there was this built in selection bias to my work that anyone who hadn't been living in Pasimpe before 1992 was not really someone that I spoke to, which meant that I ended up talking to a lot of older families, right. People who, that were very established. And so current labor practices in Possimp are almost a whole new kettle of fish. There's lots of migration in the last 30 years and lots of questions about who owes what to whom. So that's a slightly different Question. In terms of my interviews, I was very clearly networked through the chief and, and not just through the chief, but through Sebihan's family, through the, the household I stayed in, which was one of Sevillon's daughters, Agnes Suri, and her husband Nelson, and who were, in their own way, sort of, you know, local opinion leaders, both through the chiefly network and, and through other networks and. And so I think there's a lot of stories I don't get in the book about the kinds of resentments and tensions and sort of long term processes of differentiation that happened outside the chiefly family. I try to upend that a little bit or kind of dig a little deeper into it by using one of the resources that I really did have in my hand, which is that I interviewed a lot of people in the family who didn't go to school. And so primarily this is a whole community of women who came to Sebiam's compound as wives, many of them as young girls, so sort of the same age as Sebiyam's children and never went to school. Right. And so I talk a little bit in the book and then also, sorry, Sebiam's brothers and a kind of collection of people who came to the compound as brothers who also didn't go to school. And so I, I tried to talk a little bit about thinking of family networks both as places that allow people to consolidate networks of influence, but also as spaces that are riven by the same class and gender divisions that happen outside of families. And so here I'm really thinking about lineage and what it meant to be, you know, a wife versus a daughter, but also just thinking about the ways that schooling, you know, who goes to school, which was a very, it's a very idiosyncratic process in the 1940s and the 1950s, most people didn't want to go to school. Right. As you well know from your own work that this is, you know, this ends up changing the way that people navigate the state. And so I hoped I could, could bring some light to that. Even as my interviews, you know, no one was probably going to say a variety of things to me or perhaps even recall the kinds of resentments they had in the 1950s about this kind of labor. Although a few did. I got a, I got a good sense that labor in the 1950s was not joyously given to these development projects.
- [32:44]
B
Well, I'm so glad that you mentioned the lives because I really enjoyed reading that, that section partly because it felt, it felt like a part of the story that often gets left behind. And actually, one thing that really struck me in reading about, you know, the patterns of accumulation in Sebiyam's family and among his wives was that, you know, in Ghanaian history, particularly history that is focused on the south, the after Nkrumah era is one that is that, you know, seems to be very dim. You know, there's at least. It's not just that there's not so much work on it. It's more a sense of, you know, that the archives get very fractured, at least the central government archives, and there's coups, so there's some instability in the government. And the general picture that one has and is of a Ghana that's going through a very difficult time after the kind of brilliance of the Nkrumah era. But actually, from the perspective of some of These wives, the 19, the late 60s and the 70s, and especially the kind of green revolution idea and Operation Future Self is, is a time of possibility. So I think that's something that's interesting about reading this book is thinking about Ghanaian periodization history of Ghana in a little bit more nuanced way. That was really helpful for me. So what is happening in kind of the 1970s when Northern Ghana, at least the way you tell it, maybe seems to have some momentum in terms of these development projects happening?
- [34:25]
A
Yeah, thank you for this. I'm, you know, I am super fascinated. But with, yeah, a period, I guess I'm just going to call the long 1970s. I talk a bit in the book about how people in Pasimpe and elsewhere and then even policymakers kind of have a hard time talking about that era without just calling it, like, Achan Pong's time or Busia's time. Right. Like, there were a lot of different governments in the late 1960s through the 1970s. And yet, and this is one of the things I found while talking to people and was really surprised at and, and I can talk a little bit about going back and checking and making sure I wasn't making stuff up year after year after year of like, thinking about this period as one in which a wide swath of northern Ghanaians remember it fondly. Right. Even as they recognize, like, oh, like the fertilizer was subsidized. Didn't always work. You had to wait, you know, you had to wait for the right buyers to come. It wasn't like it was this, you know, coherent development initiative that, that brought northern Ghana into some sort of, you know, new era of, of agricultural prosperity. It was, however, a period in which the national Government was focusing on northern Ghana as a place that it saw again as undeveloped. But instead of seeing it as sort of peripheral to the development project in the country, it became the center of this plan for agricultural modernization. And in the, in the scholarship that was written at the time, a lot of scholars focused quite understandably on these immense big rice estates that were rapacious, you know, often, often riven with, with class and ethnic differences, that ethnic struggles that resulted. I mean, Jack Goody has this, this famous sort of touchstone article about rice burning, about people burning the, the rice fields in protest to this sort of extractive rice plantations or rice estates. And yet in, when you just spoke to, you know, regular people, although a pretty wide range of people, like you know, just people I would meet in Tamale, I would always just ask about the 1970s, if they were old enough because they, I wanted to check like really everyone had fertilizer. Really like every, it wasn't just this like folly of a national program. No. Like there's a lot going on. Right. And so I, I like this idea as you bring up this idea of possibility because I don't, you know, there's really good work on agriculture now that, you know, makes it clearer than even it was at the time that these were not practices. This is not, you know, these green revolution technologies were not technologies that are, you know, long term sustainable. They're not even short term sustainable. Right. And yet the idea that it was just easy to farm. Right. Just easy to farm just became so central to people's memories and particularly I think in the shadow of the, of the neoliberal era. Right. And what, regardless of what you think of what happens with the subsidies and with the sort of pervasive use of, of green revolution inputs in the 70s and the 80s, there, the withdrawal of those subsidies and the, and the collapse of that system has a really, really long shadow in Ghana.
- [37:48]
B
Yeah. And I kind of wanted to, to come to, you know, your kind of reassessment of neoliberalism, which is very commonly framed as the rollback of the state. You just talked about the rollback of the subsidies, of the fertilizer subsidies. And what you're arguing when you get into that, you know, kind of final chapter of your book, the, the the 80s and 90s, is that there's not so much the rollback of the state happening, but actually even deeper entrenchment of a form of statecraft that has been going on throughout the, the 20th century. And we haven't really mentioned this term, but it's a subtitle of the book Hinterland Statecraft, or it's Rural Statecraft, the subtitle. But hinterland statecraft is really a term that, that. That you use to explore these dynamics. And I was interested in how you were thinking about historicizing neoliberalism in this way, because neoliberalism is sometimes everyone's favorite punching bag and, you know, a very much a topic of social science, but hasn't as yet really become a historian's topic.
- [38:56]
A
Yeah, thank you. And I, yeah, I think, you know, one thing that I didn't talk about, I was just sort of talking about the agricultural side of thinking about the 1970s. And one really, what I thought was just exciting about talking to people about the 1970s is thinking of a time in which local organizing around various schemes, right? It was this sort of paradoxical time in which it was incredibly easy to get fertilizer, but, like, no one had any money for a road, right? So people were just, you know, sending petitions to the government, like, hey, we got, you know, 25 people. Can you send out the, you know, the gritter? And, like, did this sort of, like, thinking about all this local organizing that was trying to turn the national interest in the north into something that would deliver these kind of local development goods that people had come to demand over the course of the Nkrumah era. And so one of the things that I realized about the neoliberal era and is I think I have a line in there somewhere, you know, hopefully not stolen from someone else about that. The rollback of the state actually took quite a bit of work on the part of state agents, because what happened for state agents is that they were just scrambling with all these new, you know, because what happened is, like, the, you know, government budgets get slashed at the same time that there's this whole raft of NGOs that come into northern Ghana thinking of it as this kind of development space. And so local officials are just trying to, like, cobble together every single tiny little village project that every, you know, international, national, local NGO wants to do and what these NGOs are asking for is, like, exactly what people have been doing in the 1970s. And in fact, what the Nkrumah government was asking for and what the colonial government was asking for, which is just like, can you get some people to show up and do some labor? That's going to be this signal of sort of local ownership of what becomes glossed as participation in this era. And so I think, you know, I have. I had sort of two insights about the neoliberal era that I hope come through in the book. So one is that by the time that non governmental organizations start doing village projects in northern Ghana en masse, there are people with decades of experience of organizing locally. Right. To whom these projects are not new and are in some ways just interchangeable. Right. It's like, okay, if you can't get ceta, you can get World Vision. If you can't get World Vision, get Oxfam and. But there's never enough of them. And so people are always scrambling to try and do this local organizing and attract NGOs or contest what NGOs are doing. I mean, it's not all this sort of consensual process, but it's not new. And then the other thing that I, I think is really important about putting the neoliberal era in the light of the 1970s, if you don't think of the 1970s as this period of absence, if you think of it as a period of vitality, then what the neoliberal era looks like is a real narrowing of the possibility of these kinds of projects. Right. No longer tied even rhetorically to a kind of centrality of northern Ghana or a hope for the future of northern Ghana. And this is what I mean by hinterland statecraft, this way in which regions that are conceived by governments as peripheral are not absent of statecraft. Right. But they are governed, or at least I would argue this is. Again, I'm generalizing, but I would argue that at least in northern, in the northern Ghanaian case, as explored through possum pay and I think hopefully translatable to other spaces, they are governed very particularly with this kind of cheap, substitutable, easily generalized kind of small scale project that is meant to stand for something much larger and yet rarely does. And I think the neoliberal era or this kind of, yeah, this engine that gets started in the nineteen, late nineteen eighties and the early nineteen nineties of, of project after project after project just creates a political economy where there is very, there's, there's very little else that someone can demand because they have done this local labor. And I don't. So, you know, it's both hopeful and a little and tragic. And I, I'm hoping that the book spurs some discussions, at least for me, with people who've been working in the last 30 or 40 years that can really help me see what has changed since then. Right. And help me see the kinds of possibilities that as I, you know, look to the Future from 1992, see as a, as a Pretty limited landscape.
- [43:34]
B
So the title of the book, Village Work, how did you come to that idea? I think it does, oh, it's going to be a terrible pun. A lot of work for you. But where does, where does that come from? And what do you think is kind of the closing idea that you would like to leave a listener with when they think about this title, Village Work,
- [44:02]
A
Quick aside. I remember being in a seminar once and I had written something and someone said, so I think this phrase is doing a lot of work for you. And I left that seminar like, yeah, great. And then, you know, a friend of mine pulled me aside and was like, that's not good. It's not good. If the, if the word is the phrase is doing the work for you, you gotta do the work, right? So I do see this title, you know, you gotta have a title, right? So I hope that the title is a package into which I can pour some variety of meanings from the book. And I also a conversation starter about what it means to work in and on and through something called a village. So the, the origin of it, I think, unless this is a story I tell myself, is that, you know, I had no title for many, many years, and it's not the title of my dissertation, but I was speaking to, looking through my notes about speaking to a group of development practitioners in northern Ghana who work contemporarily in Tamale, like people that I would had been kind of background interviewing just to see what the work was like, you know, now. And they were kind of outlining the kinds of development jobs that you could get in, in Ghana right now, right? Or in, in, in Tamale right now. And so you could be a policymaker, right? You could be an activist, you could be an analyst. And then there was this whole category says that. And then there's, you know, there's all this village work, right? Which is the actual, you know, from the developer lens, the work of going to a village, you know, any, any village, many villages, right? And trying to organize labor, trying to, you know, put up some sort of project at, well, or a school or, you know, et cetera. And it was, it kind of worked across agencies. It had become this kind of specialty, right? And so I, I, I thought about that and, and the reason I say I hope it's kind of a package is that as a phrase, I think that's perhaps its sort of least illustrative way of thinking about it. I hope the book brings up the way in which both the concept of the village and the unit of the Village as a really central way in which the state has been organized in Ghana is something that did not. Was not just authored by successive governments. Right. It was actually took a ton of work on the ground by people, residents of places like Pasant Pay, and also by local officials, local development workers, who. We're always navigating this. This divide between particularity and generalizability and trying to drum up something that they might call success. So I want to bring attention to the work of government that is happening at the local level, not just in villages, but to make villages central. Right. And then the other kind of work that, of course, I want to highlight in the book is the amount of actual physical labor that the kind of village development that the book chronicles over time is. Requires of people. Right. And the. One of the central kind of puzzles or meditations of the book is that it's a book about people who do labor. Right. It doesn't chronicle that many fights about communal labor because the engine that makes development projects keep coming is the success of these sort of amorphous, often ambiguous, often contentious calls for communal labor. And, and yet the work that people have done is really the. The way that the landscape of northern Ghana, at least the development landscape of northern Ghana, has been built over time.
- [47:43]
B
So village work, that's. That's where what we've talked about and what wraps up all of these ideas. And I think that it's possible that in this conversation, it may seem that there's so many different concepts that. That we've. We've. We've covered. But if you go into each chapter, to me, the. The concepts really become, you know, kind of crystallized when you go into each individual chapter. And I think it's a book that really profits from, you know, each. Each chapter is. Is really gives you a lot. So with these kind of big themes that we have going on in the background, each chapter really pulls them together and brings them out very vividly. So actually, as we were just talking about before we began this conversation. Congratulations, Alice. Associate Professor. So now that you've wrapped up this first monograph, what are your future projects that you're interested in working on?
- [48:46]
A
Well, thank you. Yes, it's been a good end to the year with the publication of the book and receiving tenure. Certainly I am a more carefree person than I certainly was six or seven months ago. So the first thing I want to say about new work is that I think it would be irresponsible of me to not acknowledge that I haven't gotten a lot of writing done. In the last year, the COVID teaching, the collapse of my childcare situation, the inability to go to Ghana. I think particularly for scholars who are working on their, you know, their first projects, this is a really, a really difficult time. And I want to just acknowledge that. And, and so in this time that I have, you know, I had plans to return to Ghana last summer and then this summer, both of which were scrapped. I've had some time to think about, you know, what I care about and what I like as I kind of, you know, move around in the secondary literature and in newspapers and things I can get from the U.S. and so the next project I'm working on, I find that I really, I really do care about how people navigate changing intellectual and social orders, particularly around government. I'm interested in the daily work of government. I continue to be interested in it. And so the next project is about looking at the late Cold War era, so thinking about the 1970s again and the early neoliberal era, so returning to this period to trace civil service workers, scholars, people in, in Ghana and from Ghana who navigated a diverse set of intellectual agendas, many of whom, you know, had scholarships in Russia and in East Germany, in Britain, in the US came back to Ghana in the, in the 70s and the 80s, and then navigated the, the tumultuous politics of actually implementing neoliberalism. So as you say, this is a period that is not often historicized and I'm really interested in, in doing so as more perhaps an intellectual history than this project is as well. I'm interested in knowledge production in and from Ghana. And then what's good about that is it corresponds to what I like, which is talking to people about their jobs a lot. And so, you know, I'm a boring person at the party that is like super fascinated that you're a medical biller. And I can ask you all of my questions about how the medical billing process works. So I love talking to people about their jobs and so I'm looking forward to starting up that research from oral historical aspects of that research from, from networks that came out of this book in Northern Ghana. And it'll probably also lead me to families because I also like talking to people about their families. So I'm hoping I'm going to give it some space to breathe, but I'm hoping that it, that some, some publications and some interesting conversations, more importantly come out of it.
- [51:58]
B
Sounds fantastic. I'm a super devotee of the 1970s too, so I'm, I'm really looking forward to hearing about how. How that work develops. Thank you so much for not only for taking the time to talk about village work with me over, you know, the summer, where we should all be relaxing, probably, and taking it easy, but also thank you for acknowledging, you know, how difficult this year has been for all of us in so many ways. And also in terms of being, you know, being academics, being humans, and for reiterating that the most important thing is really to focus on what we care about, you know, whatever that might be in this moment. So thanks so much, Alice, and I look forward to inviting you back to the New Books Network for the next project.
- [52:49]
A
Thank you so much. It's been lovely to talk to you. Elisa.