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Jeffrey Ahlman, "Ghana: A Political and Social History" (Zed Books, 2023)
00:41:36
An interview with Jeffrey Ahlman
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- [00:00]
A
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Over the last two decades, historians have steadily moved away from writing long duray national histories. Especially in the wake of the global history wave. National histories can seem decidedly 20th century. But what if you're asked to take up that task and you accept the challenge? Today, I'm discussing that question with a historian who has grappled with what it means to write a national history in 2024. My guest, Jeffrey Allman is here to discuss his new book, A Political and Social history. The book asks what it means and what it has meant to be Ghanaian over the past two centuries, arguing that the concept of the Ghanaian nation is very much a moving target. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Anisa Prosperedi. Today, as I just mentioned, my guest is Jeff Allman. Jeff is a professor of history and the chair of the African Studies program at Smith College. He focuses on the history of decolonization and nation building in mid century Ghana, with a special emphasis on Kwame Nkrumah. In some respects, the book that we are discussing is a culmination of his previous two works, Living with Nkrumah Nation State and Pan Africanism in Ghana and Kwame Nkrumah Visions of Liberation. Jeff, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:16]
C
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
- [02:18]
B
Yeah, I'm delighted to talk about this book. I think of it as kind of the third book in the trilogy, but we'll get to that. Introduce yourself a little bit to us. How did you become interested in the history of Ghana? And then tell us about the genesis of this particular project. Project.
- [02:35]
C
Thank you. So I'm a historian of Africa and specifically Ghana. I teach at Smith College, and I've been here for about 11 years now. My path to sort of studying Ghana was kind of circuitous and resulted from a failed dissertation project where I was actually looking at transnational connections, actually, between Ghana and Algeria that just for a variety of reasons, ended up unworkable. And I ended up staying in Ghana following this research project and developed deeper interest in sort of Ghanaian history more broadly and the history of decolonization in Ghana. And so what I thought was going to be this transnational project taking me from. From Ghana to Algeria and sort of across the Sahara, ended up just sort of supplanting me in Ghana for the last almost 20 years now. Yeah.
- [03:47]
B
And so how about this book in particular? Right. Because your previous two books have focused a lot on Kwame Nkrumah and his Ghana, in a sense, or his Gold coast and his Ghana. So when you were approached with this book, how did you think about what it might mean to step away from Nkrumah and to think about Ghana more broadly and over the course of a longer period of time?
- [04:14]
C
Yes. So the interesting thing about when I was approached with this book, it was actually the opposite. I was originally approached by the publisher to write a biography of Nkrumah, like one of the. A big biography of Nkrumah. And I didn't want to do that. And so the publisher and I, or the editor and I, we kept going back and forth about what type of projects might be of interest to them. And she suggested a project that fit into a series that Ivy Taurus, which was the originally intended publisher, had at the time called National Histories. And I was sort of in this period where I didn't really know what I wanted to work on because I was waiting on copy edits for my first book and just trying to figure out what to do. And I thought this might be an exciting thing to explore, just like, what does it mean to write a national history of Ghana? Particularly after I just finished this book where I was really trying to understand the way that Ghanaians interpreted the transnational aspects of Kwame Nkrumah's vision for Ghana, where it was really sort of complicated, this idea of National Histories themselves, where Nkrumah was really trying to get Ghanaians on board to think beyond the nation state in terms of their post colonial vision for the country. So what would it mean to write a national history? After I just sort of kind. They rejected, but sort of pushed back against that. So that really intrigued me in terms of writing this history and sort of drove the process all along.
- [06:07]
B
I want to come back to that question of kind of the national history paradigm. But you know, concretely, this is, this is a book that is mostly focused on the 19th and 20th centuries. And it's not a research monograph. Right. In the sense that it's not based, you know, on primary sources as much as it's a synthesis of lots of secondary sources. And there are primary sources, of course, that are part of it, but it's not setting out like a book that comes from a dissertation project that's really built on the backbone of primary sources. So I wanted to ask you how it was different to approach writing or preparing this monograph as opposed to a more primary source driven project.
- [06:50]
C
Yeah. So ever since I took on this project, so this has been almost seven years now, I really struggled to figure out how to explain like what it actually is. Sometimes when I try to explain what it, it is in terms of genre of historical writing, people like, so is it a synthetic work, like a textbook? Like. No, it's not that. It's really a book that I would want. If I had a student who is interested in doing a big project on Ghana. They sort of needed to get their head around like Ghanaian history more broadly. What would, what would I give them in terms of understanding the, the literature that's, that's really shaped African studies more broadly over the last 50 or so years and sort of how that is inflected into sort of the history of Ghana and the variety of primary sources that are available to them and sort of thinking through like, how do you construct a narrative out of this process? So what I ended up trying to do when I was explaining to people like what the project is, is I tried to encourage them to imagine like when they're a graduate student back in sort of that time where you're, when you don't realize it's like the best time of your graduate school experience where you just get a read and for your comprehensive exams and what would you do if you're back in that time with your understanding of the literature, but now having to go back and construct an actual narrative out of that literature while doing so with a variety of different primary source spaces that aren't talking to each other to create a general sort of coherent narrative of Ghanaian history over the last 200 plus years.
- [08:45]
B
It's very interesting that you say that because I really had that experience as I was reading of, oh, there's Meyer Forte, there's Anthony Hopkins, there's Polly Hill, there's, you know, there's Ibor Wilt. It's like there are those big books or names that kind of accompanied me, especially in the earlier stage, you know, of, of graduate school. And, and I did, I did see those touchstones kind of come up, you know, and, and, and that was comforting somehow to see them all together, see the gang back together again.
- [09:26]
C
Yeah. And I think when you're in sort of that graduate school experience, it's very overwhelming. These are people who are sort of foundational to the field, but you're just getting introduced to them. But coming back to them now, almost 15, 20 years later, it's really this process of, okay, so I, I know all these people in terms of, at least in terms of their work, sort of how they fit into the field, but I've also spent this past decade or so trying to teach that to undergraduates who don't care about who these people are and sort of what their contributions to the literature and what they care about is sort of how you construct narratives that are meaningful to them. And so trying to blend that together into like sort of hitting those touchstones in a way that like scholars will recognize and sort of see as important, but that for undergraduate readers or people just sort of coming to the history of Ghana in a new way, are going to see a sort of, a meaningful way to sort of wrap their head around the history of Ghana.
- [10:34]
B
Yeah, and you say that in the preface. I think that, you know, you wanted this to be a teachable history and I think you've. This really succeeded at this in the sense that having read it, I can attest that this is exactly the kind of book that you would give, you know, an advanced undergraduate student or a graduate student to, to get a lay of the land kind of conceptually in the literature, but also not to get kind of overwhelmed with the, with the small details in order to really stay at that level of having a sense of the, of the general picture. And then I just want to highlight what you said about the primary sources that you, you wanted to focus on using primary sources that were accessible to students so that it could be something that could help spark students own research, I think.
- [11:17]
C
Yeah. And so for most of the chapters that are in the Book, the primary source base that is sort of serves as their sort of scaffolding, I guess, are designed that you can get them through a good academic library or through a variety of sort of databases. There's still sort of paywalls that sort of limits accessibility in certain ways. But the goal was that hopefully, like an instructor, if they're in some way sort of breaking the book apart and like they're say they're focusing on World War II, they could go to the Endangered Archives Program Archive 4, the Tamale Archive, where there's a lot of documents that are sort of explaining the experiences of northern Ghanaian soldiers, northern Gold coast soldiers or ex servicemen that they could incorporate into their teaching with sort of that aspect of the book that's sort of the goal of the book in many ways.
- [12:25]
B
And I think that's important to underscore for the people listening that this really lends itself to several levels of teaching. Not just the kind of not knowing about Ghana's history, but also how you write history, how you put it together, how you connect primary and secondary sources. I think it's easy to open up, like you say, and. And to think through that with students. So I wanted to ask you questions about the technical aspect of writing this project because I was struck in the preface. You said that at home your family had endured the mess that you created, sprawled across the floor, encircled with books, a spiral notebook and a mechanical pen, pencil. And I just gotta say, it's pretty old school. Spiral notebook and a mechanical pencil. Can you. I was struck by this. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, the. The messiness of the process in the beginning for you?
- [13:12]
C
Well, in terms of that, like, it really is literal messiness. I can't write on a computer, so everything that I've written has been written by hand in a spiral notebook and then transcribed, usually one to two paragraphs at a time. And a lot of the reason is like just the little blinking thing. The word document is scary. It's like, why aren't you typing? Why aren't you typing? Why aren't you typing? So I found the. The paper and pencil aspect of it just a more liberating way to actually write in terms of sort of giving me the space to think on the spot. The circle on the floor is a literal thing as well. I've always written laying down on the floor with a circle of things around me. As I've aged, my back dislikes that more and more, but it's still working for the time being. But really, I think it's just sort of part of the writing process. Like every writer has to find like what works for them and, and just sort of go with it. And that's going to change over time. As we were talking before we got, we came online is like, I also don't really write with an outline. I write in terms of. There are three or four sort of main points I want to get across in the chapter and I see like, how the sources will take me there. So it's really this, like, this process that I've developed over the, over the years. And like when I talk to students about it, I really do talk about when it's like, this is what works for me. Something else might work different for you. And like we were talking to students who have really come up in a educational model that's like you need a, a detailed paragraph by paragraph outline in order to, to write a proper paper. So like, this is this other method that's completely antithetical to, that has worked for me. So don't feel like you're wedded to like what your previous instructors have told you is like the way to do it. Test out a whole variety of different ways to write and see what works for you. It could be a mixture of the two extremes.
- [15:38]
B
I think it's just totally radical to write lying down, to write with a pencil. I could never do it ever. But I find this really just. I thought that was just such an interesting thing to highlight. Right. And just to make that point, like you're saying everyone has their own approach to this kind of alchemy that is, that is writing.
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C
But I occasionally do get in trouble for the, for the mess.
- [16:05]
B
Well, let's get back to the, to the book. I wanted to think through this question which I raised in the introduction, which you mentioned earlier, about the national history paradigm. I think it's probably pretty clear to most people listening to us that that is a paradigm that at the minimum we can say has been interrogated over the last 20 years, if not more. And so when you were, you know, were approaching this, it's one thing to write a national history of, and maybe this is to be debated, but of a country that has borders that have been pretty well established for several centuries. It's another thing to write a national history of a place that was part of an empire that then becomes independent. So I think that when you are thinking through this question about writing this national history of Ghana, you really tried to still have a kind of overriding argument about your approach to a national history. Paradigm. So I wanted to ask you about that, to talk through a little bit. The idea of having this kind of larger argument even though the container is in question.
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C
Yeah, I think the container is in question is a great way to frame it.
- [17:25]
B
Is.
- [17:28]
C
The series that is originally supposed to be in really was like these histories, like Argentina, Morocco and that type of thing. And it's very possible that there's some utility to sort of that type of structure. But when I kept thinking about like, what this would mean for Ghana, it just didn't make sense in my mind because the idea of what Ghana is, or the Gold coast before that is, has really, since the idea, sort of come out, extremely unstable. And I don't mean like in a political sense, but I mean, it's a sense of like, who. Who is Ghanaian. Right. This is something that people in Ghana have been debating for a very, very long time. And it's a way in which, like, there's sort of the colonial borders aspect of it. What we. When we think of sort of people who are sort of straddling different borders, sort of thinking in the lines, sort of Paul Nugent's sort of work on the Ghana Togo border, or K. Skinner's work on the Ganatogo border, how do they fit within sort of ideas of Ghana? Their conceptions of what it means to be Ghanaian or Togolese could be very different than those people in Accra or in Kumasi or Homily, for instance, how do we think about this in terms of different types of occupations and sort of the integration of different groups of people in terms of the Ghanaian economy, like whether or not or how they are understood as Ghanaian or understand themselves as Ghanaians of integration into the Ghanaian economy and different religious communities as well. And then to overlay that, when you think about sort of the politics of being Ghanaian at different points in Ghanaian history, sort of thinking through the extremes of like Nkrumah's Pan Africanism, where he's at least stating publicly that he's. He has this vision of like a United States of Africa where Ghana is in some ways going to be integrated, if not subsumed into this bigger project to combat what he saw as neocolonialism coming out of decolonization and the Cold War. And so we have these varying levels about what it means to be Ghanaian in these different contexts that really provide the sort of very unstable aspect, like what it means to be Ghanaian over time and even sort of bring in like the. The pre independence period there, which people before that were doing similar things where they're trying to connect, for a variety of reasons with, with the empire as a way to sort of make claims against the empires, to show, like we are, we as gold coasters are integrated into this bigger project. That means you have responsibilities to us. So you have different sort of ways in which people are deploying forms of identity that really make the container, as you said it, or stated, unstable over time. And I really wanted to sort of explore that over the past two or so centuries.
- [21:09]
B
It's interesting to read the book because you feel this tension as you're reading. It's present. And I think that that's really productive because you can kind of. It helps you, as you're reading, not be complacent about the nation as container, you know, because it's. It's vivid that. That this is always kind of up for debate, that. That this is something contested, unstable, as you say. So I, as I was reading, I, you know, the subtitle is Ghana A Social and Political History or Political and Social History. But Jeff, there's a lot of economics in here and I love it, but there's a lot about trade. And it's most vivid to me when I saw chapter three, I believe, which is a chapter on cocoa in the first half of the 20th century mostly. And that is really fascinating to me to write a national history or history that's, that's, that's in this national frame. And yet one chapter is really about a commodity. And that to me was kind of where you tried, where you were working with reconciling these. These different questions. So I'm interested in how you came to the conclusion that this book would be incomplete if you didn't have a chapter that talked about Coco.
- [22:32]
C
Yeah, I mean, as was it Fred Sarpong's song talks about like, coco is life. Right. And in the Gold coast and in Ghana, everything sort of flows through cocoa in many ways, good or bad. And so, like, there's the economic dimension of cocoa. I mean, it is. I mean, for a long time it was Ghana's primary export commodity, the wealth of the Gold coast colony. And the first half of the 20th century was really tied to the international price of cocoa. Like. So there's that dimension of, like, cocoa is really sort of funding the Gold coast and Ghanaian economy for a very long time. But as I try to show in that chat, it goes beyond that for many people in the early 20th century, Gold coast and Ghana, where Coco provides them a means of social mobility that allows them sort of the space to shape who they are in the context of this changing political environment. So the idea of sort of building houses, right, to expressing one's for lack of a better middle class identity. And this commercializing Ghana like this is more than a just sort of I am now wealthy or relatively wealthy. This is a way of imagining oneself in this changing context. Koku allows access to marriage and divorce, as Ginama and Victoria Tashajan talk about and in their book. And so Koko is a really great lens into understanding the changing sort of social dimensions of Gold coast and Ghanaian life in the first half of the 20th century and beyond. It's also going back to sort of thinking about the national histories aspect of it. It's also a great lens to exploring path of exclusion as well. Like thinking through who is allowed this access to social mobility and the historical context of this, like thinking through the various roles of migrant labor that come to really shape the. The work of cocoa production, whether it's sort of the histories of labor extraction from. From northern Ghana or from away from Togoland who come to sort of really work these, these cocoa farms. So I found that cocoa is a.
- [25:43]
A
Really.
- [25:46]
C
Great way of sort of thinking through essentially the social mobility in this changing context of the first half of the 20th century.
- [25:53]
B
Well, I just thought it was so interesting because a big part of the kind of early global history boom was fueled by these commodity histories, right, to like undo the nation and just focus on famously cotton, sugar. And so I thought it was really interesting to include in a book that's ostensibly, you know, about the history of a nation, the commodity into the paradigm of the national history, rather than using the commodity to blow up the paradigm of the national history. So thinking about the decisions that you made as you were approaching this, if you were writing this in a more colonially oriented way, you might feature a lot more British colonial administrators in this narrative. And one thing I found striking was how few there are. For example, who is this governor from the 1920s, this Canadian governor who's supposed to be one of the good guys in the colonial administration story, if they're. To the extent that there are any at all. He always seems to loom so large in the history of interwar Ghana or Gold coast. And here he's barely there. And I just use this as a little example. But I wondered how you thought about which individuals were the ones that you were going to take time to spotlight in this text and which you were going to pull the limelight away from.
- [27:22]
C
Yeah, I think it goes back to what really sort of drove my interest When I was writing Living with Chroma is previous to this, what really interests me is how are people experiencing political and social change over. Over a period of time? And so it's really the role of personal experiences that I find interesting. And for Living Criminalism, it was how did people negotiate, interpret, and in some ways make their own this idea of Nkrumahism as they approached the CPP and the Nkrumah State during the 1950s and 1960s. And for that book, it was really like, how are people using the language of the state in order to get raises and that type of thing? How does it shape their work life? And as I saw, I was like, that's a more interesting historical question for me. It might not be the right historical question more broadly for everyone else, but for me, what is really interesting about is just like, how are people experiencing this? And I've tried to bring that over into this book. And so as each of the chapters are structured, structured, they're structured around personal community experiences with a variety of different sort of social phenomena or political phenomenon. Excuse me. And when sort of, I guess, quote unquote, major political leaders come into view, it's done in a way to contextualize what is going on. So we understand the experiences of the individuals and communities that we. That I wanted to sort of highlight. So the sort of. The big figures are there to really sort of serve a role of understanding the community perspective as opposed to the other way around. They're not ideally, they're not driving the narrative.
- [29:42]
B
I think that's another respect in which this book is really a departure from. From other attempts to do something that might on the surface look similar, but in practice isn't at all returning to this question of the decisions that you were making as you were thinking about this project I'm interested in talking about when you chose to begin. That's one of my very favorite questions. In general, why does a project start when it does so? Okay, it's pretty clear that the 20th century is going to loom large in your story and some parts of the 19th century, but, you know, the first chapter also is going as far back as the trans Saharan trade, as the old Ghana empire and Mali empire. So. And of course it doesn't linger there for too long, but it includes that as part of the story. So how did you balance where you felt it was right to begin your approach of thinking through the history of identity and belonging in Gold coast and Ghana, and then balance that also with the constraints of having the space that you had and the remit that you had.
- [31:01]
C
I mean, in many ways, I lean quite heavily on Richard Wright's Black Power in terms of contextualizing that where would be a good place to start? Like in Black Power, Richard Wright is. So he's writing this in 1953 when he's in the Gold coast for a couple of months, sort of experiencing like the heyday of Nkrumah and the cpp, like he's at the motion of destiny speech. And so he. He writes on his experiences in the Gold Coast. And it's a very complicated book in the sense that he has quite nuanced, if, yeah, quite nuanced sort of understandings of the Gold coast at this time and ways that don't sort of fit into a really sort of triumphalist narrative of decolonization that leads people to, like W.E. dubois, to essentially denounce the book when it comes out. But one of the things that Wright does in this, in his book is he tries to understand the history of the Gold coast and he takes it back to so called silent trade and all that type of stuff to understand like, the interactions between sort of West African traders and sort of other traders. And so for me, what I found, this is really interesting sort of way to think about this, is that Wright's talking to a popular imagination about like, what the Gold coast in West Africa couldn't be here. But he's also doing so in a way that sort of thinks through the idea of the Gold coast as actually being a thing. And so he's taking it back to this moment where it really is sort of this transition of trade from the Sahara to the Atlantic, sort of this shifting of perspective in terms of commercial value and sort of general connections to the world at large. And I began to sort of think this through. I critique actually his analysis for a variety of ways and the opening chapter. But for me, I think it really did sort of set the stage. Like, okay, so the Gold coast as we think of it today, or Ghana as we think of it today, really is a creation of the Atlantic trade because it shifted the perspective of where the world, for lack of a better term, the world's wealth, for lack of better term, was going to come from. Prior to that, it was coming from the Sahara. So. So the geographic perspective of people at the time were looking inland towards the Sahara as sort of the sources of their wealth. With the arrival of Europeans on the Atlantic coast, this provides competition to the Sahara and eventually overtakes the Sahara. One of the things I really tried to emphasize Here is like this isn't something that happened overnight. This is something that happened over a very, very long timeframe. It was a gradual, very gradual process, but it did sort of shift the ways in which people in this sort of region that we call the Gold coast or Ghana today understood the relation to the outside world. And that begins to sort of set the plant the seed for how we begin to sort of think about the Gold coast as a coherent political and geographic entity over time. So that's sort of why I, I start there because I really sort of see like the introduction of the Atlantic trade as important as shaping a very unstable idea of what the Gold coast is, but really sort of putting that in as a coherent, a relatively coherent entity.
- [35:21]
B
So that's for the beginning. And then what about the periodization choice for where to stop?
- [35:28]
C
Yeah, so the book stops with the Fourth Republic in 1992, or for all intents and purposes, it starts the, in the Fourth Republic, the beginning of the Fourth Republic. And really it just felt like that is there was a place to really sort of break because for me it felt like there's a whole different book in terms of understanding the 30 plus years now of the Fourth Republic that maybe it's sort of a sequel type book. But just thinking through like what democratization means in the, in the post Cold War world, when many of the ways in which Ghanaians sort of understood them, understood the international community, understood the state, really began to sort of shift and embrace sort of the Fourth Republic as a constitutional entity in ways that have been extremely sort of celebrated internationally, but have also led to sort of deep inequality within the country itself. And to me it just felt like that's a book that maybe is a sequel type book as opposed to something to add on to this book.
- [36:51]
B
Well, sequel is a perfect transition. It helps bring me to my final question for you, which is now that the kind of in My Mind Ghana trilogy of Jeffrey Allman is closed here, what are you thinking about in terms of future project, your future research interest?
- [37:12]
C
About six or seven years ago, I created in my history department, introduction to the major course Thinking Through History and Historical Methodology for history majors here. And that really has made me think quite deeply about what it means to, to do history and sort of the politics of history as a discipline. So that's pushed me to a project where I want to understand sort of W.E.B. du Bois place and in history and African studies more broadly. So I've been developing over the last year a project sort of thinking through African history through a perspective of Du Bois himself. Like, how does he deal with Africa in the context of all these emerging disciplines of the early 20th century? So he's obviously in contact with historians, he's trained historian, but he's also sort of credited as one of the founders of sociology and anthropology. And how does that come to shape his historical perspective and how we understand the historical profession today and African studies today more broadly as sort of the AHA is trying to rectify its own sort of racist past. It's sort of come to embrace Du Bois in ways that are good but also kind of unsettling in some sense, sort of trying to understand unsettling in the way that. That he is almost sort of tokenized. So I really wanted to sort of dive into like his legacy within sort of how we understand, like these disciplines of history and then the way that African Studies is multi or interdisciplinary in its own ways. They come together to shape our understandings of Africa.
- [39:15]
B
That sounds so interesting. Well, I will be here ready for when that book comes out to have a future conversation with you about that project. That really sounds so fascinating. Jeff, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me about about your new book and I wish you the best for your future research endeavors.
- [39:39]
C
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- [40:21]
B
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