Introduction

The quotidian is an area of scholarship that is receiving increasing attention in African Studies (See for instance Ato Quayson’s Oxford Street (2014); Jeffery Paller’s Democracy in Ghana: Everyday Politics in Urban Africa (2019); or the “Everyday Sociality” section of the Routledge Handbook of African Literature (2019) edited by Moradewun Adejunmobi and Carli Coetzee). This turn is refreshing, as it lends credence to the notion that Africa is a normal place that can afford to be ordinary, or even boring. While this thought should, ideally, be banal and not revolutionary, the unnecessarily high number of fantastic extremes that still frame African stories in mainstream conversations – both within and outside Africa – make any interest in the everyday helpful. And in making connections to the commonplace, I want to show how these articles reflect the ever-increasing complexity of research into African Studies. This collection of articles forms the latest issue of the innovative virtual editions released by the African Studies Review, which, beyond providing new attention and access to important scholarship, also place previously published works in direct conversation with each other. Because these articles were initially published in different years, their appearance together provides an insightful re-representation; such collections are also enhanced by the thematic umbrella under which they appear.

            While the connections to the quotidian are sometimes implicit, the obvious overarching theme for this edition is Ghana. This quickly invites an analysis of connections through a national lens – something that is not always straightforward. Revolving a set of articles around a country also provides a snapshot of a few scholarly modes through which Ghana has been parsed. Even though some of the research focuses on the 1980s and the first decade of the 2000s, all the essays were published between 2011 and 2018 - this immediately implies that an introduction reflecting on the concerns risks not being informed by enough temporal distancing. Nevertheless, it is still helpful to appreciate the context in which these articles first appeared. In this period, Ghana traversed the 60th year of political independence, suffered a pronounced energy crisis (the fourth major event in three decades), continued to incorporate China into its development agenda, switched ruling governments for the third time under the vibrant Fourth Republic, successfully navigated through the Ebola crisis, mourned the death of a sitting president, and increased the pace of harnessing Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as a developmental and socio-cultural framework. Some of these concerns form the basis of research in the articles, which are all of high quality.

            A quick perusal reveals Accra to be the place of choice for most of the research; where there is work done outside the capital, the focus tends to be on rural areas. This should not lead to the assumption that Ghana is dichotomized into Accra and rural areas, however – as with any exercise that involves selection and suppression, it is clear that the selectors were hard-pressed to leave out equally superb research work that focused on other towns and cities. And even as the articles relate with the quotidian, the direct concerns cut across different subjects, resulting in a diverse yield. They are a healthy mix of research stemming from Sociology, History, Political Science, Communication, Public Health, and Anthropology; there are overlapping and sometimes contrasting approaches and methodologies. This multi-disciplinary volume thus mirrors most regular journal editions of ASR. Even though the different years of publication allow for a chronological trajectory, I find it useful to tease out geographical, methodological, and thematic concerns that underline the strengths of these works.

            Erin Metz McDonnell and Gary Alan Fine present an analysis of results taken from a seven-point scale survey of students from the University of Ghana’s Political Science department in “Pride and Shame in Ghana: Collective Memory and Nationalism among Elite Students.” Even though many students at the University of Ghana are neither elite, nor even the “future elite” as the authors suggest, the findings underline the importance of considering the significant youthful demographic that makes up both Ghana and Africa. McDonnell and Fine posit that collective memories of pride and shame contribute to a sense of citizenship and belonging when these feelings are shared among a larger group of people. As if anticipating other articles in this collection, McDonnell and Fine agree that their research could be complemented by detailed ethnographic studies, as these provide a clearer window into an engagement with a specific issue. Ethnographic studies also tend to draw out the quotidian, because of the interaction between the researcher and the subjects.

In another Accra-based article “Informal Institutions and Personal Rule in Urban Ghana,” Jeffery Paller employs two ethnographic case studies in different Accra slums to demonstrate the importance of understanding informal relations as complementary to recognized political power. Of course, his findings should not mean that slums encourage informal relations while formal relations thrive in middle to upper class spaces. Regardless of setting, political clientelism is a significant aspect of Ghanaian political life and Paller identifies friendship, capitalist entrepreneurship, family and religion as its framing devices. His study examines daily life, using the then ruling NDC primaries in the Odododiodio constituency, and then a public screening of the 2012 European Champions League final. Odododiodio is usually seen as the barometer of elections in the Fourth Republic: as the saying goes, whoever wins Odododiodio wins the national election. The Champions League final, on the other hand, is always big news in a football-crazy nation like Ghana; in this case, Michael Essien, one of Ghana’s most celebrated footballers, had his team in the final, thus spicing the match with local interest. In both case studies, “big men” fuse their cultural capital with knowledge of the everyday to their advantage.

Stephanie Rupp contextualizes perceptions of Ghanaian citizens regarding energy and oil within Ghana-China relations, and effectively connects a historical engagement with power cuts to contemporary anxieties over both foreign and local misuse of national resources in “Ghana, China, and the Politics of Energy.”  Considering the ubiquitous Chinese presence in Ghana, it seems to many that China has become a part of Ghanaian daily life. With some of the research done when Ghana had just discovered oil and was leveraging it for national development, Rupp’s work helps to understand the complexities that come with being an “oil-rich” country. Especially today, when impressive numbers behind the oil economy do not synchronize with the non-oil sector, Rupp’s point about oil not positively affecting most Ghanaians resonates. It is, however, worth pointing out that Rupp or the peer reviewers missed the significance of a username from the notorious Ghanaweb comments section being a combination of vulgar terms from Akan and Ga. It is also interesting to revisit the negative reportage of the China-Ghana relationship by the Daily Guide newspaper, which leans toward the NPP government that was the main opposition party at the time of publication; this same newspaper would later run a series of positive stories between 2017 and 2019, after Sinohydro and the Ghana government entered into a big trade deal. Regardless of how perspectives change depending on the political party in power, Rupp is right to call attention to the role of China in national development. This article made important interventions as part of the ASR forum on Africa and China.

The period between 2013 and 2016 was characterized by dumsor, which in Akan languages means “off-on,” and is the local term for load-shedding. Power cuts became part of the Ghanaian everyday during this period. In “Underpowered: Rolling blackouts in Africa disproportionately hurt the poor,” Kobina Aidoo and Ryan C. Briggs perform a qualitative analysis of the energy sector, as they interpret data concerning the distribution of power cuts in Accra during the last official load-shedding exercise. They posit that in dealing with the inconvenience, authorities manipulated the load-shedding schedule to ensure blackouts affected lower class suburbs more than affluent residential areas. While this situation appears common knowledge in Ghana – as Rupp suggests – this masterful interpretation of data is an important backing to perceptions about government pandering. Aidoo and Briggs impute this situation to interlocking economic and political factors that make governments favor places that they feel have more political clout, over less influential areas. Ultimately, their research successfully questions the connection between infrastructure and development, the link between infrastructure and outcomes that follow from the infrastructure, and easy implications that are occasioned by an increase in access to basic amenities. History tells us that manipulating the load-shedding schedule was not a successful political strategy. This is evidenced by a casual perusal of the electoral results of 2016, which indicate that the NDC government consistently lost in affluent areas in Accra.

Beth Rabinowitz further underlines the pitfalls of focusing on urban spaces, by proposing rural areas as being decisive to Ghana’s political development in “More than Elections: Rural Support and Regime Stability in Africa.”According to her, Jerry John Rawlings achieved the twin aims of weathering the turbulent 1980s as military leader and transitioning to democracy by pivoting from urban centers to prioritizing rural areas in Ghana. This strategy allowed Rawlings to survive harsh economic challenges and dangerous political attacks, as he channeled resources into creating a new region out of the Upper Region, boosted representation from hitherto deprived areas, and generally increased the pace of development in rural areas. Rabinowitz also compares Rawlings to Nkrumah with regard to how the two leaders balanced their engagement with the Cold War. She ultimately claims that Rawlings was more successful because he drew on rural support. This contention is provocative, not least because Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples’ Party was noted for connecting with the lower classes and the rural areas in the run-up to independence. Drawing on both contemporary and historical research, she forcefully makes a case for the rural demographic as critical to economic, social, and political development.

Away from politics, but still in rural Ghana, Marcus D. Watson, and Evans A. Atuick in “Cell Phones and Alienation among Bulsa of Ghana’s Upper East Region: “The Call Calls You Away” examine the role of digital technology in a poor area of the Upper East Region by complicating the assumption that ICT automatically empowers its users. Employing Gibson’s affordance theory, they engage with dozens of Bulsa to find that, while cell phones ensure nearness to people far away, paradoxically, these devices create distances between people who are physically near to each other. While these findings appear as a matter of fact, the physical nature of interaction among the Bulsa underline the importance of responding to prevailing impressions that position technological advancement as always positive. Ultimately, the Bulsa use the phones in their own ways to their own ends. Watson and Atuick do avoid falling into an either/or trap by debunking the equally simplistic notion that the cell phone is domesticated in this setting. Rather, an intricate interplay between embodiment and ICT allows the researchers to posit a two-way form of influence that questions what development means, given that western intention does not always fit with Ghanaian context. The use of everyday devices in ordinary contexts underlines changing cultural codes.

In “Expressions of Masculinity and Femininity in Husbands’ Care of Wives with Cancer in Accra,” which is another ethnographic study which was originally published in an ASR forum on Women and Gender in Africa, Deborah Atobrah and Akosua Adomako Ampofo are interested in how husbands respond to their spouses’ engagement with terminal illness in Accra. Focusing on material, practical, and emotional categories of care provided by the husbands, these researchers posit that the ideals of dominant masculinity are not easily negotiated and are, therefore, largely compromised when men care for wives diagnosed with cancer. Using ordinary activities of five couples provides an in-depth personal scope that allows the authors to explore gender, health, and class considerations within the interplay between tradition and modernity in Accra. As the case studies traverse class lines, it is important to note the debilitating effect on a country of terminal diseases, particularly when we consider that the immediate past Vice President Paa Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur died on the way to hospital, while his successor Mahamudu Bawumia had to be flown to the United Kingdom for medical care.

            In the final article in this virtual collection which is “Cooperation and Co-Existence Between Farmers and Herders in the Midst of Violent Farmer-Herder Conflicts in Ghana,” Kaderi Noagah Bukari, Papa Sow, and Jürgen Scheffran transition to peace in the midst of conflict. Reports of the feuds between the Fulani and host farmers in Ghana are unfortunately commonplace in pockets of Ghana. The writers’ response to this national scar is to go deeper than the headlines, or even existing research, to understand modes of cooperation between the two parties. Their mixed methods research revolved around towns in the Ashanti and Northern Regions and involved almost 300 participants, leading to a comprehensive picture of the complexities that underline the relationship between the Fulani and host farmers. These two parties negotiate relations and strategize together to solve common problems. The theory of everyday peace and the concept of the cultural neighborhood allow these scholars to argue that the two parties cooperate and build peace through the benefits of interdependence.

Even if these eight articles do not deliberately set out to promote the quotidian, I find such a reading to be insightful. With emphasis on Ghana’s relationship with China in the context of energy, handling the 2014-2015 energy crisis, the role of rural areas in preserving governance, the impact of phones in the Upper East region, spousal relationships that battle with cancer, student views of pride and shame, political clientelism, and peaceful aspects of the relationship between nomads and their hosts, all of these articles can be placed along a complex continuum characterized by the ordinary. Furthermore, it must be reiterated that making this edition open-access, even for a temporary period, is particularly helpful to Africa-based scholars, many of whom do not regularly have access to such high-quality material. Considering the cutting-edge research being produced in ASR on a regular basis, it is important to maintain this tradition of releasing virtual editions to enrich the research being done in order to present the continent in a more complex and sustained manner to wider audiences.

Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang

University of Ghana

References

Adejunmobi, Moradewun, and Carli Coetzee, editors. Routledge Handbook of African Literature. London: Routledge, 2019.

Quayson, Ato. Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Paller, Jeffrey W. Democracy in Ghana: Everyday Politics in Urban Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.