Historian reading...
Amenumey, D. E. K., Ghana: A Concise History from Pre-Colonial Times to the 20th Century (Accra: Woeli Publishing Services, 2011)
Back in October 2018, I had the opportunity to present at the first meeting of the Classical Association of Ghana. This was before the pandemic, so I didn’t even think about presenting online, and anyway, it was a wonderful reason to visit Ghana for the first time.
The University of Ghana is located in a beautiful campus, on the hills outside Accra, and the conference was a great chance to meet colleagues from across Africa, Europe and the USA. Although I don’t usually refer to myself as a Classicist (I’ll probably write a post at some point on why these sorts of labels matter), as an historian whose work covers the ancient world, there were plenty of papers to interest me. I also loved the way discussions involved students and talked about issues of teaching at the heart of research.
This post, though, is mainly about something I brought back with me. Among its many amenities, the University of Ghana has a seriously good book shop - the sort with shelves that disappear out of view, divided by subject and full of surprises.
It was a pleasure to spend half an hour there, in the middle of a full conference schedule, and I squeezed my finds into a full suitcase for the journey home. Among them was Ghana: A Concise History by D. E. K. Amenumey. I wanted to know more about Ghana and I liked that this book spends a decent amount of time on the period we might call the Middle Ages (for me, roughly 300-1500 CE, but there will probably be some posts about that, as well!).
I was not disappointed. I won’t recount the history of Ghana here. If you want that, I strongly recommend starting with this book. It is clear, readable and comes with a good follow-up reading list. There are also a good number of very helpful maps. I would like to spend some time on what I thought made this such a successful study and what I personally got out of it, as somebody who went in with little knowledge of modern Ghana and not very much about earlier West African history.
There is sometimes a tendency, when I read reviews of history books, to see things like use of references or level of detail on a scale from good to bad. The problem is that this is completely subjective. As a researcher, looking to verify every point of fact for an argument I might find it ‘good’ to have a heavily referenced, extremely careful work that explains exactly how much we know about everything, who disagrees, why, what the latest ideas are, etc., etc., etc., (you can’t really have too many etc.s here…). As a more general reader or if I am coming to a subject for the first time, I might find it ‘good’ to have a clear, concise narrative which focuses on the most important and widely agreed facts and which tells the story engagingly. It is nearly impossible to do both.
Rather than ‘good’ or ‘bad’ books, on a scale of detail, therefore, I find it much more helpful to think about what a book is for. In this case, as the author states in the introduction, the aim is to offer an up-to-date introduction to Ghanaian history, and to make sense of that history from earliest times to the very recent past.
The ability to pull together a story across a long span of time is impressive in this book. So is the clear presentation of geographical and linguistic zones which have formed the persistent fracture lines and cohesion points in Ghana’s complex history. As somebody who writes ‘big history’ and struggles with how schematic to be, this was a great example of a complex story being made simple enough to follow without becoming uselessly vague.
This is definitely a history of Ghana with colonialism left in, but it is not a book about the colonisation and colonial rule of Ghana. The colonial phase takes on some of its real proportions when you see how little space it takes up in this book. Those were important chapters, but they were also only a fragment of a much larger story. Some of the most interesting chapters for me were those dealing with the earlier interactions between people in the area that is now Ghana and European travellers. With the benefit of hindsight, Amenumey draws together the threads of increasing European dominance, as local systems of government were chipped away, but he also offers real insight into why those decisions by local and European actors made sense at the time, in the context of other political rivalries and the traditions of government in the area.
One issue for me, in this book, was the focus on the nation state of Ghana, within its modern borders. As the author notes, these borders are very recent and paid little attention when they were created to the geography or cultures they cut through. Sometimes, Amenumey lets himself go beyond the borders of modern Ghana to show how events there were part of different historical groupings, but sometimes it feels as if the reader’s view is blocked by a wall of absence: what was going on over the border that did not yet exist while such-and-such was happening? Telling us, however, might have broken the promise of the author to write a concise history of Ghana!
Perhaps the biggest problem with Ghana: A Concise History is getting hold of it. It is not widely available online and is not stocked by very many libraries in the UK, the US or Africa (at least according to Worldcat, which is not perfect but the best resource I’ve found for locating books). This is a real issue. I enjoyed reading about the history of Ghana by a Ghanaian scholar. I appreciated Amenumey’s knowledge, cultural familiarity and perspective, in a way that we often don’t think twice about when reading the history of France by French historians, Britain by British historians, US history by US historians, etc. It is true that foreigners may have different but equally valuable insights, but in the case of global majority/global south countries, especially in Africa, it is also true that it is too easy ONLY to read books by foreigners from global minority/global south countries.
I don’t have a good solution to this problem. I was very fortunate to be able to pick up my copy from the source, and if you are in Accra, I definitely recommend the a bookshop visit. If not, perhaps ask your local library (university, school or public) if they can get hold of a copy, or your local bookshop. It may not work, but if we all ask more, perhaps we’ll see libraries and bookstores expanding their catalogues.