Panel 1: The Archival Diaspora of African Liberation: In Search of Ghana’s Postcolonial Past

Moderator: Jean Allman – Professor of History, The Africa Institute, Sharjah, UAE and J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities and Professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, USA

Much has been written over the past three decades about the colonial archive, particularly as a technology for reproducing state power. But what of the anti-colonial archive, the archive that documents the challenges to colonial state structures, the struggles to disassemble them? As Ghana’s postcolonial past so vividly illustrates, coups and counter-coups, structural adjustment, and economic precarity have wreaked havoc on the making of postcolonial archives in Africa. And yet there are fragments of documentation dispersed around the globe that constitute a vast transnational, postcolonial archive of African liberation. Featuring archivists, activists, and academics, this panel explores the archival diaspora through which current and future generations will reconstruct Ghana’s postcolonial past – from the early years of Nkrumah through the close of the Rawlings’ Presidency in 2001.