Creation Story
The story of the Ghana NRC begins during the historic 2000 campaign season, when the New Patriotic Party (NPP; one of Ghana’s two dominant political parties) calls for a truth and reconciliation commission. The NPP manifesto, “Agenda for Positive Change,” described national reconciliation as a way to secure Ghana’s political progress. “The festering sores within the body politic must be healed. This is necessary so that the nation can look confidently and boldly into the future.” As described in this manifesto, the national reconciliation exercise would “consider all surviving cases of human rights abuse and award appropriate compensation for the victims.” Seized properties would be restored, Ghanaians living in exile would be granted unconditional amnesty to return and tell their stories, and persons imprisoned for “politically-related offenses” would be released.3
When the NPP triumphed at the ballot box in 2000, the dream of a Ghanaian TRC became a reality. The newly elected president, John Agyekum Kufuor, publicly championed a Ghanaian truth commission as an antidote to the “culture of silence” that had been created when “people were killed, properties were confiscated … some destroyed … and people were denied their say.”4 This would be, ultimately, a collective renewal project. Meeting with the Western Regional House of Chiefs, Kufuor described the commission as an “exercise to recapture the country’s lost soul,” and a way for the country to regain the “spirit of showmanship and wealth,” tarnished by the violence of the past.5 Missing in this government rhetoric about the NRC as a site of healing was any recognition that this process might exacerbate, not alleviate political tension in Ghana.
After all, Ghana’s successful transition from military rule to electoral democracy had occurred almost a decade prior (1992). The newly-elected government’s call for the NRC was itself an assertion that the earlier democratic transition engineered by the rival National Democratic Congress (NDC) had been inadequate. J. J. Rawlings, the military leader who had twice seized control of the state apparatus, exercised authoritarian leadership for more than a decade, and then—under international and domestic pressure—transformed himself into a democrat, had overseen Ghana’s return to constitutional rule. The constitution which returned Ghana to democracy also included an indemnity clause that prohibited the prosecution of persons who participated in the past decade’s military government at all levels. Nobody in Ghana could be “held liable either jointly or severally, for any act or omission during the [previous] administration.”6 The excesses of the period of military rule could only be addressed informally and voluntarily. Although Rawlings himself had proffered apologies, these previous mea culpas were of “dubious validity and international acceptance,”7 and generally, “low key … opaque, piecemeal and selective.”8
Given this context, it was not surprising that former president Rawlings and his National Democratic Congress (NDC) party cried foul when the NRC bill arrived in Parliament.9 The NRC, they claimed, was a “Nail Rawlings Commission” designed to attack the legacy of former president Rawlings, and the legitimacy and prospects of his party.10 However, the TRC format was well suited for Ghana’s context both because of what it promised and what it could not possibly deliver. The NPP’s call for a truth commission—a form utilized in response to atrocities like South African apartheid and Guatemalan civil war—was a bold assertion that atrocities occurred on Ghanaian soil and that justice had not yet been done. At the same time, the NPP’s call was pragmatic. The accountability that the NRC could provide was limited. No one would be sent to jail because of the NRC or even forced to part with money or property. Reconciliation was the central imperative; truth would be pursued only to the extent that it supported this agenda. President Kufuor made the outcomes clear: persons found to be perpetrators would not face material consequences; they would just have to live with their consciences.11 And so Ghana’s reconciliation experiment remained within the boundaries of the country’s fragile political equilibrium.
In the public’s perception, the NRC could not step out of the shadow of its partisan beginnings.12 This was partially because the terms of the 1992 transition made it politically taboo to publicly confront the violence of the Rawlings years, but other aspects of the commission’s genesis also fueled the sense that national reconciliation could only be a partisan project. The NPP claimed the NRC as a way to burnish its party legacy. “The NPP solemnly promised the people of Ghana that it would undertake a soul-searching investigation of those human rights violations and abuses if granted the privilege of leading the nation,” piously intoned the government’s white paper in response to the NRC. “This pledge is not surprising, since the NPP is committed to the promotion of the Rule of Law, respect for human rights, and eradication of the culture of impunity.”13 If national reconciliation was evidence of the NPP’s human rights credibility, how could a politically polarized nation rally around it?
Moreover, the version of the NRC bill that President Kufuor presented to the Ghanaian Parliament was based on the premise that human rights violations occurred only under military regimes, so only military regimes would be scrutinized. A more expansive time frame would have been more “in keeping with the spirit of the commission’s goal” and have rendered the bill “more conciliatory and inclusive.”14 Immediately, the NDC parliamentarians grumbled that their leadership and political tradition were being unfairly targeted. This temporal restriction made it appear that the NRC was just vulgar politics in a more virtuous form, and the NDC ministers walked out en masse when asked to vote on this version of the NRC bill.15 Ghanaian democracy building and human rights organizations saved the day by officially requesting an expanded temporal mandate. “The credibility of the Commission to a large extent depends on public perception of its independence,” they explained.16 If the NRC was to transcend accusations of partisan bias, it could not, from the outset, proclaim that only particular regimes were guilty of violence. The final version of the National Reconciliation Commission Act (Act 611) included a broad temporal mandate that reviewed the majority of the national history from independence in 1957 through the reestablishment of political democracy in 1993.17
Ghanaian civil-society organizations also challenged President Kufuor’s proposal to appoint all the commissioners himself. The parliamentary committee proposed that both the Council of the State and the Parliament should have a hand in appointing commissioners. This advice was ignored; President Kufuor himself appointed all nine commissioners. The people chosen as National Reconciliation commissioners represented the legal community, academia, traditional leaders, religious leaders, trade unions, and the military.18 Three of the nine were women. While the commissioners held diverse regional and ethnic affiliations, their unilateral appointment suggested that the much-ballyhooed transparency and accountability of the NRC went only so far.19
One of the central arguments of this study is that Ghana’s NRC generated a breathtaking collection of citizen testimonies about the national past, present, and future. What should be clear from the above section is that before the NRC was a haven for citizen voice, it was a catalyst for partisan political wrangling. This context, in which reviewing historical violence was also a matter of partisan competition, influenced all that followed—from how citizen stories were composed and shared to the commissioners’ reactions and recommendations.
Similarly, the nuts and bolts of the NRC’s institutional practice, what I call the NRC bureaucracy, also influenced the expression and transmission of citizen voices. The choice of who was hired as a statement taker, how the room was arranged for the public hearings, which stories were valorized and called for hearings and which were dismissed as irrelevant—all of these shape the contents of this archive. Layers of translation, transmission, and transcription mediate the space between petitioners and their audiences. The NRC bureaucracy was a web that constrained and colored the stories that Ghanaians shared. And yet, the voices of the Ghanaian people shone through. With deliberation and intention, the so-called victims of Ghanaian history came forward with stories about the distressing past and the expected future. The NRC bureaucracy publicized the existence and purpose of the NRC, but ultimately individual citizens had to come forward and join in the “healing process.”20 This was no easy task.
Bringing