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      Making the NRC Archive

      Truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) may not immediately extract justice, peace, or reconciliation from the brokenness of the past, but they always and everywhere produce records of human suffering. Narratives of human rights violation are being gathered all over the world—from Canada to Liberia to East Timor—but after the tears have been shed and the speeches made, what becomes of the stories that have been amassed? Ghana’s National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) functioned as a public history-writing project. A diverse cross section of the national population presented, analyzed, and interpreted Ghana’s history of political violence in full earshot of the world. The consequent archive is a revelation, but this does not make it an uncomplicated, transparent, or free site where all Ghanaians had their say. The contentious birth of the NRC in the first years of the twenty-first century is the firmest foundation from which to understand the complexity of the stories that Ghanaians shared. The tensions that marked the NRC’s genesis and functioning are echoed in its archive.

      When I began reading the NRC file folders at the University of Ghana’s Balme Library, the contents were immediately arresting. In these stories, marked by colloquialism, analogy, and innuendo, Ghanaian people held forth. At first, I read these documents as rich primary sources in which Africans were “speaking for themselves” about the past.¹ Six months later, after reading one-third of the NRC’s 4,240 petitions, I had come to a slightly different conclusion. These records were more profitably read as histories: complex, deliberate, and artful representations of Ghana’s past. These citizen stories are not mirrors to the past; they are fabrications reflecting the hand of the authors, forged within a particular season and deliberately crafted to illuminate particular aspects of Ghana’s march through the twentieth century. The term “fabrication,” as used here, is not a slight on the veracity or accuracy of the archive’s contents. Its Latin root, faber, gestures toward artisans and describes the work of constructing with one’s own hands—utilizing sweat and skill to create. Citizen participation in the NRC occurred on these terms; Ghanaians were making histories, deliberately crafting versions of the past that might serve.

      For a process that was supposed to locate the truth about political violence in Ghana, the NRC archive’s most striking revelation is the impossibility of establishing a unitary narrative about the past’s turbulence. Between the citizen petitions, public hearings, NRC staff legal opinions, and news media reports, there are different images and understanding of human rights abuse in Ghanaian history. What happened to particular populations during different political regimes and under diverse leaders? When did state violence rise to the level of human rights abuse? How might we assess and compare the human impact of different policies? In responding to these questions, Ghanaians produced a multitude of accounts that, when juxtaposed, make it plain that the country’s political journey must be written as a history of difference.

      The contents of the NRC archive include letters, photographs, land-use maps, funeral programs, dismissal letters, and other information that petitioners submitted as corroborating evidence. Witnesses to violence, who were often neighbors, family or friends, also offered supporting statements. Each file also includes documents created by the NRC staff (legal opinions, investigation reports, etc.) pertinent to the case file. There are video and audio records of the public hearings as well as considerable national media coverage. In reading all these documents together, my goal was not to ascertain the veracity or fallacy of any of these accounts, but instead to place them into a dialogue with each other and with other narratives and ways of knowing Ghana’s past. To this end, I spoke with a limited number of NRC employees, including commissioners, the executive secretary, and the head of the psychological unit. I spoke with members of the sponsoring government and Ghanaian politicians, as well as with nongovernmental organizations. I compared the content within the NRC stories with documents about political violence stored in the Ghanaian National Archives in Accra and Cape Coast.

      Describing the NRC’s diverse petitions, testimonies, videos, reportage, investigations, and reports as an archive speaks to the complexity of the commission’s relationship to Ghanaian history. Recording the past is only part of the TRC mission. These commissions endeavor to work with the past: to smooth out the rough edges, perform resolution, and create a platform for a future of peace, stability, and prosperity. Recognizing that these commissions pursue both the past and the future, Annelies Verdoolaege describes the South Africa “TRC Archive” in the Foucaultian sense—as a site where power is expressed. Both remembering and forgetting are part of the TRC’s work, these documents seek to establish the truth (i.e. “what can and cannot be said”) about historical violence.² Similarly, the Ghana NRC archive is a site imbricated within state power. The sponsoring Ghanaian government shaped both the NRC’s practice and its records. How human rights abuse was defined and classified, which stories were publicly shared, how these documents were preserved and publicized—all of these were shaped by the government-appointed NRC bureaucracy. And yet, Ghanaian citizens themselves also shaped this archive. Their stories were strategic, intentional and often pushed beyond the limits set by the NRC officials. In substance and contour, the NRC archive reflects this bureaucratic web. The voices of the self-proclaimed survivors of history emerge opaquely, in a mediated form. Reading these documents together reveals multiple points of disagreement and rupture; the tensions among individual accountings, and between Ghana’s citizen stories and the NRC bureaucracy, are apparent. Inasmuch as the NRC archive reflects state power, it is also a site of citizen struggle and must be navigated as such. In telling the story of Ghana’s national reconciliation

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