Before Me
about this blog: b4-me is a collection of inspiration and research for a story that I'm working on.
about me: I am a Chicago based creative. I lead Chicago Reading Africa-
photo by Lawrence Agyei
Brilliant contemporary riff on the west African studio photography styles
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“I wrote “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in Haiti. It was dammed up in me, and I wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks. I wish that I could...”
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I am no longer seduced by your poetries.
I’ll call this progress.
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“More and more I feel creativity is a commitment to what you love. When the demons of doubt take over or whenever the stress of life and work bog you...”
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“As a class, you and I and our friends who comprise the elite are incredibly blind. We refuse to see what we do not want to see. That is why we have...”
Doing some research on Ghanaians in Germany (for a short story) and came across this from Boris Nieswand:
In Germany Ghanaians experience marginalisation in different ways. Coming to Germany means becoming ‘socially coloured’. Most of the Ghanaians in Berlin have problems finding a job fitting their qualification and are forced to take on work which they would not take on in Ghana. Moreover, the asylum procedure through which a large number of the Ghanaians in Germany have gone has produced “spoiled identities” (Goffman 1986). Finally, the language skills of the Ghanaian migrants are devalued. To put it briefly, I would like to argue that we can only understand the “life-world” of migrants if we acknowledge the “simultaneous incorporation” (Glick Schiller/ Fouron 1999: 344) of migrants into two societies and two social status reference systems. The migrants are perceived as socially successful, modern and wealthy in the Ghanaian context and at the same time as backward, poor and marginalized in the German one.
The gaining of status in one context is achieved by a loss of status in the other. This is what I would like to call the ‘paradox of migration’: living in two status systems with contradictory attributions of prestige at the same time, a condition which is deeply rooted in the process of migration itself. Because the site of status production is not the site of consumption, there is a structural incentive to maintain integration in both systems. Local migrants’ organisations with a transnational orientation are of crucial importance for processing the ‘paradox of migration’.
For greater context, click here.
and her family in a way that even I don’t understand. This hunger for them, a biological tug to return, scares me—a hunger that goes unrequited, since I cannot go back into their arms, their wombs, or their laps.
A few key events highlighted in this video (do watch the full video for a more complete story):
1966 - National Liberation Council (shown in the video ~16min are Lt. Gen. J.A. Ankrah, J.W.K. Harlley, and Lt. Gen. E.K. Kotoka) overthrows Nkrumah government. In the video, they deny any Western involvement in the coup.
1966 - after negotiating with the NLC, Kofi A. Busia returns, from exile in Europe, to Ghana
1969 - elections are held. Busia representing the Progressive Party and Komla Gbedema (formerly of the Convention People’s Party) representing the National Alliance of Liberals are the primary contenders for Prime Minister. Busia wins.
1972 - unsatisfied with Ghana’s stagnant economic situation (& changes in military leadership), Lt. Col. Ignatius K. Acheampong leads a coup against the Busia administration.
1975 - the Supreme Military Council replaces Acheampong with Lt. Gen. Fred W.K. Akuffo
1979 - Flt. Lt. Jerry J. Rawlings is successful in his second coup attempt against the SMC. (He was jailed after the first attempt, the second attempt occurred within a month of the first). He forms the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council and they conduct some “housecleaning” to try to end the corruption within government and private business.
1979 - elections are held. Hilla Limann, of the People’s National Party (related to the CPP), wins.
1981 - unsatisfied with Ghana’s stagnant economic situation (sounds familiar huh?), Rawlings overthrows the Limann administration. He forms the Provisional National Defense Council and acts as its chairman, leading the nation.
1992 - Rawlings retires from the military, legalizes political parties, and forms the National Democratic Congress
So much good has come from modernity: freedoms of the mind, and of the stomach. It is hard to look back at older ways of being with nostalgia. Things were hard in the old days. And yet, with the modern came some brutal social forms, one of which was the scientific linkage of blood to belonging. Caste and bondage has a long history, a brutal past that leaks into the uncomfortable present. Those older social oppressions are now married to the technology of the modern State, whose capacity to measure and count, to conduct surveillance and police its borders, is far more efficient than that of the pre-modern State. It is this linkage between older ideas and new technologies that makes migration of the past so different from migration of the present.
“Immigration,” as a concept, is born in the era of imperialism. “Immigrants,” in this context, are not just those who cross boundaries, but those who pointedly enter the advanced industrial states from lands of dusky skin. Immigration is always already about mobile capital and immobile race. Colonial rulers went were they willed, and they even moved people from one colony to another; but the colonized were not to be fully welcome in the heartlands of the empire, in Europe, in the United States. If they came, they were allowed in for their labor, not for their lives. Those Indian traders in Africa would become foreigners, not just outsiders. Racism would overwhelm older forms of xenophobia.
Places in Ghana - Rex Cinema, Accra
Rex, one of the few cinemas in Ghana, used to be the “it” back in the “*colo” days. The Rex Cinema is located in the central Makola district of the capitol city.
*“Colo” refers to Colonial period in Ghana’s history
Currently Reading: Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial #Accra
From the publishers: Making the Town is the social history of a West African urban community, the Ga people of Accra, Ghana, from the 1860s to the 1920s. Its focus is town politics, and it shows how the Ga townspeople actively shaped Accras transition from pre-colonial city-state to colonial port city.
Any chance that someone else out there is also reading this (or sections of it) that would like to chat about it? Message me.
If you’re checking for moving images from peri-Independence #Ghana, take a look but be warned the framing of questions and generalizations from the interviewer and respondents may cause eye-rolling.
