Evidence of Things Unseen: Ghanaian Women’s Struggle for Independence and Freedom
By Dr Nicole Gipson
Throughout history, women have achieved great things – in the dark. The all-encompassing importance of men has cast a shadow on her name. This invisibility was exacerbated in the heady days of African anti-colonial struggles for independence and the challenging task of nation-building. At the First All-African People’s Conference held in Accra, Ghana, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, made the following declaration on December 8, 1958:
There have been great Empires on this African Continent, and when we are all free again, our African Personality will once again add its full quota to the sum of man’s knowledge and culture… The African Personality in liberty and freedom will have the chance to find its free expression and make its particular contribution to the totality of culture and civilisation. [1]
African women played key roles in Ghana’s anti-colonial struggle. They too comprised this way of being in the world, this decolonial identity, given its complete expression through the “African personality”. African women’s grassroots activism was an essential component of the revolutions that led to this “decade of African independence.” However, as we will see, for Ghanaian women activists independence was not freedom. Ghanaian women’s activism in the anti-colonial struggle was a grassroots movement comprised of businesswomen, women with a strong sense of civic duty, and women driven by political ambition. We know from the scholarship that these women working on the ground and with local communities during the late 1940s through the diarchic period (1951 -1957) [2] were: the market women’s groups, the voluntary, nonstate actors in civil society groups, and the women’s wing of Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP). [3] The purpose of this blog entry is to shed light on who some of these women were and their contribution to Ghanaian independence and the project of nation-building. Fortunately, several twenty-first century scholars of Ghanaian history have produced a body of literature which aims at writing these women back into history. [4]
Market Women
Adwoa Opong’s dissertation chapter entitled “Women and the ‘Making’ of and Independent Ghana, 1950 to 1957” provides us with a clear picture of who these market women were and their vital role in mobilising local resources and people for Ghanaian decolonization. Before providing more details about their specific relationship with Nkrumah, she contextualized these women in a broader historical framework of the Pan-African movements that were gaining momentum throughout the continent, even at the local level. For example, we learn that in Nigeria, this same class of market women in Nigeria were vital in garnering popular and local support for the Nigerian National Democratic Party and its leadership. [5] Why was this local connection so vital to the nationalist goal for independence? A triangulation of sources from the local press, an interview from Lucy Anin (the youngest member of Parliament appointed in 1960) and CLR James’ Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, provides a short description of these women. [6]
Gold Coast market women were primarily fishmongers, farmers, and food supply traders who were deeply engaged in the Ghanaian boycotts and riots which occurred in 1948. It was during these days of intense struggle that the Big Six: Kwame Nkrumah, William Ofori-Atta, J. B. Danquah, Ako Adjei, Obetsebi Lamptey, and Edward Akufo Addo would mobilize all the forces at their disposal, towards the larger post-colonial struggle and its nationalistic goals. One of these vital resources was the uneducated, illiterate group of market women mostly from the Accra and Central markets who used their complex networks of trade and distribution to disseminate information, coordinate strategic advantages, communicate vital information, and spread political ideologies of an anti-colonial movement whose time had come. [7] These market women would also wield their immense power and wealth, working at the grassroots level for Nkrumah to “organise rallies, fundraisers, and provide material support for the party.” [8] Nkrumah understood the importance of these market women’s contributions and maintained close ties to them keeping them in the loop of political invitations and events once he came to power.
Women and Nationalist Struggles
Opong relies on a wide palette of sources from nationalist movements for independence from across Africa from such countries as Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, and Guinea who, like the Gold Coast women, “were at the forefront of the anti-colonial protests and agitations.”[9] There is ample scholarship which documents the women who worked within the CPP, building the nation from the grassroots up. Some of those women were Mrs. Alice Appiah of Senchi, Mrs. Leticia Quaye, Madam Ama Nkrumah and Sophie Doku. [10] Unfortunately, major players like Sophie Doku, Margaret Martei, Mabel Dove Danquah, Hannah Kudjoe, Susanna Al-Hassan, and Annie Jiagge do not have life stories to add to the current body of scholarship, simply because they were not written. All we can ascertain from the remnants of available sources is that these women participated in “the decolonization process, formulating a discourse of nation-building through the creation of alliances across the African continent, Europe, and the United States and using international forums to negotiate the socioeconomic status of women at home.” [11] One explanation for the absence of these life stories seems to be linked to the Ghanaian cultural convention of women not publishing their own life stories, to the wilful destruction of existing records at the end of the Nkrumah regime.[12] LaRay Denzer reported that “West African women nationalists have refrained from offering extensive published accounts of their careers and philosophies.” [13]
Mabel Dove Danquah in The West African Review, 1954
Women’s Groups
As for women’s groups, they were also vital to the early years of the nation’s move towards independence. There are two prominent women’s voluntary organisations which are of particular interest in understanding the trajectory of female empowerment during the late colonial and diarchic periods. The National Federation of Gold Coast Women (NFGCW, 1953 – 1957) headed by Evelyn Amarteifio, and the Ghana’s Women’s League (GWL, 1953 – 1960) under Hannah Kudjoe. My focus on these two particular groups is motivated by two factors. The first is that the leadership choices of these two leaders’ organizations provide a window into the condition of female leadership under the fledgling Nkrumah regime. The second is that the primary sources become sparser and the autonomy of women’s groups more precarious as the new nation-state sought to absorb and consolidate all women’s groups. Kudjoe’s meeting with Nkrumah in 1947, her support of the “Big Six” (1948), her founding of the Committee Youth Organisation (CYO), her work as propaganda secretary for the CPP (1951), and her foundation of the All-African Women’s League (later the GWL in 1960) are all well-documented. There has also been substantial archival research during this same period on the genesis of Amarteifio’s NFGCW and its role in women’s empowerment at home and abroad. For example, Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch follows these two women’s trajectories in “Women’s International Alliances in an Emergent Ghana,” by analysing the federation’s internationalism and its willingness to work within the nation-building strategies of the Nkrumah regime. Her study is demonstrative of “the diverse and conscious ways in which African women sought to achieve their own objectives through engagements with the Ghanaian state and international groups.” [14] Additionally, Jean Allman’s “The Disappearing of Hannah Kudjoe: Nationalism, Feminism and the Tyrannies of History” brings the textual silence on Hannah’s life during and after the Nkrumah years into sharp relief. [15]
To conclude, African market women, women activists, and women groups’ leadership are emerging from the shadowy rim of their particular past, due to efforts of dedicated scholars. This growing body of evidence is helping to close the agnotological fissures in African women’s history.
[1] Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File: All African people’s conference 1958.pdf,” Wikimedia Commons, pp. 1-12. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:All_African_people%27s_conference_1958.pdf&oldid=789101351 (accessed December 7, 2023), 4.; See also: Conference Resolution On Imperialism And Colonialism; and All-African People’s Conference News Bulletin, Vol. I, No. 4 (Accra: 1959), pp. 1-2.
[2] The period of diarchy corresponds to a time following the elections of 1951 which brought Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) to a power-sharing arrangement with the British from 1951 to 1957. Ghana became independent in 1957.
[3] Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch, “Women’s International Alliances in an Emergent Ghana,” Journal of West African History 4, no. 1 (2018`0: 27-56, https://doi.org/ 10.14321/jwestafrihist.4.1.0027, 16.; Adwoa K Opong, “Rewriting Women into Ghanaian History 1950 to 1966” (dissertation, 2012).; Adwoa Kwakyewaa Opong, “All That is Meant by Citizenship: Women, Social Work and Development in Ghana, 1945-1970s.” (2020).
[4] Jean Allman, “The Disappearing of Hannah Kudjoe: Nationalism, Feminism, and the Tyrannies of History,” Journal of Women’s History 21, no 3 (2009): 13 -35, https://doi.org/ 10.1353/jowh.0.0096, 16.
[5] Opong, “Rewriting Women into Ghanaian History”,18. See also: The Market Women of Lomé.
[6] C.L.R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (London: Alison and Busby, 1977), 55 -56. 131.; For other major works on Ghanaian nationalism see also: Dennis Austin, Politics in Ghana, 1946-1960. (London: Oxford University Press, 1964.); and George Padmore, The Gold Coast Revolution: The Struggle of an African People from Slavery to Freedom. (London: Dennis Dobson Publisher, 1953).
[7] Opong, “Rewriting Women into Ghanaian History”, 40.; CLR James, 55.; Ms. Lucy Anin, Personal Interview, West Leon, 11 June 2010.
[8] Opong, “Rewriting Women into Ghanaian History”, 41.
[9] Ibid., 15.
[10] Opong, “Rewriting Women into Ghanaian History”.; Takyiwaa Manuh, “Women and Their Organizations during the Convention People’s Party Period,” essay, in The Ghana Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Kwasi Konadu and Clifford C. Campbell (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 285–91.; Mansah Prah, Chasing Illusions and Realising Visions: Reflections on Ghana’s Feminist Experience (Dakar, Senegal: Codesria, 2003).
[11] Sackeyfio-Lenoch, “Women’s international alliances in an emergent Ghana,” 29.
[12] Allman, 18.
[13] LaRay Denzer, ed., Constance Agatha Cummings-John: Memoirs of a Krio Leader (Ibadan, Nigeria: Sam Bookman, 1995), xvii.
[14] Sackeyfio-Lenoch, “Women’s International Alliances in an Emergent Ghana,” 27. See also: Rose Miyatsu, “Tracking the History of Women’s Welfare Work in Ghana,” Department of History, November 1, 2020, https://history.wustl.edu/news/tracking-history-women%E2%80%99s-welfare-work-ghana.
[15] Allman, “The Disappearing of Hannah Kudjoe.” For more information on civil society organizations see also: Maame AA, Gyekye-Jandoh, and Seidu M. Alidu, “Civil society and democratic governance in Ghana: emerging roles and challenges,” Contemporary Journal of African Studies 4, no. 1 (2016): 1-27.