‘If You Trouble a Hungry Snake, You Will Force It to Bite You’: Rethinking Postcolonial African Archival Pessimism, Worker Discontent, and Petition Writing in Ghana, 1957–66

Abstract

My aim is twofold. Highlighting the value and importance of African archives in the construction of postcolonial African histories, I first reject what I call ‘postcolonial African archival pessimism’: the argument that postcolonial African archives are too disorganized or ill-kept to be of much, if any, value in configuring postcolonial African histories. Second, primarily through petition and complaint letters, I examine how Ghanaian workers protested racist and abusive workplace environments, government malfeasance, stagnating wages, and unfair dismissals in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana. These archival gems illuminate how workers made claims to and performances of citizenship and reminded the state of their importance, politically and practically, to building the Ghanaian project. From Ghanaian and British archives, I seek to complement histories that highlight the centrality of African workers — through their letters and feet — in articulating the contradictions and aspirations of postcolonial African states.

Researching post-independence Africa in regional archives: possibilities and limits in Benin, Cabo Verde, Ghana and Congo-Brazzaville

“…While the need to survey the potential of African archives was formulated as early as 1960 in Philip Curtin’s classic article, historians have assumed, in the absence of a thorough, updated survey of Africa’s documentary repositories, that archival sources for the period after independence are likely to be few, ‘poorly maintained and difficult to use’ (Ellis 2002: 13). As we will show, there are good reasons to challenge what Nana Osei-Opare (2021: 63–4) recently called ‘postcolonial African archival pessimism’. We endeavour to contribute to the creation of a ‘burgeoning school’ engaging with postcolonial archives, and this article will demonstrate their importance at the regional level 4…”