Writing the New Nation in a West African Borderland: Ablɔɖe Safui (the Key to Freedom) by Holiday Komedja

ISBN-13: 9780197266526 / Angielski / Twarda / 2020 / 352 str.

Kate Skinner (Senior Lecturer in the His;Wilson Yayoh (Founding Director of the C

Opis

This book rethinks the history of decolonisation and new nationhood in the Ghana-Togo borderlands, and speaks to an increasingly urgent debate on the production of knowledge about Africa. It does this through the close reading, translation and analysis of a unique primary source - a newspaper entitled Ablode(meaning 'the Key to Freedom'). Ablode was initiated and sustained by a shoemaker named Holiday V. K. Komedja, and written almost entirely in his mother-tongue, Eve. Whilst many studies of nationalism have highlighted the importance of anti-colonial newspapers, this volume is unique - in its intensive focus on a single African-language newspaper, in providing translations of entire issues, and in following the story of decolonisation into the era of new nationhood. The manner in which Komedja recounted and explained political events challenges existing scholarly accounts of the rise and fall of Togo's first independent government, and of ethnic nationalisms and local loyalties within new nation-states. In re-reading the history of the Ghana-Togo borderlands through the pages of Ablode, this volume demonstrates that intensive inter-disciplinary engagement with specific African-language texts is indispensable to the meaningful study of Africa and Africans in global history.

O autorze

Kate Skinner has a longstanding interest in issues of decolonisation and new nationhood in Africa. Her first book, The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland (Cambridge University Press, 2015) examined the connections between literacy, formal education and networks of political activism in the Ghana-Togo borderlands. This gave rise to a broader interest in African-authored and African-language texts such as Ablɔɖe, which engaged in the work of nation-building. Kate is now working on West Africa's first coup d'état (which occurred in Togo in 1963) and on gender activism and the reform of family law in post-colonial Ghana. Wilson Yayoh is the Founding Director of the Centre for African and International Studies at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. His research addresses colonial policy in Africa, ethnicity and national identities, historical perspectives on democratisation in Africa, and Africa in world affairs. Articles by Wilson have been published in the International Journal of Research in the Humanities, the Contemporary Journal of African Studies, the Ibadan Journal of Humanistic Studies, the Journal of History and Cultures, the Ghana Social Science Journal, the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, and the Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana. He is now working on a monograph entitled Contested Territory: Governing Colonial and Post-Colonial Ewedome (Ghana), c. 1922 to 1974.