Petitioning and Ghana's National Reconciliation Commission: Good Citizens,Bad Citizens,and Performing the Moral Economy

Abstract

The 2002–4 National Reconciliation Commission in Ghana sought to reflect upon the country's tumultuous post-independence history. The truth commission received thousands of statements and documents about the lived experiences of Ghanaians during periods of authoritarian rule. This rich and largely unutilized archive is particularly valuable because the holdings of the national archives for these periods are fragmentary. This article will demonstrate that the petitions contained within the National Reconciliation Commission archive represented an active attempt by Ghanaians themselves to reconstitute and reassert a specific moral economy. When read as a genre, these petitions constructed and reconstructed two types of Ghanaians – good citizens and bad citizens – each associated with specific actions, behaviours, and attitudes. When viewed in their totality these petitions represent an articulation of a moral economy which criticized authoritarian rule and attempted to build the foundations of a fair and democratic society.

On 5 September 2002, Edward Yeboah Abrokwah appeared before the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) in Accra, Ghana. His oral submission was short and succinct. In 1968 Abrokwah began working for the police, initially stationed with the Regional Mobile Force in Koforidua. In April 1980, however, he was dismissed without reason. As his dismissal was part of the Huppenbauer Committee of Enquiry Into Police Force Disturbances, introduced by the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) in 1979, he had no right to appeal. ‘I should be compensated by the police force for this abuse of my basic human rights’, he told the interviewer, ‘I feel very bitter about this wrongful dismissal because 2 of my children died as I found it difficult to look after them due to my difficult financial situation’. ¹

A close reading of submissions like Abrokwah's reveals how Ghanaians made their own ‘truth’ within the NRC. Abrokwah's submission did not simply contain a dry account of events. It made a very specific claim, for compensation, and put forward a number of carefully selected pieces of evidence. Abrokwah stated his dismissal was not only a breach of his human rights but that it caused significant hardship for himself and his family. To support this claim he brought with him eight previous petitions, some of which he had kept for over 20 years, demonstrating his long-term dedication to the issue. This specific evidence was not requested directly by NRC investigators, it was brought by Abrokwah himself. Petitioners like Abrokwah defined for themselves what ‘truth’ they had experienced and what societal changes were required to make amends.

This article argues that the petitions held in Ghana's NRC show historians how Ghanaian people themselves were intimately involved in the production and reproduction of moral economies. By ‘moral economy’, I refer to E. P. Thompson's conception of ‘a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community’. ² John Lonsdale's seminal study of moral economies during the Mau Mau rebellion in colonial Kenya forcefully applied this concept within an African context. As Lonsdale explained, ‘British conquest’ required Kikuyu ‘to thrash out again the old issues raised by their society's unequal moral economy’. This influenced developing conflicts over what it meant to be Kikuyu: ‘[t]o debate civic virtue was to define ethnic identity’. ³ Johanna Siméant has cautioned against the ‘unconstrained’ use of the term ‘moral economy’, arguing that analyses which use the term without referencing ‘an economic ethos or … the reinvention of tradition’ risk ‘destroy[ing] the concept’. Remaining aware of this risk, this article will demonstrate that petitioners to the NRC consistently emphasized the economic dimensions of their claims, both specifically in terms of what they requested from the Ghanaian government and more broadly in how they outlined what they believed should be the ‘proper economic functions of several parties’ within Ghanaian society. ⁴

By looking at a number of different petitions, including historical petitions resubmitted to the NRC, patterns begin to emerge as specific forms of evidence appear over and over again. This repetition helps reveal the actions, behaviours and attitudes that petitioners believed distinguished good citizens from bad citizens within their moral economy. Good citizens were those who attempted to uphold their social obligations. They looked after their families, acquired property and accumulated wealth legitimately, and were loyal Ghanaian nationalists. Bad citizens were those who prevented others from upholding their social obligations through violence, theft and arbitrary confinement. They prioritized their own individual well-being over the well-being of their communities and fellow Ghanaian citizens. This reflected longer-term debates on the meaning of citizenship in Ghana – Jennifer Hart, for example, has highlighted how discussions of who ‘good’ and ‘bad citizens’ were became particularly acute during the economic decline of the 1970s and 1980s. ⁵ This moral economy did not exist independently of the petitioners but was actively reconstituted and reasserted through the social experiences they recounted. Through the NRC, Ghanaians themselves defined the qualities and boundaries of citizenship in Ghana.

To facilitate this analysis, this article will focus on petitions as a genre of texts. As Karin Barber stated, ‘[t]he conventions of a genre are tools or templates for giving specific forms to utterance.… The producer of a text operates in the expectation that the receiver will identify the genre and in turn bring the right kind of expectations to bear on it’. ⁶ While no two petitions were exactly the same and while the author maintained creative latitude, by conforming to the genre of the petition, these texts are, in Barber's terms, ‘reflexive:’ they ‘may criticise social forms or confirm and consolidate them’. ⁷ By mediating their claims through a petition, Ghanaians were entering into a form of entextualization that was well practised by the late twentieth century, and which had specific ‘devices’ which both the writer and receiver would expect to see. ⁸ By reading multiple petitions crafted by the same individuals – some of which date back years or even decades before the NRC was convened, historians are given a glimpse into which devices changed and which devices remained stable over time. As Luise White suggested, ‘reading evidence for its generic qualities, for the formulaic elements with which a good and thus credible story is told, reveals a level of meaning and significance that interpreting evidence as personal testimony would not do’. ⁹ Identifying certain devices which came up repeatedly across petitions reveals the composition of the moral economy which petitioners were implicitly referencing and reconstituting.

When read in this light, petitions to the NRC and the claims attached to them represented not just an act of recounting historical events but were part of a longer-term effort to assert a view of good citizenship that reached beyond the framework of particular state bureaucracies and governmental ideologies. Texts are productive. As Barber stated, the text does not just ‘depict or disclose existing social relations and subjectivities; rather it is part of the “technology” by which they are produced’. ¹⁰ Petitions did not merely reflect a moral economy which existed independently of the petitions and petitioners but represented an attempt to reconstitute and reassert one based on the narrated and documented experiences of these petitioners. In part this was to aid their claims, in part, this was to appeal to the perceived values held by the audience convened by the NRC, and in part, this was a broader attempt to try and right the moral wrongs of the post-independence period. The total NRC archive consists of 4240 files, which are stored in the Balme Library at the University of Ghana. This article is based on the close reading and contextualization of approximately 40 of these files. I worked with the first two storage boxes of cases submitted to the Accra Collection Centre (ACC), though these files contain petitions describing events that occurred across the regions of Ghana and in some cases even across its national borders. I analysed numerically sequential files, but since the files were not numbered and stored based on theme or date, in effect I worked with a random sample. The sample size was limited for two reasons. Firstly, given the politically contentious nature of the NRC, access to the archive was restricted. I produced nearly 200 pages of handwritten notes because no digital devices, photography, or photocopying was permitted. Secondly, my aim was not to overview the files or utilize them as a dataset amenable to quantitative analysis. Rather, I aimed to develop a deep, historically-informed analysis of the petitioning genre and associated practices, and the nature and significance of the claims that petitioners advanced. This kind of microhistorical approach has been employed recently by other historians of Ghana. Nana Osei-Opare, for example, did not specify exactly how many files he located and utilized in Ghanaian archives, but his recently published article cited eight specific letters of protest from five Ghanaian workers alongside a selection of other archival documents. His deep analysis of this small set of letters was both incisive and generative, inspiring the approach that will be taken here. ¹¹

Each file in the NRC archive usually follows a specific format. The petitioner provided a statement, either pre-written or communicated on the day to an interviewer. They then provided additional information in the form of documentation (previous petitions, medical records, receipts of purchase, dismissal letters and photographs to name but a few) or acquaintances who could substantiate their claims. This was sometimes supplemented by documents and statements gathered by the researchers at the NRC. As Abena Ampofoa Asare stated, this wide variety of interviews and documents represents a ‘public history-writing project’. ¹² The archive provides ‘an unprecedented public accounting of Ghana's past, by Ghanaian people, at the turn of the twenty-first century’. ¹³

This alternative archive created by the NRC is of particular importance to scholars of postcolonial Africa. There is a long history of violence against African archives. Historians such as David Anderson have described how British colonial government destroyed potentially problematic documents during the decolonization process. ¹⁴ Such approaches to archives continued into the post-independence era. Moses Ochonu argued that African archives suffer from ‘fragmentation’ stemming from both ‘Africa's postcolonial bureaucratic dysfunction’ and ‘a deliberate effort on the part of contemporary actors to keep sources and documents apart, scattered, and sometimes indiscernible’. ¹⁵ Authoritarian governments and crashing economies combined in the 1970s and 1980s to deprive Africa's archives of documents. Despite these limitations, however, Osei-Opare has challenged historians to reject ‘postcolonial African archival pessimism’, the belief that ‘postcolonial African archives are too disorganized or ill-kept to be of much, if any, value’. ¹⁶ Historians such as Jean Allman and Kate Skinner have made significant use of African ‘shadow archives’, locating key documents in previously overlooked regional or international archives. ¹⁷ Similarly, the NRC archive provides both unique public testimonies and various documents from state agents, such as letters and reports sent between civil servants, which are largely missing from national state archives.

Though Asare's extensive 2018 work Truth Without Reconciliation provided a masterful analysis of the NRC and inspired my own engagement with its archive, this article will depart from Asare's analysis in two main areas. First, Asare notes that many Ghanaians approached the NRC not for ‘neoliberally defined, broad, national concepts’ but to achieve ‘distinctly local goals: land reallocation, educational welfare, small-business seed capital, and the like’. ¹⁸ This approach, I argue, overlooks the interlinkages between the ‘national’ and the ‘local’ in the NRC archives. When Ghanaians went to the NRC to seek recompense for seized goods or lost incomes due to human rights abuses, they were not only attempting to gain personal compensation but were also working to define the actions, behaviours of attitudes of good Ghanaian citizens. The economic elements of petitioners’ claims, which were not the focus of Asare's analysis, are key to understanding how petitioners used the Commission to engage with Ghana's moral economy. Secondly, while Asare dwells on the ‘contested and contradictory stories’ of the NRC archive, I instead focus on the ways in which many submissions conformed with one another. ¹⁹ Identifying the similarities between petitions, sent by different people at different times, allows historians to view them as part of a broader genre, a narrative form which transcends the individual petitioner and demonstrates the broader social role of testimonies to the NRC.

Since independence, Ghana has experienced a multiplicity of different governments with radically different views on how society should operate and who the ideal Ghanaian citizen should be. Between independence in 1957 and the establishment of the NRC in 2002, Ghana oscillated between civilian and military rule, with the first peaceful handover of power between civilian governments only occurring in 2000. Ideologically and rhetorically these different governments offered vastly different conceptions of the duties of Ghanaian citizens towards the state and the obligations of the state towards Ghanaian citizens. ²⁰ Governance was often accompanied by violence against individuals and groups seen to be contravening such duties, such as the Busia government's conflict with trade unions and the AFRC/PNDC campaigns against market women. ²¹ During the 1970s and 1980s in particular, with Ghanaians facing serious economic hardship, a perennial enemy became those accused of kalabule. Kalabule was ‘a term that referred broadly to profiteering, either by manipulation of the state machinery or merely by evasion of official controls’. ²² Those accused of kalabule by Ghanaian governments and civilians ranged from ‘big men’ in positions of political and economic power to market traders and vehicle owners of more modest means. As kalabule often described transactions ‘on the margins of legality’, an accusation often hinged on the accuser's perception of licit and illicit wealth rather than any direct evidence of legal wrongdoing. ²³ Though governments came and went, this turbulent history produced various competing moral economies. Who good and bad citizens were, and what represented licit and illicit wealth generation and distribution, were continually contested.

The NRC was envisioned as a remedial reflection upon this turbulent history. Since the end of the Cold War ‘truth commissions’, as part of a broader toolkit of ‘transitional justice’, have become an increasingly common device utilized by states transitioning from authoritarian to democratic politics. These bodies, as Priscilla Hayner suggested, seek to affect ‘the social understanding and acceptance of the country's past’ by providing a platform for citizens to recount their experiences of violence and injustice. ²⁴ Among the most prominent examples are the 1983 Argentinian ‘National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons’ (CONADEP) and the 1995 South African ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’. ²⁵ Though tallies differ depending on what definition is used, Kathryn Sikkink and Carrie Booth Walling estimated that 35 truth commissions had been established worldwide by 2004, primarily in the Americas, Africa and Asia. ²⁶

Academics, however, have disagreed over the extent to which these bodies shape the ‘truths’ which they propagate. André du Toit has argued that the use of phrases such as ‘Nunca Mas’ (‘Never Again’), associated with the 1983 Argentinian truth commission, demonstrated that ‘[i]t need not be spelled out what it is that should not be allowed to happen again, and even less why this must not happen … it is overwhelmingly and transparently clear to all’. The ‘truth’ was obvious before the commission began. ²⁷ Ruti G. Teitel has emphasized their role in ‘the fashioning of a liberal political identity’, stressing a constructive and ideological element. ²⁸ In a critique of these positions, Audrey R. Chapman and Patrick Ball have argued that ‘the documentation and interpretation of truth is more complex and ambiguous than many analysts and proponents of truth commissions assume’, with various social, technical, methodological and epistemological constraints limiting ‘a commission's ability to produce an authoritative account’. ²⁹ Whether truth commissions represent a neutral body where ‘truth’ can be proclaimed, or whether they represent sites where specific ‘truths’ are encouraged and others are discouraged, remains a matter of scholarly disagreement.

The formation of the NRC in Ghana reflected these kinds of disputes. Following a coup on 31 December 1981 power was seized by Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings and the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) military government. Justified as a ‘revolution’ rather than a coup, the seizure of power by the PNDC saw both soldiers and civilians utilize violence to combat alleged kalabule. In 1992, after a decade in power, the PNDC announced multi-party elections and the return to civilian rule. Rawlings and his newly formed National Democratic Congress (NDC) handily won the 1992 presidential election. Opposition parties rejected the validity of the results, boycotting the subsequent parliamentary election. Historians have noted irregularities in the voting process, but generally suggested that Rawlings would have won the election regardless. ³⁰ Rawlings, on the NDC ticket, again won the following presidential election in 1996, and though similar criticisms were made opposition parties recognized the result and competed in the subsequent parliamentary elections. ³¹

The watershed moment, however, came in 2000. The 2000 elections were won by John Agyekum Kufuor and the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). This represented the first handover of power from one democratically elected civilian administration to another in Ghana's post-independence history. For opponents of Rawlings, it also represented the country's genuine return to civilian rule. Critics of Rawlings had argued that a ‘culture of silence’ had emerged in the 1980s under the PNDC and remained into the 1990s under the NDC, with people unwilling to speak about state-backed violence. The election of Kufuor and the NPP, therefore, provided an opportunity for Ghanaians to more openly discuss human rights abuses perpetrated under previous governments. The NPP's election manifesto promised the formation of a ‘truth and reconciliation commission’ to achieve this. Following the elections the establishment of the NRC became a matter of controversy. With the initial proposals focussed on previous military governments, supporters of Rawlings and the NDC characterized it as a ‘Nail Rawlings Commission’. NDC members walked out when asked to vote on a Bill establishing the NRC. Compromise was eventually reached when civil society groups intervened and suggested the timeframe of the NRC be expanded, including all governments from 1957 to 1993. Following this, an amended Bill was passed, and between 2002 and 2004, a total of 4240 statements were collected at five centres located around the country. ³²

These disputes highlight the challenges behind the establishment of Ghana's NRC. In countries like Argentina and South Africa, the ‘transition’ from illiberal to liberal rule was more clear-cut. Both had transitioned from authoritarian forms of government with narrow support bases to liberal, multi-party democracies. The truth commissions had been established shortly after these new governments had been inaugurated, forming a key part of the transition process. In Ghana, however, what ‘transition’ meant was disputed. For supporters of John Agyekum Kufuor and the NPP, the 2000 elections had represented the culmination of Ghana's transition from authoritarian to civilian rule, with the truth commission representing part of that ongoing process. For supporters of Jerry Rawlings and the NDC that transition had already occurred in 1992, the foundations for the democracy of the Fourth Republic had been laid under Rawlings’ leadership, and thus it was not necessary to establish a new truth about Ghana's past. Petitioners to the NRC, therefore, were not simply stating ‘transparently clear’ truths, they were asserting both the validity of those truths and how and why Ghana and Ghanaians should change in response to them.

The creation of the NRC convened a large audience, one which continues to actively discuss cases to this day. Reporting on various hearings occupied the pages of daily newspapers and the programming of radio and TV stations. Asare stated that ‘the country waited on tenterhooks when Rawlings was called as a witness to the NRC’, with crowds of supporters waiting outside to cheer him in. ³³ Videos of various hearings uploaded to YouTube years later have amassed hundreds of thousands of views. ³⁴ But even cases involving less high profile individuals were reported at length in the press. ³⁵ This publicity was known to both petitioners and witnesses, both to the benefit and detriment of the NRC. One witness, for example, wrote to the NRC requesting to ‘Withdraw from Giving Evidence’, stating that ‘I will be shot dead … after the 2004 election NDC will come back to power and I will be arrested and killed’. ³⁶ Not only did petitioners and witnesses believe their words would be received by a wide audience, but that those words would have wide effects.

Though Asare noted that the ‘NRC bureaucracy’ influenced ‘the expression and transmission of citizen voices’, there were several factors relating to the NRC's composition which reduced the role of intermediaries over its testimonies. ³⁷ Many of the statements to the NRC were a culmination of years of petitioning to various individuals and organizations. Numerous petitioners brought previous petitions with them. By analysing what is consistent across petitions sent by the same individual to different recipients, it becomes possible to ascertain devices which were not just a product of the ‘NRC bureaucracy’, but which petitioners themselves believed constituted an important part of their claim within the genre of petitions. This is further bolstered by the fact that many statements were pre-written, produced before the petitioner came to the NRC. While they were certainly influenced by the broader advertising of the NRC, this reduced the possibility for statement takers to shape testimonies.

Furthermore, while investigators at the NRC had the power to decide whether a case got taken to public hearings, even rejected petitions were kept in the NRC archive. John Yaw John Frimpong, for example, came to the NRC to tell investigators that he ‘saw a vision’. While no statement was recorded, the archive contains a document given to investigators by Frimpong, an image of a man holding a Bible with various lines linking specific body parts with numbers and Bible verses. At the bottom of the statement-taking form the investigator wrote ‘Gentleman – unstable – wanting to talk to us about the coming of Christ – didn’t require counselling though offered; he said he would prefer to see his pastor instead!!!’ The NRC's legal opinion dismissed the petition, stating that ‘this is a psychiatric case and one which does not fall within the jurisdiction of the NRC’. ³⁸ Though this petition was rejected for a public hearing the case was still maintained within the NRC archive. While investigators could prevent a petition from getting a public hearing, they could not choose who came to the NRC to make a statement, what they said, or whether their documents were archived.

Claim-making was a device which unified almost all the petitions sent to the NRC. Though the focus of the NRC was to establish an ‘accurate, complete and historical record of violations and abuses of human rights’, the National Reconciliation Commission Act outlined that one of its further objectives was to make ‘recommendations to the President for redress of wrongs committed within the specified periods’. ³⁹ The pursuit of truth and reconciliation needed to be backed up by some form of compensation. Claim-making allowed petitioners to demonstrate how their experiences of human rights abuses had harmed them economically, and to seek monetary compensation for that harm. This was reflected in the petitions sent to the NRC, the vast majority of which made some sort of material claim. The Final Report of the NRC stated that ‘getting monetary compensation was indicated by most of the statement makers as their primary reason for petitioning’. ⁴⁰ As a result of their petitions approximately 2000 Ghanaians received reparations ranging from US$217 to US$3300, with the Ghanaian government finishing payments in 2007. ⁴¹ As Asare states, ‘[m]any of the victims expressed dissatisfaction with the size of the payments and the fact that reparations were paid years after the end of the truth and reconciliation exercise’. ⁴² Despite this, the symbolic nature of these payments was key, with compensation acting as material confirmation that petitioners had been economically wronged. These claims can be sorted into three broad groups.

The first group of claims pertained to monetary compensation for injury or hardship. In 1979, two weeks after the June 4 coup, soldiers picked up Juliana Dogbey after her mother was accused of selling garden eggs (a fruit similar to aubergine) for above the control price of 20 pesewas. The soldiers thought her mother was too old to beat, so they instead took Dogbey. Soldiers beat her and stripped her to her underwear, then shaved her head with a broken bottle. In her statement, she said the ordeal left her paralysed until the previous year, preventing her from working. For this, she claimed government aid. ⁴³ Through her testimony Dogbey presented herself as a good citizen who, through the ordinary act of selling produce, had received a violent and unjustified punishment from bad citizens, causing her years of hardship.

A second group of claims related to rehabilitation of employment, often with the return of certain benefits. Robert Koom Amissah, a Bank of Ghana employee who was arrested for allegedly allowing the illicit release of foreign currency in 1979, requested his pension, entitlements, and ‘that I be compensated for the pain and violations I suffered’. In addition, he requested exoneration as otherwise he would be unable to return to any job in banking. ⁴⁴ Government jobs in Ghana often came with valuable benefits, especially for higher ranking employees. In addition to wages, they would sometimes include housing, vehicles, staff, pensions, and other allowances. Being removed from a government job would often not only see the loss of income, but the loss of various resources which the employee and their family depended on. The return of such benefits became an important claim for many petitioners.

A third group of claims revolved around the return of specific items, such as seized goods, vehicles or properties. Soldiers attacked Mrs Rose Apedoe, an Accra-based trader, on the 4 and 6 April 1982 at her home ‘on the basis that they have been informed about my being rich’. In her petition, despite it being 20 years after the events, Apedoe listed all the items seized by the soldiers in detail, ranging from 75 half pieces of cloth (Holland and GTP) to a set of plates, glasses and cups. ⁴⁵ Even across decades petitioners believed that they would at some point receive justice, and therefore maintained detailed information about their cases.

Properties were another common object of claim-making. In much of Ghana individualized property rights were only introduced in the twentieth century. In many places systems of legal pluralism maintain the role of traditional authorities and state institutions over land allocation. ⁴⁶ Claims within the NRC archive reflect the fragmented and unstable authority over land in Ghana. Ernest Kwame Agudu, a retired civil servant, told the NRC that he had acquired a house in Tema in 1964. ‘I carried out extensive improvements on the building’, such as adding sandcrete blocks, burglar proofing, PVC tiled floors, glazed doors, ‘lavished florescent lighting’, ceiling fans, a cemented courtyard, as well as building a living- and dining-room and planting an orchard. In 1973 this property was transferred to his son, Gottfried Kofi Agudu. In 1974, he acquired a second house in Tema and allowed an Allie Tabbica to stay there. Sometime around 1980, Tabbica wrote to the Tema Development Corporation (TDC), informing them that she was co-tenant in the property and that Agudu had illegally transferred his first property to his son, who at the time was a minor. Following the 1981 coup, this came under the purview of a One Man One House Committee, a newly inaugurated soldier-led body tasked with investigating individuals who illegally owned multiple properties built by public organizations. Agudu faced three hearings. The first two allowed him to keep the house but the third, headed by Captain Kumah, confiscated it. In his petition, he stated that ‘Captain Kumah's action landed him in Nsawam Prison for his corrupt[ion]’ but the house ended up in the possession of W.O.1 G. K. Gapklazi. Agudu requested the house be returned to him as well as compensation for the unpaid bills and rent. ⁴⁷ Agudu's claim was based not just on the possession of a deed, but on the labour and improvements he committed to the house. Petitioners did not see property ownership as static, rather it was active. They sought to demonstrate that good citizens worked on land they possessed to confirm their ownership, while bad citizens neglected land they illegitimately held.

In almost every petition to the NRC, truth-seeking was linked with claims for compensation. This emphasis on claim-making mirrors Michael J. Lowy's findings on court use in urban Ghana. Lowy, analysing various methods for dispute management in Koforidua between 1968 and 1969, concluded that courts ‘provided urbanites with an efficient forum for achieving prestige and status and a vehicle for formulating and disseminating ideas of correct behaviour’. ⁴⁸ Court use was intimately linked with the moral economy. All civil complaints made to the Magistrate's Court had to contain some sort of monetary claim, but Lowy found that in many cases when such monetary claims were ‘grossly exaggerated’ they also ‘contained specific reference to a desired change in the future behaviour of the defendant’. ⁴⁹ In such cases the exchange of money following a successful court case represented confirmation that the plaintiff was not just wronged legally, but morally. The reward of compensation was a material confirmation that they were good citizens and that their conception of the moral economy had been contravened. This is reflected in the role of claim-making within petitions to the NRC.

To legitimize their claims petitioners to the NRC utilized several different devices. These devices demonstrated certain actions, behaviours and attitudes which delineated the boundaries between good and bad citizens. The most common device which appeared in petitions was an emphasis on personal injury and hardship. When Rameil Nii Ankrah was arrested in 1983 for allegedly supporting an uprising against the PNDC, he was ‘seriously tortured at Gonda [sic] Barracks. Due to that, I am now impotent and my wife divorced me. My penis was pulled several times. I was forced to have sex in the sea sand which I could not discharge’. ⁵⁰ These detailed and frank accounts bring attention to the serious and often long-term injuries which petitioners sustained.

A regular theme was the hardship faced during detention. Even when petitioners were not directly tortured, they often highlighted the poor conditions of confinement. When John A. Hamah was arrested in 1983 on suspicion of subversion, he described not being allowed to wash, dress, or brush his teeth when the police picked him up for questioning at 3:30 AM. It is clear this embarrassed him, and by 8 AM ‘I was still sitting on a wooden bench at the station … an obvious object of police station curiosity and gossip’. When he was finally taken to the Inspector General of Police he was escorted by Tema Police District Commander Mr Sekyi. Upon arrival, Sekyi ‘in an uncouth and uncivilized manner shouted a grating order to the station “Officer! TAKE THIS MAN IN AND LOCK HIM UP”’. He was put in a ‘small, dirty, dark and dank concrete “aperture”, unfit for even rodents. The stench in the cell was enough punishment for any crime!’ His cellmate was a man ‘with dishevelled hair, a person who seemed not to have taken his bath for about two weeks’. ⁵¹ Even though Hamah's description was less violent than many others, his focus on the inability to clean himself and the poor conditions in the cells highlight how this treatment challenged his self-image, embarrassing him in front of his neighbours and others.

Petitioners who had been confined also emphasized the challenges they encountered in contacting their families. Hamah stressed that only on the third day of his arrest did his wife locate him to give him food. ‘She was completely dispirited, exhausted and worried’. She was not told of his whereabouts and had to enquire with Sekyi. ⁵² Detainees would regularly be moved between different holding cells, guardrooms and prisons, further damaging their health and hindering contact with their families. Sammy Nasser, during his detention between 1988 and 1992, was moved from the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) Headquarters, to James Fort Prison, to the BNI Annex, to James Fort Prison, to Nsawam Medium Security Prison, then back to James Fort Prison again before finally being released. Over this period he suffered from various bouts of malaria, treatment for which was limited. ⁵³

In addition to physical harm, petitioners regularly referenced economic hardship stemming from human rights abuses. Gordon Wallace Setranah outlined that ‘I suffered and continue to suffer irreparable damages, including prolonged loss of income, economic hardships, poverty, disorganized family life, disruption to children's education, very low societal rating emanating from invalidity to meet common civic obligations’. ⁵⁴ Petitioners demonstrated that economic hardship prevented them from meeting their familial and societal obligations, leading to broader social consequences. Loss of income was often emphasized as preventing petitioners from providing an education for their dependants. In 1983 Daniel Mensah Bosompem, a Police Corporal in Kumasi Asokwa, was fired from his position after a Public Tribunal accused him of taking a bribe. Bosompem requested compensation as his dismissal ‘disorganised the education of my five children’. ⁵⁵ Good citizens were those who had faced unjust personal hardship and injury, while bad citizens were those who had unsympathetically created those conditions.

Individuals who had government jobs made appeals to nationalism and civic duty an important element of their petitions. Often this was demonstrated by emphasizing the years of service they had provided. Gordon Wallace Setranah, who worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, stated that he had ‘gone through the mill to become Foreign Service Officer (FSO).… I offered it all, 19 years of honest, dedicated and incorruptible service to my employers’. ⁵⁶ The poor treatment these individuals received from bad citizens was contrasted with their long service to the nation-state, a demonstration of their good citizenship.

For those whose national identity was questioned such rhetoric became a crucial method to emphasize their authentic Ghanaian nationalism. Many examples of this were contained in the various petitions sent by Sammy Nassar. Though Nassar and his father were both born in Koforidua, during his detainment his Lebanese heritage was utilized against him. During his imprisonment between 1988 and 1992 over accusations of subversion, he was regularly informed that if he gave up his Ghanaian citizenship and went to Lebanon he would be freed. Throughout various petitions, however, Nassar reiterated his Ghanaian identity. In a previous petition to the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) in 2001 he stated that upon hearing about the accusations against him ‘being first and foremost a Ghanaian, proud of my nationality, and having no intention whatsoever to destabilise the nation, I quickly organised myself to return to Ghana to face any charges’. Nassar's NRC file contained not only previous petitions but a 14 August 1970 letter from the Ministry of Interior to Nassar confirming that he was considered a Ghanaian citizen and a copy of Nassar's Ghanaian passport from 29 May 1944. ⁵⁷ As Emmanuel Akyeampong stated, ‘it was conceptually difficult to envision a non-black citizen in Ghana – and West Africa – during the period of decolonization’. ⁵⁸ Lebanese-Ghanaians like Nassar had to demonstrate their Ghanaianness, and their commitment to Ghana, as part of their petitions. Unlike other petitioners, those with disputed national identities had to explicitly show they were Ghanaian before being afforded the rights of a Ghanaian. Good citizens were patriotic Ghanaians, while bad citizens prioritized their own personal gain over that of the nation.

In support of their claims, petitioners brought a wide variety of documentation to the NRC. This included previous petitions, medical reports, photographs, newspaper articles, deeds, copies of passports, internal governmental reports, and many others. Mr Benjamin Kwadwo Agyare brought with him various internal reports and documents from the Customs and Excise Department in the 1980s to support his claim, such as a letter from his boss complaining about external interference. ⁵⁹ Martha Paintsil, who claimed property from Samuel Kwasi Boateng at the One Man One House Committee, brought a letter from a Tema People's Defence Committee stating she should be given legal tenancy. ⁶⁰ Many of these are documents which would be impossible to locate within governmental archives. In addition to being incredibly useful sources for historians, for NRC petitioners these documents served both a practical and demonstrative purpose.

Practically, the provision of documents allowed petitioners to provide evidence for claims that the NRC investigators could not. The National Reconciliation Act gave NRC investigators a range of powers to pursue cases, such as gaining access to ‘any information and records’ or ‘question[ing] any person’ related to the investigations of the Commission. ⁶¹ This, however, was easier said than done. Some institutions would reply promptly with information. The Ghana Armed Forces, for example, would reply within one to two months providing information on soldiers requested for interviews. ⁶² Other institutions struggled to furnish such requests. The National Police Headquarters were unable to locate documents relating to cases in the Huppenbauer Committee. Whether those documents could not be found because they never existed, because they had been lost or removed, or because there was little will to find them is not clear. ⁶³ Other institutions were more actively obstructive. CHRAJ, a statutory body created following the return to civilian rule in 1992 to investigate human rights abuses, openly rebuked the attitude of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during their investigation of John Enredom Yankey's case, saying that various letters were ignored between November 1993 and October 1994 before they eventually detailed an officer to go to the Ministry in person. ‘The Commission will at this stage express its dissatisfaction with the manner in which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs treated it by failing to respond to at least four letters to it on petitioner's issue, thus dragging this matter for 15 months’. ⁶⁴ While the NRC was in theory vested with the powers to conduct investigations, in practice their powers were limited by gaps in the archives and uncooperative attitudes from various officials.

At the same time, petitioners who did not bring specific documents with them often faced greater scrutiny. Godfred Odame Kissi had his initial investigation at CHRAJ closed in September 1996 as he had been unable ‘to send the requested information’. ⁶⁵ Due to the limitations of the NRC in locating documents, and the emphasis the Commission and related institutions placed upon petitioners providing written evidence for their claims, there was a practical need for petitioners to bring documents with them. While this allowed petitioners who had been able to keep detailed archives to make stronger claims, this hindered those whose documentation had been lost or taken.

Documentation, however, was provided for more than just empirical reasons. Documents, especially past petitions, allowed petitioners to demonstrate a strong and long-term interest in their case. Many petitioners would focus on the previous petitions they had sent. John Kweku Mensah stated to the NRC that ‘[a]ll petitions I sent for redress did not receive favourable responses’. ⁶⁶ Not only was the inclusion of past petitions an appeal to the goodwill of the NRC officials, emphasizing that other organizations had been unable to help, they also demonstrated that petitioners had put in the necessary time and effort to be seen as justified in pursuing their claim. CHRAJ, for example, specifically asked Gordon Wallace Setranah to provide further evidence ‘of any action you took to seek redress of your complaint since 1990’. ⁶⁷ CHRAJ similarly stated that John Kweku Mensah ‘did not show sufficient personal interest’ in his case due to a lack of previous petitions, declining to pursue it on his behalf. ⁶⁸ Petitioners felt the need to demonstrate the time and effort they had put into resolving an issue before coming to institutions such as the NRC. Many of the documents they brought with them were demonstrations of that previous effort. Good citizens showed a long-term commitment to their claims by collecting and showing relevant evidence, while bad citizens made frivolous, unsupported claims.

While many of the devices in the petitions contained in the NRC archive were formulaic, remaining fairly consistent regardless of if the petition was sent in the 1970s or 2000s, it is important to note the elements which changed. Petitioners often responded to contemporary political events and ideologies, altering their petitions depending upon when and where they were sending it. Petitions of the 1980s would often reference the radical rhetoric of the PNDC. In a 1985 petition to Force Headquarters, Flagstaff House, Ayigya Kojo stressed that in the name of ‘the on going Revolution … justice must prevail’. ⁶⁹ Following his dismissal from the police service under the Huppenbauer Committee, Edward Yeboah Abrokwah sent a petition to the Inspector General of Police requesting he be reinstated ‘[i]n the view of Flt. Lt. J. J. Rawlings broadcast on radio on 31/21/81 calling all dismissed servicemen to report’. ⁷⁰ Following the 1992 elections and the return to multi-party government, however, references to political radicalism declined. Ernest Kwame Agudu's 1993 petition said Rawlings was ‘unalloyed and supremely judicious by nature’. ⁷¹ In the political atmosphere of the 1990s, where revolutionary rhetoric appeared out of place, individual flattery seemed more fitting for petitions to Ghana's leaders.

Though historians have referenced the growth in ‘rights talk’ in Africa from the 1950s onwards, it was not until the 1990s and 2000s that explicit references to ‘human rights’ began to appear in the Ghanaian petitions found in the NRC. ⁷² Departing from his earlier rhetoric emphasizing Rawlings’ political speeches, Abrokwah's 2001 petition to President Kufuor stressed the ‘unconstitutional’ nature of his dismissal from his job, stating that ‘since your government is bent on correcting the ills and abuses of human rights and excesses committed by the past government in the name of the so-called revolution’, he should be reinstated. ⁷³

The various petitions sent by Gordon Wallace Setranah between 1983 and 2002 provide another example of these shifts. In his early petitions, Setranah focussed on the revolutionary rhetoric of the PNDC government. In a 1983 petition to the Ombudsman Setranah stated that ‘The “31st December Revolution” was staged to check and correct injustices in the society and this has been one of the laudable achievements recorded by the PNDC government’. The unfair nature of his dismissal was explicitly contrasted with PNDC rhetoric about promoting justice. By the 1990s this revolutionary rhetoric disappeared from his petitions. In a 1992 petition to the Ministry of Mobilisation and Social Welfare, Setranah instead took a more religious tone: ‘God … will richly bless you and the members of your committee if the wrong is righted’. And in the 2000s Setranah instead shifted to criticizing the PNDC. In a letter to CHRAJ in 2001, he stated he was unable to get redress to his claims in the past as ‘the PNDC era was abnormal … it would have been unwise for me to institute legal proceedings against the same powers of oppression, suppression and elimination’. It is in this period that statements about ‘human rights’ first appear in Setranah's letters. In a 2001 petition to Emil Short, Commissioner of CHRAJ, Setranah said that ‘on human rights issues, I have been keen in listening to you attentively at the least opportunity’. ⁷⁴ While the political and ideological views presented in Setranah's petitions changed significantly from the early 1980s to the early 2000s, the core claims remained the same, demonstrating his conception of good citizenship was independent of the particular state bureaucracies he was petitioning to. For many petitioners providing a history of petitions with contradictory rhetoric was not seen as detrimental to their claims. Petitioners did not seem to withhold older petitions which made very different arguments in favour of the same claims. Instead, they presented these histories in full to the NRC. Petitioners were more interested in demonstrating their long-term efforts to achieve justice rather than providing evidence of a consistent ideological position. Emphasis was placed upon showing they had written many petitions in the past and that they had exhausted all other avenues.

Through the devices utilized in these petitions, we can begin to see the construction of two different types of Ghanaians. Good citizens, typified by the petitioners, were described as those who attempted to uphold their social obligations. They looked after their families, and when they were unable to do so this was because of circumstances out of their control. They called for compensation so they could resume such obligations. They owned property legitimately – they developed the land and buildings that they had acquired, and they did not hoard goods. They were loyal Ghanaian nationalists, with many years of service on behalf of their country and no interest in partisan politics. They pursued their claims diligently, providing sufficient documentation and proof of previous petitions. Through their careful engagement with the genre of petitions, they demonstrated that they pursued claims legally and without violence, prioritizing sending petitions to relevant authorities over direct confrontation. Not every petitioner stressed all these attributes, and which attributes a petitioner emphasized depended upon their social experiences, but the same fundamental character was constructed across multiple texts within the genre. Contrasted with this good citizen was the bad citizen. Bad citizens prevented others from upholding their social obligations through violence, theft and arbitrary confinement. They took property illegitimately, seizing land through their position in the government or military and refusing to develop it. They were unconcerned with the Ghanaian nation or the well-being of fellow citizens, instead prioritizing their own personal wealth. And they attempted to prevent justice from being achieved with threats and violence.

In part, this was an attempt by the petitioners to rescue their personal honour. During Ghana's turbulent history, various alternate moral economies had flourished. In the past many petitioners had been defined as bad citizens and faced social and economic consequences. Many petitioners described the intense social stigma they received from their experiences. Petitioners were often publicly detained, with their neighbours witnessing them being driven away by the police or military. Their names would appear in newspapers or on the radio, especially during the AFRC and PNDC era, accusing them of being involved in kalabule or other crimes. When they failed to live up to specific social obligations word would travel. As Rockson Symon Agorkpah, a police officer accused of impregnating the wife of a witness in 1988, said in his petition: ‘Sir, the sudden and unexpected loss of job with wide publicity in both print and electronic media had destroyed my reputation, affected my psychologically [sic] and brought untold hardship on me and my family’. ⁷⁵ These petitions were an attempt to set the record straight. They were an attempt to consolidate a moral economy which defined the petitioners as good citizens rather than bad citizens. They sought to counter the alternate moral economies which had flourished in the past, ones which had promoted more populist conceptions of participation and redistribution but which seemed increasingly out of place in the age of multi-party democracy, human rights, and national reconciliation.

Literature on truth commissions has often framed them as part of a specific historical moment. André du Toit described them as ‘historical founding projects’ in the transition from authoritarian to democratic governments. ⁷⁶ Pierre Hazan viewed them as part of an ‘intermediary world’ following the collapse of the Soviet Union. ⁷⁷ This literature overwhelmingly placed truth commissions and their concerns within a very specific time and place. As this article highlights, however, a close reading of petitions provided to the NRC in Ghana demonstrates that these texts were part of a much longer process. Discussions over who good and bad Ghanaian citizens were and how the state should reward or punish them had been ongoing for decades. Individuals contributed to the NRC archive by bringing a sequence of past petitions to their hearings, demonstrating not just their long-term commitment to their claims but also the ongoing nature of these discussions. Though some devices changed, reflecting the nature of government at the time, others remained remarkably consistent across decades. The close reading of these texts shows the importance of subsuming truth commissions into the longer-term history of which they were part of rather than separating them off into a uniquely transitionary moment. Petitions sent to Ghana's NRC represented not a break with the past, but a continuation of ongoing debates over the construction and constitution of Ghana's moral economy.

Furthermore, the petitions held within the NRC archive highlight the agency of Ghanaians within this process. Far from ideas about good governance being enforced on Ghana from abroad through the implementation of a truth commission, the petitions submitted to the NRC demonstrated that many Ghanaians had developed ideas of what constituted a good and bad citizen based on their own lived experiences. The NRC archive represents a vast and rich collection not just of Ghanaian experiences of human rights abuses in the postcolonial era, but of attempts to produce and reproduce a moral economy which counteracted those abuses. These petitions, when viewed as a genre, outlined a consistent and coherent perspective on what good and bad citizens do. Viewed in their totality they represent an articulation of a moral economy which criticizes the authoritarian rule and violence which had occurred across multiple governments since Ghana's independence. This shows the importance of engaging not just with the statements made by politicians and administrators regarding truth commissions, but also engaging in a deep reading of the statements made to truth commissions by citizens themselves.