In a Thursday seminar for this term, if there are any sort of announcements at just in terms of the procedure,
any announcements, comments, questions do when we come to the end, use the chat,
which will be monitoring and I think hopefully everyone can see all the hand function in teams in order to grab our attention
as a few of us who will be monitoring these because it's quite tricky to have eyes on all of these at the same time.
So that's that's how we'll proceed and to introduce today's speaker,
it's a really great pleasure to welcome Khwezi Canada because he's scheduled to last April was, of course, postponed.
We because it is due to come to the UK we were going to be meeting in St. Anthony is to host you and and that didn't happen.
And so we postponed the whole series. So it's a really great pleasure to have the opportunity to be able to to welcome causing amongst us,
even though we're not in St. Anthony, as some of you may be,
actually, but we're not altogether because it's the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, endowed chair and professor at Colgate University in the US.
And he's a historian who teaches African history as well as worldwide African histories and is a very, very prolific author.
And we would be here for quite some time.
Listing the number of books that he's published, but he's a specialist in West African history and in Ghana in particular.
Some of his recent publications include a kind of that Ghana reader and work on the Akan Diaspora in the Americas,
and today's talk is about a new or relatively new.
It would have been you back in April, monograph called Our Own Way in this part of the World biography of an African community,
culture and nation, which we're very much looking forward to Kweisi.
So without further ado, perhaps I could hand over to you.
Thanks. Sure. And thank you very much, David and the organisers for hosting this virtual version of what would have been an in-person conversation.
And so I'm planning to take no more than half an hour or 40 minutes to at least lay out some of the arguments for this particular work.
And I'm going to assume that you have not read the book. I'm also going to assume that you know something about the Gold Coast donor.
And. I want to begin with with the hope that that drove me to this particular project as I as I write in the introduction to the book,
I came to Ghana during 2000 2001, beginning what was a vague idea about a doctoral research project.
And in Techiman, which is a community roughly two hours northwest of Kumasi and approximately six hours northwest Accra, the capital of Ghana.
I met this. This family and this family happens to be the family of coffee uncle and throughout my research,
which was focussing on indigenous medicine and therapeutics. I began to hear all these stories about coffee.
Don't call mind you. He had passed away in 1985, so I could not and did not meet him.
However, I encountered him in all these stories from other healers who I interviewed and
who I had informal conversations with throughout my time in the community.
And as I walk around and engaging people in the markets, in their homes,
doing festivals during particular healing or ritual activities, coffee don't go kept on coming up and up and over and over.
In fact, he became this sort of ubiquitous figure, and I sort of put him to the side and say,
OK, I'm going to focus on my research on healing and medicine.
And perhaps at some point later, I'll find out more about this idiomatic figure named.
And of course, we don't call you fast forward, let's say, several years later.
Approximately seven to 10 years later, I begin to look back into my notes and into these conversations.
And what I found was that there was something particularly important about this figure who at once was enigmatic, but at the same time, omnipresent.
He was not only found in the stories throughout the community, but also in the regional archive in Sunyani and Antonioni's,
about 45 minutes hour drive west of teaching and in the regional archives,
I began to pore over the documents, finding some contextual information, but not anything about him.
And I sort of wondered why were this individual that was so crucial,
so critical to his community was invisible in the regional archive that had other kinds of records about it,
about the polity, about its people and particularly its political local leaders.
And so I began searching in any one who had a footprint in Yemen,
so I began looking in the archives of the different missionary societies and
particularly the Roman Catholic mission referred to as the Holy Family Mission,
which have a hospital intensive one called the Holy Climbing Hospital. I began poring through the records.
I began looking at everyone from the Salvation Army to researchers to other individuals who had some contact with the area,
the region and more directly.
Some acquaintance with coffee don't go through it all over 10 years looking through regional national international archives.
I didn't find much about coffee, but what I found was that there were individuals who were still alive who remembered him.
And so in my search to find him, the book is, on one hand, the result of that long search,
but is also the result of trying to push my field of African history and the field of world history to think,
you know, a rethink actually about how to find these individuals,
these communities who had these sort of wide angle perspective based on the multiple roles they played in their communities.
That was so crucially important to those communities, but was for more or less lost to the official historical records.
And so I began looking for coffee. Don't go from a ground zero where there were no other records about him,
except for the monograph and the papers of one anthropologist who I'll come to a little bit later named Dennis Michael Warren.
Dennis Warren had been a Peace Corps science teacher in teaching on secondary school in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
And so I pored over his papers at both Indiana, where he was a graduate student.
In the inverse of that is and in Iowa, where he was an instructor,
a professor that is at the University of Iowa in Ames, Iowa, and was in Iowa's Iowa State.
And that really led me to sort of build these fragmented pieces from interviews, from archives, from people who had some encounter with him.
And what struck me through all this was this particular quote, which became the title of the book.
So Kofi Donkor was quoted as saying, for those in search of past events as I was and that is connected to his culture as I was, I let them know how.
I let them know clearly how we go about things in our own way in this part of the world.
And so this statement is both an ontological statement, but it's also a theoretical statement.
The idea of our own way in this part of the world that is confidential was very much aware and subconscious of the the past,
the present in which he stood, but also that there were particular ways in which culture, health and healing,
as well as dealing with the perhaps greatest public health challenge of colonial rule in the Gold Coast down.
And so there were particular ways in which they went about things in that world, and I wanted to know what those particular ways were.
And so it's important to begin whether you are conversant with the history of Ghana or not to begin with sort of the spatial layout and
really to to reframe how we think about the colonial architecture of British rule in this particular West African territory and so on.
The left is a map of the Republic of Ghana in present day Ghana, and in it you find sort of the major towns.
Did you mind being in the centre of Ghana? And that's not by happenstance.
Ted Simon was an is a crossroads town. It is the sort of biblical core that links the northern part of Ghana with the southern part of gun.
That is the more arid wooded grasslands savanna lands in the north to the dense tropical deciduous force in the south toward the Atlantic coast,
and as a crossroads town, it became at least spatially ideal to think about the flows and exchanges of people's ideas and goods and services
that came through this crossroads town and therefore in many ways enriched it by having this particular ecological,
political as well as geographical positioning.
And what's important to grasp is that on the right, what became colonial Ghana and most cars referred to?
Colonial Ghana, whether by happenstance or intentionally as really one colony, in fact, would argue that in fact there were three colonies,
and this is important for Kofi Dunkle and his community's place within this colonial architecture.
And so the Gold Coast colony was actually three colonies that were resource imagined and as well as perceived quite differently.
And so there were the Northern Territory's that roughly approximated most of what is now northern Ghana.
So, especially north of kintampo, would you see the on the map to your right?
And then there were the Asante Crown Colony,
which was largely based around Kumasi and clanking out in sort of all direction into a wide enough radius.
And then south of Kumasi, south of Asante Main Asante Empire, was the Gold Coast colony proper,
and this included largely the hinterlands and the coastal regions. And you see that on the map.
Accra Cape Coast, of course, there's a Axim, Takoradi and so on.
And so these were actually a tripartite colony, a sort of a three layered colony.
And this is really a colony is important in terms of just having a metaphorical
grasp of the history of the colonial Gold Coast and the present day Ghana,
because essentially the tripartite colony was the Asante Empire.
If you look at the outer circles that are dotted, says the limits on the Empire, you will notice that these aren't the empire it was.
It was almost envelops what became the modern Republic of Ghana.
And in many ways, the Asante Empire was what became the tripartite call.
So what I'm suggesting is that first and foremost, the tripartite colony was simply the architecture of Asante mind,
simply under the machinations of British colonial rule.
And even that rule was tempered by the very architecture which I'll get into a bit later.
Secondly, it also sets up the life of Kofi Don't go because coffee, don't call his life and that of his community was framed by two hedge memories.
On the one hand, touching mine was still under the head harmony of the Asante Empire,
and so Asante rule remained intact for him and his community, including his hometown of Ockham's and democracy in the polity of Crans.
And but you see, just east of Techiman. Secondly, he was under the heading money of British colonial rule.
And so he's born into this dual imperial structure,
and he's also born into this dual economy where he has access to all the resources of the savannah, but also all the resources of the forest.
So this this duality for copy don't copy will become crucial for he and his family and his community as we move throughout the 20th century.
And so this is sort of the the spatial frame in which I'm operating.
And lastly, on the point of this frame,
I want to emphasise that what I'm looking at is we are taking our view of what I'm referring to as intra-African history.
That is history that are made between and amongst the various groups of African people without a European into local or filter or intermediary.
In other words, the coast and so often the coast of much of Atlantic Africa has been the basis for explorations of African histories.
But what I'm arguing is actually, on the flip side,
I'm turning it up on its head by saying that we need to look at the history of the Gold Coast Ghana,
not from Cape Coast or Accra or the coastal region, but to look at it in places like Yemen,
where most of people's lives were being transacted, where the coast was simply a sort of foreign frontier.
But the vast majority of the people that came to occupy the Gold Coast kind of would never see the coast.
And so this intra African energy sets up a different frame of reference with thinking about how we conceptualise
research and write African histories from the interior looking outward rather than from the coast looking inward.
And in this spatial dynamic, there are two characters that sets up, you know, in the way we don't go.
One is on the left is the well-known figure of your son to a Ejisu.
And she's, of course, famously remembered for leading a unsuccessful bus but very spirited crusade or charge against British colonial rule,
not against colonial rule per say,
but against the sacking and overthrow of Asante rule and in particular, her place as a leading political figure in the DCEU and also in Asante mind.
We'll come back to her in little more detail.
On the right is Kwame Nkrumah, who as many of you know, led the Gold Coast to political independence in 1947 in March 1957.
And he, of course, is a central figure in Gold Coast politics and of course, in the Republic of Ghana without question.
So these two figures are important because these two are the heroes are icons of the sort of anti-colonial anti-imperialist movements.
But what what I would argue is, in fact, we should see them not as heroes, but as as anti-heroes.
And I want you to kind of hold that thought as I as I come back to that in the moment.
So hold the image of these two figures,
as well as the notion that perhaps they perhaps best viewed as anti-heroes in the sense of how they are portrayed and remembered is
not perhaps how they should be portrayed and remembered through the optics of this Kofi Dunkle and his comedian touching on it.
So we'll come back to them in a moment. So this is the pictorial a visual view of this tripartite calling.
So now you can see clearer that essentially a Northern Territory is a Asante proper and the Gold Coast colony.
And you see there that tissue mining is under the.
Imperium, or absolute power of a to mine as a subject haven't been conquered by a sign to mind twice both in 17, 22 or 23 under a city Henning Pokuaa.
And then again in 1877. For joining forces with a group in Jamun, located now in the Ivory Coast,
and so this dual sacking essentially so confirmed touchy subject position to assign to mine and of course,
the British Empire rule doubly confirm this dual colonial city and the dual hegemony under which life was lived for people
not only touching one but touching my becomes a sort of laboratory for what happens in the broader tripartite colony.
And if we zoom in into this region, it touches on what you see is that there were these local crucial places that are integral to understanding,
you know, the historical developments that occur in and around Richmond.
And so in front of you, what you see is in the centre.
This place called Demasi, that's because we don't was born in 1913 and being born in this village.
Will become the setting for the forces and also the characters that begin to take shape in this evolving story around quote,
we don't always his in this community and. As a approach to the life, we don't cross community and to the colony, a nation that became Ghana.
What I offer an introduction is this notion of a community arbitrary that is I'm not interested in the individual life story per se,
but what I'm interested in is more so how the individuals that came in contact with a person like what we don't
call ricocheted and refracted and provided perspectives that could create what we may call a people's history,
write a people's narrative of their historical movement through time and culture.
And so places like democracy in Crown's intention when troubadour hometown of Boise,
when seton-lasalle and the like they are the communities that will again provide not only the clients that will seek accord.
We don't call for his therapeutics and healing as a healer, but also he was also a blacksmith, a drummer.
A father, a husband, as well as a community leader to his people,
looked for for guidance and also for a range of social, psychosomatic and biological therapeutics.
And so this figure of the healer will this multiverse and therefore those people that encounter
interacted and shared a life of we don't call is what I'm referred to as a community organiser.
And so this is sort of the spatial layout of that community, arguably as we don't call take shape.
And so of course, we don't call very early on when he's born.
He is born into this building inclusive democracy and then in adolescence, around 13, maybe perhaps 14.
He moves to touching mine, which is his mother's town.
And as many of you may know, the bonobo bono or a con society.
And of course, societies are matrilineal, which means they trace their inheritance, their identity.
There's authenticated through the mother's lineage as well as property.
Inheritance and leadership comes through the mother's line,
and so he returns to touching on his mother's community, and that's where he leaves out the remainder of his life.
But of course, the master remains crucial, and in fact, many of the rituals he would do would pay homage to the Demasi.
He returned there annually to do so, but touching what becomes, you know,
the setting for his adolescent and his adult life and entertainment is where you find this,
this this, this really crossroads town that that is is a sort of an encapsulation or representation of the demography of the wider tripartite colony.
And what will become present day Ghana. And so if we look at this particular layout that was done in 1970, so it is fairly.
Representative of those decades, the 60s and 70s,
when does this sort of aerial view was drawn up and you notice that there are several wars and so touching one
was the actual township was divided into these quarters awards that host particular communities of people.
And so Kofi Duncan was located, and I use my cursor in the Tom Suozzi ward, which is the blacksmith ward.
And remember, I mentioned that Koby Duncan was a blacksmith. He learnt blacksmithing through his uncle.
And became an apprentice, too. But in fact, he would continue blacksmithing, you know, after he becomes a healer in his early 20s in teaching.
And so these located in this tomb Swasey Ward,
which is home to a series of families to which the trade is blacksmithing, not solely, but predominantly.
And then you have the. Abandoned Ward and that particular ward, you know, hosted a number of peoples, including,
you see the M stands for the market touching my has a large as one of the largest markets,
second largest market in Ghana and certainly one of the largest in West Africa.
And what's unique about 18 months market again, it's a crossroads town is that it brings with it people,
goods, services and ideas from as far as Nigeria,
Niger, Mali, certainly Burkina Faso to the North Cote d'Ivoire or Ivory Coast to the West and Togo and also northern beneath.
So people flock from throughout this wider West African region to transact and also to set up temporary,
which was morphed into some kind of permanent settlement in that region.
So that ward is home to these sort of transient,
semi-permanent communities that that view this market as really a major hubs between the northern part of Gold Coast,
Ghana and the southern portions of the tripartite call. The present day Ghana and of course, to the south is the hemisphere award.
And that's where the indigenous leadership resides. Whereas in the Jomo and the House and the gumbo wars and these awards designed for
people who are referred to in the Akan as a whole or strangers or foreigners.
And so these were referred to in colonial records as strangers, quarters or the strangest wards.
And these were people that were transient but had had a base by people who were once transient, who established communities there.
And this is sort of, you know, a structure that replicates itself in Kumasi,
in Accra and throughout the entire former colony into the modern day Republic,
where you find these strangest quarters awards that are usually homes to African Muslims who set up communities both as a basis for trade,
but also for playing out their lives. So you really become sort of a template, you know,
community that gives a sort of a sampling of what happens in the wider colony and throughout the coast.
Confident go is part of this class, and here is a older photo of a group of healers are calling for and will sing for
the upcoming fall are those that are scrupulous healers and the root word is akombe,
something that's very difficult to translate in English and I will not try to do so. But it refers to this particular process of hunger.
But sort of a spiritual hunger that leads to a sort of contemplation of meditation that
through which there's a certain sort of a prophesies and that is the idea of divining.
And so the occult for all the people who do a comb and a comb refers to a range of therapeutics and rituals and access to both ancestral knowledge.
And now that comes through the spiritual forces for which I outlined in the book in more detail, and we can talk about that in the Q&A.
So these healers in their multiplicity, in their variety, were trained in groups and collectives and coffee don't go with no different.
In fact, one of his closest colleagues, none of which to me.
Train together, including a few others. And in this particular photo here, there is the.
The sister of Kobe, Andrew Accuser, and she's in the bottom to the right in this photo.
And so this sort of collectivist approach to training and healing was a precursor to sort of the the role of the healer.
That is where the healer is guided by the ethos of community interest before
self-interest serving the community in a way sort of what immunotherapy prescribe,
which is that if you can diagnose and cure or deal with a range of afflictions to populate the community with enough healthy people,
then that increase population begins to cast a wide net and therefore ensuring a
certain kind of immunity or a certain kind of response to those who choose otherwise
not to and so be the community and collective ethos was literally socialised into
healers through their training and even their sort of post-graduate training,
which we can talk about in the Q&A. And as a class of healers.
These individuals were integral to community conflict resolution, as well as maintaining this sort of equilibrium of spaces between community members,
their own striving interests, including a range of forces both auspicious and malicious.
That essentially is the human condition that is this interplay between forces of energy and matter.
Right. And so human beings are a confluence of those forces and human beings,
and human life has to deal with these forces throughout their progression, throughout the duration.
And so these this festival is the Appau Festival, which healers were spotlighted and they were spotlighted because they were the
connective tissue between health healing and whole and chaos and debility,
as well as disability and on wholeness. And so at the Apple Festival, coffee don't call would have been one of these healers.
In fact, the cover of the book has called We Don't Go going to the Apple Festival,
carrying the brass pan on its head, as you see here to the right and here in the centre.
This was actually a photo taken by Robert Raftery,
the first of three anthropologists that would have been that would have perhaps encountered a young coffee drinker.
But though I can't prove it, but certainly was in touch, you man. And this picture was taking up the Post Festival in 1922 1923.
So Coffee Don't Go is an adolescent at this point, and in this Apple Festival, the Apple Festival, the root of the word Apple means to reject.
So it's a festival of people getting out their eggs, their anxiety.
It's a it's a forum for criticising leadership. It's a forum where everyone is sort of judgement free.
That is, the laws relax and people can freely air their grievances even towards people who live on the perch of authority.
They can insinuate and even insult those and people in power.
And so it is really a time when again the law relaxes the social rules and norms collapses.
And in that moment is really a time to purge and to cleanse the polity,
cleanse the community and and to reaffirm their connexion with not only the spiritual forces which Calvary Dunkle had,
but also to the pack between healers and political leaders.
I'm talking about indigenous political leaders, and so that pack was healers well,
the custodians of the land on which and through which these groups of forces reside.
Whether these and these principles are referred to as abusive and abusive refers to in T refers
to something that is of a limited purpose that is created to service a limited purpose.
And so these spiritual forces of different varieties and kind are located in nature and brought into human culture.
And so as custodians of the land and these spiritual forces,
they had a pack sort of an agreement with the indigenous political leadership who did not own land or the management of land.
Because land ultimate belongs to ancestors, the people who originally where the custodians of land.
And so this this pact between spiritual healers and indigenous political leaders is what drove the
history and development of churchmen and communities like it throughout these societies and Biocon,
I'm referring to the root of the word con meaning first and foremost and pioneer.
And so a car is similar to here in the United States.
The notion of First Nation, that is people who are artisans or indigenous to a land and became custodians of the land and all of the resources,
both crop wise and food, as well as spiritual forces on those land.
And so these Akon or pioneer societies were rooted or anchored in this compact between indigenous political leaders and healers.
That was said, by the way, will be tested doing life. Of course we don't go. And I come to that shortly.
What I want to do is sort of give us a bit of a reprieve, but also a perspective on this festival as it as it was recorded by Robert Rattray in 1923.
He's not in touch at this moment. He's actually in Kumasi.
But what we have here is a rare footage. And I was just tempted I could not help myself.
But to share this with you is that the World at Large Institute in London and it shows a a
festival referred to in touchsmart as one auquel and in Asante referred to as Queer Day.
And this is a festival and ritual and pretty much honouring and venerating the ancestral forces of that land and others come back.
And so I want to warn you, it is a silent film, but the value here, all the visuals.
And so we can sort of step back.
And just take in the visual, so what you see here are many of the attire that quote we don't call would have worn, which is the into the cloth.
The the you see the the cheers for the people leadership.
You see the stools. They're individuals. They're.
With the umbrellas and you see both the young and the old, you see the drummers or chinaman and Kofi Dunkle was also a drummer.
And so the visual take here is sort of a time travel war that actually would bring us into the life and community of coffee.
Don't go as he lived as he and they lived it in the 1920s.
And so we're going to move on from that video and we come to another anthropologist that is crucial to we don't cause and it's community under right.
This is Dennis Michael Ward again,
this Peace Corps science worker who essentially used achievement as his base for doing a doctoral dissertation in anthropology on Bono,
a common medicine disease and therapeutics and in a centre is also greenpoint.
Dr was a brain bone who is a veteran scholar and ethno historian.
Who was the primary assistant and research assistant to Dennis Warren?
In fact, I would argue he was more than that. And so in this picture was captured, you know, a very crucial moment,
but also crucial knowledge and power relation dynamic and that the idea would still loom large enough today.
The idea was that research in Africa was viewed that the Africans were to be the interpreters were to be the the assistance,
this sort of low grade accomplices, you know, to the sort of greater research, you know, project.
But in this case, the idea was that these intermediaries did not necessarily own any authorship to the novels in which they procured.
And so you see the as warring is sort of sitting there and taking it in, and that's worn by his own admission.
You know, he knew a little bit of the tree language, but never enough to conduct an interview or to hold a conversation.
And so he relied on as many research researchers at the time and have to have done otherwise to bring home and also bring Poland,
you know, in interviewing him and talking to them.
Over the years has argued that 85 percent of all the work the research, the interviews interviewing thousands of people,
community people and healers of drawing maps of the local geography, doing surveys of thousands of people in the community.
For Dennis Warren's research, which became his, you know, his his entree entry into the world of medical anthropology,
and he had a stellar career working for the World Bank as an expert.
But that knowledge base was rooted in work done by the bring forward by recipient.
Paul received the benefits, you know, from from this particular relationship because it was a brand.
Cohn was casted as an assistant and only an assistant, whereby most of the research I was at Brown Kong did,
and I was able to cooperate with the growing problems side of the story because I went
through Dennis Warren's papers located at the archive in the University of Iowa,
as well as Iowa State. And his recordings, the ones in which was the brand,
was there recording on a older device at Indiana University, at its folkloric archive and much of the work.
Their collaboration was a brand promise claim.
What's important is that we don't call was, as Dennis Warren says, his main informant, but Kofi Duncan was more than enough for me.
In fact, I argue that quote we don't call was that it was intellectual, therefore a colleague,
because his intellectual history is what Boyd and became the substance of Dennis Warren's our own dissertation, but also of his academic career.
Because then his work dissertation over 600 pages was really the mental map.
If we don't call where, as Dennis Warren admits, hit the bulk of his of his theoretical approach, the idea of this classification scheme,
which became very popular in medical anthropology in the 70s and 80s and even into the 90s,
was based on over 2000 disease laxmmi or disease terms, an item that came from one quote unquote preschooler named coffee.
Don't call and so call. We don't call.
He fits this sort of fate of of African intellectuals who intellectual property and intellectual history becomes simply a footnote as an informant,
as as as an as an assistant when they were central to that intellectual project.
And therefore we don't call and Michael war,
and the relationship stands as a representative for the currency of knowledge knowledge production between Africa and the world,
between Africa and the world there. They are sort of inequitable power relationship.
As reflected in the spear of knowledge production,
confident call while not only producing and enriching the knowledge of anthropologists
like Dennis Warren and others who would come after he was also growing in medicine,
in marriage and family. And so there is a chapter devoted to his life and marriage medicine,
the family that kind of lays out the sort of intimate picture of, you know, the ebbs and flows of community life.
Because, excuse me, go back a bit. That was by accident.
And so his life in medicine and marriage was framed by his partnership with who you see on the right.
This is a film one of fear. And she was, you know, own right descended from a family of healers.
Her father was a herbalist, and she too dabbled in therapeutics related to women's health and children's health.
She was also a trader in the market. And so her particular skill set company, any coffee drinker and with them,
they had numerous children, which by not by happenstance, many of them became healers of sorts.
And so excuse me.
And as quote, we don't know, began to mature as a healer.
He began to train hundreds, maybe thousands, of other healers.
Here is a diasporic connexion between coal.
We don't look or we don't.
One of the first persons to train diasporic Africans that is people of African ancestry in the from the Americas in this case.
This is not a quick in the centre who's having what's called the ampicillin PSA?
The locked here being trimmed doing a ritual referred to as Kumar and cucumber is sort of
the graduation ceremony for a healer after an average of three to seven years of training.
And in this picture is really an ensemble of knowledge and expertise so confident don't is trimming the here.
You see there in the back and to the his immediate left is done a call for Gabor,
who was the or chimie or the speech intermediary who worked with him and also a nephew.
We don't go to the extreme left is none of coffee ever.
He was a summer coffee drinker who was also a healer and a very prominent one in his own right.
And you might see here to the, you know, our faces have hidden, but this is the azra.
Come, sir, and that is copy. Don't kill his sister. And to the left, to the right, excuse me, is a healer from the Asante region,
and so his his healing training forte extended not only, you know, throughout, you know, Ghana, including northern Ghana,
as well as as far as Togo and Lucchino Faso, but also extended into the African diaspora in the Americas,
where known as such, it was only one of several who will be trained. And again, he was the first in doing so, connecting both, you know,
Africa with its diasporas because we don't go didn't stop there in terms of his therapeutic and his relationship,
because many of his clients were also and friends were also Muslims.
The people who did not share his particular indigenous spiritual approach and culture still were some of his his largest clients,
patients as well as partners. In fact, Kofi Duncan would travel to northern Ghana to learn from Muslim healers.
And in turn, you see here on the left community of Muslim leaders from the Techiman Zongo Zongo,
those strangers quarters, or those the Gumbo and House awards that we saw earlier.
And on the right, another large pool of people who were his patients and clients and community members were also Christian.
And so here you see one of the largest churches in Tudjman and its members in front of it to the right.
And so more than a third, in fact, more than half of his clientele, you know, over the span of his healing career,
which spans at least 40 or 50 years, were Christian Dennis self-identified Christians in part of the whole.
And so what's really fascinating and I think really insightful about this approach to healing in medicine and also to
human beings is that don't call healed and cure for and sought for the well-being of everyone despite or in our besides,
there are, you know, racer religious or ideological political views.
And I argue that this is sort of the the temperamental or ethos in terms of a roadmap for thinking about humans thriving in Ghana,
but in Africa writ large and Kofi, don't call it, embodied that particular role.
And OK, and Kobi Dunkle was also the first to partner with international organisations here.
There's a partnership to one of the first of several programmes in Africa to integrate, you know, so-called allopathic and biomedicine with.
Indigenous therapeutics.
And this was a training session between healers and the biomedical trainers, which we don't call was crucial to this particular partnership.
And. While curing and treating both children, as well as as women, as you see on the right, we don't call would incorporate, he was given as a gift.
An African-American friend came to visit him and gave him as a gift the stethoscope that you see him using to his left.
And so on the one hand, he was very much secured and firm in his grounding in his own cultural and spiritual values.
But at the same time, he was also not averse to trying and experimenting with other approaches to get to the same,
and that is the wholeness and health of his community. I'm not sure what's going on, but get this light in order.
OK, so what does all this mean? You know, in the life, of course, we don't go in this community in the context of this.
Do hegemony in the context of this dual ecology while trying to affect?
The hole in health in a, you know, on hole and in a corrosive environment of colonial rule.
I argued, particularly in the epilogue,
where where it's sort of a meditation on this thing called closure rule that if we think about colonial rule or colonialism,
least a Western European variety as a sort of forced intimacy.
Whereby ecologies had to be forced open homes, cultures and intimately, and we must open and on display that this forced intimacy,
this sort of forced coercion due to closeness and proximity is something that
I think helps us to rethink how we think about colonial rule and colonialism.
In other words, what I'm arguing that. That what was at stake was what a report from the Watson Commission in 1948 referred to as British colonialism,
undermining the report argued the sort of traditional views and values of society and that the clock could not be turned back.
This is what I'm referring to, has forced intimacy that colonial rule should be reimagined as forced intimacy as this notion of propinquity,
the idea of closing closer proximity of the subjugated in this sense,
leading to a certain kind of forced openness and really a psychosis whereby the colonised begins to see their cultures,
see their cultural forms, see their spiritual culture, their ideas and values and knowledge is as being the demonic inverse of this
Christian Westernised notion because of the hirsute proximity of two colonial power.
And it is this forced intimacy to see and to see colonial rule as an inquisition right,
whereby subjugated cultures are under this inquisition of rule.
And therefore people are forced to make this sort of ultimatum between living
through their own knowledge and cultures as as they have done for for centuries.
An evolving culture at that or discarding that in favour of the sort of Christian orthodoxy that was roaming from the coast
into the forest region and ultimately touching on which we can discuss later in terms of its effect into the interior.
And I think this way of thinking about colonial rule as forced intimacy as an inquisition allows us to view independence from colonial rule,
not as the sort of euphoric celebratory occasion,
but really as a lost opportunity whereby people like Kwame Nkrumah and these men who stood as the architects of the Republic of Ghana.
What I argue was least equipped to really make the Gold Coast's tripartite colony independent independent in the sense of its ideas is knowledge.
Systems is beliefs. Which is not to say that, you know, people cannot or should not incorporate external views and views,
but that people should choose on their own terms to do so.
And that choosing is foreclosed by the Inquisition. Bothered by the force intimacy occasioned by Western European colonial rule,
which is a kind of colonial rule which the comedian Trevor Noah jokes about,
is peculiar because it's not the kind of a coup that seeks territorial conquest and simply provisions
for fighting wars that is used for recruiting men to fight wars or provisions of food crops alike,
but is a kind of forced intimacy whereby the British, like the French and other colonial actors,
sought to remake their subjugated populations into black British men or black Englishmen, as it were.
That is, to remake them in their own image.
And I argue that's a particular kind of colonialism that has to be viewed differently than simply territorial conquest.
Because in that, looking to remake the subjugated it cause amongst the subjugated this particular
psychosis where they view their culture and that of the call as as an ultimatum,
right, rather than a choice rather than a choice on their own terms.
And that creates a range of schisms and conflict whereby in Kwame Nkrumah and his Kadry looking
for inspiration to build a new nation rather than look at what was there on the ground.
And what I argue, looking at the sort of decolonise, non-national approach to nation building.
I quote we don't call often meaning that we don't go.
We cared for, connected with and viewed people, regardless of their political affiliation, gender, you name it, class status and so on.
That that was the rule meant to look because at 9:57, when incluem and others began to think about how to build this new nation,
the composite sort of resonate for the Gold Coast was this bastion due to the people were farmers were illiterate in English,
in European languages, but literate in their own land and knowledge systems.
And they were non-Christians and non-Muslim, the vast majority.
And that's the profile, that's the resume. So rather than look toward that.
Where do the others look, look to Britain and look to the United States, and of course,
we have to remember that Kwame Nkrumah was was his ideas about nation building
was shaped by his time in the United States as a student at Lincoln University.
Though it wasn't, you know, historically black university, he was shaped by the experiences there in terms of,
you know, coming back to the Gold Coast and being immersed into the politics of the Gold Coast.
And so this was a lost opportunity to a crucial lost opportunity because what happens then is that many of the
values and ideas which we don't duncan's this community and therefore the vast majority of Ghana stood for,
we lost. Because rather than abolishing or renewing that indigenous profile,
Kwame Nkrumah and others began to redefine the the Christian orthodoxy running rampant on the coast began to redefine the capitalism running rampant.
In fact, he rather than abolish the Cocoa Marketing Board, for instance, because cocoa was a crucial crop for the economy.
The tripartite colony he redefined and made even more central.
And that sort of approach know came to bite the economy of Ghana, whereby in 1960, to give you an example of the independent Ghana was its currency.
The city was at par with the pound sterling one to one.
Right. And so by the time of the coup in 1966, where who was ousted and overthrown in absentia,
that the economy, the currency and the sort of fanatic, you know,
Christian orthodoxy that is rampant in Ghana today was let loose rather rather than,
you know, corralled or addressed differently based upon again their profile on the populace.
And so in many ways, this was a lost opportunity, you know, and we can talk about this further.
And that was an opportunity for incoming others and other so-called nationalist anti-colonial
statesmen to really show the world how we go about things in our own way in this part of the world.
Thank you. I think that was really wonderful talk and well, people are just getting their questions,
let me remind everyone that we will operate the kind of hand up system primarily for a question and people can then interact directly and.
But if you also want to put something in the chat, we'll be monitoring that too.
You know, I think the the the story of Kofi Dunk really is an amazingly powerful and productive
example of the way in which a research strategy that looks at people in the middle,
people at the interstices of of Connexions is,
you know, as I said, incredibly sort of productive too to writing history in relation to the alternative
kind of perspectives that you are giving for and from from the hinterland.
But also because as a person, as a healer,
he's sitting there at the interstices of power and of transformation in terms of knowledge and relations between, as it was, nature and society.
And and this sort of perhaps it's a bit of a stretch to think about the work as a work about being in the middle or intermediaries.
But it made me think of two questions, really.
The first was.