Good evening, everyone.
Good evening and welcome to Big Tent Live Event, Live Online event series from the University of Oxford as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme,
one of the founding Stones for the future, Stephen Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
My name is Wes Williams. I'm a professor of French and I'm also the director of Torch, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.
We're continuing to bring this event programme online and hope that you're all safe and well during this extended and difficult time.
Everyone is welcome in our big tent as we explore big ideas here together.
I'd like to remind you that this exploration is also a collective and that you can submit questions and comments for our speakers.
Please type these into the YouTube live chat below and we'll answer as many as possible later in the session.
In our first big live event of this term, we bring you a concatenation of rooma.
In other words, a conversation between writer, filmmaker and art historian Nana Aferdita erm and professor of African history Richard Rathbone.
The discussion tonight will be the first that celebrates the paperback edition of Nonna's celebrated novel, The Godchild.
Nana and Richard will also discuss the interplay of academic life, academic research and fiction,
and how narratives are shaped and reshaped according to the telling and the tellers to chair the discussion this evening.
I'm delighted also to welcome now to the screen Dr Laura from Bakugan.
Laura Laura is the director of the Petrobas Museum and professorial fellow at Lineker College here in the University of Oxford.
Previously, she led the curatorial department of the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures with
senior curator for Middle and South America and was departmental lecturer in Archaeology,
Museum Studies and Indigenous Heritage at Leiden University.
Lawrence Regional Academic Research has focussed on collaborative collection research
with Amazonian indigenous peoples and Maasai communities from Kenya and Tanzania,
Yokota and Maya, oral history, Mistick, indigenous market systems and merchant biographies and Nicaraguan indigenous resistance in colonial times.
In other words, it's hard to find. Think of anyone better to chair tonight's discussion.
Welcome, Lara, and many thanks for joining us tonight. You're part of the international network that we have here, some of us in Oxford.
Others elsewhere in the world. And so without further delay, I'll hand over to you to introduce our speakers and to begin the conversation.
And all being, well, if the Internet holds out, I'll only return right at the end to say goodbye again.
Over to Laura.
Thank you, West, and thank you for having me, and I can think of a of people who would be much better than me to have this conversation,
because I think that the people that we have in the room tonight are such of such eminence and work in areas that I am partly wholly unfamiliar with.
But at the same time, I've been a great admirer of the work that both Nuna and Richard have been able to bring to us.
And I think what I'm going to really sort of limit myself to make sure that we have
the maximum amount of time for the conversation to introducing Na'ama and Richard.
And so then I'll start with NAMA and then Richard and I'll hand over to Richard, actually,
to give a presentation, a short presentation of five minutes about his book and his work.
And then afterwards, Na'ama from Ghana is going to talk about her wonderful book of the child,
the number of Riata, and almost doesn't need an introduction anymore.
She's a writer, a filmmaker, an art historian.
And really, I always wonder how she combines the many, many different aspects of the inspiring and exciting, the innovative work that she combines.
She lives and works in Accra, Ghana, and as a special adviser to the Kenyan government on museums and cultural heritage,
is leading the country's museum restructuring programme.
Now, she's also the founder of the Institute of Arts and Knowledge, and she appeared in almost every newspaper, I think,
worldwide when she pioneered from an African cultural encyclopaedia,
one of the most exciting cultural conceptual rethinking of what museums might look like in the future.
What they can actually be in a more sort of another possible.
Possible is also led by NAMA.
And this is a project called the Mobile Museums Project that to me really sort of illustrates that we can move beyond what is usually conceptualised,
what museums are and what they should be.
Now, her curation of Ghana's first pavilion at the Venice Biennale was widely acknowledged as both thrillingly beautiful and shaking up the Biennale.
As usual, Whiteness in 2009, Themes published her first novel, The Child with Bloomsbury.
And for our German speaking audience, a German translation has just come out with penguins.
Now the book touches the heart and mind. At least that's how I experience it.
When I was reading it last summer, the book really touches the heart and the mind equally,
and I cannot recommend reading it more highly, not for someone like myself.
Living in the world of museums. It also offers both beauty and imagination and ask some very important and piercing questions around
ownership and around entitlement and around many different aspects that one can sort of think
around about migration and how one assembles and feels disassembled when living in my in a sort of
state of migration and or coming home a bit similar to the sort of questions it asks about the book,
asks about the assemblages that have been build up in European museums.
But Will, I'm sure we will touch on that later in the conversation.
Now, there's too many accolades, other accolades to mention awards that mama has rightfully won.
But I just want to sort of now first discuss Richard and move on with the conversation,
because otherwise I would take up all all the evening just talking about how much amazing work has been done.
Richard Rathbun began his research career at the School of Oriental and African Studies,
or so US, where he worked under the pioneer historian of Africa, Roland Ollivier.
Richard has served as chairman of the University of London's Centre for African Studies and as the Dean of Postgraduate Studies,
and was promoted to a chair in modern African history in nineteen ninety four.
And then a series of research trips followed and fellowships that led him to Ghana and the University of Cape Town,
Johannesburg, Harvard and Princeton, as well as the DeSoto and Toronto.
Which is current appointments include emeritus professor and professional research
associate at SO and honorary professor in history at Aberystwyth University.
He's also the author of many books, including Murder and Politics in Colonial Ghana and Kromah and the Chiefs,
The Politics of Chieftaincy in Ghana between nineteen fifty one in nineteen sixty.
And some of those books have really been given amazing accolades and both in the way that they write
them and the sort of boldness and at the same time very thoroughness in which they capture a degree of,
as the Times Literary Supplement set about what the book said that they captured,
as it could be a remarkable degree of the tragic tragedy and confusion of Ghana's transition
from both pioneer of anti colonial modernism to postmodern epic of post-colonial despair.
The Sunday Telegraph talks about how Richard's book allows the reader to enter into the past in a way with history written on a grander scale.
Sometimes just not because it's more restrained. It's very scholarly and often almost elitist in tone.
And the Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics talks about how his book has the pace and
tension of an historical thriller and tells the story of a genuine watershed in British imperial history.
So I cannot wait to hear how this conversation is going to take place because there's so much so many different aspects within which the different
books and the different ways of reading elements of history actually enable us to think more deeply in new ways about how history has shaped.
So, Richard, I'm going to hand over to you and amuse myself.
Thank you, Laura.
I got into this particular bit of my research career by being troubled by the domination in histories of 20th century Ghana, which is well done.
Most of my work in Africa, domination of 20th century Ghana and political history by a single narrative.
And that single narrative is, of course, the great epic,
anticolonial struggle conducted by a radical nationalist party who took on a very successfully on a mission to regain sovereignty from colonial rule.
Unfortunately, I spent an awful lot of my life buried in archives, which what historians do and a lot of the documentation,
particularly in the Ghana National Archives, so very much my second home.
What emerged out of that immersion was at least as important as that struggle, the struggle that has the focus, the anticolonial struggle.
And that struggle is a struggle over a radical nationalist party which becomes, after 1951,
a government, a struggle against traditional chiefly government, chiefly authority, chiefly states.
And the dominant narrative,
the winners narrative insisted that chiefly authority was supported and even created by colonial rule and accordingly joined at the hip.
Colonial rule and traditional rule constituted a kind of unholy alliance and osseo regime that deserved to be ousted.
Now, the question that occurred to me, first of all, was that demonisation of traditional rule entirely justified?
And my answer is that reasonably radical person, I think was yes,
in many ways it was traditional authority had indeed been bolstered by colonial policies.
And those colonial policies had in West Africa anyhow,
relied on the devolution of many powers to these kingdoms because it devolved to them control over things like law and order,
dominating over half the binary legal system in those states.
And in some some cases, these states had their own local police forces, their own local prisons.
It is also the colonial state devolved to chieftaincy chiefly through tax collection, sanitation, licencing and moneylenders, letter writers,
etc., etc. because all law and in some cases these powers were exercised in a thoroughly undemocratic and self-serving fashion.
I think we should make no secret of that because I tend to romanticise the state we're going to be talking about.
No one is going to be talking about possibly too much.
Into the oppressive quality of chiefly through lies,
the roots of the disenchantment of many of the new generation of literate young people and their attraction to incomers convention, People's Party.
This is the interwar period and the immediate post-war period of the 20th century.
But what we knew about those kingdoms derived from a very fine,
if limited ethnographic corpus and the views of governments, both British and from 1951, gone in.
And I wanted to know a little bit more about traditional chieftaincy and for a variety of reasons,
I started looking at that in my book, which some people call Akim wrongly and none.
And I would call it a work, but not least because for thirty one years, long period of life, a generation,
the tenant of the royal throne and you'll see Nuna actually is in the palace for a time of year where this man settled his stool, sat on his throne.
He was a very obviously very remarkable man called Nana, sir, for you after he'd been appointed by the British in 1927.
He did everything that it was possible to be as an African in the interval period.
He was on the colonial legislature. He was a colonial grandee form and much of the literature.
However, despite all of these achievements and considerable achievements,
much of the literature wrote him off as a collaborator and as a colonial stooge.
With all those labels of collaboration studiousness not justified,
and I think not because the massive amount of the documentation and there is a huge amount of it,
including his own archive in the palace that are sitting in at the moment, argue something very much more interesting than not.
First of all, he was a man who used the weakness of the Colonial State, which actually had no physical presence in Morocco until 1908,
use the weakness of the Colonial State to assist him in rebuilding his kingdom as a modern state.
And when colonial officers arrived, as they did from 1908, he dominated them.
He really did dominate, not dominated them. He had them in his pocket so much.
There was one of the most long running district offices in Ashim of what was actually called Kibbie Chebbi Jones,
it being as it were, taken over by Chebbi,
taken over by the Royal Palace of Religious Vision, I think can be summed up by being a vision of self-sufficiency,
the acquisition of modern skills and especially literacy. Progressive agriculture and above all, the retention of control of resources, for example,
controlling the access to mining concessions in gold and diamond fields in the state like the kingdom.
And equally important, and I think we'll have a lot to say about this,
he really cared about the defence of his ancient culture from which a lot of the sources of Nonna's come come from.
Basically, he got away with all of this because he was so much more clever than the colonial establishment officers.
He was fluent in QWhy, the language of the Afghan people. And Ajimobi Walker is an Afghan state fluent in history and in English.
And the correspondence between him and the mountains of it, the correspondence between him and colonial authority always shows him to be the stylist.
He's the grammarian. He's the master of the case. Laws, intricacies.
He's the subtle debater. And they look so let me put it in comparison.
And he runs rings around them. And consequently, the colonial authorities were intimidated, I think, to a certain extent,
by they defer to his knowledge of traditional law and that knowledge of traditional law was bolstered by the
two massive tomes on traditional Afghan law and customs written by his no less extraordinary Half-Brother,
the pioneer nationalist lawyer, the playwright, the journalist, J.B. Danquah, his half brother,
as I said, so afraid his political clout ensured that his opinions became excuse me, rulings.
He's not alone in that kind of figure in a colonial state are a couple of others I can think of.
The great lawless action in Fiji left his imprint on the Colonial State in that kind of way, as the did in Uganda, both all of whom were, I think,
able to perform with such manifest authority that their understandings, their portrayals of the nature world, they are the ones that dominated.
Now, after years in the company of four yassa in written form, of course, he died five died before I was able to keep his company.
I've always seen him as a conservative nationalist and I think he was a nationalist.
He was dedicated to what he called progress. He was dedicated to development as well as the defence of his culture.
And while he was manifestly a conservative with a small C., he was also attractively progressive.
He built a school near Chebbi, the academic work of state college, so that young people,
young people would not have to study at Borders or strangers in the big schools in Accra or Cape Coast.
He was remarkable in the antiwar period for being an enthusiast for the education of women amongst whom were his daughter,
who was to become Ghana's first woman, doctor and incidentally, the aunt to Ghana's current president.
He was additionally behind the so-called Kouakou hold up a strike of coca farmers withholding the coke that coca
they produced to receive a fairer price on the world market and to try to strangle the brokers out of business.
And he even tried to negotiate deals which would have cut out the middleman, cut out the country brokers.
Now, all of this was a balancing act and one which required very hard work through all archives,
really reveal a man to have been extremely industrious,
a monarch whose commitment to detail always reminded me when I was going through his in his correspondence,
reminded me of the second or Louis the 14th people who worked way after closing time again and again and again,
and being progressive, especially progressive, while being at the same time notably repressive.
That's a juggling act. And this great juggler died in 1944, and that's with the removal of a key stone in a great Gothic cathedral.
The roof fell in. The story that brings down on myself together is what what goes on in the 40 days of mourning after his death,
some members of the royal family were accused of being complicit in the ritual murder and chebbi the capital city of of work.
Once the signature of the admiring gaze of the world, I think,
lost the support of the colonial government while attracting the heightened hostility of the radical political party,
which was effectively to govern gone from 1951 to 66.
That case, as I've already said, that brought down on myself and I hope,
productive and enjoyable contact that she brings to the narrative, something that I can't or a lot of things that I can't.
She brings to that narrative insights which I could not and did not want to take account based on the stories that are available in archives,
lots and lots and lots of them.
And for hours and hours and days and days of interviews and information gained from those interviews from only men and women
did not talk to me during the period I spent doing research in the period of time that I spent doing research in Ghana.
She has, as a consequence, as a member of the royal family. She's the granddaughter of Nanosphere.
For Yatta, she has access to what intrigued the language of the icon.
She has access to what are called the things of the house, the family secrets, and in some ways, I suppose the dirty washing as well.
And in a very wonderful book, which I have on my desk, I hope it can be seen on screen.
She excludes things that I could not explore, such as feelings and meanings, what it is like to grow up as a royal child,
which is no longer a child, but certainly royal and growing up as a child of someone who's close kin has been hanged for murder.
Very dramatic thing to have in the history of your family. And for me,
it's a great privilege for me as a historian to be able to read in her work a very fine exploration of thoughts and sensations I could only imagine,
but thoughts and feelings and sensations which she has realised in her book.
And in that sense,
I think we I hope that we are kind of complementary contributors to the understanding of a very extraordinary man who would be part of the world,
a very extraordinary culture, a very extraordinary kingdom. That's it.
I finished. That's right.
That is wonderful. So I thank you so much for that context on the one hand, and historical insight,
which I think is and also drawing the line towards us work and how there's different dimensions that the work brings.
One sort of having been really from working through the archives and investigating the archives and interviews with most women.
And the other story, which no, I'm happy you've been able to put your video also on and here with us and in a very exceptional setting of the palace,
I'm going to hand over to you for your introduction. Thank you.
Thank you, Laura, and thank you, Richard. You are asking Laura how I managed to get everything done and sometimes the answer is.
Day or two, we were in the middle of filming day, which aired this morning, and I'm still sometimes of multitasking.
So, yeah, I'm in the fear and the pilots actually I have the drums,
I decided to sit in front of the drum house because they have so much to do with the narrative that I wrote,
but also the inspiration of everything, more or less that I do.
You'll see the ones on the wood, actually, the humdrum, the talking drums of Atima Black.
And like I said, one of the big inspirations for my work of the talking drums and the iron the I'm sorry, this is the.
A lot of. Noise in the background, the downstairs uncle and uncle Frase up watching through what they call a trauma, which is a divine drama.
And when I actually did my master's, that was where Professor Rathbone or Richard was.
I was a professor. And when I did my master's in African art history,
I realised that the terms and the concepts of which I was describing my culture were all foreign ones.
And I started looking for a narrative form, concepts, terms in which I could describe my culture on their own terms.
And so I started looking at oral literature, and that's when I came across drawn poetry,
which was this incredibly poetic, philosophical way of telling history.
And not only did I come across the German poetry, but I realised that my own uncle was a master of the drums of divine drama and trauma.
So I kind of became an apprentice to him. I sat at his feet for years documenting the drum poems, you know,
that deeper meaning that different boys had learnt the drum, but only a few of them get passed on the deeper meaning.
The secrets of the drum. And when it came to actually wanting to drum myself, I was told that I'm Falciani because I was a woman,
I wasn't allowed to serve these drums behind me at the time.
I'm actually, unfortunately not allowed to touch, which is a shame.
But it also actually drove me into the question of how do I become a historian of, you know, using the forms of the iron on my own terms,
you know, because there are certain restrictions, spiritual, traditional, that stopped me from becoming one in a traditional sense.
And that's when I switched to writing and filmmaking.
But I always inspired by the form of the iron, which underscores everything, which underscores everything that I do.
So even in the book itself, the rhythms of the iron, the cyclical nature of it, the elliptical nature of it,
the abstract nature of it was really, really, really a driving force behind it.
And then not only and also my great grandfather to my grandfather's father was also a crematorium.
And thus maybe Richard can speak about it a little bit. That was a great kind of schism between him and the reigning king when my great grandfather
became a Christian and was driven from the kingdom and and and was basically I think you,
Richard, you likened it to the story of Jesus, where he was driven from the kingdom and had to kind of bring up his family elsewhere.
Then obviously his sons, both his sons, had a kind of reconnection with the kingdom in a very deep way.
Another kind of source, obviously, of of of of of the kind of story that I've told is Richard's own writing,
both in combat and the chiefs, and that the one that set here in that time of Black I the book was,
I think three times as long when I first wrote it, because it had a lot of historical background, again, drawn a lot on Richard's writing.
And so it's really a real privilege to be sitting not here while sitting digitally
or metaphysically in some way here with him and to be able to talk about it.
I'm going to read just a little tiny bit of the beginning of the book just to kind of set the tone in a fictional way.
And then I think it would be great if we could actually have a discussion about some of the themes.
I cannot remember how I first knew my life was not my own.
It came to me not at once, not in words or visions, not in capitals or in imperatives or assertions,
but as a perennial wordless whisper, a stream whose beginnings were beyond science and whose ends I somehow seemed to carry.
I looked over at him. He was the one they would have chosen for me.
And yet I had arrived here by my own volition.
I had watched him all these years on both sides from close quarters, as if at a poker table to smirky to male, to shrouded in codes.
I had neither the ability and willingness to understand. I had sort of the generation of above me is still to be tainted by colonial malaise
of my generation as a bridge of our daughters and sons of the ones to be truly,
hopefully free. And yet quietly, imperceptibly, I been witness to a transformation from a narrative too large,
too unwieldy, to unconcerned with the small in the human,
to couched in arrogance and entitlement to one of hardwork, nobility, loyalty,
fidelity through the clarity there, the clarity, the vision, the truth of it was not yet apparent.
It seemed a certain grace had set in and that it was all of us.
There was tiredness, exhaustion, disillusion, cynicism, mistrust on all fronts.
But strangely, it also felt like something new was beginning, not for one side or the other,
but for us as human beings bearing a geographical space, creating a common story.
All that was missing was the joy, the lightness and innocence of my mother, her brothers of Kodjoe.
And yet they had not survived. I looked at him now as he walked towards me at all of them, they who had finally won.
But I was more my mother's daughter, Kodjo sister, than theirs.
Could I look back to that first splintering, that first awakening, and then could I win as they had and still as they had not to remain open?
Could I as my mother and Joe had not survived? And so, yeah, that's a little bit of the introduction to the book and quite a few of the themes of it,
of freedom and obligation and, you know, the kind of maleness of power and of trying to fit in.
And yet a lot of a lot of those themes. But I would love to have a conversation with Richards and with Laura about about some of those now.
Richard, I don't know if there's there's anything you want to pick up on or we'll say, well, maybe I can ask you some questions, Olara.
I think Larry's in charge of this movie.
Yeah, I think Norma has given you a number of questions and it would be really wonderful to hear what your thoughts are.
So would you be able to sort of give some reflections around the elements that might have sort of brought both of you,
sort of her getting to know the history of her grandfather through some of your your own work and at the
same time sort of some of the questions that she also posed about sort of the piece that was written,
which really has sort of made, ah, some of my reflections in the book, How Power is Assigned.
I suppose the question that I felt all the way through reading this book is what does it feel like to be royal?
I have no experience of it at all. I'm a rank commoner, but there is something very special about being royal and it's about oppression.
I think it weighs heavily on the shoulders.
It's a tough thing to be their expectations all the time of it and their expectations not just of being royal,
but in what royalty has done to the STEM family,
the House and the Senate clan that you're a member of a very high achieving, very successful, very powerful people.
And I have no experience of that personally. And it comes out very much in the book.
Certainly that sense of being held under in a way, as well as being pushed up,
it seems a very binary experience and a very frightening one in some ways.
And I think the fear comes out of the book as well. I mean, is that a bad reading of a child?
No, I think it's a really, really, really accurate one, and interestingly,
I think the first person he's really picked up on it so strongly and I think probably that's because of your research.
You know, I also, you know, at the beginning, I think I wasn't so explicit may be in that in the fact that it was you know,
there was elements of of of of kind of self in it.
But I think that, you know, this idea or this dichotomy of of of obligation.
And, you know, we we obviously, you know, in our culture, the ancestors' kind of such a place,
such an important role in our lives, this idea of continuity.
And you know, that they're always there with us.
And, you know, my I in the book has this sense that from the very beginning.
Oh. And she she has this obligation to have these voices that are always and that she kind of has to function of can she can she not be?
And it's a bigger question of history as well.
You know, can one free oneself from the burden, from the obligation of history, you know, both visually and collectively as well.
And this is a question that I ask myself a lot, you know, both as an individual, but also as a as a as a cultural historian.
So I think it was it's a very, very, very apt reading.
I'd like to ask you if you allow me the time, Laura, to talk to us, really, what what of the the things of the house did you learn?
I'm not asking for specific data,
but how far how far could you get in terms of those close kept secrets that are were anyhow historically part of what the ruling council of the state,
the Australian Council had, what they understood them to be,
which weren't for other people to digest or know about, and things that I could never find out about.
And I'd also access to places I could never go to, which you can and I can't.
It's a very it's a very big chunk of experience and understanding caught up in all of that,
what places looked like, what they feel like, and what are the moments in which people say sush?
I think I think that again and start to kind of it's quite a deep connexion in a way,
because I think knowledge and secrecy and power are so closely interwoven, like not just in this case, but generally in all.
For example, the indigenous knowledge systems that I've been looking at is the idea that knowledge is such power that you don't hand it over easily.
You only give it to those who are spiritually who are, you know, who he was very, very, very serious about it.
And I've shown that seriousness through years and years and years and years of commitment.
You don't just hand knowledge over. And I think one of those things, one of the consequences of that godding of knowledge was that, you know,
a lot of the time when researchers or anthropologists came in and there was the seeming
death of knowledge because people just wouldn't talk or they would mislead with knowledge.
And I think that's it's a really interesting, not just in the specific case,
but just generally the the notion of knowledge and of passing on knowledge is such it's just.
So different to anything that I learnt in my Western education, where knowledge is such an explicit thing,
it's like any knowledge, anything that you learn is good and it's linear.
And the more that's said in the more that's visible, the better here.
It's really about secrecy. It's about guarding even the Iame.
The drug policy has so many gaps within it so that even the poems are being passed on as history.
But yet you have to know all of these backgrounds in order to piece together that history.
And so to answer your question about how you know, how much I personally could access it, it's been a long, ongoing journey.
I mean, I had a very, very, very close relationship with my uncle, which led me, you know,
into certain areas of knowledge that, you know, he told me, for example, that I could never share.
And I was like, but I have a history, you know, that's. But, you know, I want to share.
I want to. And in a way, that's kind of the freedom of. Fiction as well, is that, yes, you know, that's not the.
The kind of hard facts that you can play with the idea of truth,
and I find and that's also why I ended the one that said the appendix, which is very, very, very heavily inspired.
I love that somebody described you because a thriller, because I found that as well.
And that's why I kind of had a parallel to the way that you told the story as well,
right down to like when they put the black square down, you know, and kind of like the judgement was told.
I just I find it so captivating and.
You know, in that in that appendix, I try to really explore the idea of what is truth because, you know, in and I think, you know,
to go back to the title of this talk of a contact nation of rumour,
the idea of what truth was, and especially as you tell it in your book, was so fluid.
It was kind of told. It was retold. Tradition was retold.
And I thought this idea of truth not being fixed, this.
Siderov even in the drum, Pertwee, for example, the eye of the drum perm could be the present king,
the alginate, but it could also be 12 kings before.
But it's still spoken of as the same person you.
Subject timidities into changeable and so what happens to a story when there is no fixed subject,
when there is no fixed truth but everything is possible fluid?
What happens to that still to this day so fascinating is how do you how a story is
told where things are interchangeable as they are when you were telling them on the.
She's for another, as the drummer has his own way. You know, what does that say about story telling or story telling us, you know,
as people know it in the Western world and I still haven't gotten to the end of it.
Could feel like I'm done in the middle of the exploration, you know, as it pertains narrative, but also the idea of fluidity and yeah,
like I said, I find it very, very interesting in your book how you underscored that the idea that this idea,
that truth was something that was being made and remade, this idea, that tradition was something that was most being,
you know, like sometimes very, very seemed very old, but sometimes it seems like it was almost being invented on the spot.
And, yeah, you know, that might be seen in some instances as negative, but there's also a certain openness to that.
I think it's also symbolised to a certain extent, but in a way, the things that are physical and so on.
I mean, the Fratta is a very traditional chiefs in many senses are king.
I call him throughout because, you know, I mean, he rejects Presbyterianism, although he's a child of romance.
His father, as you say, was a drummer who becomes a Presbyterian minister.
His mother was also a Presbyterian. He rejects Presbyterianism on becoming Argentinean, becoming king.
And although the the ministers of the Presbyterian Church are allowed into the palace to pray, he never goes to a service again.
And during the obsequies, when he's dead,
you can hear the service in the church in chivvy in the Hanafi where there are other ceremonies going on and the other bits of symbolism about change,
but also alteration. And I find him fascinating in terms of how flashy he is at times.
I mean, this is a man who has hand rolled cigarettes manufactured in Burlington Arcade for him with his initials on which he gives to visitors.
He loves big American cars, the last of which I had traced back a Chevrolet with whitewall tires, which is absolutely splendid.
And the fact that when the telegraph is built, which is actually a space ridging idea, spreading the device,
in many senses the line of the telegraph goes right over the mausoleum of the most of all the dead or Argentina.
I mean, the symbolism of that is very, very marked.
And it's part yards away, feet away, metres away from a tennis court that he had built with a tennis court built in the palace grounds,
which is sadly overgrown when I last saw it. And I love all those disjunctions that go on between, as you said,
the the falsity is obviously the full story of the notion of tradition, but also the ferocity of the notion of modernity.
It's the mills that's exciting and the process that leads to the mills.
That's exciting. Don't know whether that makes any sense. Yes, it absolutely does.
I was wondering that I could weave in one or two questions from the public because none of this information is.
Absolutely, and they actually. Hello.
Yes, we can hear you again. Well, actually.
All right, yeah, yeah, so the question from the public is that there was a question that was asking whether Anoma whether you could speak
a little bit more about the kinds of narrative tapes your experiences with drums and drumming have created.
This is from my own little who asked this question. I mean, I think it's it's it's evident in the book, it's also evident in my films as well.
I mean, that the drama itself, the drama language itself is is made of fixed poems.
There's also room for improvisation. But it's not the telling of the.
Of history is not. As we know it, in a linear.
And, you know, it started in sixty and then went forward and these wars happened and, you know,
it kind of jumps howls of those appellations with that ruler and then it jumped to the
president with the same appellations and then interjects with kind of an interlude.
And it's just I mean, for somebody who comes from a very formalistic point of view, it could seem very chaotic.
You have several drum orchestras happening at the same time.
And then suddenly the drummer starts speaking to the dancer in front of him and interjects.
It's just it's very fluid.
It's very intuitive. And it requires such a huge amount of mastery of form for you to be able to talk so that people
can listen and understand and then kind of move between rhythms and hold your audience and,
you know, not just be makes sense in a in a in a conceptual way,
but also be rhythmic enough so that those who don't understand the language can also enjoy the music of it.
Could one say that in the book, that's exactly what you do, right?
So you there is that sort of I mean, it's just it's an extraordinarily.
It's. Hello.
Yeah, there's moments that we're probably not that we're losing each other, or at least my my Internet connexion might not be very stable,
but I was just wondering that in your book, that is also very much that rhythm and that sort of change of rhythm.
Very much so. Happens in the book. And you were saying earlier that your book was three times as long reach the other
parts that you sort of very consciously started to change the rhythm also of the book,
because that space is something that one feels in the book. Also that there is sort of difference in rhythms.
Yeah, I mean, it was it's an experiment in that way, you know, the idea of kind of translating something from one form into another.
And, you know, I I didn't know to what extent. I don't know to what extent it would succeed.
It was just an attempt to you know, I think if it was or speaks about language so much, you know,
and about this idea of going into the postcolonial by reclaiming writing in our languages.
And for me, I'd say the reclamation took another form in that I can't deny my Western education.
I can't deny kind of my fluency in certain Western languages.
But I can try and inhabit them with something that's really, you know, so deep and rooted to me and that's so ancestral within me.
And so we kind of inhabit it, a language that, you know, to a certain extent was imposed on me or my forefathers and mothers,
but still take ownership of it by expanding it through these forms and then see what happens.
I think in one of the indigenous knowledge systems that I am looking at, one of the ones it said something like language.
I can't remember the quote exactly now,
but it said something so beautiful about language bringing you back to the harbour of self or the hub of the soul.
It was very, very I comes in from the way it was very, very beautifully put.
And I think that, you know, that this idea, or at least I felt that idea sometimes growing up,
that language for me, something and I think I gave my about a little bit as well,
that kind of absence that she felt in terms of language, of knowing, of knowing this and knowing self and how do you get back to that?
And I think to a certain extent, with the form of the drum poetry, it's my kind of way of trying to reconnect with something that I feel.
For example, you know, when Richard speaks about my grandfather and he's kind of trying to really bring the kind of ancestral,
the traditional with him into modernity, it's kind of, I guess, a way of of connecting with that.
Another question from the audience, which is really to you said of the books that tell you the book that you have been referring
to is mostly the book that you that is an Ohio University Press and James Curry press book.
No, we're talking about Yale University Press murder and politics,
but that's somebody who's more or less the only says asked whether you could repeat the books that have been referred to mostly.
And could you talk a little bit more about what the book touches on which one is the one that you've been mostly referring to?
Well, it was it's basically a sort of potted history of actually my book where there
wasn't really anything very much substantial written about how she mccorkell, which is what I was talking about,
because he had ignored these kingdoms of being in the historiography because they weren't part of the genealogical story of liberation.
So that the first third, I suppose if the book is about Frater and also about the kingdom itself in a sometimes rather travel book kind of way,
I'm afraid I I loved I loved it. The Biram Valley, which is which of its is a very beautiful part of the world.
And it colonised me very much as a site of great natural beauty and peace.
And I was very happy there. But then it ends.
It's sort of the middle. It is is this ICRA that occurs with the murder and it then becomes about the murder,
which is also about the end of chiefly rule to a large extent, that the slow ending of chiefly rule in in in Ghana.
And it ends with a rather limp attempt to talking about what I think chieftaincy might or might not be about,
which the moment I start writing that I wish I hadn't started, but it had to be finished.
So it really is the story up to about independence in 1957, the second book, The Crimson the Chiefs,
is about the hounding of our traditional rulers by the Conventional Peoples Party.
A bit of the convention People's Party rule from 51 in effect to internal affairs until 66.
The coup, which takes out a lot of chieftaincy, reduces the power of chieftaincy to virtually nothing.
And one of the abiding images of it is known as Uncle J.B. Danquah, probably the greatest intellectual that God has ever produced and its own very,
very brilliant scholar who was a presidential candidate in 1960, unsuccessfully so, but was a leader of the opposition.
And he's imprisoned under the Preventive Detention Act, is a desperately sick man,
and he dies in a pool of his own vomit in a swamp jail, although he had called for medical help and has been denied.
So, I mean, that was Morgan Freeman. The Chiefs was about the ending of chiefly privilege, if you like,
and if you rule in Ghana so that they're related but different, I hope they're different.
I shall be selling a. Now, is that the uncle you were also referring to earlier?
No, no, it's actually my great, great uncle, yeah, look.
Both suffer. Yeah, it's you use that word.
But. Privilege, which should and like probably all my life,
it was something that I touched on a lot in the book, this idea of privilege, I think is is one.
Yeah, that that concerns all of my work. Who has the power to speak, who has the power to tell stories.
And even though I speak of the divine drama, I don't do much.
It's still something that's still rooted in unequal power. Even here, you know, it's comes its power as told through the lens of a royal family.
You know what? Of all the hundreds and thousands of people who don't have that lens, you know,
and who how do you give access to people and the power to people to tell stories in the same way those who've been,
you know, had the power to tell stories, you know, have.
And I think that's something that that concerns me so much, is this idea of privilege and power.
And obviously, like, you know, it's a huge responsibility and leadership is so hard.
But at the same time, you know, how do we get to a space where that privilege is passed on to as many people as possible?
And it's a real dichotomy that I have with the notion that you touched on at the beginning
which of what royalty is because I'm the one and having royal kingdoms within Ghana or,
you know, having kingdoms that predated the idea of Ghana has allowed us to hold on to so much of our culture, which has been exported.
You know, the county that I'm wearing right now has become like a symbol of,
you know, of blackness, of African-American and sort of diaspora of connexion.
You know, we have our gold. We have, you know, the Ashanti Gold Waite's.
We have lection Gold Waite's rather.
There's so much that's been passed on, including the iron because of the notion of royalty, because it's a concentration of power,
but it's also a space in which learning culture, et cetera, was concentrated on the one on one hand.
So it's allowed a lot of history, a lot of our culture,
a lot of our sense of identity and a lot of our sense of self to prevail despite and through colonialism.
And yet there's still the kind of discomfort of it being a very tiny bracket of the population and the kind of injustice and unfairness of that.
And and how do you begin to deconstruct that? And and that's only within our small, you know, privilege also.
Then obviously, when it comes to race and class, et cetera, outside of a small country, becomes even more complex.
But I think that dichotomy is something that I find incredibly challenging.
I don't know what what you think of it. I think a generation needs to be fed into that, too.
I mean, there is no more insulting put down about things that you can and can't do and the insult which you've never had to suffer,
which is that you're a small boy, namely, shut up.
You have no right to talk about this because you're not old enough and mature enough to have any kind of opinion.
It's devastating when it happens and I've seen it happen.
It's like a slap in the face and it's very powerful to the exclusion of of of the young as well as women and their commoners.
And to some extent and something we don't talk enough about how people are slave dissent in the kingdom to.
Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I think that, yeah, this idea of how do you give more voice to people, how do you privilege more stories, I yeah,
it's something I mean, I think through the work that I'm trying to do with museums is something that you have is an ongoing question of.
Yeah, how how do you make you know, I think that the idea,
the notion of royalty in itself is not necessarily harmful because it's it's about a kind of,
I guess, a divine sense of self or like a divine sense of rootedness and belongingness.
But, you know, everyone should have that, you know, so we should all be royals like everyone.
Everyone should have that as their birthright, not just a few.
A beautiful note to end on it, and I'm going to if unless there's any sort of urgent questions that either of you would like to discuss still,
I was going to invite West to come back in and I just lost that thought on the one hand,
that divine sort of feeling of belonging and at the same time making sure that
that is actually shared with everyone so that everyone can feel that way,
that there's still quite a bit of work to be done in all the different places.
I think that we are all located. But the work that you're doing with the mobile museum and the restructuring of the whole
museum world is such hopeful work that it really leaves us with a lot to to look forward to.
So thank you to both of you for what was a wonderful conversation that was too short,
but absolutely brilliant mounds of elements that were being discussed and touched on and with.
I'm going to hand over back to you. Thank you.
That was indeed a wonderful discussion. And I love the ending where we got to where everyone should be royal.
It kind of reminds me of the notion of the priesthood, of all believers.
In a way, there's a kind of a commonality across there, but something very special in there at the same time.
So thank you to our wonderful speakers, Nina and Richard, and also to Laura for sharing so brilliantly in what was a pretty tough Internet world.
In some ways people were coming in and out, but I think we stayed with it.
And thank you so much for navigating the storms of that particular bit of our discussion.
Thank you. Also for the viewers at home and to all your comments and questions.
And before I do a little sort of sign-off about next week or the next time.
Once again, thank you so much to Nana, Lara and Richard.
Thank you. OK, thank you. Our Big Live Event series will continue here again in a couple of weeks time with a bumper section of theatre.
First on Wednesday, the 12th at seven thirty pm we will have around Myshkin in conversation with Katie Mitchell.
And then on Thursday the 13th at 5:00 p.m.,
we'll be coming to you live from an Oxford venue and joined by the award winning playwright and actress Leslie Chakrabarty.
I hope that you'll be able to join us then again, but for now, many thanks again to all our speakers for being here.
Thanks for you, to you for turning up and goodbye for now.
Thank you.