Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch

Her first book, The Politics of Chieftaincy: Authority and Property in Colonial Ghana, 1920-1950 examines critical junctures and transformations in the history of local Ghanaian institutions during the first half of the twentieth century.  The study explores larger questions of power, authority and conflict by tracing the ways in which Africans reworked local epistemologies and practices to engage with and resist powerful internal and external influences in a growing urban setting. As colonial rule intersected with grassroots politics in the colonial capital, Accra, the removal of chiefs, succession disputes, and litigation became powerful sites of conflict and disruption. Sackeyfio-Lenoch demonstrates that these sites of conflict were also innovative spaces for Accra’s residents to negotiate the sociopolitical and economic changes of the period.  Disputes opened new arenas to engage in dialogue and debates around the efficacy of chieftaincy and the meaning of property and its alienation during colonial rule.

Questions of decolonization, African internationalism, post-independence nationhood, and transnational/global cultural projects animate her current work. The genesis and evolution of cultural policies/projects in Ghana and across the globe during the post-independence era are central to her book manuscript in progress. The study examines the efforts of Ghanaians at home and abroad by tracing the international/transnational/ global projects of Ghanaian artists, writers/intellectuals, and cultural institutions--against the framework of failed nation building--that has figured so prominently in studies of this era. The book reframes our understanding of post-independence African nationhood by identifying spheres of generative cultural and intellectual projects tied to the colonial era but with afterlives that were far-reaching in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s within Ghana and beyond.