Ghana Studies 15/16 2012/2013 Ghana Studies Editors Akosua Adomako Ampofo (University of Ghana), [email protected] Stephan F. Miescher (University of California, Santa Barbara), [email protected] Editorial Board Emmanuel Akyeampong (Harvard University) Jean Allman (Washington University) Gareth Austin (London School of Economics) Lynne Brydon (University of Birmingham) Francis Dodoo (University of Ghana and Penn State University) Takyiwaa Manuh (University of Ghana) T. C. McCaskie (SOAS, University of London) Birgit Meyer (Free University, Amsterdam) David Owusu-Ansah (James Madison University) Mansah Prah (University of Cape Coast) Richard Rathbone (Emeritus, SOAS, University of London) Ray Silverman (University of Michigan) Dzodzi Tsikata (University of Ghana) Ivor Wilks (Emeritus, Northwestern University) Larry Yarak (Texas A&M University) Cover logo: “East-West” by George Kojo Arthur (Published February 2014) Ghana Studies is a membership benefit of the Ghana Studies Council. Otherwise all volumes are $22 each to individuals and $44 each to institutions. Volumes 1-2, 4-14 are available from the African Studies Program, 205 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706 Tel: 608-262-2493, FAX: 608-265-5851, e-mail: [email protected] 2014 by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin—Madison ISSN 1536-5514 Ghana Studies 15/16 Health and Health Care Guest Editors: Sjaak van der Geest, Kristine Krause & Kodjo A. Senah 2012/2013 SPECIAL ISSUE: HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE CONTENTS Editors’ Note 1 Akosua Adomako Ampofo and Stephan F. Miescher Introduction: Studying Health and Health Care in Ghana 7 Sjaak van der Geest and Kristine Krause Articles on Health and Health Care The Perception of Abnormality in Kasena and Nankani 41 Infants: Clarifying Infanticide in Northern Ghana Albert K. Awedoba and Aaron R. Denham Caring for the Seriously Sick in a Ghanaian Society: 69 Glimpses from the Past Deborah Atobrah “No Matter How the Child Is, She Is Hers”: Practical Kinship 103 in the Care of Mental Illness in Kintampo, Ghana Ursula M. Read HIV Disclosure in Ghana: The Underlying Gender 135 Dimension to Trust and Caregiving Fidelia Ohemeng Mobile Technology and HIV/AIDS in Ghana 159 Perpetual Crentsil Dilemmas of Patient Expertise: People Living with HIV 195 as Peer Educators in a Ghanaian Hospital Jonathan Mensah Dapaah and Eileen Moyer Pharmaceutical Potentials: Praying over Medicines in 223 Pentecostal Healing Kristine Krause Humanitarian Claims and Expert Testimonies: 251 Contestations over Health Care for Ghanaian Migrants in the United Kingdom Benjamin N. Lawrance Mission Medicine in a Decolonising Health Care System: 287 Agogo Hospital, Ghana, 1945-1980 Pascal Schmid Documentaries on Women’s Health Accra’s Women on Screen, 2001: A Documentary Pair 331 about Body, Risks, Tonics, and Health R. Lane Clark, Nancy Rose Hunt, and Takyiwaa Manuh Other Articles Managing the Pan-African Workplace: Discipline, 337 Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of the Ghanaian Bureau of African Affairs Jeffrey S. Ahlman Staging Unity, Performing Subjectivities: Nkrumah, 373 Nation-Building, and the Ghana Dance Ensemble Paul Schauert Discourses of Love and Newspapers Advice Columns 413 in Ghana Jo Ellen Fair Reviews New Wine in Old Wineskins: The Conservative Tradition 467 in Ghana’s Historical Surveys David Peterson del Mar Christine Oppong, Delali M. Badasu, and 497 Kari Waerness, eds., Child Care in a Globalizing World: Perspectives from Ghana Cati Coe Notes on Contributors 501 EDITORS’ NOTE e are delighted to present the double issue Ghana Studies 15/16 which will be our last as editors. More W than four years have passed since we assumed the editorship, and it is time to pass the baton to a new set of editors: Akosua Darkwah of the University of Ghana and Sean Hanretta of Stanford University. They will continue the practice of an editorial team that is based in Ghana and in the global North. We are confident that their next issue will mark the beginning of another fruitful transnational collaboration. Our journey as Ghana Studies editors has been exciting and intellectually stimulating, although the workload at times stretched us beyond what either of us had anticipated. When we were invited to take on the editorship in 2009, the journal had not appeared for several years. In 2010, our predecessors published their last issue, GS 10 (2007), a wonderful special issue about Ghana@50; the same year, we brought out our first issue, GS 11 (2008). The double issue 12/13 (2009/2010) on Revisiting Modernization followed in 2011, and then issue 14 (2011) in 2012. We are thrilled to report that with the present double issue Ghana Studies is again up to date. We trust that our successors, who are already hard at work preparing issue 17, will continue publishing the journal in a timely fashion. More good news needs to be shared: Ghana Studies, in addition to its print edition, will appear online as part of Project Muse starting in 2014. At the time of writing, we are still looking for a suitable Internet place to house the back issues yet remain confident that they will become accessible online as well. In the course of our editorship we accumulated numerous debts, including to our reviewers, our authors, and the production staff of the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, 2 Madison. We are especially thankful to our reviewers for their unflinching support of the journal—some of them turned around articles we sent them in record time. Their names appear at the end of this note, and we hasten to offer apologies to anyone whom we may have omitted. We hope that the support of reviewers will continue under the new editors, as rigorous peer review is at the heart of this scholarly journal. Ghana Studies 15/16 is an especially rich and diverse issue. It contains a special issue on health and health care in Ghana, skillfully edited by Sjaak van der Geest, Kristine Krause, and Kodjo A. Senah. We are leaving it to two of the guest editors, van der Geest and Krause, to situate their special issue within a larger scholarly context and introduce their contributions. The nine articles on health and health care are followed by R. Lane Clark, Nancy Rose Hunt, and Takyiwaa Manuh’s piece that introduces two film documentaries about women’s health and medical care: “Excuse Me to Say”-- Notions of Body and Risk in Accra and “Where Shall I Go?”-- Tonics, Clinics, and Miracles in Accra.. These two documentaries, directed by Clark and produced by Hunt and Manuh, are accessible online through the Ghana Studies website, YouTube, and Vimeo.1 The documentaries are the culmination of a collaborative training project on women’s health in Accra between the University of Ghana and the University of Michigan. In these films, “health” not only refers to the curative sense but also to social health, economic security, and activities related to joy and well-being. While the first film focuses on catering and seamstress apprentices who share their dreams and aspirations about beauty, dating, marriage, and health concerns, the 1 See http://youtu.be/h3fcKq6wGGQ and http://youtu.be/j4P1CFNOJh0, http://ghanastudies.com/ghana-studies-journal/, and http://vimeo.com/rlaneclark 3 second film shows therapeutic options sought out by girls and women, including hospitals, pharmacies, herbalists, spirit mediums, and healing churches. Both films feature a complexity of voices and spaces, in which women of different ages speak candidly about their health options and challenges. The films incorporate interviews with Ghanaian health experts whose work is cited by other contributors. Thus, the documentaries complement and extend the findings and scope of the special issue by adding a compelling visual dimension. Two articles deal with two very different institutions founded by Kwame Nkrumah. Jeffrey Ahlman revisits the Bureau of African Affairs, one of the most controversial institutions of Nkrumah’s Ghana. While most scholarship has looked at the Bureau in relation to its Pan-African activities seeking to shape governments across the continent, Ahlman examines the Bureau as a workplace. He looks at the development of work regimes that transformed contestations over pay, leave, and technological innovations into debates about national security and ideological discipline. Drawing on the Bureau’s neglected archive, he reconstructs cases of talkative staff, perceived abuses of the telephone, and gendered lack of discipline. These workplace tensions triggered challenges to the Bureau’s operation, its Pan- African and nation-building agenda. Such inter-office debates, Ahlman argues, reflected anxieties about gender, generational, and class tensions in postcolonial Ghana. Paul Schauert’s contribution tracks the history of the Ghana Dance Ensemble, established at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana in 1962. This state-sponsored troupe became instrumental in attempts of nation building and in promoting the ideologies of African Personality and Pan-Africanism, even beyond the duration of Nkrumah’s regime. Schauert explores how 4 Ensemble members have interpreted, embodied, and expressed nationalism through performance. He argues that while the ideals of nationalism pushed individuals into an objectifying unitary identity, drummers and dancers individually engaged with such processes. By performing a variety of Ghanaian dances, they embraced a national identity but still related this identification to their own sense of self. Adopting a national identity did not mean to abandon their own ethnic affiliation. Rather, national unity was experienced subjectively as individuals created their own identity through music and dance. Jo Ellen Fair brings an interesting popular dimension to this collection by providing us with perspectives on the dilemmas of “modern love” as read from the letters to advice columns in Ghanaian newspapers. Romance, sexual attraction, love proposals, courtship, uncertainties, and heartbreaks are issues that concern people of all ages and cultures. However, Fair shows the particularly Ghanaian ways in which “tradition” and “modernity” meet, and sometimes collide.