Contemporary Journal of African Studies

From the Editorial Team

Akosua Adomako Ampofo — 2022-11-30

A note from the Editor-in-Chief

Playing for oman Ghana: Women’s Football and Gendered Nationalism

Anima Adjepong — 2022-11-30

Feminist scholars of nationalisms acknowledge the gendered character of national identity. Due to their association with heterosexual masculinity, national sports teams are one avenue through which gendered nationalisms manifest. Football (soccer) represents the peak of sporting masculinity and national identity around the world. Following the inaugural Women’s World Cup in 1991, women’s football continues to gain global popularity, raising questions about what new forms of nationalism can take root through this sport. Recent transnational feminist research has highlighted how, despite feminist resistance, patriarchal forms of gendered nationalism persist. Using the case of Ghanaian women’s football, I examine how reactions to the national team shape and reveal understandings of gender and national identity. I find that whilst state institutions use their support of the women’s team to shore up heteropatriarchal national identity, some spectators and fans discursively advocate for a recognition of women footballers as citizens and workers. These findings have implications for how activists and scholars engage the gendered construction of national identity.

Knowledge, activism and institutions for Africa’s transformation: Key strands in Takyiwaa Manuh’s feminist scholarship

Charmaine Pereira — 2022-11-30

This essay examines ways in which selected texts in Takyiwaa Manuh’s scholarship treat the themes of knowledge, power and institutions with a focus on their role in Africa’s transformation. The range of Manuh’s scholarship covered includes her earlier work on how the political power of the Convention People’s Party was used to advance Ghanaian women’s participation in public affairs and African Unity; her later work on universities as institutions of knowledge production, addressing their relations with the wider society and the project of change and social transformation; as well as her work on women’s empowerment in Ghana. The main argument of this essay is that Manuh’s feminist work foregrounds the role of knowledge and action in the pursuit of social change, with institutions providing formalised conditions of possibility for the coalescence of knowledge and action in practice. Moreover, whilst Manuh’s scholarship is grounded in the realities of Ghanaian women’s lives, her work transcends a single national context in its relevance for Gender and Women’s Studies and for African Studies. As evident in her involvement in continental and transcontinental research networks, Manuh’s scholarship invites us to reflect on the politics of place and context in knowledge production for the African continent and beyond.

Delineating The Image Of Woman Through Akan And Dàgàrà Proverbial Expressions

Martin Kyiileyang — 2022-11-30

African Expressive Culture is replete with proverbial expressions which address many subjects as part of cultural identity. Proverbs contain appropriate linguistic features which are suitable ingredients for spicing language. This study takes a critical look at how women are depicted through certain proverbial expressions in the Akan and Dàgàrà traditional societies with emphasis on her personality and character. The main objective of the study is to examine the image of the woman and the kind of personality associated with her in a typically patriarchal cultural environment. Data was gathered from two different cultural communities.
Dàgàrà proverbs were gathered between 2004 and 2019 through fieldwork whilst Akan proverbs were gathered through library and internet search. Proverbial expressions which focus on women were selected and analysed using the qualitative approach. The Lakoff-Turner Theory on the Proverb as The Lakoff-Turner Theory on the Proverb as a species of metaphor and Honeck’s affirmation on the cultural context of proverbs undergird this study. Results indicate that the woman is an admirable but vulnerable figure. Her personality reflects that she is a builder and a destroyer in society. This study generates significant debate on how the woman of yesteryear was depicted in the respective societies. It also reveals a pattern of misconceptions about her in the cultural context in which she was depicted.

Verb-Noun Collocations In Newspaper Editorials In Ghana: A Corpus-Based Analysis

Millicent Akosua Bosompemaa Quarcoo — 2022-11-30

This paper is a corpus-based study which aims at profiling the most frequent verb-noun collocations and their communicative functions in newspaper editorials in Ghana. In all, a total of 92,927 running words were culled from 220 newspaper editorials from The Ghanaian Times and The Daily Graphic, which were published in the 2016 and 2017 news years, for compilation of a specialised corpus for the study. From the collocation tab of the AntConc corpus software, sixty-seven Verb-Noun Collocations were found to constitute the most frequently occurring collocations in the newspaper editorials under study. The corpus revealed that both predictive and open Verb-Noun Collocations which alternate at the left and right sides on the collocation window span are mostly used by newspaper editorial writers in Ghana. Again, it was observed that phrasal patterns of a noun collocate differed according to its position on either the left or right side of a verb node. The semantic prosodies of the profiled verb-noun collocations revealed five major discourses which constituted the most discussed issues in the newspaper editorials published in 2016 and 2017 news years.These issues were governance, politics and elections, peace and security, law and order, and corruption.

The cultural adaptation of quantity judgment tasks in Ghanaian English and Akan

Susanne Mohr — 2022-11-30

The phenomenon of mass and countability is multifaceted and has been controversially discussed in many disciplines. For linguistics, differences in the morphosyntactic marking of the distinction cross-linguistically, and its cross-cultural ontological-semantic conceptualization are particularly interesting. However, most studies into mass and countability have focused on (American) English, and, to some extent European and Asian languages. African languages and contexts have as yet been neglected by researchinto countability, and the methodological tools employed to study it do not account for the ambient cultural contexts. This paper presents the results of a quantity judgment task designed according to Barner and Snedeker’s (2005) experiment for American English speakers, conducted in Ghanaian English and Akan. The Ghanaian experiments reveal important concerns regarding the stimuli and their applicability, especially to Akan culture. Thus, inspired by other studies into the semantics of Akan, a new set of stimuli is suggested in order to investigate mass and countability contrastively in Ghanaian English and Akan. In this vein, they emphasize the insufficiency of translations with regard to (psycho)linguistic experiments and the importance of proper cultural adaptation.

Satisfaction With The Status Quo: Why has Religious Terrorism not yet Gained Ground In Chad?

Helga Dickow — 2022-11-30

Chad is one of those countries touched by Islamist violence that has originated mostly from its neighbours. However, thus far Chadian Muslims and Christians have demonstrated a positive attitude toward religious cohabitation. Survey data from a unique dataset of five Chadian cities confirm the population’s willingness to accept peaceful coexistence as well as a high level of religiosity. However, the data reveal Islamist fundamentalist attitudes among wealthier respondents who received either an Islamic-based primary education or have a first university degree. This combination is an unusual result. These respondents also show the highest support for authoritarian structures and the Chadian leadership. This leads to the conclusion that Islamist fundamentalism is most prominent among those persons who benefit most from the present regime.

Women In The History And Culture Of Ghana

Agnes Akosua Aidoo — 2022-11-30

The present paper is a brief summary of a larger study on the lives and activities of some of Ghana’s women in our recent past. An attempt has been made to present a general picture of women in the social, economic, and political spheres of traditional life before British rule and culture were forced upon the peoples of the Gold Coast.

The Global Citizen Festival in Accra

Nii Kotei Nikoi — 2022-11-30

This commentary assesses the Global Citizen music festival held in Accra and New York city in September 2022 and provides a critical analysis of the festival, its increasing depoliticization, while simultaneously offering a critique of the psyche of the contemporary Ghanaian state.

When Women Speak

Nana Ama Agyemang Asante — 2022-11-30