The Unnamed: Exploring the Erasure of Women from the History of Ghana

Abstract In this paper, I reflect on the contribution of Ghanaian nationalist women towards the independence struggle and post-independence nation building (1950–1970), and their erasure from the mainstream history of Ghana. I rely on the literature on women’s political participation in Ghana and the scholarship on memorializing people for meritorious service in Ghana to explore women as victims of historical erasure. I also deploy other sources like the national currencies, commemorative dates, and naming of monuments to highlight the relative weight we attach to women’s and men’s political contribution to nation building. I argue that despite women’s frontal roles, including movement making, organizing prowess, founding parties, leading civil disruptions, and even funding the independence of Ghana, state-led commemorative acts and memorializing practices belie women’s effort and historize men as founders of Ghana. Such de-historizing is often endorsed by male-led political regimes. To ameliorate this masculinization of the memorializing concern, the paper proffers guidelines to enable a fairer memorializing practice. This includes acknowledging the gender biases in our memorializing practices, researching the unnamed leading women, making their information mainstream, renaming our already named monuments to include leading women, and embossing their portraits on our national currencies alongside the men.