Serena O Dankwa

Ghana Popular Music 1931-1957" features a cross-section through the popular music of southern Ghana of the late colonial period as it was then recorded and distributed on 78rpm Shellac records by the Union Trading Company (UTC) of Basel, Switzerland. A compilation of 21 songs will take you on a fascinating journey of discovery through a rich and complex metissage of influences, rythms, instruments and stiles, ranging from the rurally oriented palm wine music to the urban swinging dance bands of the 50s. The 20 page booklet contains an introduction to the popular music of Ghana written by Highlife specialist Prof. John Collins of the University of Ghana and the Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation. The songs or the titles are translated and commented upon. The compact disc results from a pilot project which aims at preserving and digitising an important collection of music from Ghana and Nigeria held at Basel, Switzerland. This is to make this music accessible again ...

Knowing Women is a study of same-sex desire in West Africa, which explores the lives and friendships of working-class women in southern Ghana who are intimately involved with each other. Based on in-depth research of the life histories of women in the region, Serena O. Dankwa highlights the vibrancy of everyday same-sex intimacies that have not been captured in a globally pervasive language of sexual identity. Paying close attention to the women's practices of self-reference, Dankwa refers to them as 'knowing women' in a way that both distinguishes them from, and relates them to categories such as lesbian or supi, a Ghanaian term for female friend. In doing so, this study is not only a significant contribution to the field of global queer studies in which both women and Africa have been underrepresented, but a starting point to further theorize the relation between gender, kinship, and sexuality that is key to queer, feminist, and postcolonial theories. This title is als...

NGO Paper: In der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit ist das Wort Intersektionalität seit einiger Zeit in aller Munde. Aber was will dieses Konzept genau, woher kommt es, und wie kann es für Nichtregierungs-Organisationen (NGO) fruchtbar gemacht werden? Eine Auslegeordnung und ein Blick auf unsere Praxis.

This article seeks to retrieve the voices of young women in the small kingdom of Akuapem (in south-eastern Ghana) in the 19th and early 20th century. This is approached through an exploration of reports written by Theophilus Opoku, ‘Native Pastor’ to the Basel Mission. His writings are archived and accessible to the public in Basel, Switzerland. Opoku's concerns with marriage and adultery, motherhood and fornication give valuable insights into the ways in which women exercised agency. They also illuminate how understandings of the mission and its gender ideology were informed by pre-existing moral concepts of Akuapem society.

The relationship between love and the bathhouse, which are both ‘queered’ through relatedness and defamiliarization, needs further interrogation. If the bathhouse makes possible the expression of ‘provider love’ (p. 217), how is this space different from other intimate or domestic spaces such as the kitchen, where the same form of love is expressed? In relying on the notion of queerness, is it possible that the potential for theorizing the everydayness of the bathhouse and its related practices is foreclosed? Rather than the space being queered by love, perhaps its multiple possibilities and opportunities suggest that the bathhouse is already a queer space. Could this be a useful point of departure? The third aspect related to friendship pertains to sugarmotherhoodand its framing as part of ‘queer family networks’ (p. 219). Queer kinship and the idea of a chosen family affords different types of family structure and collectives that are not reliant onmarital ties orgenealogical relations.The sharingpractices andnetworksof friendshipsof ‘knowingwomen’gobeyond thenotionof the chosen family.The attachment to this queer frame of family appears to be limiting in the context of the women in Ghana. Sugar motherhood, as a sort of motherhood, extends the notion of provider love. However, this extension is foreclosed by the need for these relationships to be ‘disguised much more carefully’ (p. 269). How, then, can we make sense of sugar motherhood as motherhoodwhen it requires negotiationswith genealogical motherhoodorheteronormative expectations?Might therebe aneed to challenge conceptual assumptions about motherhood in the African context? We could take a leaf out of the pages of these ‘knowing women’ and attempt to live our lives on our own terms, without the limits of trying to fit into frameworks and paradigms that reshape our existence. Through these women’s voices and lives, Dankwa delivers a rich, excitingly messy, perfectly wayward and full life of African women’s genius.

Die Hochschule gerät dabei als Spiegel und Manifestation gesellschaftlicher Verhältnisse in den Blick und überdies als ein Ort, der unter spezifischen Bedingungen zum Motor notwendiger Veränderungsprozesse werden kann. Aus unterschiedlichen disziplinären, aktivistischen und sozialkritischen Perspektiven wird die Hochschule als eine machtvolle Institution beleuchtet. Von deren Rändern aus entfalten sich widerständige Vermittlungspraxen, die schließlich kritisch-performative Zugänge für eine sozial und kulturell gerechtere (Hochschul-)Welt eröffnen.

... As Astrid Bochow argues, the churches actually created “sexuality as a subject of public discourse, if only in its negation” (Bochow 2007: 353).4 This ... I first came across it in the 1990s in a Christian educational booklet, among a pile of school-books of a teenage girl in Accra. ...

... Recently Obeng and other Ghanaian scholars have reconsidered the position of Yaa Asantewaa, the heroically acclaimed queen mother of popular Ghanaian history (Akyeampong and Obeng, 1995). Obeng (2003) argues that due to her Agenda 63 2005 105 ...

While in many places same-sex cultures revolve around politically charged subcultural understandings, this paper explores conceptualizations of female same-sex desire beyond constructions of lesbian identity. It looks at a set of practices forged by women who are involved in intimate same-sex relationships in southern Ghana and examines how their self- understandings resist and intersect with the derogatory media representations that frame them. A key term to these representations is the term supi. It implies a close friendship between two adolescent girls, whether or not their relationship has a sexual dimension. In spite of rising tides of homophobia that impact such female intimacies, two factors still allow for the creation of niches for same-sex intimacy: first, southern Ghanaian cultures draw on norms of verbal indirection and discretion, which allow for the concealment of non-normative sexual conduct. Secondly, homosocial spaces of intimacy provide an environment in which female same-sex bonds are expressed through a language of allusion rather than a specialist, subcultural vocabulary. Erotic context is formed through practice and performance and is not discursively named or understood as a social identity. Rather, these understandings of female same-sex passions revolve around the notion of secrecy and are based on tacit but vibrant forms of knowledge.