Voluntariness, Decolonization and Gender: The Women’s Movement and Citizenship in (Post)Colonial Ghana

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Iris Schröder
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 413222647

This subproject examines the political activism of women during decolonization. It explores the multi-layered dimensions of voluntariness that informed women’s political engagement and probes an often-overlooked political principle of postcolonial governance. The subproject investigates how, and in what form, voluntary action co-constituted the political and social order under late colonial “indirect rule” and in the postcolony. It also investigates how appeals and ascriptions of voluntariness were linked to shifting understandings of citizenship and gender. Taking the case of the British Gold Coast/Ghana, the subproject analyzes voluntary action examining the corresponding set of complex conditions to explore the changing meanings of voluntary action as a resource and a norm. In this vein, it also tackles ethical dimensions, asking whether and to what extent the discursive attribution of “voluntariness” to a given action marked it out as good and correct. The subproject investigates the historical significance of voluntariness as a mode of political and social action in the case of a (post)colonial society. It explores how appeals to voluntary action addressed women and girls as they, too, negotiated citizenship and belonging through a moment of transition. Political activists are at the center of this study. Their demands for political participation and for civic, political, and social rights will be studied by focusing on a series of campaigns between 1948 and 1966. During that time, activists mobilized for election campaigns and large conferences, such as the Conference of Women of Africa and African Descent (1960), as well as for a variety of issues especially related to “social welfare and community development”. These mobilizations for voluntary participation informed, but also challenged, attempts to create a vision of political and social order in the postcolony while, at the same time, aimed at creating an “African modernity,” distinct from Western models and true to its own (post-)colonial experiences. The subproject explores local as well as trans-regional and global relationships. These span from the continued relations to the colonial “motherland” in Great Britain, to the changing alliances of the Cold War and to the varied constellations of new international organizations, from Ghanaian connections with the Black American diaspora, to pan-African networks. Exploring, how voluntariness functioned in the transition from colonial to postcolonial rule, the subproject will shed new light on the history of Ghana while it also takes up the call for renewed ways of writing contemporary history informed by the postcolonial experience. Regarding the research group, the subproject will contribute to a more globally nuanced understanding of voluntariness by exploring its contours well beyond liberal, Western societies.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2983: Freiwilligkeit