'Kaffir' Renner's Conversion: Being Muslim in Public in Colonial Ghana

Hanretta, Sean

doi:10.1093/pastj/gtq009

Cited by 7 publications

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“…With the emergence of national political parties in the early 1950s, zongos began to be perceived by politicians as a key voting bloc. The Muslim Association Party (MAP) in particular worked to mobilise zongo residents with promises of improving community amenities (Allman, 1991;Hanretta, 2011). While the MAP was short-lived and ultimately banned by President Nkrumah as a religious-based party, it opened a five-year window of political negotiations between zongos and the government, with MAP advocating for educational reforms, religious institutions, and restoring zongo chieftaincies to their 'ancient dignity' (Hanretta, 2011, p. 204).…”

Section: A Brief History Of Zongo-state Engagement In Accramentioning

confidence: 99%

Redefining Engagement with Socio-spatially Marginalised Populations: Learning from Ghana’s Ministry of Inner City and Zongo Development

Brady

Hooper

2019

Urbanisation

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Global interest in enhancing accountability and community participation has led many governments to engage socio-spatially marginalised populations left behind by urban development. This article examines an emergent example of these efforts: Ghana’s Ministry of Inner City and Zongo Development (MICZD). The MICZD’s objective is to improve the social and infrastructural development of zongos, or ‘stranger’s quarters’, which have historically housed Hausa migrants and are associated with slum-like conditions. The study draws on 38 interviews with government stakeholders, community organisations and local leaders as well as on four focus groups with zongo residents. The results reveal four key findings. First, the MICZD’s engagement with zongos is perceived as politically motivated, with this viewed negatively by some and positively by others. Second, the MICZD’s timeline is perceived differently depending on who is being asked. Third, respondents differ in their prioritisation of physical versus social improvements, with the MICZD focussing on physical interventions and zongo residents focussing on social and economic development. Finally, different groups have varied visions of success for the MICZD. The article concludes by identifying two paths towards more empowering state–society engagement—more continuous engagement and counterbalancing powers—and proposes how lessons from the MICZD can inform engagement with marginalised populations more broadly.

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Section: A Brief History Of Zongo-state Engagement In Accramentioning

confidence: 99%

Redefining Engagement with Socio-spatially Marginalised Populations: Learning from Ghana’s Ministry of Inner City and Zongo Development

Brady

Hooper

2019

Urbanisation

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Islam in a Zongo

Pontzen¹

2021

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Zongos, wards in West Africa populated by traders and migrants from the northern savannahs and the Sahel, are a common sight in Ghana's Asante region where the people of these wards represent a dual-minority as both foreigners and Muslims in a largely Christian area, facing marginalisation as a result. Islam provides the people of the zongos with a common ground and shared values, becoming central to their identity and to their shared sense of community. This detailed account of Islamic lifeworlds highlights the irreducible diversity and complexity of 'everyday' lived religion among Muslims in a zongo community. Benedikt Pontzen traces the history of Muslim presence in the region and analyses three Islamic phenomena encountered in its zongos in detail: Islamic prayer practices, the authorisation of Islamic knowledge, and ardently contested divination and healing practices. Drawing on empirical and archival research, oral histories, and academic studies, he demonstrates how Islam is inextricably bound up with the diverse ways in which Muslims live it.

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Ghana and Nkrumah Revisited: Lenin, State Capitalism, and Black Marxist Orbits

Osei-Opare

2023

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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This paper reexamines African socialism, the Ghanaian political economy under Kwame Nkrumah (1957–1966), Nkrumah’s intellectual genealogical heritage, and African intellectual history as a genre that transcends the bounds of the Atlantic world. First, I sketch the lives of Black Marxists—Nkrumah, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, and Bankole Awoonor-Renner—from Africa and the Americas, to the Soviet Union, to England and Ghana, to rethink Black bodies not merely as theorists of racial and decolonial questions but also as sites, carriers, and manipulators of political-economic theories. In constructing connected and overlapping histories, I demonstrate how controversial and contested Soviet ideas became key sites of interrogation among global Black Marxists. By reframing travel as an intellectual process, I reconceptualize the movements of Black Marxists to the USSR, the United States, England, and Ghana as critical intellectual and historical processes in their understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. Second, I revisit the Ghanaian political economy under Nkrumah to argue that combining socialist and capitalist development paths was not a contradictory Marxian policy but was embedded within Black Marxist understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. In so doing, I argue that we must situate African political ideologies not solely within a romanticized Afrocentric origin but as ideas that emerge out of contemporaneous global political and ideological struggles. I draw on global Black Marxists’ correspondence; newspaper and magazine articles; British and American espionage files; and Ghanaian, American, and British state and inter-state departmental documents in imperial, colonial, and postcolonial British, Ghanaian, American, and Russian archives.

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'Kaffir' Renner's Conversion: Being Muslim in Public in Colonial Ghana

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Redefining Engagement with Socio-spatially Marginalised Populations: Learning from Ghana’s Ministry of Inner City and Zongo Development

Redefining Engagement with Socio-spatially Marginalised Populations: Learning from Ghana’s Ministry of Inner City and Zongo Development

Islam in a Zongo

Ghana and Nkrumah Revisited: Lenin, State Capitalism, and Black Marxist Orbits

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