Devising and Disclosing an Autobiographical Self

Abstract

Abstract Scholarship should attend to the imperative that African identities need to be particularized and explored, and not simply generalized and proclaimed. Thus, this article interrogates the case of the autobiographical self-portrait recently authored and published by Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings (born 1948), widow of the late J. J. Rawlings (died 2020; Ghanaian Head of State, 1979 and 1981–2001). Nana Konadu strongly identified herself with the cause of Ghanaian women in a broad sense, and became well-known as a formidable sociopolitical actor in her own right. Her autobiographical narrative only covers the period up to 1979, but her treatment of her antecedents, her birth and her young self opens a revelatory window into her own perspective on her personal formation and attitudes, and particularly with reference to her patrilineal ancestry among the Asante of central Ghana. In this article I take the “ideological I” that engineered her text, and situate it within a deep and precise reading of Asante norms and expectations taken in conjunction with the lived historical circumstances that acted upon these in a variety of ways and with a range of consequences. The wider argument being made here is that only deep interaction with and sustained reflection upon the received norms and actual practices of any historical society, African and otherwise, can furnish forth the nuanced contexts necessary to the location and understanding of the “ideological I” that speaks from within it.