Making History in Banda: Reflections on the Construction of Africa’s Past

Abstract

Postmodern and post-structural stances have forced recognition of the ways in which the past is created in the present. Yet extreme forms of constructionism divert attention from the problem of how the past created the present and deny the autonomy of sociohistorical process. In this paper, I examine the tensions between what Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) terms “historicity 1” (the materiality of sociohistorical process) and “historicity 2” (historical narrative), arguing that it is important for archaeologists to retain a focus on how everyday practices of the past shaped the present. Yet the lived past cannot be considered in isolation from how we construct that past in the present. I examine these issues through a case study of Banda, Ghana, that draws on oral historical, archival, and archaeological sources to understand how daily life was affected by Banda’s changing relationship to global trade and hegemonic polities, at the same time maintaining an eye toward how that past operates today in an area torn by a long-standing chieftaincy dispute (Stahl 2001b). In a concluding section, I reflect on implications for African American archaeology.