Phantoms of the Archive: Kwame Nkrumah, a Nazi Pilot Named Hanna, and the Contingencies of Postcolonial History-Writing

Abstract

IN MARCH 1962, AS THE WEST AFRICAN nation of Ghana marked five years of independence from British colonial rule, the country’s most popular newspaper, the Daily Graphic, introduced readers to yet another in a long list of high-profile international visitors. This visitor, however, was not the usual diplomat, artistic performer, or anticolonial freedom fighter. A prominent headline and accompanying photo announced her as “The Woman Who Dares the Heavens.”1 And who was this daring woman? She was, according to the news story, the famous West German pilot Hanna Reitsch, who was visiting the nation’s capital, on President Kwame Nkrumah’s invitation, to “advise” the government on flight and gliding. In addition to providing brief biographical information, which noted Reitsch’s “carrying out [of] dangerous test flights” during the war and the fact that she had been awarded the Iron Cross First Class, the “highest German decoration,” the article focused primarily on the reason for her visit to Ghana and her notably demure appearance. “Anyone who has heard of Hanna Reitsch,” journalist Edith Wuver informed local readers, “would expect her to be tall and perhaps masculine in build. But she is only a small woman, hardly above five feet and feminine in every way . . . Hanna has the feminine approach to her profession.”2 What the journalist did not mention—nor any of her colleagues in the national news service who covered the visit—was that Flight Captain Hanna Reitsch was not just an extraordinary woman pilot, “feminine in every way,” in a profession dom-