The Politics of History and the Vernacular in Early Twentieth-Century Ghana: Situating Gaddiel Acquaah's Oguaa Aban in Ghanaian Social and Literary History

Abstract

The paper's main argument is that texts do not have exclusively specific textual origins but are produced within historical conditions and linked to a variety of other texts within the broad spectrum of literary history. In retrieving and re-positioning Gaddiel Acquaah's historical poem of 1930 in Ghanaian literary history, it explores the impact of social and political contexts on its production and examines its intertextual links with contemporary texts in Ghanaian literature. It argues that while such textual connections illuminate differing negotiations of historical memory across time they at the same time reveal continuities in perspective and suggest plural rather than linear movements in literary history. The paper's intertextual reading of Gaddiel Acquaah's Oguaa Aban, Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons, Opoku-Agyeman's Cape Coast Castle, and Ama Ata Aidoo's Anowa reveals that only such connections across periods and languages can illuminate the production of texts and the complexities of a postcolonial paradigm.