GHANA STUDIES / Volume 10 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 65 FIFTY YEARS IN KWAHU-TAFO Memories and Reflections of an Anthropologist SJAAK VAN DER GEEST Introduction Near my village in The Netherlands is a house with a Latin inscription, a famous line from the African philosopher St. Augustine: Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis (Time changes and we change with it). I sometimes pass by on my bicycle and the words keep turning in my head while my feet continue turning the pedals: What were the most prominent changes of my time and how was I drawn into them? One event that deeply affected my life was my visit to the rural town of Kwahu-Tafo in Ghana forty years ago and the many visits that followed, up to today. In contrast with most of my colleagues, I have largely stuck to one place for fieldwork throughout my anthropological career. How did life in Kwahu-Tafo change over all those years? And how did I change with it as an anthropologist, or for that matter, as a person? Much has been written about subjectivity as a requisite for (not an obstacle to) anthropological fieldwork. The importance of related personal experience for raising questions, observing people and understanding words and actions is now a standard topic in methodological instructions for anthropologists. Without subjectivity, there is no intersubjectivity and— therefore—no communication. Introspection or reflection, searching oneself to understand the other, is commonly discussed in those instructions and is widely practised in anthropological publications. Much less has been written about how the fieldwork experience affects the personal life of the researcher. Paraphrasing Geertz, Eriksen (2004: 11) writes that all humans are born with the potential to live thousands of different lives, yet we end up having lived only one. One of the central tasks of 66 Ghana Studies • volume 10 • 2007 anthropology consists of giving accounts of some of the other lives we could have led. Writing about people’s lives in Kwahu-Tafo, I have always been aware that their life could have been mine. That awareness created closeness and distance at the same time. What changed in Kwahu-Tafo over the last fifty years immediately raises the question of what changed in me during that period. Déjà Vu I arrived in Kwahu-Tafo around Easter time in 1969, twelve years after Ghana’s independence, and three years after the coup that ended Nkrumah ’s hopeful beginning. The purpose of my stay was to learn Twi. I was given accommodation in the Catholic mission house with an American priest. The first night I hardly slept. There was an enormous noise on the other side of the road, with people shouting for hours. The next morning I learned that a man had died and that the man’s family had decided to expel the widow and her children from the house, because she belonged to another family. “This is a matrilineal society,” the priest commented, “it happens all the time.” Twenty-five years later I met Anthony Obeng Boamah, a man about my own age, who was an amateur writer and an interesting person. We became friends and worked together in doing research. He told me about the books and stories he had written. His first novel, he said, was in Twi, and was based on some personal experiences in his family, 25 years ago around Easter. It told the story of what happened to a mother and her children after her husband had died. I asked if I could read the book. It was not possible because he did not have a copy. He had brought the manuscript to the Bureau of Ghana Languages that occupied itself with the publication of literature in local languages. They had read the book and promised to edit and publish it. It was never published. Staff members at the Bureau changed over the years, some died, and every time Boamah went to look for his manuscript, he met another person with another story and the same van der Geest • Fifty Years in Kwahu-Tafo 67 promises. “Maybe, I should...