Adomako Ampofo is Professor of African and Gender Studies at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana; President of the African Studies Association of Africa; an honorary Professor at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Birmingham; and a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent book is Producing Inclusive Feminist Knowledge: Positionalities and Discourses in the Global South.
Can you please give us an introduction to your work and tell us why you wanted to study in this field?
I describe myself as a professor of African and gender studies. But I didn’t study either. My journey has included a lot of divine seeming coincidences; what I see as divine directions. I studied architecture, mostly because it required me to leave my home city, Accra! When in my first year of postgraduate studies the universities were closed by the then military regime, I moved to be with my sister in Germany and gained admission into a programme in planning that eventually led to a Masters in Development Studies back in Ghana when the universities were reopened. By this time I was already losing interest in architecture and I thought understanding the whys and hows of our social patterns was more interesting, especially issues affecting women. As part of my “National Service” required of all graduates, I worked as a research assistant on a project about women and access to land. This further fuelled my interest and the Professor, George Bennett, suggested I apply to the Institute of African Studies as a research fellow when I was done. I got accepted and then had to carve out my niche. I became interested in feminist methods and as I explored the literature, I found there was a chasm between what was being written about African women and my experiences, and the rest, they say, is history. Aspects of masculinity became important to me because I thought if we are going to understand what is going on in our social lives and the power dynamics that affect our realities, we need to understand what is going on with men.
The more I grew as an academic the more I realised how unfair the knowledge production terrain is, and how truncated, euro-centred, and even inaccurate many of the stories are about African lives are. This led me to become interested in the politics of knowledge production as it impacts African Studies: who produces this knowledge; what questions are asked/not asked, and how; who gets credit for which knowledge, where it gets disseminated and the politics of all that. For shorthand we might say I became interested in centring subaltern voices, (Gyatri Spivak 1985) and more explicitly, decolonising knowledge beyond just gender issues. And this really, was the mandate we at the Institute of African Studies were given by our first president, Kwame Nkrumah (see his African Genius Speech given at the formal opening of the Institute in 1963). Ultimately I hope this contributes to a better and more accurate understanding about global African lives, how this is situated in historical and contemporary geo-politics, and further contributes to a reformulation of relationships with other human beings, governments and so forth.
Could you please tell us about your contribution to knowledge over the course of your career?
Over my career of 35 years, I believe my contribution to knowledge has been in two main areas: African studies broadly and within that gender studies more particularly. I’ve made contributions to feminist theorising and practice, the relationships among and between women’s and men’s lives, and understanding black masculinities. A recent work I am proud of is a 2021 book co-edited with Josephine Beoku-Betts, Producing Inclusive Feminist Knowledge: Positionalities and Discourses in the Global South. I’ve contributed to destabilising some of the discourse about Africa and my work responds to Kwame Nkrumah’s call to study Africa and its diaspora in African centred ways free from Eurocentric suppositions (the decolonisation work). This approach includes not taking methodologies for granted, questioning their applicability and relevance for African socio-political contexts, and developing appropriate ones.
In that context I have also contributed to questions of academic freedom. I hope I’ve taught my students to be reflective, (self) critical, to make their work personal, and simultaneously thoughtful of “the other”.
You’ve described yourself as an activist-scholar. Could you explain what you mean by that term and why you think it is important?
Being an activist scholar for me means moving beyond simply learning things, to consciously and intentionally working towards change to improve people’s wellbeing or change socio-legal situations. This can range from working towards policy or legal reform, to educating people via both formal and informal channels. When you think of knowledge production in the academy, of being a professor and having students, the traditional understanding is that you are the knower and expert, and you are imparting knowledge to others. You are the teacher; you are the guide. Mainly it is about a transfer, possibly a sharing, of knowledge. In the traditional understanding we do not necessarily think about how that knowledge will be used. Of course, there is an understanding that it will contribute to society in some shape or form and that students learn how to do research and think critically. We hope that it will lead to the creation of a new product or policy. Where conscious activism goes further in knowledge work, is that one is intentional about bringing about change, social transformation.
I teach a class about culture and gender in African societies. We had students who were looking to get a master’s to progress in their careers, sometimes even pastors who wanted to understand what was happening with women so that they could use this knowledge in their pastoral care work. Yet when you come into the classroom people come with their experiences, their biases, their stereotypes – their views of reality. So, they might, for example, understand marriage systems in Africa and how they “should be”. As the instructor I want the students to understand and appreciate the diverse systems, and that what they think they know is not all that there is to know about marriage. There is, for example, woman-woman marriage, so-called levirate marriage, different forms of polygyny (polygamy and polyandry). It is my responsibility to provide students with that evidence. As an activist scholar, I hope that my students will not just know there are different marriage forms, but also that they will appreciate that whatever one’s personal beliefs are, forcing one type of marriage on a group of people is both patronising and deprives people of their freedoms.
One of my scholarly- activist projects has been co-producing a documentary, When Women Speak, with Kate Skinner, about women’s activism in Ghana. Beyond that I bring my scholarship into work outside of the academy: I have been part of conversations and actions where I bring my experience and scholarly knowledge to bear to advocate for legal changes and informal education. I am a member of the Network for Women’s Rights in Ghana (NETRIGHT), where we have contributed to work on several social issues, for example on the passage of domestic violence legislation in Ghana and against the passage into law of a draconian anti LGBYQ+ bill. Within the academic space I have also been actively involved in actions such as the removal of a statue and the breaking down of a toll booth, the giving (and non-giving of awards), promotion and other polices affecting students and staff, to offer some examples. I have written about scholarly activism in a chapter I titled, “Social Justice and Community Studies: Scholar Activist Intersectional Approaches” in the 2023 Handbook on Intersectionality edited by Mary Romero.
How do you think African knowledge production should be centred in the curriculum?
African studies and the themes that are important to us should not just be a part of a 16-week course where you say, “Here is the African part of the conversation”. Nor is it about giving the curriculum an African flavour by adding in African languages, literatures and histories and creating some kind of jollof rice. We should mainstream it, make it conventional. I will quote Kehinde Andrews here: “Rather than teach the industrial revolution as a triumph of British engineering alone, teachers should link it to the enslavement and colonisation of Africa which was essential to British history.”
It is also about the materials we use in our classes and for our research, who teaches. If we are talking about archiving women’s lives and stories within anticolonial movements on the continent for example, we should privilege the voices of African feminist scholars. There is a time for white male scholars, and there is a time for white male scholars, especially to take a back seat when researching African women’s lives. When telling the story, it is particularly important for white scholars to acknowledge their relative privilege, indicate where they are sitting and how that could be associated with their epistemologies and methodologies.
Your recent book is about producing inclusive feminist knowledge. Can you tell us about the mechanisms behind that and what the implications are?
The book (Producing Inclusive Feminist Knowledge: Positionalities and Discourses in the Global South) is really a culmination of the intersections of personal and professional journeys of black, African, feminist scholars for me and my co-author Josephine Beoku-Betts. Josephine lives in the so-called global north and I’m based in the global south. Our friendship and work began in 1994 when we met at a workshop. Even though our professional experiences were different in terms of location and trajectory (Josephine was the senior scholar and based in the U.S) we found commonalities in our personal and political views and journeys on feminist scholarship. Feminist scholarship was quite Eurocentric, not because Global South feminists were not doing the work but because of the hegemony when it came to what was being shared with students, whose work was valorised and cited and so forth. Our professional relationship grew, and we are both committed to bringing global-south voices to global (feminist) discourses.
The book explains our efforts to disrupt “orthodoxies” and to bring southern voices to the fore. As noted earlier, I consider my scholarship to be about activism and disrupting hegemonies. Our work, that is about decolonising knowledge, is guided by my intellectual ancestry and the academy in global Africa (on the continent and the diaspora), my journey with Josephine is an important part of that. This book is about our commitment to changing damaging narratives about black and African women.
You’ve also worked on shifting male identities, what trends have you observed in this field?
It is difficult to see “shifts” when you don’t do longitudinal work, which I haven’t done, so I can only see shifts by comparing what other people have written over time with my own work.
I became interested in male identities and masculinities because as a feminist scholar we see a lot of work about what has happened to women and girls that shows how we have been disadvantaged relative to men, or to constructions of the world that are very masculine. There is a focus on men as the problem, for example, in reproductive health work because they don’t want to use condoms and women are getting “unwanted pregnancies” and HIV. Then there is women’s experiences of intimate partner violence, or women don’t want to run for political office because the terrain is aggressive and masculinised. So, men are constructed as “the problem”. My interest is in looking what systematises these types of behaviour and how individual men or groups of men construct their own masculinity.
Any shift in the perspectives and behaviours of individual men or groups of men will also be impacted by what is going on in the larger society. In my recent work I’ve been looking at young black African men on the continent and the diaspora. In my “sample” they are from more than average backgrounds (they have higher education, have got a job etc). Some of the trends in my work have shown an increasing reflection of men’s vulnerability and their mental health. There is a recognition among some that they are themselves influenced and effected by the social system. At the same there is a tendency for some to view themselves as victims of the larger society’s expectations. For example, the expectation that a man should be the (main) provider means he cannot be un- or “under” employed. Not having a job or the “right” job can make a man “unmarriable” and place a huge burden on him, while the same doesn’t apply to women.
In the broader field, there’s been a shift from discussion of oppressive and hegemonic masculinities to a deeper recognition that there isn’t one way to be a man. Further, there is the influence of global capital, religious and military fundamentalisms that is receiving more recognition, and a shift away from the problem areas – men as violent, sexual predators—and towards understanding the intersectionality of race, class, sexuality and so forth for the making (and unmaking) of the black man. I must footnote this by noting that with the emergence of the manosphere, and a black manosphere, analyses of new hegemonies is critical.
How has your background and ethnicity influenced your work?
There are many intersecting variables that create who one is, some we recognise and are aware of, others not so much. I was born and raised in Ghana, but my mother is German, so I grew up in a multi-cultural home, experiencing Ghanaian ways of doing, and reading society but taking certain German “things” for granted. Growing up in Ghana with its education system, religion, my (father’s) Asante background and visiting Kumasi have definitely influenced my views on the world. Take marriage for example. I would not want to be in a polygynous marriage, but I understand the practice, both historically in an economic sense, and in today’s world as a masculinised relic. It is only as I got older that I realised that what was common for us– living in the separate homes, having separate accounts, having some areas of separate social lives – wasn’t the norm for the European world. My grandparents had separate bedrooms. They went to different churches. He ate in the dining room, served by my grandmother, but she ate in the kitchen with grandchildren, nieces, and domestic help. This seemed normal to me, even if in my home we ate together; I took different forms of family arrangements for granted. I went to an “international” primary school as well so without knowing it I took diversity for granted and learnt to take people from different backgrounds as a normal feature of life. This helps with sociological enquiry because you’ve known there’s difference from an early age. My background with socially conscious parents interested in justice has also impacted the way I see the world.
I grew up Catholic, then became a bit sceptical and later arrived at a personal faith. This showed me that people are different and can relate to their faith and traditions differently. And this has influenced my approach to the LGBT community, and legislation to criminalise them, for example. It has enabled me to be more sensitive to sexual minorities and different identities. We may have different beliefs about race and class and gender, but people have the right to live their lives in peace and have their humanity respected.
If you had infinite time and resources which understudied area, would you research and why?
How I would love for this to be a reality. I work with a lot of young people and on popular culture, so I am very interested in young people’s lives. Young Africans find themselves in a particular moment with many intersecting issues: Black Lives Matter, Fallist and anti-war movements; the precarious nature of work, employment and survival; the place of social media, popular culture, creativity and innovation, and professional and personal performances; sexualities and sexual pleasure; intergenerational solidarity and conflict; conflicts with the state; mental health, well-being and self-care. While there is a lot of creativity and independence, research suggests that mental ill health is on the rise. So, I would engage in a multi-country, multi-year, multi-method study to understand how young people feel about these issues, and how they respond to them. Of course, my interest goes beyond “merely” describing where young people are, to theorising what is going on and what it portends so we can better meet the needs of the next generations. We need to connect with them in ways that improves inter-generational and multi-social solidarity, and that enhances our collective humanity. I would work with young scholars and practitioners as co-investigators to design and implement this enquiry.
Which African Thinkers and/or books by African authors would you recommend people read?
That is a very difficult question since I could have a really long list and it really “depends” (on at what stage of awareness the person is, their social and educational background and so forth). However, here is a very brief list, in no particular order, that speaks to where I am today, Africa, knowledge production, feminist theory & practice, and masculinities:
(Auto)biographies:
Unbowed (2007) by Wangari Maathai because her story as an activist shows the intersections of identity (Kikuyu, feminist, Christian, environmentalist etc) resistance, and humanity are so compelling for me.
Hilla Limann Scholar, Diplomat, Statesman by Prof Ivan Addae-Mensah
Novels:
Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ
The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah
Everything Good Will Come by Sefi Atta
Scholarly works/authors:
Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society by Ifi Amadiume
Thandika Mkandawire and Akilagpa Sawyerr on higher education and the neo-liberal terrain.
Divine Fuh on precarity, the politics of suffering, and humanity.
Peace Medie because she does both scholarly writing and very relatable fiction.
Toussaint Kafarhire Murhula on social justice (especially restorative including return of knowledge and artefacts, restitution); democracy and peace.
Grace Musila on African Literature; African Popular Culture; African Feminism and biography.
Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o on declonizing African Studies
Maya Angelou and James Baldwin (of global Africa)
Takyiwaa Manuh, Dzodzi Tsikata, Sylvia Tamale, Amina Mama: feminist scholars