The Intimacies of Family Legacies in Ghana
The Difficulty of Telling Certain Stories
When I was thirteen years old and living in Singapore, I wrote a short story that won my school’s essay-writing competition. It was a fictional piece called “My Uncle Tarzan.” I blended a child’s (spectacular and problematic) imagination of “Africa” with my own family’s history and presence in Ghana. In the story, Tarzan was my uncle who lived in Ghana and nothing like the sensationalized “Tarzan” of the Hollywood movies. Instead, he was Sindhi (South Asian) and had made the African continent his home. At that time, all I had was a child’s imagination. I had yet to meet my Ghanaian/Sindhi family.
It was ten years later that my father invited me to visit them – my grandparents, my granduncle, uncles, aunties and cousins. On my second trip to Ghana, I spent several months getting to know them better, interviewing my grandfather (I was about to start a PhD in Anthropology), listening to his stories and learning as much Twi as possible (I was in Kumasi). My PhD research was on Pentecostalism (see Daswani 2015) and not on my father’s family. Even if they were previously distant to me while growing up, they became the people who provided me with a home and company when in Ghana. At no time were they the objects of my study. It is over time, as Ghana became (like) home and Ghanaians (like) family, that my family’s history became more interesting to me.
My grandfather Victor Daswani had made Ghana his home (since the 1930s). He differed from his own grandfather who had previously lived in the Gold Coast only to return to Sind (our ancestral homeland) and to his father who later retired in India (post-1947 partition of India/Pakistan). If my family had become Ghanaian citizens and lived there all (if not most of) their lives, what was their relationship to Ghana like? How did they fit into Ghanaian society and politics? In that regard, social class, the specific places where they lived (urban centers like Kumasi and Accra), as well as their institutional and occupational networks mattered.
My training as an anthropologist made me keenly aware of how the intersections of race, class and gender shaped their status as Ghanaian/Sindhi. Yet until recently, my status as a visiting family member allowed me to look the other way and focus other research topics like Christianity and later (anti-colonial and post-colonial) activism. I had started interviewing my grandfather for fun when we first met, but I then compartmentalized this family history and positioning as separate from my research. I only started asking more questions after he died, when pictures, old diaries (from my great-grandfather), letters (written in Sindhi and English), and even jewellery came out of the closets and into new visibility – attesting to the intimacy of their lives in the Gold Coast/Ghana and to the entanglements of Africa and South Asia (Sind and India).
My family’s presence in the Gold Coast and in West Africa span six generations over the course of c.130 years, starting in Hyderabad, Sind. It is important to note that Sindhis were in the African continent before they even identified as “Indian” – that they were Sindhi, or from Sindh, first before they became Indian. In 1919, my great-great grandfather and his brother were one of the first Sindhis to start a business in the Gold Coast. The presence of Sindhis in Africa is entangled with the history of the British Empire, and more particularly with the British colonial rule over the Indian subcontinent (the “British Raj”, 1843-1947). While Sind had already been an important node in the Indian Ocean trade networks several centuries before British annexation, colonial networks encouraged the Sindhi traders of Hyderabad to look for alternative markets and to search for further business opportunities in places already connected with the British empire – including the Gold Coast.
When I started reading more about historical event in Gold Coast/Ghana such as the 1948 Accra Riots or the boycott of European imports (also known as the AWAM protests) and the subsequent post-colonial political shifts between civilian and military governments, I started to wonder what my (great-) grandfather and my granduncles were doing or thinking at the time. They were already living in the Gold Coast/Ghana and were businesspeople who had either experienced these transitions on a personal level or been in contact with people who had. It certainly would have affected their businesses and their ability to earn a living – so these political events and their consequences mattered on some level to them.
How did the ubiquitous appearance of historical events in the books I was reading also obscure the histories and lives of people I called family? These absences intrigued me, and they started to make an appearance in the objects and stories that appeared after my grandfather’s death. Without having an intention nor any direction in mind, I slowly started to take pictures of pictures, asked people to tell me stories about stories, and mentally connected the different pieces of the jigsaw. Then I realized that the jigsaw was never meant to provide a complete picture: Each piece was cut differently and in a way that did not allow them to form one overarching narrative. Memories were selective, misplaced or temporally displaced, and stories were always told from the perspective of the person telling them. So how does one study one’s family history when all you have are stories? How do they contribute to the archive?
Bombay Bazaar, 1920s, Gold Coast (Ghana). Bombay Bazaar was one of the first Indian businesses that was established in the Gold Coast. It was established by Tarachand Jasoomal who was brother to Metharam Jasoomal Daswani, the proprietor of Metharam Brothers shops in the Gold Coast.
In Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of the Four Continents (2015) we learn that, apart from the “colonial division of intimacy” that dominated the British colonial project and that included ideas around liberal personhood (private property, individualism, domesticity and household), there were also the ““residual” and “emergent” forms of intimacies on which that dominance depends” including “less visible forms of alliance, affinity, and society among variously colonized peopled beyond the metropolitan national center” (ibid: 18-19). I have written about the close relations my grandfather had with members of the Asante royal family and the elite in the Gold Coast and Ghana (Daswani 2021). The pictures below are of my grandfather, Victor, and his wife (Mohini my grandmother) with two past Asantehene’s.
Victor and Mohini Daswani with Otumfuo Nana Sir Osei Tutu Agyeman Prempeh II
Victor and Mohini Daswani with Asantehene Otumfuo Opoku Ware II
These relations paved the way for his citizenship as well as the friendships that forged his attachment to Ghana. Such residual processes are not located in the past but ongoing as they are still unfolding through the descendants of my grandfather who continue to live in Ghana. If the classificatory work of the archive is performed “in the context of the colonial need to prevent these unspoken “intimacies”” (ibid: 35) how then do family histories allow us to peer into these residual processes that have created new social formations in Ghana like the Sindhi/Ghanaian? How did other relations and connections (beyond commercial activity and profit) participate in a new identity formation? How does one speak about the intimacies that are not meant to be shared? And how much do you tell or refuse to tell?
My grandfather Victor acted as a public mediator between Indians and Ghanaians because of his strong relations to both groups. He frequently hosted Indian dignitaries and introduced them to his Ghanaian friends and to members of the Asante royal family. In the picture below, we see him welcoming Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, an Indian diplomat, politician and the first woman President of the UN General Assembly (as well as Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister – first prime minister of India), on her visit to Gold Coast (probably 1948).
Victor presenting a gift to Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit during her visit to Kumasi
These are the kinds of stories and pictures shared and talked about with much pride within my family. To tell this story and in this way is to reaffirm a family legacy in Ghana – of Ghana-India relations. It is also to confirm a colonial legacy of categorization and distinction where groups remain separate even as they live side by side. Where people like my grandfather mediated between distinct groups. But what of the Ghanaian/Indian relationships that are not about mediating seemingly separate groups? In the process, other stories get left out or untold. Stories about inter-racial marriages, about extra-marital affairs, about the lives and work of women, about less well-known family members, or about people who do not reproduce wealth and social class as well.
I am slowly putting my family’s stories together but have arrived at a place of resistance and reluctance. Some in my family do not want certain stories to be told and have acted as gatekeepers. They sought to restrict what I could write about, and what others can know, even if these stories were shared with me and by other members of my family. They have actively tried to dissuade some from speaking to me.
It is easier to get permission to share stories of living family members, like my father or granduncle, who can tell me what I can and cannot write about, what is alright for sharing and what is too personal. However, it becomes tricky with the dead and when stories do not reconfirm the boundaries of prestige and social class. When I spoke to my grandfather about his life in Ghana (sometimes taping our conversations), or when he told me stories about intimacies of past relations, he knew I was taking notes and interested in writing this down one day; he welcomed my interest in telling his stories including the ones my family now want to prevent me from sharing. He spoke to me about his imperfections, his regrets, as well as his specific embrace of humanity that transcended India and Sind.
But some living members of my family are protective of or silent about the types of stories that can be told especially when they do not serve their own aspirational agendas. After all, if our ancestors live on through our memories and the stories we tell, then to challenge or reshape these narratives is also to alter our/my family’s public self-image and reputation. I understand that. Because stories can do damage and harm to those who are living and can have unintended effects on those you love.
Yet, the specifics of permission (of my extended family’s permission to tell these stories) can also be seen as a violation of the informants’ memories in the sense that my family is interested to actively occlude and erase some narratives that do not portray them in the best of light. It reminded me of a quote from Milan Kundera’s (1995) book Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts: “A dead person is treated either as trash or as a symbol. Either way, it's the same disrespect to his vanished individuality.” Are we not also being disrespectful to the dead and their own embrace of a life lived – a life that demonstrates complexity – when we disregard their individuality and simply treat them as a symbol? And what about those who never get to tell their story because it has been actively suppressed in order to maintain the image of respectability and in order for a family’s legacy to remain unchanged? These forms of gatekeeping resemble a family’s archive where “in the final analysis, they always stay the same: always in the right… (and where) changing lets them stay unchanged” (Kundera 1995).
My approach to methodology is similar to what Katherine McKittrick (2021) refers to as “an act of disobedience and rebellion”. In other words, I do not tell these stories to reaffirm the categories that have emerged from colonialism and empire (such as “Indian” or “Ghanaian”) but to point to experiential knowledge and historical experiences that challenge such categories and that speak to occluded histories. I am interested in the moments of struggle and the failures, the imperfections and regrets, when trying to hold on to identities carved out from and out of colonialism and post-colonial realities. I am also interested in the stories not often told but which point to the intimacies of the in-between, of what lies between Sindhi/Ghanaian, in ways that move beyond family reputation or legacy.
In writing about the unspoken or less visible relations, my project hopes to provide alternative stories to the forms of nation-building that draw on that (colonial) archive to categorize and separate groups and that overlook intimacies. It is “not a project of merely telling history differently, but one of returning to the past its gaps, uncertainties, impasses, and elisions; it is tracing those moments of eclipse when obscure, unknown, or unperceived elements are lost” (Lowe 2015: 175). It is a project of love but one that could, inadvertently, cause some to fall out of love with me. In other words, it is a selfish project that aims to disrupt the archive and to include “the political, sexual, and intellectual connections and relations” (ibid) of formerly colonized peoples who now call Ghana home.
References
Daswani, Girish. 2015. Looking Back, Moving Forward: Transformation and Ethical Practice in the Ghanaian Church of Pentecost. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Daswani, Girish. 2021. “This is Not Namaste Wahala: On Silences, (His)Stories, and Ghana’s Oldest South Asian Family” Everyday Orientalism.
Kundera, Milan. 1995. Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts. Translated from French by Linda Asher. Harper Perennial.
Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
