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From: "Akurang-Parry, Kwabena"
Shippensburg University
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IN MEMORIAM: AN APPRECIATION OF PROFESSOR A. ADU BOAHEN (1932-2006)


A. Adu Boahen, distinguished professor emeritus from the Department of
History at the University of Ghana, Legon, has gone to the ancestral
home.  He died on May 24, 2006, at the 37 Military Hospital in Accra,
where he had been hospitalized since 2001 after suffering from a stroke.
Professor Boahen, whose death coincided with his birthday, was born in
Oseim in the Eastern Region of Ghana on May 24, 1932. He attended
Mfantsipim Secondary School, graduated from the University of Ghana in
1956 with a B.A. honors degree in history, and proceeded to earn a Ph.
D. degree in African Studies from the School of Oriental and African
Studies (SOAS), University of London. He was appointed a lecturer at the
University of Ghana in 1959 and rose to the rank of a full professor in
1971.

Professor Boahen's life and career as a historian and a public
intellectual were rewarding in many respects. Although, as a
professional historian, his thematic preoccupations encapsulated several
themes in African history, in this tribute, I pay homage to what has
become synonymous with his luminary presence: his rethinking of African
perspectives on European colonialism in Africa. And as a Ghanaian, I
cannot beat the fontonfrom drums of eulogy without extolling Professor
Boahen's unsurpassed role as a public intellectual. Indeed, he
singularly fought to adorn Ghanaians with the kente of democracy at a
time when most well-known Ghanaian intellectuals and academics
subserviently trooped to the Osu Castle of military dictatorship,
masquerading as vampire socialists, to enjoy sanguinary crumbs of wealth
and power.

Professor Boahen published numerous articles on precolonial/colonial
Ghanaian and African history, but was better known for his monographs,
namely Britain, the Sahara, and the Western Sudan, 1788-1861 (1964);
Topics in West African History (1966); with J. B. Webster, The
Revolutionary Years: West Africa Since 1800 (1975); Ghana: Evolution and
Change in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1975); African
Perspectives on Colonialism (1987); and Mfantsipim and the Making of
Ghana: A Centenary History, 1876-1976 (1996).  He was the editor of the
UNESCO General History of Africa: Africa Under Colonial Domination,
Volume 7 (1985). Apart from these stellar publications, Professor Boahen
produced a spate of unpublished essays, some of which deal with
postcolonial history and society and which have been edited and
published by the prolific Nigerian historian, Toyin Falola, entitled,
Africa in the Twentieth Century: The Boahen Reader (Trenton: New Jersey,
Africa World Press, 2004).



Professor Boahen: The Historian and His Craft

            On the whole, Professor Boahen's scholarly preoccupations,
both published and unpublished works, sought to exorcize the apparitions
of Eurocentric interpretations that have informed the writing of African
history. He was concerned that despite the popular reverberations of
African voice and agency, carefully encoded in prefaces and
introductions, scholars still position their accounts to mirror
Eurocentric perspectives. Professor Boahen's writings on colonialism
debunked the staple Eurocentric view that on the eve of the European
colonial conquest, African societies were firmly anchored in a static
state of Hobbesian misery, consequently, Africans applauded the
imposition of colonial rule with all the aplomb they could muster,
seeing colonialism as an inevitable divine intervention.

One reason why Professor Boahen will continue to be popular among
students of Africa is the incandescent beauty of his penmanship. In
fact, like many of my generation in West Africa, I was attracted to
African history after reading his Topics in West African History in high
school at the Presbyterian Boys' Secondary School (Presec), Legon,
Ghana. Throughout my high school years, I read it with profit, and my
love affair with the luxuriant texture of the book undoubtedly
buttressed my interest in history as a discipline. I must also disclose
that my love affair entailed Professor Boahen's unique writing skills
and to this day my writing skills are deeply embedded in the fountain of
his writing craft.

Overall, Professor Boahen's works demonstrate readability, a patented
trademark which must be the envy of many practicing historians. Crisp
phrases and textual brevity inform all his writings. He was an
unassuming critic who understood the organic nuances, theoretical
currencies, and ideological positions that underscored the works he
critiqued. In spite of the stern rigors of his scholarship he was
generous in weighing various arguments on their own merits before
drawing critical conclusions. One is tempted to say that Professor
Boahen was ever the okyeame [Akan linguist-historian] who yarned the
past with the thread of proverbial and metaphorical stretch. Thus, he
was able to bring his readers to the living frontiers of history.

            Professor Boahen was an empiricist to the core. His efforts
to debunk the staple viewpoints of the Eurocentric cabal of scholars had
been successful because he summoned overwhelming evidence and wove
seamless webs of information as his counterpoints. His empiricism and
revisionism were based on an arsenal of evidence that covered different
regions of Africa. Professor Boahen's use of evidence was unique: it was
always spiced with refreshing comparative and epistemological insights;
a dosage of historiographical overviews and theoretical perspectives;
and typologizing, but devoid of essentializing and particularizing.



Professor Boahen: Rethinking European Colonialism in Africa

            Among the eminent African historians of Africa and European
imperialism, Professor Boahen offered some of the best theoretical
overviews of the subject of colonialism. One major contribution of
Professor Boahen was his explanation of the various forces that had
reshaped Africa on the eve of the colonial conquest by 1880 and which
had placed Africans on the pathways of change and revolution. According
to him, in the aftermath of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, African
societies began to develop viable political entities with vigorous
modernization programs. Indeed, the processes of modernization in
several sectors of society and economy had peeled off some of the
retrogressive wrinkles of old Africa, and in addition to constitutional
experiments, were remolding old Africa's political economies. Professor
Boahen's resonating message was that those who had argued that the "Dark
Continent" continued to be "darker," necessitating colonial rule had
failed as historians because they had abandoned an important cog in the
historian's craft: rigorous periodization that could unmask the dynamism
and resilience of precolonial African societies.

            Professor Boahen's contributions to the framing of the
reasons for the European colonial conquest, defined by historiographical
overviews, periodization, and comparative history, are unique. Overall,
his conclusions show that the period 1880-1900 witnessed the peaking of
the European conquest and African resistance, but he was careful to show
that in some areas colonialism had occurred much earlier and that
African resistance had outlasted the European consolidation of colonial
rule from about 1910. Drawing on comparative perspectives, Professor
Boahen argued that it was not only Africa that was subjected to colonial
rule in the late nineteenth century, but Asia and the Pacific as well.
Thus, local factors had nothing to do with the imposition of colonial
rule in Africa; rather colonial rule should be placed at the doorstep of
Europe. It is important to stress Professor Boahen's insistence that the
"most important and decisive of those forces were definitely economic;"
thus, his conclusions support the Hobson-Lenin thesis.

            Indeed, it is in the area of African responses to colonial
rule that Professor Boahen made his best contributions to the subject. A
close reading of his African Perspectives on Colonialism shows that
unlike a great number of historians of Africa, he had explicitly divided
the subject into two: African responses to the colonial conquest itself
and African responses to the political economy of colonial rule. Due to
their unique experiences, constituencies and groups/sub-groups responded
differently to the colonial conquest. The littoral African
intelligentsia, having assimilated aspects of European culture and the
imperial ethos, covertly embraced colonial rule. In contrast, tucked
away from the enclaves of the diffusion of Afro-European cultures, based
on Euro-Christianity, Western-education, and incipient colonialism along
the coast, the interior states sought to maintain the status quo.
Professor Boahen showed that rather than being "romantic reactionaries,"
most African states and societies fought courageously but were defeated
by the superior European-led armies. In spite of the failure to
overthrow the colonial system, the anticolonialisms of the period
1919-1935 created a watershed of active resistance that peaked with the
Italian occupation of Ethiopia in 1935. Professor Boahen strongly
elucidated that but for the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939,
the forces of African nationalism and diasporic African pan-Africanism,
set in motion by the Italian invasion, would have led to the overthrow
of the colonial system.

            Overall, Professor Boahen's assessment of the impact of
colonial rule is different from the conclusions of the two major schools
of thought: Eurocentric on one side and the underdevelopment theorists
and Afrocentric school on the other. His conclusions are on the left
margins of the historiography, yet he went to great lengths to show that
colonial rule was not all about debits, but also included some credits
on a time-scale of ephemerality and long-lasting trends. He was careful
to show, however, that the positive effects of colonial rule are
incidental and unintended, that is, to say that colonial agents did not
knowingly initiate policies, for example, the building of  railways, to
benefit the colonized Africans, but rather to maximize the dividends
from colonial rule.

            Professor Boahen also took issue with the "real significance
of colonialism for Africa": the extent to which colonialism had affected
and will continue to impact the course of African history. One school of
thought holds that colonialism was brief, but prone to impact African
history, while the opposing school insists that colonialism is marginal
to African history. Professor Boahen situated himself comfortably in the
historiographical terrain, but leaned more to the left than to the
right. His perspective is worth quoting at length: "I believe that the
issue at stake is not as clear-cut and simple as both schools of thought
have made it look. In some respects the impact of colonialism was deep
and certainly destined to affect the future course of events, but in
others, it was not." In sum, Professor Boahen believed that whatever
happens and whatever it takes, Africa will continue to "bear some of the
impregnations and scars of colonialism."



Professor Boahen: The Public Intellectual and the Seeding of Democracy
in Ghana

            Throughout his distinguished career, Professor Boahen did
not only devote himself to the extirpation of Eurocentric violence in
African history, but also political violence in Ghana and Africa as a
whole. Some of the themes that inform Professor Boahen's writings
exemplify his pursuits as a public intellectual. He campaigned
tirelessly to root out problems of social inequality, ethnocentrism,
nepotistic brokerage of national resources, and political disorder
championed by dictatorial military regimes in Ghana. In 1978, he
championed popular protests against the military regime of General I. K.
Acheampong. For his efforts, Professor Boahen suffered four months
detention in the far away Tamale prison. Undeterred, Professor Boahen
called into question the June 4, 1979, coup led by Jerry Rawlings that
ended the Acheampong military regime and patented the most brutal
political era in the postcolonial history of Ghana.

These and other noble preoccupations of Professor Boahen were further
demonstrated by his glittering public lectures in 1987 that forcefully
questioned the democratization of violence as an instrument of political
intimidation of the opponents of the Provincial National Defense Council
(PNDC) led by Rawlings. Indeed, Professor Boahen's public lectures
created a political watershed for the demise of the endemic "culture of
silence" imposed on Ghanaians by the PNDC regime.

            Professor Boahen was instrumental in the emergence of the
People's Movement for Freedom and Justice (MFJ) in 1990. The MFJ
relentlessly championed anti-military rule thereby empowered Ghanaians
to seek democratic governance. During the 1992 presidential elections,
Professor Boahen was the presidential candidate of the New Patriotic
Party (NPP). Unfortunately, he lost the election to Rawlings, the
incumbent military dictator.  Professor Boahen later made clear in a
political treatise on the 1992 elections entitled, The Stolen Verdict,
that the PNDC rigged the elections. There can be no doubt that Professor
Boahen's 1987 ground-breaking public lectures were what shook the very
foundations of the dictatorial PNDC. More significantly, the public
lectures gave Ghanaians the populist voice to articulate democratic
governance. Thus, the credit should go to Professor Boahen for having
summoned courage in the face of overwhelming political intimidation and
violence of the times to champion anti-military rule.



Professor Boahen: Obenfo Odupon Nantew Yiye [Eminent Intellectual Rest
In Peace]

            Very recently, Professor Boahen's peers and former students
have honored him with a festschrift, edited by Toyin Falola and
entitled, Ghana in Africa and the World: Essays in Honor of Adu Boahen,
(Africa World Press, Inc., 2003). This book, a testimony to Professor
Boahen's enduring scholarship, lauds his role not only as a pacesetter
in Africanist historiography, but also as a popular intellectual who
fought for democracy and human rights at a time when Ghana was planted
in a pit of military dictatorship. Overall, "even in death," as the Akan
eschatological saying goes, Professor Boahen has bequeathed to
generations of historians an eminent chronicler's craft pivoted on
intellectual capital, unvarnished statements of facts, and an edifice of
theoretical precision. Indeed, in the area of methodology, his use of
solid evidence, appeal to historiography, and recourse to comparative
historical perspectives is commendable.  His methodological
fortifications leave little room for his critics, but enable him
liberate African history from unwarranted universalism of
Eurocentricism.

Indeed, as long as there is abakosem [a history] of the Europeans in
Africa, Professor Boahen's ideas will continue to be an illuminating
frontispiece to whatever discussions that will emerge. That Professor
Boahen applied his historian's craft to liberate his native Ghana from
the political debauchery of military dictatorship is now a part of
Ghanaian history. His evergreen ideas of democracy will forever serve as
signposts along pathways of democratic governance in Ghana. In sum,
Professor Adu Boahen's place in the kinship of eminent African
historians is assured, and Ghanaians, including his avid political
detractors, will forever remember him as the prolific public
intellectual, who used his monumental historian's craft to deliver them
from the vortex of military dictatorship, thereby anchoring Ghana in a
congenial democratic precinct.


ODUPON ATUTU! OBENFO BOAHEN ODUPON, NANTEW YIYE, NANTEW YIYE!

BOAHEN A OKYEKYE OMAN, ADU A ODUA OMAN, NANTEW YIYE, YIYE!

[BOAHEN, THE GREAT SCHOLAR AND ADU THE NATION BUILDER, REST IN PEACE]


**WITH PERMISSION: Parts of this Tribute are Excerpted and Abridged from
Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry, "A. Adu Boahen" in Toyin Falola (ed.), The
Dark Webs: Perspectives on Colonialism in Africa (Durham, North
Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), 379-398.

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