In my chapter, Digital Communication Tools in the Classroom as a Decolonial Solution: Pedagogical Experiments from Ashesi University in Ghana, I argue digital communication tools like Twitter and Wikipedia can decolonize not just minds, but classrooms too, as the tools support students and lecturers together to rethink, reimagine, and reshape knowledge production.
In the chapter, thought hard about the idea — at this point-in-time almost catchphrase — “decolonizing the university” and what it really means, like HOW do we DO it? As part of understanding the many possible meanings, I outlined five aspects of decolonizing the university. I deduced it is ultimately about sharing power with students, examining implications about what we include and exclude in our classroom conversations and course outlines, changing the content, providing epistemological access, and finally decolonizing also the institutions.
After arriving at these five aspects of decolonizing the university, I wanted to say something about how digital communication tools can address or bridge these aspects. See figure below.
If you click on the linked button below, you can get a preview of my chapter.
I would love to hear what you think of my ideas and the operationalization of decolonization of universities into five aspects. What did I overstate or miss entirely? Do you agree digital tools can be of help or are they merely new, sexier methods to further colonize the world-at-large by the few?
Today, it was #AfricaDay and I did not celebrate very much from my bland WFH reality, but I thought I would share what little things I did do!
Africa Unity Speech May 24, 1963
My friend Emmanuel Gamor of the podcast Unpacking Africa sent an email with this video and I really enjoyed it. Check out the pod which is full of interesting voices!
Africa Union Day or Africa Day for short is a holiday in African countries and celebrates the African Union and efforts of African unity. In Ghana, children wear traditional clothes for school the day before the holiday and learn about other African countries.
My girls in head wraps at their school some years back on Africa Day.
As it is a holiday, there is a lot of merry-making. Two videos I came across on Instagram which made me smile came from these accounts – not sure though if they are meant to be #AfricaDay themed…
…but always good content there! So I thought of something my mother-in-law always say, “happy yourself”! And with a little help from the content above, I did just that!
In November,I was invited to give a lecture in the African Studies course at Uppsala University. The lecture was to be based on my research, preferably with a link to African youth as that was a theme for this year’s course. I chose the topic: University students in Ghana, Migration Aspirations and the Colonial University.
The lecture focused on decolonial thought, reasons for studying abroad and the situation for Ghanaian and African students at this moment. The class was small, engaged and were happy to interact. Several of the students were also exchange students which led to a reflexive discussion.
I invited a Ghanaian student, Claudia Esi Dentu, a former student of mine to come co-lecture with me. Claudia just happened to be in Sweden this semester on an exchange program with Ashesi University and Malardalens University.
The lead for the course we visited was also a former colleague from Ashesi University, Clementina Amanquaah who now is a Ph.D. student and lecturer at Uppsala University. It felt powerful to reunite with people from the past in my first guest lecture at Uppsala University!
As I was a student of this African Studies course back in the day, I was quite happy to be able to guest lecture in it. It was a closing-the-circle kind of evening!
Last month, I began a new adventure as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the institute founded by the Nordic countries in 1961 to collect information about Africa, NAI. Today it is supported by the Swedish, Finnish and Icelandic governments. The institute has researchers organized in different clusters such as,
Inclusive growth, poverty and inequality in urban and rural Africa
The institute also publishes policy notes and booklets (a recent one on Ghana’s female representation in parliament for instance by NAI researcher Diana Højlund Madsen).
What is studied and taught about political systems in Africa?
Where are political science graduates employed?
Do political scientists feature in public discussion and media?
In what ways do they contribute to preparatory work on electoral laws, constitutional changes etc.?
Do they cooperate with political parties and how?
Except for a semester as a research
assistant and my recent sabbatical, I have never done research fulltime and am
enjoying it wholeheartedly so far. Thinking! Reading! Collecting data! Strategizing!
Networking! (Missing students knocking on my door!) Except for helping in
answering the research questions for the project, I hope to learn more about
the research process, research applications and funding, best practices in data
collection and more.
The position is a postdoctoral research position which means it is a time-limited research position (18 months), where I am working on a research project with a supervisor. It is the next step up from the PhD in learning how to be a researcher!
NAI is housed in the light yellow building behind the Baroque orangery. Photo: Jarvis – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16318254
My new workplace is situated inside the most beautiful Botanical garden in Uppsala, just a stone’s throw away from my alma mater Uppsala University and my office has African cloth as decoration on the wall, making me feel very much at home.
You can see my online profile here and I can from now be reached on Kajsa.hallberg.adu (at ) nai.uu.se or on the first floor in the light yellow building in the Botanical Garden
The film “Tema Life: City of the Future” will be presented in a panel about Tema – the city that geographically is the center of the world.
The panel is in Room 1 at 2.30-4pm on Friday 12 July, 2019.
Here is my writeup about the documentary:
The city of Tema was planned and constructed in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a central part of Ghana’s modernization project. Buildings and areas were purposely designed for industrial, residential or business purposes according to the modern planning ideas of the time as well as socialist ideology. Original inhabitants were moved. The industrial model town was populated by foreign and local workers. By 1960 the city and surrounding areas had 25 000 inhabitants and ten years later just shy of 100 000. The industrial model town had various industries: textiles, radios, soap, motor vehicles, food stuffs, cigarettes and so on and was populated by foreign and local workers. The city was constructed “to be the city of the future” (Ahlman, 2017).
Tema was politically and economically central – in addition to purposely geographically constructed in the Greenwich meridian before it hits the ocean. Later political and economic pressures, including geopolitical changes and the growth of Ghana’s nearby capital Accra and its industrial areas and Tema became peripheral.
This project seeks to collect narratives from the first dwellers in Tema in a documentary film. Young laborers in 1960 would today be in their 80s and hence the time is running out to capture their oral histories about Tema then and now. The narratives will focus on what work, leisure, shopping was like during the early days of Tema and offer Tema’s first inhabitants a space to reflect on how it has changed. Building on the Nana Project by Kirstie Kwarteng that seeks to collect oral histories in Ghana, the conversations will be professionally filmed and the output will be a short documentary and a journal article analyzing their oral histories about the center of the world, Tema.
The team behind the film is scholar Kajsa Hallberg Adu, PhD and filmmaker Mantse Aryeequaye who bring together knowledge of Tema and of documentary film in Ghana. Mantse is a cultural producer and filmmaker perhaps best known for his championing of the street art festival Chale Wote in Accra. He is however also a longtime music and film producer who has worked all over the continent with companies such as MTV, Studio 53, Moonlight Films in Capetown, The Africa Channel, and currently serves as director of Reddkat Pictures and as the co-director of AccraDotAlt.
Ahlman, J. S. (2017). Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana . Athens, OH, US: Ohio University Press.
This week, I paid a visit to the exciting new innovation, incubation and coworking space in Tema, InnoSpace Tema. It is located side-by-side to Ecobank in Tema’s business district Community 1 and InnoSpace Tema offers meeting and working space in a good location.
Proximity to Ecobank Community 1
One stair case up
You find InnoSpace Tema
MD was in! Coffee too!
I chatted with the team behind InnoSpace: Naomi Anita Addae is the Managing Director, Daniel Addae is a Director and the Chief Technology Officer and Michael Osei Nkrumah is a Director and a Training Consultant, (entrepreneurship and international development).
Daniel, Naomi Anita and Michael of InnoSpace Tema
1. Why does Tema need an innovation hub?
InnoSpace is a creative space for creative thinkers. Tema is a Metropolitan populated with very vibrant, talented and innovative youth who are looking to make a positive impact and be rewarded in return. Talk of music and arts, tech, entrepreneurship and more, they’re there. Most people travel all the way to ImpactHub, Ghana Innovation Hub and the likes in Accra to hone their creativity and innovation. InnoSpace is established right here in Tema to fill that gap and to spearhead entrepreneurship – tech, agribusiness, and water & sanitation through coworking, private spaces and enterprise development incubation programs.
2. What is your plan for the next 6 months?
We just had our first enterprise development stakeholders forum which was oversubscribed; in the coming 6 months, we will be organizing the first ever hackathon in Tema where we bring tech-savvy youth to leverage on technology to solve social and business problems
3. What is InnoSpace Tema especially passionate about?
We are passionate about innovation, entrepreneurship, tech and the SDGs.
Personally, I am excited to see Tema, the center of the world geographically, connect with the world of hubs and offer this service to small and new businesses. And a passionate hub at that.
Recently, I was introduced to an elegant looking woman in a coffee shop in Accra. She was well-spoken, chic, and had a good sense of humor, and a hello turned into a 30-minute conversation. Towards the middle of the convo, she told me about having had the opportunity to make a BBC documentary about her life. I was quite impressed talking to a twenty-something with her own documentary and told her I would check it out.
The woman was Brigitte Sossou Perenyi and her story was “My stolen childhood: understanding the trokosi system”. This fantastic documentary chronicles Brigitte’s and thousands of other West African girls’ unfair fate of being human sacrifices. In some cultures in Ghana, Togo, and Benin, a committed sin is believed to cause sickness and death in the family which can only be stopped if a girl is “sacrificed” and made a slave of a shrine.
This documentary is fantastic as it shows how striving for understanding of wrongs made against you can free you, how returning to the scene of the crime and remembering together can let your courage spread to others. Our heroine travels the region and speaks to everyone from an Uber-driver, a group of elders, academics studying the practice at the University of Ghana, her trokosi friend who also managed to get free, her family, and to all of us who want to listen to her story. I spent another half-an-hour with Brigitte and cherished every moment of it.
Thank you Brigitte for reclaiming and sharing your story with so much courage and truth-telling!
Trokosi, or ritual servitude, was made a crime in 1998, but no one has been prosecuted for a practice that is still ongoing and affecting many lives.
Saturday, June 1st, 2019 will be my last graduation as a lecturer at Ashesi University in Berekuso. After the summer, I will explore a new path in my career journey.
I have been an employee at Ashesi University since August 2009, I even experienced the ground-breaking ceremony for the Berekuso campus! I can look back on 10 years of joy, incremental learning and meaningful meetings on two different campuses. I’m thankful for the opportunities I’ve been provided and I have been proud working for the important mission of Ashesi University – to educate a new generation of ethical and entrepreneurial leaders in Africa – if even in a small way in the classroom and in off-campus interactions. See some photos in the gallery below.
Photo session for Ashesi website.
Education Collaborative 2017
Education Collaborative 2017
Teaching Social Theory
Commenting on politics on GhOneTV
Ashesi employees at the Labone campus
Ground-breaking ceremony in Berekuso 2009
Grading papers
Team
Whiteboard for Written and Oral Communication
Meeting Prof Appiah, a board member of Ashesi University, after the Reith lecture with other Ashesians
My article about Ashesi’s approach to teaching ethics in Swiss newspaper NZZ
My student Dorcas came to support me on my PhD Viva at University of Ghana
In the classroom-selfie
In a conference with Dr Oduro-Frimpong and colleagues
Featured on Ashesi Website 2013 “Small class sizes, amazing teachers”
Stonebwoy at Ashesi and other Instagram highlights
Graduation 2018 (Phisheyegh)
Crying at graduation! Lilian and I at Graduation 2018 (Phisheyegh)
So on Saturday, it will not just be Class of 2019 leaving the Ashesi community – I will be clasping my handkerchief and remembering the good times as well! Thank you to all fantastic individuals: students, colleagues, alumni, parents, support staff, foundation folks, board members, friends, all who have crossed my path at Ashesi since 2009!
Last month, one of the journalists from the TigerEye team was murdered in cold blood. Ahmed Hussein-Sualewas shot in his car, first from a distance and then assassinated on close range right in his neighborhood in Accra suburb Madina. This longform article by Joel Gunter, BBC, explains both how central Hussein-Suale was to the Tiger Eye investigative team, and how he was a family man feeling at home in Madina, despite threats to his life.
We produce journalistic investigations targeting organized crime and corruption. Last year, we completed an exposé of corruption in international soccer. The BBC broadcast our findings, shaming powerful figures in sports and politics. Sprawling across 16 countries, the investigation required a large team. Ahmed was one of the lead journalists.
We had expected to find corruption, and indeed dozens of officials were filmed taking illegal payments, including a referee scheduled to work the World Cup in Moscow. But then the stakes were raised much higher.
Ahmed Hussein-Suale was murdered on the 16th of January, 2019. His murder sends a message to all truth-lovers in Ghana and beyond that, the stakes indeed are very high. Perhaps higher than they have ever been. Ghana is a country that usually do not see violence against journalists and President Akufo-Addo has condemned the crime. However, we have now all been exposed to the ferocity of evil forces.
One month has passed today since the heinous — and unusual crime– that took one of Ghana’s best journalists and defenders of what is right away, and I am so angry. We need to know free speech is revered in Ghana! We need more people on the good side! We need more exposure of the people who think they are too powerful to be exposed! We need more Ahmeds!
You could join me in writing about and asking questions about free speech and Hussein-Suale’s death.
You could convince me to believe that the future of investigative journalism in Ghana is still bright and that Hussein-Suale’s life’s work fighting corruption with everything he had will be taken forward by others.
At the end of last year, I saw how Prince Charles of Wales was welcomed to Ghana – pomp, circumstance, and reverence – during his royal visit to West Africa.
I had an eerie feeling until I saw the billboards where Prince Charles and Ghana’s president stood together under the text “Shared History, Shared Future”. How could we understand this? To understand (but also fuelled by anger and disgust at this public, at very best, omission), I blogged and attended an event at Libreria to decolonise and discuss, but only this year with another visit, that of the Hollywood actors in the FullCircleFestival, I could tie it all up in a bow in an essay for Africa is a Country.
