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For generations, healers sustained medical knowledge in African communities through oral communication. During the twentieth century, healers who learned to read and write used literacy as a vehicle for establishing medical authority. In particular, literate healers lobbied colonial and national governments for recognition, wrote medical guidebooks, advertised in African newspapers, and sent letters to other healers to organise their profession. This article examines the case of literate healers in colonial and postcolonial Ghana living near the twin port cities of Sekondi and Takoradi. There, an early organisation of ‘Scientific African Herbalists’ and later, the ‘Ghana Psychic and Traditional Healing Association,’ used literacy to reclaim the public's trust in their medical expertise. An examination of literacy shows historical avenues for professional formation and the continued quest for medical legitimacy and respectability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars of children and migration have recently turned their attention to how children mediate home and belonging, especially through contradictory or challenging circumstances. For unfree children in Africa, challenging circumstances of sale or debt-bondage pose particular difficulties. Despite what historians of slavery have noted of their adaptability for survival, questions remain about how the unfree child constructs self, home, and belonging when transferred over long distances, and when age and size precludes running away as a strategy for survival or return. This article focuses on the transcript involving the testimonies of three young, unfree girls transacted in 1930 and redeemed through a district court of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast in 1941. Though their testimonies are provided within the arena of a male, colonial district court, Atawa, Kibadu, and Abnofo reveal how their treatment, duration of bondage, and geographical and cultural distance shaped their constructions of self, home, and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The formative influence of colonial art education on modern art movements in Africa has not attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. Yet, European art teachers in the Gold Coast challenged colonial prejudice that Africans were incapable of mastering European aesthetic forms. This article analyses the art education provided at the Teacher Training College at Achimota School where pupils learned both to revalue African art forms and to draw and paint in European, representational art styles. Modern artists built on and reshaped what they had learned at Achimota in order to respond to changing social and political conditions. The last section of this article explores the impact of colonial art education on the work of two of the earliest modern artists in Ghana: Kofi Antubam and Vincent Kofi. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the experiences of immigrants from British and French West African colonies in the Accra lunatic asylum in the first half of the twentieth century. Placing particular emphasis on how immigrants got into and out of the asylum, the article argues that immigrants were marginalized and manipulated by colonial psychiatric institutions to a greater extent than non-migrant colonial subjects in Gold Coast. In making this argument, the article argues for the value of adding colonial origin and subjecthood to the racial and gendered perspectives that have dominated the history of health and medicine in Africa to date. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes one key feature of the Convention People's Party's youth policy in postcolonial Ghana: the Ghana Builders Brigade. Founded as a response to rapid urbanization and growing unemployment, the Builders Brigade aimed to create a new productive and modern citizenry by returning the country's young men and women to the land through a network of mechanized work camps and state farms. Remembered as both a locus for party intimidation and indiscipline as well as a source for political and social opportunity, the Brigade emerged as a key site for a generationally-defined and gendered debate over the roles and responsibilities of the country's youth in the first decade of self-rule. Through an interrogation of this debate, this article argues that the Brigade provided a space for its members to explore a socially recognized yet politically conceived notion of adulthood under Kwame Nkrumah's rule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]