Sitting on my friend's veranda, I balance a bowl of Alansa on my knees. I eat it greedily because it's in season. The road outside moves in steady pulses, engines rising and fading. The atmosphere, the fruit and the silent watching pull me back to vacations with my grandmother, when Accra felt suspended and the world narrowed to her voice.
It was during these vacations that I fell in love with history. My grandmother was a retired headmistress and loved to talk. She would take me outside to sit and tell me stories about her life in boarding school. She was the first daughter in her family to attend boarding school. It was, and remains, one of the prominent girls' schools in Ghana. She would talk about how white nuns were her teachers and how she sewed and knitted with them over the weekends, about the war between the Ashantis and Denkyiras, the Golden Stool, and the migration of ethnic groups in Ghana. This love of history would later inform my decision, as a teenager, to purchase the book ‘Early Civilisation' at a school open book fair. And from there, purchasing and reading more history books.
One thing was constant when I read about these histories: the women were missing or rarely spoken of. In ‘Early Civilisation’, or any of these books, the only women I remember coming across, the only ones who were not confined to celestial kitchens, were the goddesses in ancient Egypt. And so, for a while, women who lived in my earliest memories were bound body, mind, and soul to the kitchen as primary caregivers.
Once, in high school, during a Government class, as our tutor rumbled on about the road to independence in Ghana, I asked a question which had the entire class chuckling.
Were there no women during the independence struggle for Ghana?’
I asked during the class, my face taking the form of a young girl mildly enraged by this erasure. Also, I was genuinely curious. Surely I couldn't be the only one bothered that no women were part of the struggle. Where were they? Kitchens? Farms? Markets? Madam Helen only sighed and continued with the class.
I would later discover that women were, indeed, integral to this fight for independence. Their labour threaded through rallies, unions, market protests and fundraising, mobilising traders and sustaining the everyday work that kept the movement alive. Across the colony, women were also organising themselves through associations such as the Accra Women’s Association and the Gold Coast Women’s Association. In 1953, Evelyn Amarteifio helped establish the National Federation of Gold Coast Women, bringing together women’s organisations from across the colony to coordinate women’s political participation and public organising. They held political positions, and as the empowerment folks like to say, ‘they moved from classrooms to boardrooms. Why don't I hear of them when the Big 6 is mentioned? Why don't you hear of them?
A car horn cuts through the evening outside, pulling me out of my thoughts. The engines rise and fade again. The alansa is nearly finished, sticky against my fingers.
Further into my interest in unearthing all the buried contributions of women in Ghana’s independence, I found that most of Nkrumah's campaign was funded by market women. Women like Agnes Oforiwaa Tagoe-Quarcoopome, Rebecca Naa Dedei ‘Ashikishan’ Ayitey, and Hannah Kudjoe. Mabel Dove Danquah worked at the Evening News, using her pen to defy colonialism and raise nationalist consciousness. Akua Asabea was arrested during the Positive Action Campaign in 1950 and earned the nickname 'James Fort Prison Graduate'. Sophia Doku, Leticia Quaye, and Ama Nkrumah became propaganda secretaries for the CPP, managing the party's campaigns in the press. Through market associations and trading networks, women organised collections, mobilised traders for rallies and boycotts, and carried political messages from one market town to another.
Their mobilisation was part of a broader wave of political agitation that had been building across the Gold Coast through the late 1940s. On 28 February 1948, armed officers under the British colonial administration opened fire on unarmed ex-servicemen marching to Christiansborg Castle with a petition to the governor. The shootings sparked riots across Accra and exposed the depth of public anger under colonial rule. Market women had been central to the boycott of European stores that preceded the shootings, using their control of trade to apply economic pressure on colonial authorities. In January 1950, the Convention People’s Party(CPP) declared Positive Action, a campaign of strikes, boycotts and non-cooperation meant to force the demand for self-government.
Hannah Kudjoe travelled widely organising rallies and political meetings and later served as the CPP’s National Propaganda Secretary. Market leaders such as Agnes Oforiwaa Tagoe-Quarcoopome mobilised traders and helped raise funds that sustained political organising across towns and markets, while women like Ama Nkrumah and Sophia Doku organised women’s groups and support networks that carried political discussion into homes, markets and community gatherings. Even after the colonial government declared a state of emergency and arrested several leaders, including Nkrumah, the movement continued to grow. The CPP went on to win the 1951 elections, expanding political participation across the colony and setting the stage for independence in 1957. In the early years of independence, women's organising reached new heights. In May 1960, ten women were elected to parliament: Comfort Asamoah, Sophia Doku, Christiana Wilmot, Ayanori Ayambila, Lucy Anin, Regina Asamany, Grace Ayensu, Mary Koranteng, Victoria Nyarku, and Susanna Al-Hassan. Two months later, in July 1960, Hannah Kudjoe organised the Conference of Women of Africa and African Descent at the University of Ghana, bringing together delegates from across Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Women weren't just fighting for Ghana; they were building pan-African networks. But even these victories were fragile. By 1960, the government had merged all independent women's organisations into a single body under party control, sidelining leaders like Hannah Kudjoe and Evelyn Amarteifio who had built these movements from the ground up.
Why must we dig through archives to find women who shaped independence struggles, policies, creative industries, food industries, and the country as a whole? Women and other marginalised communities are systematically erased from history and the archives, reduced to footnotes, unnamed collaborators, or omitted entirely from official records. Even organisations that women built themselves rarely appear in the national story. Groups such as the Ghana Women’s League and the National Federation of Gold Coast Women once mobilised thousands of women across the colony, yet they remain largely absent from the dominant narratives of Ghana’s political history, not because they were absent, but because the structures that record history were never designed to centre them.
I have had to dig for women from the archives. I know I am not the only one. People have had to collect oral stories about women from women. They say women are the keepers of memory and stories, but nobody thinks to document the storyteller and the memory keeper?
Years before I decided to document women, culture and other marginalised groups, as a young feminist doing a lot of questioning and finding language, a radicalising moment arrived at Parade Grounds in Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) during a casual conversation with friends about the formation of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) and nationalist movements in Ghana. One of those friends casually blurted out, ‘Charley, you reck say then no woman dey for the independence struggle inside? Them go come worry we plus feminism and some abrokyire nyaa!’ Do you realise there were no women during the fight for independence? Women will later worry us with feminism and other foolish Western takes. The others laughed and jeered him on. I was appalled, angry, and yet reflective. I stood for quite a while in shock. My legs felt wobbly, and my voice suddenly left my throat for another home. If only our schools taught about women of independence, too, if only women sat in museums and were commemorated just like men are. I stood in silence and begged my voice to return.
When it did, I asked: ‘Can anyone bring out a 50 pesewa coin and look at the woman on the back?’ Ike, the dread-head amongst us, dived into his pocket and fished one out, placing it in his palm. A few leaned closer to look, others craned their necks. The small coin sat there, ordinary and worn, passed through countless hands before this one.
‘We handle money every day, but we do not always take time to look at it,’ I started.
The woman on the coin, Rebecca Naa Dedei ‘Ashikishan’ Ayitey, was known for her entrepreneurial pursuit as the queen of the flour business in Accra. Aside from her flour business, she was a staunch politician. By the time Nkrumah was released from jail in 1951, Komla Agbeli Gbedemah had mobilised the market women as the backbone of the CPP in Accra. The leader of the pack was Dedei, who campaigned relentlessly and funded Nkrumah’s pursuit to win in Ashiedu Keteke, the nerve centre of the Ga-Dangme Confederacy. A seat that, if lost, would have cost Nkrumah the prime ministership.
I asked, ‘If I no mention her name rydee, like you know am or you biz about am before?’ If I had not mentioned her name now, would you have known or even asked about her? He shook his head. He had no idea who she was. Her face is stamped into a currency that circulates everywhere, from roadside kiosks, trotro stations, to fully air- conditioned offices, through hands that never ask her name.
The conversation went on for hours about women of independence. I told them about the Big Four: Akua Asabea, Ayisi Ankrah, Ama Nkrumah, and Hannah Kudjoe, who led rallies across the country after the Big Six were arrested, mobilising people and funds despite the ban on public gatherings. While the Big Six sat in prison, these four women kept the movement alive. I spoke about Mabel Dove, who in 1954 became the first woman elected to Ghana's Legislative Assembly. About Susanna Al-Hassan and Esther Ocloo, women who shaped both politics and economies. About the ever-popular Ama Ata Aidoo and Efua Sutherland, among others. To a large extent, I think he was convinced, and I offered to share some articles for him to read. He, like everyone else, needs to educate themselves. But I doubt he ever read the articles I shared with him. I think about him often, whether he still maintains the thought of feminism being inherently a ‘white woman’ concept, and no women being a part of the independence struggle.
I resolved then, after that afternoon, to be a memory worker and an archivist. In the years that followed, I have kept digging. Someone needed to start from somewhere, do the digging and share the knowledge. I needed to read and gather as much as I could. African Feminist Journal issue 19 (2014) on Pan-Africanism and Feminism became a personal favourite. I still read it till today. I realised the issue was not only in Ghana but across the continent. Most, if not all, women who participated in nationalist movements had been completely erased. My deep dive started nearly seven years ago. A line often attributed to Frantz Fanon, that Africa is shaped like a revolver and the Congo is the trigger, drew me toward the Congo. That was where I first encountered Andrée Blouin. She organised women, mobilised support, and stood close to power at a turning point in Congolese history. Lumumba’s name filled the pages. Hers hovered on the edges.
Now, seven years after that afternoon in KNUST, this month being Heritage Month, I chose to intentionally remember all the women who have gone before us, yet remain largely erased and undocumented. Like the renowned poet Audre Lorde wrote, poetry is not a luxury. As a queer African woman, I cannot choose to forget. The act of remembering is political. The act of documenting women before me, with me, and after me is not a luxury. It is survival, and we cannot treat it as optional. When I write, talk, or work, it is for African women, women in the global majority, queer people, differently abled people, sex workers, and all marginalised and oppressed groups who have been systematically left out of history. We must collectively write ourselves back into history to counter further erasure. Documenting our lives means documenting our resistance, our struggles, our joys, our languages, and our ways of living. This is how we centre our narratives and produce our own ways of knowing.
Digging through the archives is necessary, but staying quiet about what I find is not. The women are there, funding campaigns, organising rallies and protests, creating, theorising, marking their faces on coins no one looks at or questions. I write their names. I share their stories. The silence has to break somewhere.
I choose to write for the women whose stories were never told, whose songs stuck with a generation and didn't make it to mine. My writing is to name them one after the other and ask that you do the same. I do it for girls like me who would sit in Madam Helen's class and ask questions as I did. I think about that a lot, whether they will find answers as I later did after leaving secondary school and holding onto those questions, or whether they will let them go.
Still sitting on my friend's veranda, I look at the guava tree and the ripe fruit at the very top, and I know what my next move would be. I remember my grandmother once again and a phrase she always said: Asante didi nso Asante nkae.(Asante eats, Asante does not remember) I chuckle.
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Adomaa Adusei is an Afro-feminist weaving memory, body, and knowledge into stories of resistance and renewal. Her work explores feminist memory, archiving, and knowledge production grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing, guided by the belief that the body remembers and carries history and wisdom. She works with Drama Queens, a Ghanaian feminist collective that uses art as a language for activism, and is a co-dreamer of Buchei, a collective centring feminist memory work, storytelling, and feminist knowledge creation. Her work is shaped by African women and women of colour who write, remember, and remake the world.
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