Academic literature on the topic 'Ghanaian Personal narratives'

Widespread assumptions about the extractive and self-serving nature of African elites have resulted in the relative neglect of questions concerning their personal ethics and morality. Using life-history interviews undertaken with a range of Ghanaian development workers, this article explores some of the different personal aspirations, ideologies and beliefs that such narratives express. The self-identification of many of those interviewed as ‘activists’ is examined in terms of the related concepts of ‘ideology’, ‘commitment’ and ‘sacrifice’. Much recent work within history and anthropology uses the ‘life-history’ as a way of introducing ‘agency’ that is purported to be missing in accounts focusing on larger social abstractions. Yet it is the very opposition between abstractions such as ‘history’ and ‘society’ and their own more ‘personal’ lives that such narratives themselves enact. The article thus interrogates the various ways in which development workers variously imagine their lives in relation to broader social and historical processes.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how a Ghanaian migrant family business in Kent makes financial decisions and measures business growth within the framework of Social Network theory and focussing on influences such as family, cultural and social factors. Design/methodology/approach Case study: migrant Ghanaian family business owner in Kent, first generation who migrated to the UK after the year 2000. The business is a small and medium enterprise and running the business as a family. Findings The narrative highlights important aspects of cultural and social factors that are not usually considered in credit analysis or applications for a relationship with a mainstream financial services institution. It is also indicated that family and personal attributes and culture had the most social capital for the shop owner to use or explore in taking her financial decisions. The discussions provide a basic framework for future research. Originality/value There is a gap in the research of Ghanaian migrant family businesses in the UK, in particular of their financial decision making process.

What does it take for a person to persist through the various changes that he or she undergoes in the course of a lifetime? Consider the case of Anton Wilhelm Amo. Assumed to be born in Ghana in the first half of the eighteenth century, Amo was brought to Germany at the age of three or four, where he was reared by a German Duke. He obtained degrees in the natural sciences as well as philosophy, and became the first black philosophy professor in Germany. Wiredu argues that Amo was an African and a philosopher, therefore, he was an African philosopher. Amo returned to, what Wiredu calls, “home”, “to his motherland”, after more than forty years. Could he have felt “at home” in Ghana? Was this really to be his “motherland”? Was Amo actually German or rather deep down Ghanaian? Who was Amo really? Amo’s is no rare case in our time of globalisation. This is reflected by a large number of discussions on migration, immigration, interculturalism and multiculturalism across the globe. Philosophically these questions are typically treated as questions of personal identity. The case of Amo seems to pose above all one particular and persistent traditional philosophical question: What fact about a person such as Amo makes that person the same person through the various changes that he or she undergoes in the course of a lifetime? This paper considers possible responses to this question by comparing concepts of narrative, experiential, communal, cultural and placial identity, and offers an alternative, contextual identity.

This chapter moves to Chicago to examine membership in Evangelical Charismatic congregations in the context of migration. Using examples from a particular Ghanaian Charismatic congregation in Chicago, and personal narratives about past experiences in different kinds of congregations, the chapter argues that certain congregations exhibit practices and principles that support intensified sociability among members, and thus have a culture of connection. In such congregations, members often express and enact lots of personal trust in each other, which makes membership in such congregations a potential basis for the formation of trust networks. Ghanaian immigrants are particularly prone to define “a good church” as one that has such a culture of connection. Moreover, although many of them would ideally like to attend a diverse, non-Ghanaian congregation, it is more difficult for them to find a culture of connection in such places, which leads many of them “back” to the ethnic church.