Sankofa: Disability and the Door of Return

This dissertation is organized as sets of related essays that explore the concept of Sankofa (return to the source) as a method to revisit, resurge and reclaim Nkrumah's ideology to better understand the structures that continue to create disablement in Ghana. Disability studies as a field has come to acknowledge that the majority of disabled individuals live in the global south, however, the field does not yet account for how Europe underdeveloped Africa, how it continues to do so, and the impact it has on Her children.

African Indigenous studies scholars such as Nana George Dei, charges new scholars to revisit the past in order to design the future of Africa for Africans. Heeding this call, I returned to the revolutionary anti-colonial ideologies of Julius Nyerere, Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah and Frantz Fanon in order to center their approaches within the discourse of disability. Applying their ideologies, this dissertation draws particularly on Nkrumahism as a framework to engage and critique western biomedical approaches to disability and disablement. I argue for a Nkrumahist resurgence that views disability and disablement from a cultural-social-political-economic perspective, and examine their pre- and post-colonial historiographic contexts which allow for a critical engagement and a space to write Akan spirituality into critical disability studies.

Through creative theorization this dissertation creates a Door of Return to Indigenizing African/Ghanaian ways of knowing and rewriting the histories which includes ancestors who were silenced due to several complex relationships; therefore, this dissertation partially concludes that, it is not our culture to stigmatize against persons with disabilities particularly those who are classified as insane; instead they should be viewed as being one with the spirit world, interpreting messages from ancestors which in itself is a gift that the Akans hold with pride. It also concluded the main argument of this dissertation that institutionalization of the Indigenes due to their African spirituality led to an increase in formalized confinement of Indigenous bodies. To further interrogate this inconclusiveness from the European archive, I propose further research that will allow the Indigenes themselves to speak on how, why and if those considered insane/mad and not able were banished or erased during pre-colonial Ghana.