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Hannah Kudjoe was Ghana's leading woman nationalist in the struggle for independence from British colonial rule in the 1940s and 1950s. As Ghana celebrated a half century of independence in 2007 and the heroes of that struggle were publicly honored by street naming ceremonies, the unveiling of statues, and historical reenactments, Hannah Kudjoe's name was nowhere to be found. Who was Hannah Kudjoe and how could such a high-profile, formidable, and well-connected nationalist leader be forgotten so quickly? Employing an agnotological approach to women's history that interrogates the construction of ignorance and sanctioned forgetting, this article traces the processes by which Hannah Kudjoe "got disappeared," and the ways in which feminist and nationalist histories have conspired in her disappearing.
On 6 March 2007, the West African nation of Ghana, with all due pomp and circumstance, celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its independence from British colonial rule, achieved under the leadership of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People's Party (CPP). The government's Ghana@50 secretariat orchestrated an extraordinary schedule of events around the theme "Championing African Excellence," as Ghanaian jubilants, visitors, and dignitaries were treated to music festivals, parades, fashion shows, beauty pageants, fireworks, and historical reenactments.1 The so-called "Big Six"-Kwame Nkrumah, William Ofori-Atta, J. B. Danquah, Ako Adjei, Obetsebi Lamptey, and Edward Akufo Addo-long heralded as galvanizing the masses in the postwar struggle against British imperialism because of their arrest in the wake of the 1948 riots, won pride of place in the Ghana@50 commemorations, as statues were unveiled and streets and roundabouts renamed in their honor.2 Yet nowhere among those commemorated was the name of a single woman. Nowhere, indeed, was the name of Hannah Kudjoe, or "Convention Hannah," as she was once known-the only woman to participate in the founding meeting of Ghana's first mass nationalist party, the woman who single-handedly mobilized rallies (often illegally assembled) up and down the country, as she led the massive petition drive for the release of that very same "Big Six." Two days after the Independence Jubilee, on 8 March 2007, Ghana celebrated International Women's Day with the opening of a large photographic exhibit dedicated to the great women of Ghana's past and present. While many "firsts" found pride of place in that exhibit-the first woman...