Introduction ^{Footnote 1}

In June 2005 while walking briskly along the road from Kotoka airport to the El-Wak stadium in Accra, I suddenly felt hungry. It was about 11 am, so I looked around and just close by was a street vendor selling roasted food. I went over to her and bought some plantain and peanuts. She wrapped my snack in paper and handed it to me. After I’d finished eating my roasted plantain and peanuts I was about to throw the paper away but decided idly to read what was on it. To my intense surprise I saw that it was a photocopy of a diploma certificate from the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague (The Netherlands). It happened to be a copy of the one awarded in the 1990s to the man who had been Ghana’s ambassador to Togo in the 2000s. That afternoon I left El-Wak to 37 Military Hospitals to take a trotro minibus to the University of Ghana at Legon. The traffic was heavy so I thought I’d better think about lunch. This time I bought some roasted yam and more peanuts, again wrapped in paper. When I’d finished I again decided to read the wrapper, which this time turned out to be a paper of some legal importance. It appeared that an Otis lift on the Ghana Commercial Bank Towers had been repaired sometime in the early 1990s. The Bank of Ghana has some of its offices there so it uses the same building and according to my lunch wrapper the management of the Ghana Commercial Bank was requesting the Bank of Ghana to bear half the cost of repairs to the lift. I’m afraid I can’t say how the matter ended – perhaps some other hungry Ghanaian walked off clutching the rest of the story in his hand, or of course, her hand! That evening I went for a roasted meat kebab, again beautifully parceled up. This time the paper was not quite as well-preserved as the first two because of the oil and pepper from the kebab, but there was none-the-less important information on it. To my amazement it was the University of Ghana examination transcript of the daughter of my history lecturer. So, over the course of a single day I had come across information that was highly relevant to research, be that economic history or the history of tertiary institutions.

Since that one day’s foraging had already given me an idea of what would have been in the archives of those institutions, I decided to buy similar roasted food whenever the opportunity presented itself. I collated the wrapping papers I was given and to my surprise the majority had come from government institutions and organizations, in particular the Universities, various Ministries and regional and district assemblies. Some had come from the internal revenue service. The range and variety of information on the papers covered a number of subjects and as I say, all the documents are supposed to be in the national archives or the archives of their respective institutions.

Closely related to this experience is the same phenomenon of photocopies of archival files, especially from the Northern Record Group (NRG) and the Ashanti Record Group (ARG) series turning up among food vendors in Tamale and Kumasi. Certainly this is material used by students and researchers, after which the files are either thrown away – or perhaps donated to the food vendors. Indeed, a specific example of a file belonging to the NRG 8/2 category which happened to be the most voluminous and deals with social, administrative and political issues of the north was found with a woman who revealed that a graduate student had brought it to her.

The scenarios above certainly points to an emerging methodological problem for historians now or in the future. The question of course is why does this happen? This paper tries to answer it by situating this phenomenon in the general context of urbanization, politics, labor relations, cultural change – and simple irresponsibility.

Why Documents End Up with Food Vendors

As indicated, all the documents gathered during this research came from within the city of Accra even though similar documents, although fewer, were obtained from Kumasi, Tamale, and Takoradi. The phenomenon therefore could first and foremost be attributed to the rapid growth of urban populations and the increasing number of people working outside their homes. Many parents are now employed away from their homes and children attend schools some distance away, all of which has brought changes to the eating habits of Ghanaians. Fewer people are eating full home-cooked meals, especially in urban areas and a great deal of food is now purchased from vendors. As a result a fast-food industry has been growing rapidly around offices, factories, schools, hospitals, and commercial centres. Kiosks selling fast-food can be found along virtually every street in the major towns and cities in Ghana, and most of them are operated by women. ^{Footnote 2} Similarly, there has been an increase in leisure and many people feel the need to “wind down” after work, so many workers do congregate around bars and other drinking spots in the evenings and on public holidays. Many meat kebab sellers, mostly from Niger and Mali and Northern Ghana, have seen an opportunity to make some money by roasting meat at these bars. There are therefore two broad categories of vendors; women who sell food and men who roast kebabs, and all of them make extensive use of paper to wrap their wares. Such a great demand for paper is often met by “unofficial” supplies from various institutions and organizations in Ghana.

It is important to consider the historical antecedents to this development. The first attempts to package foods by making use of official documents – especially those from archives – seem to have begun in the 1960s. Ghana’s archives were established in 1946 by the British, and on independence in 1957 all the documents naturally passed onto the hands of the Ghanaian government and from then until the 1960s there were substantive documents that were transferred to the archives. Following the overthrow of Nkrumah in 1966, gun-toting soldiers went into the archives in Accra and took it upon themselves to set fire to the documents. Their action was triggered by the fact that the archives held files containing information on Nkrumah and his Convention Peoples Party. The soldiers left as soon as they saw the fire had taken hold, but a few sympathetic and daring individuals fetched water and put the fire out. Some people rescued what remained of the documents and took them home for safe keeping, then when order was restored after the coup d’état most of the documents were returned. But it was still true that some documents ended up on the streets and in the markets and were used to package food. ^{Footnote 3}

In the light of what happened to the documents after Nkrumah was overthrown some government departments were somewhat reluctant to entrust any more of their documents to the archives, so as more and more documents were generated the older files were either locked away in cabinets in the corridors outside offices or just simply put in boxes and left out in the dust on the veranda at the mercy of all weathers, to say nothing of various insects which contributed to the documents’ decay and destruction. Naturally enough the wind also blew some of the papers about, making the premises of institutions rather untidy. In the end the cleaners were told to burn the papers to keep the place tidy.

It was that instruction to burn the documents that gave some of the cleaners the idea to sell them to food vendors, an action we must understand in the context of Ghana’s labor relations. Most cleaners in Ghana are illiterate or at best semi-literate and so had no idea what they had been asked to burn; then they decided they would rather sell the papers to anyone who might want to buy them. For the cleaners, selling the documents made much more sense, rationally and economically, than burning them. “Why burn something that others can use?” asked Kofi Atonebanye, a cleaner in one of the Ministries in Accra. But behind the utilitarian argument used to justify the sale of the documents is also the reality of income differentials across all institutions and organizations in Ghana. Cleaners are generally poorly paid even though of course the work they do is hard. As one of my informants pointed out:

The lamentations of that cleaner remind me of a woman in Madina, a suburb of Accra. She came to the University of Ghana in search of papers to buy, and I saw her approach a faculty member on the veranda of one of the departments in the University and ask if he had paper to sell. The woman’s main business was buying scrap paper to resell to food vendors. The directness with which she approached the lecturer shows that to her, the university is no more than an important link to the business world. It never occurs to her that her simple request for “paper,” if granted, might mean the loss of a useful historical tool for examining the university and the city of Accra as well as other institutions which are enfolded in complex layers of culture, politics, economics, and much else.

I must emphasize here that for all educational institutions space is indeed becoming a problem because there has been an astronomical increase in student numbers without any substantive improvement in infrastructure to support them. In fact in the case of some universities and polytechnics in Ghana, the corridors where documents were already being kept have themselves been converted into office space to accommodate extended faculties. Inevitably that has led to the throwing away of documents. Closely linked to the problem of physical space is the ever increasing diffusion and utilization of Information, Communication, and Technology (ICTs) in the public service. Ever since its introduction ICT has had many and various negative implications for how paper is regarded and valued in Ghana – and indeed in most parts of the world. Rather than deposit paper documents with public historical archives many prefer to throw the paper information away and instead keep its information in digital form, which is considered more convenient and of course less bulky. Precisely as Calogero Gaccio et al put it:

That very lack of space and the increasing reliance on digital storage is exactly what has led most sellers of roasted food in the environs of institutions and organizations in Ghana to opt to obtain their supplies of wrapping paper from cleaners.

It is important to point out that some of the food vendors have unique stories and provide very interesting spiritual explanations for their dependence on this paper. They blame it all on the Christian religion. Christianity has led to the peddling of information that seems to privilege the utilization of paper as compared to other forms of packaging. For example in times past plant leaves were central to the packaging of food. Nowadays such leaves are being demonized by wayside Christian preachers. They feel that everything that comes from the forest is bad. They claim that plant leaves contain demons because plant leaves are very central to certain traditional rituals. They therefore admonish people not to eat food packaged in them for fear that the demons that inhabit the forest will eventually enter the customers via the leaves. Apart from the spiritual aspect is the question of hygiene. Health professionals in Ghana have warned people not to eat food wrapped in leaves since they contain germs. ^{Footnote 6} In condemning the utilization of leaves, alternative and unintended sources have been proposed, and frequent public health education has gradually pushed the packaging preferences of food vendors away from plant-based packaging and towards paper and plastic.

Fundamental matters in addition to concerns of space, economic hardship, religion, and health are simple logistics and bureaucracy. Following the decentralization of the National Archives of Ghana in the late 1950s most regions in Ghana now have a regional archive. ^{Footnote 7} Alongside decentralization came the decision that documents within the municipal and district administrations should be moved to the regional archive for safe-keeping. Essentially archives are supposed to take documents from the regional, municipal and district coordinating councils and assemblies. Likewise the district, municipal and regional councils are supposed to make documents available to the archives in their respective regions. Indeed the plan described above was supposed to ensure checks and balances as far as the archiving and preservation of paper documents were concerned. But an arrangement like that is inherently likely to create nothing but confusion. The institutions expect the archives to come for the documents, whereas the archives expect the institutions to either bring the documents or ask the archive to come and fetch them. Another serious concern is that, although staff of the various archives are willing to go and pick up the documents, they lack adequate transport capability. Apart from the National Archive in Accra which has an official vehicle for administrative purposes none of the regional archives in Ghana has access to a suitable vehicle. Staff of the archive normally depend on the regional, municipal and district assemblies who do have vehicles to help them convey documents from the districts to the regional capitals. Incidentally, most of the officers in responsible positions at the district, municipal and regional offices themselves are wholly unaware of the relevance of the archive and in most cases have been unwilling to make vehicles available to convey documents to the archives. “They simply do not see the importance of the archives,” says a staff member in the Tamale archive.

In situations where staff of the archive are able to rescue documents and bring them to their premises they find no office space for the documents because most archives share their premises with the regional administration or other government establishments. That normally leads to competition for space and in most cases administrators, not knowing or even thinking about the importance of the archives feel reluctant to allocate space for the storage of those documents that have been collected. It has become more or less standard practice in almost all the regional capitals to relegate the archival section firmly to the background. Since the documents refer to matters that have already been dealt with some do not even see the point of keeping them. The scenario above means that it is very easy for documents to get into public circulation and end up being used in the sale of food.

However, there needs to be a much deeper analysis of the behavior of those in authority regarding the utilization of the archive and the need to send documents into storage rather than allowing them to be used to package bananas and peanuts. One politician made it clear in an interview that in part at least people do not want documents to find their way into the archive because they fear that in future those documents might be mined by security forces or journalists who might make different use of the information than historians would. The documents might well end up telling a story that would either implicate a political figure in the present or destroy his family in the future. As that politician pointed out, one might take a decision that is good today but in the future that same decision might be considered to have been a bad one. Such things do happen, and sometimes because documents ended up in an archive. “Such occurrences return to haunt you for life,” he concluded. The insights offered by that politician provide an interesting parallel between the thoughts of today’s politicians and the soldiers who destroyed the archive in Accra after the coup d’état of 1966. They all acted as they did because of the uncertainty of the political terrain in Ghana, where “existing” information continues to indicate the identity or actions of an individual actor or actors.

Implications for Research and the Need for Historians to Seek Alternatives from Vendors

It is important to consider the specific implications for the writing of Ghana’s history of this practice of selling papers to street-vendors. From what has been discussed so far it is evident that documents that have reached the vendors could be highly significant as any document might be one of the few from the historical record that could report to a historian on some matter of interest or a particular event – indeed such a scrap of paper might be the only surviving record. The years of maximum input to the archives in Ghana were between 1957 and shortly after 1960, ^{Footnote 8} and unfortunately just six years later the coup d’état of 1966 saw the destruction of most of the documents. It is probable that important pre-1960s documents held by individuals and families have been released into the public domain only to end up being used by food vendors.

Similarly, these days it is very common to go to the archive and consult a particular document only to find on the next visit that the same document has gone – an experience familiar to a number of researchers in Ghana’s archives. The current state of affairs in Ghana, especially with respect to chieftaincy and land matters, means that many chiefs, opinion-formers and families are in the habit of paying individuals to search through the files in the archives and remove information beneficial to their opponents in legal cases or, conversely information that is unfavorable to their own families. Razor blades or scissors have clearly been used literally to “cut” particular portions of documents to leave only those sections that serve individuals’ purposes. Since this practice of “censoring” by so called “academics” or “researchers of fortune” began only relatively recently, the best thing for bona fide researchers and historians to do is to look for alternative sources to fill in the gaps. And as we have seen, for some of the NRG and ARG series it is possible to obtain a certain amount of otherwise missing information from the local food sellers since in most cases individuals, organizations, and institutions tend to discard information after use. But of course in relying on the papers found among the food vendors one runs a definite risk of not getting the full story from the archive.

Contemporary historians and anthropologists too have been forced to adopt this same method of seeking information from papers lurking on the streets of Ghana because new material generated by organizations and institutions does not reach the archives. While it is true that new material is supposed to be added annually to the core collections in Ghana’s archives it is evident that nowadays fewer and fewer documents are being added. That documents are not being added at an accelerated rate means that a complete picture can be obtained only by using secondary sources like the one indicated here in an attempt to help fill gaps in the story.

The story presented regarding the utilization of important historical papers by operators of food stalls and “drinking spots” points to the fact that even though archives provide researchers and historians with a lot of opportunities and sometimes serendipitous information, that might not always be the right information. So the question is not just about information in general from archives nor even the volume or quantum generated in the archive by frequency of addition; rather it is a matter of having the right information. It is true that the individual pieces of paper one might find with the street vendors are of limited scope, but such scraps or even complete sheets might well be as valuable as the very large quantity of information sought and generated in an archive. In any case researchers keep going to the archive, presumably because they do not have the right information or because what they have is so minimal that they want more of it; but of course some of the documents they seek could be with the food vendors! More importantly, since whole volumes of papers are sold to vendors they might have in their possession an entire collection dealing with a specific historical matter. A perfect illustration concerns a PhD student from a European university who was working on the transformation of the security sector in Ghana since the beginning of the fourth republic. She spent two years doing her field work in Ghana and gathered all the information she needed – except the salaries of some of the security staff. She approached me for advice; did I have any suggestions? she wanted to know. All I could do was suggest that she go and buy herself a few nice roasted meals from some of the vendors nearby the premises of the security agencies she was studying. And she was in luck, because she found the pay slips she wanted wrapped round the food she bought!

The research experience in Ghana on the matter of paper circulation should make one think critically about the information needed to write history. In our specific case institutions, administrators, workers, and food vendors play a very critical role. I for one could not agree more with Christine Borgman who indicates that “data have no value or meaning in isolation. They can be assets or liabilities or both. They exist within a knowledge infrastructure–an ecology of people, practices, technologies, institutions, material objects, and relationships.” ^{Footnote 9} From the discussion above it is evident that the Ghanaian food vendors have been bringing together all those basic but important ingredients of scholarship. It is they who are in possession of the documentary material and at the same time their daily business of selling food makes them central cogs in the general circulation of information and ideas since the vendors operate at important nodal points in Ghana’s cities.