09 Film Launch: When Women Speak: A Documentary About Struggle, Sacrifice, Sisterhood, Freedom (2022)

Chair: Christine Vogt-William (Chair of the Round Table)

The new documentary film which premiered in Accra, Ghana in January this year, was produced by Akosua Adomako Ampofo (University of Ghana) and Kate Skinner (University of Birmingham, UK) and directed by Aseye Tamakloe. The film follows the activist experiences of 16 Ghanaian women during the 1960s and the 1970s when Ghana’s political landscape was impacted by military, single-party and multi-party regimes. As prominent figures in the media, law, academia, politics and diverse governmental and non-governmental organisations pertinent to women’s sociopolitical concerns, their stories disrupt and challenge popular narratives that gender activism is a foreign ‘Western’ import, that crept into Ghanaian contexts with the restoration of multi-party democracy in 1992.

The documentary itself is a medial site of knowledge production with the following aims: The aims of the research project were consistent with Sustainable Development Goal 5 on gender equality.

The specific objectives were: To address gaps in our knowledge about how Ghanaian women organised and campaigned under military, single-party, and multi-party governments, and how they interacted with international women’s organisations and events. To create an archive based on the interviews with gender activists and women in public life.  To use the documentary film to challenge representations of gender activism as a recent foreign import, showing instead how women’s organisations and campaigns have long been part of Ghana’s national history.  To use the documentary film to inform public and policy debate on women in public life.

Press Release, When Women Speak (January 2022) The genre of the documentary film then is a media format meriting some engagement in the framework of the Cluster Conference theme of Medialities, whereby this genre of mass communication is aligned with women’s political visibility through performative and processual modes of agency to foreground the intersectional complexities of women’s roles in shaping African histories, education and politics. Hence, given the strong Afro-Feminist sensibility marking this documentary, the film launch and subsequent Round Table conversation with the film producers, director and production team are thus germane to revisiting and rethinking the role of media in the discipline of Media Studies, while driving conversations on how the production of medial texts by African women can contribute to reconfiguring the transdisciplinary field of African Studies itself.

Procedure: The Film will be first screened and the Round Table with the production team will follow. The Round Table Participants are:  Executive Producer and lead researcher: Prof. Akosua Adomako Ampofo (University of Ghana) Executive Producer and lead researcher: Dr. Kate Skinner (University of Birmingham, UK) Director: Ms. Aseye Tamakloe   Postdoc researcher: Dr. Jovia Salifu   Animation and Camera Supervision: Akosua Asamoabea Ampofo   Kwame Crentsil: music, lights and sound Composer: Dzidzor Amorin.   Illustrators and animators: Charles and Emmanuel