Contemporary Journal of African Studies (CJAS)

From the Editorial Team

2025-06-25T20:10:50+00:00

Narrating humanity to the African child: Deconstructing the hero figure in Naana J.E.S. Opoku-Agyemang’s Who Told the Most Incredible Stories (Vols 1-5)

2025-06-24T12:40:23+00:00

The figure of the hero is central to how cultures and societies construct themselves and articulate stable fundamental ethos. It is also a site of intense deconstruction because the figure of the hero is one way of normalizing or consolidating existing norms. Yet, within the Ghanaian context, virtues and depictions of heroism are represented through the function of the trickster character. Drawing on Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth, the paper explores how traditional notions of heroism are subverted in J.E.S. Opoku-Agyemang’s Who Told the Most Incredible stories (Vols 1-5) through character foiling as a means of creating alternative forms of heroism. The paper shows that alternative models of greatness and/or heroism are encapsulated in values of community. The paper is significant in terms of the ways in which it echoes the role of literature in upholding and interrogating ideals of heroism in contemporary Africa and how literature contributes in thinking about new forms of subjectivities.

Nigerian newspaper negotiation of victimhood in banditry reportage

2025-06-24T12:40:24+00:00

This study examined how media encode and decode victimhood in reporting the activities of bandits. The lack of studies from the discourse-analytical viewpoint to reveal victimhood in the discourse has prevented an understanding of the role of context in enacting meaning in banditry reports. To this end, this study discusses different discursive strategies used by newspapers to negotiate victimhood in BD and interrogate how newspapers construct Nigeria and Nigerians as victims in the discourse. This study adopts content-based and qualitative methods of analysis considering their emphasis on the interaction between text and context to enact meaning. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is adopted as the anchor for the study because of its relevance in describing text within context. Data are sourced from two Nigerian national newspapers, the Premium Times, Guardians, Sahara reporters, and the Punch. The newspapers are selected not only because of their wider coverage but also because they gave enough space for the coverage of news about banditry and are resourceful in the use of different discursive strategies to negotiate victimhood in the discourse. Six (6) discursive strategies are identified, namely; predication, evidentiality, referential, penchant for figures, and implicature. From the van Leeuwen’s (2008) categorization of social actors, the study revealed that reporters use functionalization, generacisation, role allocation, exclusion, aggregation, nomination, and collectivization. These are used to construct bandits as killers, kidnappers, destroyers, and attackers. The study recommends a further study of BD from sociolinguistic and sociological perspective to reveal how reporters use language to influence society.

The aesthetics of the Dangme dirge

2025-06-26T13:37:30+00:00

The Dangme people are known to best express their cultural beliefs and thoughts through any genre of literature. The aesthetics of the Dangme language in the dirges is examined considering all the structures that bring out the language’s beauty. The study relies on the ethnographic design of the qualitative research approach which involves the study of texts within the context of a particular social group in a natural setting over some time. Data were gathered at funeral grounds in Yilɔ Klo and Manya Klo in the Eastern Region of Ghana, and Adaa and Nugo in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. The structure of the dirges, their components, and their significance were recorded for the next generation of speakers. Documenting and transmitting the knowledge will enhance the language’s vitality. It was found in the study that repetition is the major feature of the Dangme dirge in terms of its structure. This is done to indicate the passion of the dirgers in terms of the messages they want to put across. The dirges are rooted in metaphors and, as such rely heavily on symbolism as the primary literary device. Other devices like ideophone, apostrophe, and personification also featured in the dirges. The Dangme dirges are used to cast insinuation, reflect on the life of the deceased, show agony, and indicate the unpreparedness of the deceased to the ancestral world.

Social justice and infrastructure approach to youth development in Ghana

2025-06-24T12:40:25+00:00

Ghana seeks to transform its youth to contribute to national transformation. unemployment among young people. Having defined youth as a social category that needs skills training and jobs to transform them into useful development that promotes social equity. Drawing on primary data obtained through qualitative interaction with 20 young people who participated in a Farafina Institute workshop in Ghana between 2018 and 2019, the paper contends that the existing utilitarian paradigm, skill training and merit-based access to resources are based on a neo-liberal individualist and meritorious approach that is at variance with social justice based on a collective benefit from state resources. The utilitarian and meritorious approach breeds social injustice against the many youth staggers. The proposed alternative paradigm of state support for youth transformation is founded on the framework of infrastructure for collective, social equitable benefit of all youth.

The structure of the Dagbani conditional clause

2025-06-24T12:40:25+00:00

The expression of conditional clauses remains unexplored in most African languages including Dagbani. In this paper, I provide an account of the structure of the conditional clause of Dagbani, a Mabia language spoken in Northern Ghana. I show that there are two ways of expressing conditionality in Dagbani including the use of an independent syntactic element yi and the yi-less conditional clause which does not require the overt yi conditional marker. Regarding the syntax of this conditional particle, I demonstrate that it occurs in the protasis and can either precede or follow the adoposis. The yi-less conditional is, however, introduced by lan/lahi ‘again’, which occurs in the dependent clause and the independent clause is preceded by the linker ka ‘and’. It is further demonstrated that Dagbani conditionality exhibits both reality and unreality conditional clauses, and that the two have distinct syntactic characterizations. The particle di together with naan is identified as the counterfactual markers in the language, which I analyze as discontinuous morphemes, which combine with the conditionality particle yi in coding unreality conditionals. The data used in this work are drawn from two main sources: data taken from Dagbani literary works and some constructed based on my native speaker introspection as a native speaker of Dagbani.

Animacy distinction in Kaakye

2025-06-24T14:09:14+00:00

The paper investigates the nature of animacy distinction in Kaakye (Kwa, Niger-Congo). It describes the various grammatical manifestations of the animacy concepts in Kaakye. Based on the data presented, it is observed that animacy is a crucial determinant in the choice of forms and behaviours of nominal prefixs, pronouns, nominal modifiers, and concord subject marking. It concludes that Kaakye is sensitive to the notion of animacy-based distinction and that, like some other Kwa languages, Kaakye shows a high preference for animate versus inanimate distinction to human verses non-human distinction. However, unlike other regional languages, topicality and verb transitivity do not have significant impact on animacy distinctions in object position in Kaakye. Thus, unlike Akan and Nkami, for instance, that sometimes compromise animacy distinctionin object position, Kaakye always upholds it. The description provided in the paper aims to contribute to the cross-linguistic study of the role of animacy in the grammar of languages.

Review of Reimagining the Gendered Nation: Citizenship and Human Rights in Postcolonial Kenya by Christina Kenny

2025-06-24T12:40:26+00:00

Tribute to Marika Sherwood from the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana

2025-06-24T12:40:26+00:00