Africa Table - History and Memory of the Fante Confederation

Join the Center for African Studies for our weekly lunchtime lecture series.

Speaker: Trevor Getz, Chair & Professor, Department of History, San Francisco State University; Visiting Professor, Department of History, Stanford University

The 19th century Fante Confederation still exists in the Central Region of Ghana as rumor, oral tradition, and art. These accounts are quite different, however, from official histories reproduced in school curriculum and the scholarly writings of historians. What Ghanaians have to say about these differences -- in digital forums, paintings, and responses to museum exhibits -- can tell us a lot about the disconnect between History and its doubles: memory, tradition, heritage, and lore.

Trevor Getz is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Abina and the Important Men, which won the American Historical Association’s James Harvey Robinson Prize, and editor or author of nine other books and numerous articles.  Among them are textbooks on historical methodology, including oral history and historical linguistics. He recently completed work on A Primer for Teaching African History (Duke University Press, 2018) and, with Rebecca Shumway, Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora (Bloomsbury, 2017).  He is currently working on a grant-funded public history project entitled The Fante Confederation in History and Memory.