“Virtuous Citizenship”: Ethnicity and Encapsulation among Akan- Speaking Ghanaian Methodists in London
Mattia Fumanti
Paper for the Conference on African Transnational and Return Migration in the Context of North-South Relations, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom, 29-30 June 2009
Abstract:
This paper examines the ways first generation Ghanaian Methodists in London construct citizenship in the context of highly encapsulated ethnic fellowships, characterised by the exclusive usage of Akan, Ghanaian styles of worship and an ethos of mutual assistance. Encapsulation seems irreconcilable with an idea of an active citizenship as grounded in participation in the public sphere of the nation. Yet it is within these encapsulated fellowships that first generation Ghanaian Methodists construct citizenship through the making of a diasporic Ghanaian identity grounded in the ideas of hard-work, respect for the rule of law, virtue and morality. Building on Aristotle’s concept of citizenship as an expression of virtue, goodness and the preservation of harmony among citizens and the state, I call Ghanaian Londoners, often ‘virtual’ in the sense of lacking legal residence, ‘virtuous citizenship’. The paper also addresses issues of multiculturalism and tranansnational belonging through an analysis of a current debate within the Methodist polity.
Keywords: Citizenship, Ethnicity, Methodism, Ghanaian diaspora, London, Multiculturalism
Introduction
The literature on the new African Diaspora in Britain and the US has tended to underline loss of status, alienation and invisibility experienced by African migrants. Stoller (2002), for example, citing Ellison’s Invisible man, describes the experience of a Songhay trader in New York as the life of ‘an unseen person... who walked among the shadows’ (2002:6), while Akyempong (2001) and Vasta and Kandilige (2007) argue that Ghanaians conceptualise London as ‘the great leveller’. Arriving from Africa often with high-level professional qualifications and education, Ghanaian migrants end up in menial jobs and experience a loss of status: ‘the elites rubbing shoulders with the illiterates’ (Akyempong 2001: 196). JoAnn McGregor describes the experience of shame associated with de-skilling among Zimbabwean professionals working in care homes for the elderly (McGregor 2007). In this context, nostalgia for home, and the pain of disconnection take centre stage in powerful narratives of displacement (D’Alisera 2004). This is also expressed in novels such as The children of the revolution on Ethiopians in Washington D.C (Mengestu 2007). Such an emphasis on alienation and loss of status, while capturing a deep-seated truth on the reality of racism and daily discrimination encountered by many African migrants, can potentially, overlook the complexity of the new African diaspora experience.
Alienation and invisibility may disguise active citizenship within a diaspora community, invisible to outside bodies, although undoubtedly, incoming migrants do find some aspects and values of the society they live in deeply unsettling (Stoller 2002, d’Alisera 2004). Against this alienation and invisibility, social involvement with their communities opens up for migrants other avenues for recognition and distinction. Encapsulation in political, religious and mutual aid associations has long been recognised as an essential aspect of the process of settlement in a new country (Mayer 1971, Whyte 1943, Werbner 1990, 2002)[1]. As Sam Selvon’s (1956) classic novel, The Lonely Londoners, on post-war migration from the Caribbean reminded us more than fifty years ago, hopes and dreams, places of recognition and visibility, co-exist with alienation and invisibility.
This paper aims to build on this dualism in the literature by addressing the way in which Ghanaians in Britain negotiate their sense of belonging and citizenship while remaining double rooted, commited to both Britain and Ghana, and despite being in some cases overstayers who are neither British citizens nor legally resident in Britain. In particular, the paper reflects on the way that membership in the Methodist church in Britain and Ghana mediates for Ghanaian Methodists a sense of citizenship, based on moral and ethical ideas of virtuous performance.
For first generation Ghanaian Methodist migrants in London the Methodist church becomes a space for the construction of a unique ‘diasporic' citizenship, irrespective of the formalities of passports and voting rights. This is because the church constitutes for migrants a transnational polity, one that is both British and Ghanaian, a naturalised, taken-for-granted continuum arising from the long history of Methodism as a British mission in Ghana (Bartels 1965). For Ghanaians in Britain, whether or not they are officially full British citizens outside the church assumes secondary importance to their sense of entitlement as postcolonial citizens returning to the home country. Critical is their status and role within the church itself. Though in many cases lacking official papers, and frequently suffering discrimination and loss of status at work, with many employed in manual labour despite their educational qualifications, the Methodist church provides the space where Ghanaian migrants can construct their sense of being both ‘British’ and worthy citizens. This stems from migrants’ recognition of the Methodist church as an essentially British institution which recognises their loyalty and allegiance whatever their formal status. By working and achieving recognition within the church, they see themselves as living virtuous and dignified lives in British society more generally. The church is thus a space where their contribution to Britain as good Christians within a Christian nation is morally acknowledged.
Ghanaian Methodists construct their subjecthood as virtuous performance. According to this ideal, citizenship, the right to national belonging, is achieved by being law abiding, hard working, and actively involved in Methodist fellowships through acts of caring, charity, nurture, and human fellowship. Nevertheless, the space of the church is also the space in which tensions inherent in the wider concept of citizenship between universalism and particularism are played out. On the one hand, citizenship for Ghanaians is founded on universal Christian values of love and care. They phrase this in terms of the Akan concept of empathy, ɔtema. On the other hand, universal caring remains in tension with particular membership in Ghanaian ‘ethnic’ fellowships. These often exclude Caribbeans and other African groups within and outside the church. Moreover, their highly moralistic ideal of proper conduct promotes a sense of moral superiority in relation to the ‘English’, the host society, and a negative judgement of their perceived immoral and sinful behaviour. Hence, competition and opposition both within and beyond the ethnic group typifies membership in Akan Methodist fellowships. Indeed, my paper discloses, the Akan tendency towards encapsulation and ethnic particularism within the church has come to be regarded as highly problematic by the church hierarchy, and has led to calls for an internal debate and reflection on the role of ethnic minorities within the Methodist polity.
This marked tendency towards local and transnational encapsulation among Akan speakers has implications for the wider debate on multiculturalism in Britain. In effect, their ethnically exclusive fellowships lead to the creation of a bi-polar transnational social field within the confined space of a single institution, the Methodist church, which itself is both British and transnational. This feature of the church allows for the simultaneous negotiation of different citizenships. On the one hand, being members of a transnational polity whose roots and centre are in Britain makes Ghanaians in their own eyes naturally British citizens, but it also permits them to create ethnic fellowships which transcend the boundaries of the nation, while at the same time transforming the church into a multicultural polity.
For more recent Ghanaian migrant arrivals, living in London without residence visas or work permits, the presence of Ghanaian Methodist fellowships signifies a British recognition of the contribution made by Ghanaians to the UK as British citizens and helps legitimise their presence in Britain in their own eyes since, despite their illegal status, they are citizens within the British Methodist Church. For those who have been settled in the country over a longer period of time and possess all the necessary legal documents, the Ghanaian Methodist fellowships become a space to celebrate diversity, by maintaintaining their unique cultural link with their home country and remaining engaged in the project of Ghanaian nation-building while living in the diaspora (Mercer, Page & Evans 2009). Both these groups come together within the framework of the church.
Within multicultural Britain, the church constitutes an ideal space for intercultural dialogue. As a British religious institution with a long history of engagement in social justice and progressive themes, British Methodism has undergone considerable transformation in recent years in order to accommodate a growing number of ethnic fellowships. The ensuing debate created by the efflorescence of such ethnic fellowships mirrors wider debates on citizenship and multiculturalism in Britain. As in Britain as a whole, themes of allegiance to the British Methodist church, of active citizenship, of cohesion and integration, are central to this internal debate in the church, especially as it relates to the more highly encapsulated ethnic fellowships like the Ghanaian ones.
Addressing active citizenship in Britain: towards a Feminist and Aristotelian synthesis
These new challenges can be met only by government and people working together, met only by an active citizenship, only by involving and engaging the British people and forging a shared British national purpose that can unify us all... Here is the deal for the next decade we must offer: no matter your class, colour or creed, the equal opportunity to use your talents. In return we expect and demand responsibility: an acceptance that there are common standards of citizenship and common rules. And this is the British way: to say to all who live in our country there are common standards and rules to be upheld. (Gordon Brown, Labour Party Conference 2007)
Over the last decade Britain has seen the affirmation and consolidation of a more communitarian definition of citizenship. Based largely on the American republican model in its late 20th century version (see for example Etzioni1993, Putnam 2000), the communitarian tradition places great emphasis on active citizenship and, as Gordon Brown underlined in his speech, on shared rights, obligations and common standards for citizens. This is seen largely as opposing an individualist, liberal tradition. It aims to promote the sense of collective duties and social rights over individualism, technical expertise and the alienating tendencies of market capitalism. As T.H. Marshall famously emphasised (1964), individual definitions of citizenship, although potentially emancipating, cannot eradicate class and inequality. Instead, he defined citizenship as ‘a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community’ (1964: 84). Although Marshall’s view was progressive, laying the philosophical foundations for the welfare state, a number of feminist scholars have pointed out that the communitarian stress on belonging and ‘actively joining with others to promote the common good in a community’ (Assiter 1999, 44), is exclusionary in the sense that it tends ‘to homogenise groupings’ and ‘to gloss over class, gender, racial and other power differentials between groupings, in the interest of generating a common identity and a common value system’ (Assiter 1999: 45).
Against the homogenising vision of the communitarian tradition and the alienating approach of the liberal tradition, feminist critics have suggested alternative constructions of citizenship. Lister (1997), for example, proposes a feminist synthesis of the liberal and communitarian traditions that would address citizenship’s exclusionary power and the public-private dichotomy (see also Prokhovnik 1994 ). Lister argues that contrary to the stress on universalism, citizenship has long excluded women and other groups, such as ethnic minorities and the disabled, ‘from the theory and practice of citizenship’ (Lister 1997, 38), relegating women to the private sphere. As a corrective to this false universalism, Lister proposes the notion of a ‘differentiated universalism’ - ‘a universalism which stands in creative tension to diversity and difference and which challenges the divisions and exclusionary inequalities which can stem from diversity’ (Lister 1997: 39). Writing about the disability movement, Judith Monks suggests that it advocates an ‘alternative form of citizenship which provides for a flexible kind of participation’ based on intersubjectivity and relationality (Monks 1999: 66). Assiter suggests that citizenship should ‘not take it for granted that individuals are members of nation-states’ (1999: 41), while Stasiulis and Bakan argue that citizenship ‘is negotiated and is therefore unstable, constructed and re-constructed historically across as well as within geo-political borders’ (1994: 119; see also Werbner and Yuval-Davis 1999). These theoretical alternatives to legalistic definitions of citizenship are seminal, allowing for a novel conceptualisation that aims to take into account intersubjective moral relations between citizens.
Assiter uses the notion of an epistemic community, drawing on Aristotle, to refer to ’a group of individuals who share certain interests, values and beliefs in common... and who work on the epistemic consequences of those presuppositions’ (Assiter 1999: 47). A key aspect in Aristotle’s theory overlooked by Assiter, however, is his invocation of virtue, ἀρετή, to describe the good citizen, καλὸς κἀγαθόs, as the ideal (Adkins 1963, Newell 1987, Develin 1973). For Aristotle, citizenship is negotiated through the intersubjective communication and pragmatic responsiveness to circumstances (Aristotle 1950, Adkins 1963, Develin 1973). In this latter respect, citizenship is always specific; limited to a particular community and particular historical setting, and the right to be a participatory citizen is dictated by individual status. For Aristotle the virtuous citizen, the ἀγαθός, remains an ideal, achievable only by those able to combine the universal qualities of humanity proper, of the virtuous man, with the particular qualities of being a citizen subject to the law of the πόλις. As he says in the Politics, ’Now in general a citizen is one who both shares in the government and also in turn submits to be governed’ (1950: 92). As Adkins (1963: 35) points out, the good man/citizen, καλὸς κἀγαθόs, relied for his survival and well-being on a clearly defined and demarcated community in which virtue, mutual assistance, cooperation and trust were debated and agreed upon. This was more so for those living in a foreign land (1963: 35). There, survival was often reliant on the patronage of good men within the household or οἶκος. It was in this highly encapsulated space that the individual made sense of his experience and was taken care of, nurtured, protected and recognised.
If we extend this notion of οἶκος to the migrant community, we may argue that encapsulation within the church provides the protective environment needed to survive in a foreign land. In Aristotelian terms, a flexible, postcolonial diasporic citizenship is expressed by the notion of virtuous citizenship within the British Methodist church. The church provides a ‘nurturing’ space where Ghanaians organise themselves in encapsulated fellowships, coming together to worship and celebrate their contribution to Britain and Ghana through their efforts in the church. In the process they construct an ideal model of virtuous citizenship, one that encompasses their experience as subjects and citizens in Britain and in Ghana. Within the fellowships differences in immigration status and time are erased. There is space for both newcomers and pioneers, the long-term settlers, to cooperate, engage, and negotiate their presence in Britain. Encapsulation within the fellowship thus allows even newcomers to achieve status, regardless of legal formalities. In the context of the Methodist church these are rendered meaningless, conflated with the ‘British’ qualities of being virtuous, hard-working and law-abiding.