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To the Farm, Again and Again, Once and for All? Education, Charitable Aid, and

Development Projects for Deaf People in Adamorobe, Ghana

In: Citizenship, Politics, Difference: Perspectives from Sub-Saharan Signed

Language Communities, Edited by Cooper, A, and Rashid, K. Gallaudet

University Press. (2015)

Annelies Kusters

In Adamorobe, an agricultural village in southern Ghana with a population of about 3,500

people, 41 inhabitants are deaf due to the local circulation of a “deaf gene.” Two main spaces

constitute the lives of these deaf people: the village in the valley and their farms on the

surrounding hills. Practically all of the deaf adults are farmers in heart and soul. Every

morning you see them, cutlass under their arm, a barrel of drinking water on their head,

wearing old clothes, leaving for their plot of land, where they cultivate corn, cassava, and

yams. The journey goes uphill, often through low but dense jungle, which has to be mastered

with the cutlass. They use a stick to pound on the ground to chase snakes and scorpions off the

trail. Behind them, Adamorobe recedes into the background, getting smaller and smaller.

Even though farming is the most common occupation for both deaf and hearing people

in Adamorobe, the deaf villagers consider themselves better farmers than their hearing peers.

They argue that it is in their blood, that farming is their specialty; at the same time, their

farming is subsistence farming, which does not yield enough income to live on. This contrast

is a point of contention, where deaf people bitterly mention their lack of formal education:

Deaf adults are less educated than the average hearing person in Adamorobe even though

several formal attempts to educate the former have been made.

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Deaf adults in Adamorobe connect their lack of education with being limited to

farming as a profession and contrast this with the opportunities available to deaf children in

the village: Since around the year 2000, the deaf children of Adamorobe have been going to

the residential school for deaf students in Mampong (located about 10 kilometers from

Adamorobe). Because of this, it is said that their future opportunities are more likely to

resemble those of hearing people than those of previous generations of deaf people. Although

farming is similarly the most common job for hearing people in Adamorobe, the village is also

home to hearing people who are educated and own shops or engage in sewing, hairdressing,

corn milling, and carpentry businesses, as well as a number who commute to and from jobs in

the capital city, Accra, sometimes in combination with subsistence farming. Accra is a vast,

extended, and growing city; Adamorobe is located in the eastern region, 40 kilometers (km) or

25 miles from Accra, a few kilometers outside the Greater Accra Region, and lies 3 km from

the main road leading to the city. Although historically Adamorobe was an agricultural village,

it is becoming a small town due to its relative proximity to rapidly expanding Accra.

Partially in response to poverty resulting from the failure of schooling and the

limitation to subsistence farming, Adamorobe has a long history of charitable donations and

other forms of aid to deaf people. In addition, church workers and other individuals from

outside Adamorobe have initiated development projects for the deaf population. As yet, none

of these interventions has been successful. What is more, aid and failed development projects

have further instilled a sense of neediness among Adamorobe’s deaf population.

This chapter addresses the reasons that education and development projects to uplift

deaf people’s living standard in Adamorobe, particularly their social and financial statuses,

have thus far proven unsuccessful. The issue that I am concerned with throughout the chapter

is the significance of the farm for deaf people, both in and of itself (as land, activity,

livelihood) and in light of attempts made by others to educate, provide aid, and direct

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development projects designed for them. The data I present are based on fieldwork conducted

in 2008 and 2009, when I resided in Adamorobe for 9 months, researching deaf-deaf and deaf-

hearing social relationships and discourses on deafness and sign language. My main methods

were participant observation and ethnographic interviews. In addition, I engaged a hearing

research assistant, Okyere Joseph, to conduct interviews with hearing people in Akan, and to

translate their responses into written English.

I give a brief description of life in the village and then discuss the theme of farming,

explaining how deaf people in Adamorobe give meaning to farming, particularly through

statements describing it as inherent in their physical features and their blood. In the next

section I discuss education, describing how deaf people are traditionally educated by their

families, how formal education has been less successful, and how these circumstances

influence deaf people’s attitude about farming in Adamorobe. This is followed by an in-depth

exploration of how aid and development are seen as compensating for failed schooling and as

practices that could or should supplement or replace subsistence farming, as well as how these

developments fail to affect the position of deaf people as full-time farmers. I conclude with a

discussion of the different meanings that farming holds for deaf people in Adamorobe.

The Village

The unusually high number of deaf inhabitants of Adamorobe is due to the historical presence

of a “deaf gene,” a Connexin 26 R143W mutation (Meyer, Muntau, Timmann, Horstmann, &

Ruge, 2001), which was probably circulated in Adamorobe by means of marriages between

the founding Akan matrilineal clans, starting in the late eighteenth century (Nyst, 2007). The

high rate of deafness resulted in the development of a local sign language that is used by both

deaf and hearing people on an everyday basis. Even though hearing people in Adamorobe

speak the main local language, Akan, with each other, as well as other spoken languages,

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Adamorobe Sign Language is used in interactions with and among the deaf inhabitants (ibid.).

Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL) is known and used by all of the deaf people in

Adamorobe and by a large part of the hearing population, who have grown up seeing and

using the language. In the highly social everyday life of Adamorobe, deaf people interact

naturally and frequently with hearing people by using Adamorobe Sign Language and

conventional Ghanaian gestures. People who are typically able to sign well are close relatives

of deaf people, people who grew up with deaf people, friends of deaf people, or people who

work with or near deaf people (for example, those working on adjoining farms).

Located in a valley, Adamorobe village consists mostly of brick or clay houses in a

traditional compound structure: rooms built around an inner courtyard, where people engage

in activities of daily life in the open air (e.g., washing clothes, preparing food, socializing).

Most people live with their extended family in compounds and regularly go to their relatives’

and friends’ compounds to visit and to inquire after everyone’s health and well-being. During

these visits, they tease each other, quarrel, talk about practical matters such as housekeeping,

and exchange family and village news and opinions.

In addition to these interactions with hearing people, deaf people frequently mingle in

deaf-only conversations and social clusters that I call “deaf spaces.” Although these spaces

can come into existence anywhere in Adamorobe (and also at the farms) where a few deaf

people meet and engage in conversation, they more frequently spring up in certain places,

such as at a crossroads between deaf people’s compounds, where a good deal of coming and

going takes place, as well as in a compound where three particular deaf people reside.

The Farms

In West African tradition, lands were said to belong to the ancestors, and the living people

were seen as custodians of these places (Fisher, 1998). Each of the six matrilineages in

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Adamorobe has family lands in or around the village (many of them on the surrounding hills),

and the lineage head allocates plots to members for building or farming. Another way to get

land is to hire a piece of land belonging to another family and pay them a small amount of

money and drinks (schnapps or palm wine). Most women and men tended one or more plots

of land. Several deaf people had a plot of land next to a deaf sibling, cousin, or friend. Two

pairs of deaf brothers farmed on four adjoining plots of land. The most important farming

products are corn, cassava, and yams: Ground corn is used to make banku and kenkey (cooked,

fermented corn dough shaped into balls), cassava is cooked and used to pound fufu (dough

balls), and yams are cooked and eaten in pieces. These dishes are served with a chutney or

soup, often with fish and sometimes with meat. Most farmwork is done with a single tool, a

cutlass, which is used to chop, cut, and dig.

Some people go to markets outside Adamorobe to sell their produce; however, most

crop growing in Adamorobe is subsistence farming, which is generally understood to be best

combined with either commercial farming or (more often) another profession because, in the

increasingly capitalist society of peri-urban Ghana, subsistence farming no longer yields

sufficient income. “From farming you cannot build a house, and you cannot buy clothes,” a

deaf man said. Because subsistence farming produces very little income, people supplement

their meager earnings by selling firewood chopped in the forests, occasionally catching and

selling bush meat, or selling cassava and corn to small merchants in Adamorobe, who prepare

banku, kenkey, and fufu for sale in village food stalls. Some of the deaf people also set aside a

plot of cassava harvests to sell, and this brings in extra pocket money that helps with bigger

onetime purchases, such as roof sheets. A few deaf people also do some trading, either on

their own or as part of a family business, selling homemade herbal medicines or fish bought in

nearby Aburi, or preparing and selling kenkey. Several deaf people (mainly men) occasionally

do some day labor (often on other people’s farms) in return for payment. A number of deaf

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people attempted to extract and sell rock from the mountainsides on the outskirts of

Adamorobe to make a living (like many hearing inhabitants of Adamorobe) but stopped for

various reasons, including the theft of the rock or of crops on their untended farmlands and the

danger of getting rock fragments in their eyes. Hence, the majority of deaf people in

Adamorobe are subsistence farmers most of the time.

Farming is the pride of deaf people in Adamorobe. Kwame Osae, a deaf man

approximately 60 years of age, said, “The hearing are lazy . . . while the deaf are hard and

strong laborers.” Farming is regarded as an honorable occupation, and deaf people regard

themselves, and are are regarded by the majority of interviewed hearing people, as especially

skilled and hardworking. Deaf men were particularly proud of their hard muscled hands with

rough skin and boasted that they impressed hearing people (whose hands were “weak and

soft”) with their handshake. They told stories about “those bad and lazy hearing people” who

stole from deaf people’s land rather than grow crops themselves (for example, because they

worked as stone extractors at the edge of the village or had a job in Accra).

The deaf people seem to believe that their strength is not just built up through hard

work but is also inherent in deaf people.1 This is exemplified in stories describing the genetic

research conducted in the village in 2000 and 2001, when researchers came to investigate the

“deaf gene” in Adamorobe. Blood samples and skin snips were taken from a number of deaf

people (and a number of hearing people) (Meyer et al., 2002). Several deaf people were

convinced that these researchers wanted to use their blood as a medicine for “weak people”

because deaf people’s blood is “very hard and very red” and therefore “very good, strong and

healthy.” In addition to these biological explanations, psychological reports also circulated

with regard to deaf people’s connection with farming. Both deaf and hearing interlocutors

explained that deaf people are not lazy, focus better on what they do, and do things “from the

bottom of their heart.”

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This view of deaf people as strong farmers is also laid down in historical stories about

the cause of deafness in Adamorobe (among a myriad of other tales: see Kusters 2015

forthcoming). Some stories state that there was once a young, strong deaf man whom every

woman wanted to marry because of his good looks and/or his hard work. This mysterious and

attractive man was a migrant: Because deaf people are believed to be stronger and to work

harder than hearing people, this man was invited by the first people of Adamorobe to “breed”

deaf people to work on the farms (Osei-Sekyereh, 1971). This story, of which several variants

exist, associates the spread of deafness in Adamorobe with the belief that deaf people are

strong and hardworking. Deafness, then, seems to be regarded as a side effect of these skills

(or the other way around). In this respect, my research assistant, Okyere Joseph, cited an Akan

proverb: “We have a saying that an elephant baby cries for everlasting life and not for

hugeness. The ancestors did not ask for deaf people to be born but requested strength.”

In addition to this inherent connection between farming and deafness, the farm has

many other associations for deaf people: nutrition, danger, refuge, and pleasure. The

connection with nutrition is a deep one: They largely live off their farms, harvesting daily

what they need for their cooking. On days when deaf people do not go to the farm because of

funerals, they complain that they will be hungry. They also set traps to catch bush animals and

check these very regularly. Even when there is little work on the land, the deaf people go to

their farms to check these traps and to chat, rest, cook on the spot, and spend time under a tree

with a view of Adamorobe, enjoying the breeze on the hills, alone or with other people.

Most of the deaf people of Adamorobe love to be on their farms, often returning late to

the village, leading to criticism from hearing and other deaf people, who say that doing so is

dangerous. The farms are associated with danger because a number of them are located on

contested land. The neighboring ethnic group, the Ga, are said to kill or rape people who set

foot on this land, and going there is said to be especially dangerous if you cannot hear. This

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fear is apparently justified, as attested by the story of Kwame Afere, a deaf man who was

killed a few years before my research by several Ga when he was cutting wood on contested

land. Other perils are thorns, giant wasps, scorpions, snakes, juju traps (black magic),

wandering ghosts of deceased people, and malicious dwarf sprits (mmoatia). Finally, the farm

is also a place of refuge, allowing deaf people to avoid attendance at church, gossip, fights in

Adamorobe, faith healers who come to “heal” deaf people, white visitors who come with

empty hands, and so on.

Thus summarized, the farm engenders a myriad of associations. This chapter focuses

on how discourse about farming gives expression to bitter feelings: Deaf people described

feeling limited in terms of economic opportunity and living standards. We could say that the

discourse of being harder and better workers than hearing people is the deaf people’s pride,

but we also could say that in a way this pride locks them into repeatedly doing this particular

work.

In similar circumstances, a certain group of Mexican migrants was given very hard

work to do as berry pickers on farms in North America because they were from Oaxaca, a

state in Mexico, and considered to be “closer to the ground” than other workers because of

their small stature (Holmes, 2007). The berry pickers also believed themselves to be more

resistant to the detrimental health effects of pesticides than weak and delicate Americans. This

ethnic pride in perceived bodily differences naturalized and justified their hard work and

reproduced the structural violence that existed. In Adamorobe it is not just this discourse of

deaf people as good farmers that locks them into doing farmwork but also structural

circumstances such as the lack of schooling and the failure of development projects. The

feeling of being trapped in this repetitive practice is given expression in the frequently used

phrase “to the farm, to the farm, to the farm, again and again and again,” expressed in a

rhythmic way, with a sense of bitter resignation, connoting surrender.

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Formal Education

Traditionally, people in the Akan culture and other African societies learned everything they

needed to know from their parents and other elders. Similarly, deaf people learned everything

from their (mostly hearing) parents through Adamorobe Sign Language, including practical

skills such as farming, trading, and housekeeping, knowledge of the use of plants and herbs,

witches, and one’s ancestors. Still, many deaf people feel disadvantaged because they are

nonliterate in their native spoken language, Akan, and because their array of possible life

choices is narrower than that of educated hearing people. Although Adamorobe traditionally

was a farming and hunting village (and in that respect deaf and hearing people were not

different with regard to employment), recently it has experienced an increasing diversification

of living standards and employment options available to hearing people in Adamorobe due to

the introduction of a capitalist economy and rising levels of formal education.

Many hearing people in Adamorobe are formally educated (to diverging degrees

ranging from primary to university-level education), have small businesses, and/or commute

to and from Accra daily. Yet, very few people have salaried jobs, and being illiterate or

semiliterate is not considered unusual in Adamorobe. The 2000 census showed that almost

half of those who went to school (i.e., two-thirds of Adamorobe’s population) stopped

attending classes after primary education (Statistical Service of Ghana, 2002). Although

Adamorobe has had schools since 1928, people have concentrated mostly on farming and

hunting in the past, and this is still the case. The deaf people of the village, however, believe

that having more opportunities is an important difference between deaf and hearing people;

this is because, although at the time of my research, deaf children were attending school, the

deaf adults were still subsistence farmers. Unschooled and nonliterate, they experienced living

standards that were not much different from those of decades past. Thus, at the present time,

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deaf people connect the state of being limited to the occupation of farming with their lack of

schooling.

In the last decade several attempts have been made to formally educate deaf people in

Adamorobe, but they have not proven successful for a variety of reasons. The key figure in the

initiation of deaf education in Adamorobe (and wider Africa) is Andrew Jackson Foster, a

deaf African American who is referred to as the “father of deaf education in Africa” inasmuch

as he established 31 schools for deaf children in 13 countries in West, East, and Central

Africa. After obtaining degrees in education, Christian missions, and special education, Foster

left for Africa with the intention of expanding deaf education on the continent (Moore &

Panara, 1996). Because of Ghana’s early independence, he decided to work there initially.

Arriving in Ghana in 1957, Foster established a staunchly religious day school in Osu (Accra),

called the Ghana Mission School for the Deaf. In 1959 the school relocated to Mampong,

where it became a residential school (Aryee, 1972; Tetteh, 1971). Foster is said to have gone

“from town to town and from village to village seeking out the deaf,” and in 1963, he brought

about 15 deaf children from Adamorobe to the Mampong school (Oteng, 1988, p. vii). There,

free schooling and boarding were provided, and the children were taught the basics of

American Sign Language (which, in the spirit of Total Communication, is the language that

the Reverend Foster introduced) (Oteng, 1988). However, after only a few months, the deaf

children from Adamorobe all stopped attending the school for different reasons, such as

illness, parental deaths, conflict and theft at the school, and fear of headhunters2 and because a

lion was shot in the vicinity of the school. As it turned out, the deaf children and their parents

never really liked the idea of sending the youngsters away to be educated outside Adamorobe.

In 1974 the Ministry of Education erected a tiny building with two small classrooms

connected to the Anglican primary school in Adamorobe3 (figure 1). About 15 deaf pupils, 6

to 14 years of age, were taught by Godfried Akufo Ofori, who was trained in deaf education in

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the aforementioned teacher training institute in Mampong and commuted daily from Aburi to

Adamorobe. Ofori described his teaching method as a combination of lipreading,

fingerspelling, speech training, and some (American) sign language.

Figure 1. Adamorobe’s former “unit school for the deaf.”

Ofori told me that the unit closed in 1980. The Anglican school now uses the building as

a nursery school; however, deaf people still see it somehow as theirs, often pointing at it with

bitter expressions and signing “Ama Korkor is bad.” According to them, a conflict between a

deaf woman named Ama Korkor and the teacher had escalated to a fight in which the pupils

became involved. This altercation prompted chief Nana Kwaakwaa Asiampong to close the

school. The teacher himself, however, indicated that the incident was only “a minor case” and

maintained that “the chief was engineering the whole problem.” He explained that during a

study trip to Denmark in the early seventies, he had learned about mainstreaming deaf

children and wanted to do this in Adamorobe. Ironically, he wanted to apply this ideology to

deaf people who were living in a village where the use of sign language is omnipresent. The

chief did not support this plan (for reasons that are unclear to me). Hence, the school closed.

Sometime in the early eighties, around 10 young deaf adults from Adamorobe were

brought to Accra for vocational training organized by the hearing-led Ghana Society for the

Deaf (GSD). They were to be trained for vocations such as sewing or carpentry in an

environment where Ghanian Sign Language (GSL) was used. However, after a few weeks or

months, they collectively decided to leave without informing the GSD and went back to their

village. They told me the teacher was too harsh, the work was too hard, they received very

little money to buy food, and they were given only one full meal a day. Even though they

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sometimes expressed frustration when looking back at this missed chance, it was not as big an

issue for them as the discontinuation of the school in Adamorobe. They, their parents, and the

chief apparently still remained uncomfortable with education (or training) outside Adamorobe.

In or around 1995 Samuel Adjei taught a literacy and numeracy course in GSL to deaf

adults in Adamorobe. Adjei is a self-educated deaf person from Accra who moved to

Adamorobe in 1988 to start a farm. In Accra, a man named Odame had tutored Adjei in how

to teach literacy and numeracy to deaf adults. The idea was that, if Adjei’s attempts at

teaching were successful, his students might move on to a vocational training project. Twice a

week, 10 to 15 deaf people went to his classes, held in a classroom at the Anglican school;

however, after a number of months, the classes were discontinued. Adjei explained that the

deaf people showed up very late or did not come at all, and when they did come, they

complained that they were hungry and that they had been working hard at their farms. A deaf

man in his thirties felt that it was difficult for them to learn to write later in life, and a woman

in her fifties explained that their priorities lay elsewhere: Life revolves around the farms and

the household. She explained: “If I’m hungry after the farm, I have to prepare food instead of

being occupied with writing, right?”

Because of all of these attempts at formal education, a small minority of deaf adults

can write their name, and some of them can also write (parts of) place names such as Accra

and Adamorobe and the numbers from 1 to 10. Typically, those who went to the school in

Adamorobe for several years had a better recollection of how to write, although they pointed

out that their schooling had taken place so long ago that most of their learned but unused skills

and knowledge had vanished.

Many of the Adamorobean deaf people regard their lack of education and their

illiteracy as failures that currently limit their possible life choices to farming (even though

unschooled people also have other options, such as stonecutting or small-scale trading). Being

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uneducated is associated not only with having to farm but also with having to stay in

Adamorobe: Occasional trips to Accra or the market are cherished, but it is expensive to travel

outside the village, especially in view of the meager profits that farming produces. Most deaf

adults believe their life in Adamorobe would be more prosperous and more varied if they had

finished their education or vocational training and that they would have to go to the farm less

frequently or not at all. The closure of the school in Adamorobe in particular is still an

especially painful and sensitive issue for deaf village residents. The small building in which

classes were held is a vivid reminder of their limitations today, which they bemoaned

whenever we walked past the building. Also, the atmosphere noticeably deteriorates whenever

the topic surfaces; invariably they say, “Because Ama fought, we have to go to the farm, again

and again, every single day.”

At the same time, deaf people themselves had a hand in the cessation of their own

education, such as the escape from the project in Accra and nonattendance at the literacy

lessons; this seems to indicate a disconnect between their bitter feeling about historical

patterns and their own agency in perpetuating them. Would education have made a noticeable

impact on their employment options, or would they still have ended up as full-time farmers

like a good number of educated hearing people in Adamorobe? Furthermore, when I learned

that, in other villages, deaf people have small businesses in addition to farming, I wondered

why so few deaf people in Adamorobe establish such enterprises. I believe that the answer

partially lies in the impact of development aid on deaf opportunity in Adamorobe: Various

agencies have responded to the conditions in Adamorobe by offering assistance and setting up

projects to help deaf people diversify their employment options. These initiatives have proven

unsuccessful, yet they have had lasting effects.

Charitable Aid

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In many developing countries, philanthropy by churches or other faith-based groups and

NGOs has supplemented (and sometimes obviated) the government’s obligation to provide

services to people with disabilities (Ingstad & Whyte, 1995) (also see Tesni et al., this

volume). At least 30 foreign organizations are working with deaf people in Kenya and

providing food, clothing, Bibles, and other items (Wilson and Kakiri, 2011). The

internationally pervasive perspective on deaf people as “disabled” and therefore “needy” has

made its way to Adamorobe, too. For decades, Adamorobe has attracted attention from

churches, NGOs, aid agencies, and wealthy individuals because of the large number of deaf

people there.

One of the organizations working in Adamorobe is Signs of Hope International (SHI),

active in the village since 2007. Its approach to addressing the education of Adamorobe’s deaf

children is a good example of the mental legacy that such aid often implies. A movie on the

home page of SHI’s website (still in use at the time of this writing:

http://www.signsofhopeinternational.org/) shows Adamorobe as a poor village whose deaf

residents have no opportunity to attend school; in fact, almost all of the deaf children were in

school at the time this movie was produced. Focusing on the poorest deaf family in the village,

the movie centers on one deaf child who had as yet received no schooling. Ironically, the

movie also show deaf villagers as having no means of communication in their daily lives,

suggesting that they are lacking a language. Sometimes deaf people’s arms and legs were

excluded from view when engaged in signed conversations, and the camera zoomed in on

their faces, implying that their way of communicating consisted merely of facial expressions.

Moreover, their signing was not subtitled, while the soundtrack played a melancholy song

about “people sitting in the darkness” and “changing the world for them.”

Needless to say, this movie is problematic in a myriad of ways: It reinforces

paternalistic binaries such as donor/recipient and generous/needy (Kapoor, 2008),

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misrepresents village life, and presents misinformation about the presence of schooling and

signed language. It shows happy schoolchildren in contrast to sad villagers. Although sad

moments certainly occur in Adamorobe, the sadness in the movie is performed and edited. In

such shock-effect appeals, whose purpose is to demonstrate deep suffering, the social and

historical contexts of deafness are disregarded (Chouliaraki, 2010). As represented,

Adamorobe is a “deaf hell,” an analogy to Kim’s (2011) work on hells and heavens for people

with disabilities. Movies like this one “distribute images not only of impaired bodies in need,

but also of a crippled, ignorant Africa and its benevolent knowledgeable Northern rescuers”

(Nepveux & Beitiks, 2010, p. 238). In addition to the disturbing portrayal of deaf people in

Adamorobe, the effect of formal education is idealized. Meanwhile, the local effects of

attending the residential school for deaf children are ignored: The children of Adamorobe are

removed from the village for most of the year, which affects their AdaSL fluency, their

farming skills, and their communication and relationships with hearing people in Adamorobe

(which are already far less intensive than those with deaf people who stay in the village).

The first person to provide deaf people with charitable gifts was the Reverend Andrew

Foster, mentioned earlier. He regularly preached to the deaf people in Adamorobe in

American Sign Language, but in the spirit of Total Communication he also attempted to learn

and use some AdaSL. In addition, he provided them with generous charitable donations; on

regular visits to Adamorobe, he came with a big van bearing goods such as rice, clothes,

sandals, toothbrushes, oil, cocoa powder, soap, bread, sugar, milk, onions, peanuts, corn,

towels, caps, and watches. Foster’s donations were the most substantial (and probably the

first) example of (Christian development) charity aimed at the deaf people of Adamorobe; this

initiated a pattern (later perpetuated by other benefactors) that created dependency and notions

of neediness and shaped an association between church attendance and the receipt of

donations.

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According to Kwame Osae, “Foster said, ‘Do you come to church? You want me to

stop distributing rice and clothes? No? Well, then . . . ’ ” (implication: you will come to

church). After Foster, several deaf preachers from Accra (including Samuel Adjei, who

initiated the literacy training mentioned earlier) have preached to deaf people in Adamorobe,

and often donations have been channeled through the church. Since 1998 church services have

been organized by Kofi Akorful, a deaf Lutheran pastor from Accra. Even though AdaSL is a

thriving and viable language that deaf people mainly prefer to use, most of the time Akorful

employed a mixture of GSL and signed English (signs from GSL used with English syntax,

with additional signs to fill any gaps); he also employed unfamiliar concepts and added

AdaSL signs. The deaf people could not fully understand him except when he used slow and

simple GSL (with or without AdaSL), which he mostly did not (see Kusters [2014b] for a

further discussion of language use and ideologies in Adamorobe).

The deaf people never used the argument “I am deaf” to express their “right” to receive

support but instead indicated that they are un(der)educated and therefore poor farmers (and

thus needy). It is true that today the deaf people are disadvantaged in a changing society, with

its increasing economic stratification and the growing importance of education, but when

Foster’s donations started 50 years ago, being an illiterate farmer was apparently standard in

Adamorobe. Kwame Osae recalled that hearing people also begged from Foster, saying things

like “I don’t have clothes, I’m a farmer, please give me something.” Okyere Joseph

commented that “In the past we thought we were all the same range, led the same life, and

when anybody comes from overseas to Adamorobe, they think of the deaf people.”

For many years, several other churches, NGOs, and wealthy individuals (some of them

foreign, some of them Ghanaian) have donated items such as corn, wheat, rice, oil, and

secondhand clothes to the deaf villagers. Another benefactor is Kristo Asafo (Christ Reformed

Church), whose slogan is “in aid of the needy of the society.” This church regularly donated

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subsistence products to schools for children with disabilities, children’s homes, prisons, and

disability organizations (such as the Ghana National Association of the Deaf) and also to

Adamorobe. Another church from Accra came “to help the people in Adamorobe” but decided

to concentrate only on the deaf population. Other people came to visit the village because they

were acquaintances of Adamorobe’s chief, who lives in the United States part-time. When

they learned that many deaf people live in Adamorobe, they decided to provide assistance.

Someone also mentioned a man from the United States who married a woman from

Adamorobe and started asking people in the States “to help the deaf.”

Due to this established pattern of aid, when I initiated my research, the deaf people of

Adamorobe and their leaders asked that I provide forms of reciprocity resembling aid given by

previous visitors and researchers: gifts such as clothes, rice (considered a luxury product), or a

big piece of laundry soap. During my 9 months of fieldwork I provided every deaf person with

a gift every 2 or 3 weeks and a packet of several gifts at the end of each of the two research

periods. As a result, Akorful’s church services were much better attended when I was in

Adamorobe (from a few people to an average of 20 per week) despite my countless

explanations that these were unrelated to each other and despite the fact that I did not

distribute any items in the church or on Sundays.

Receiving large donations is associated not only with attending church but also with

not going to the farm. Deaf people said that, after a large donation, they did not go to their

farms for a week or so because of having food (such as rice) on which they could live for a

few days. They remained in the village to chat with each other and celebrate the donation.

Apparently, none of the later donations could match those from the Reverend Foster: If they

were the same in quantity, then they did not match the frequency. Seemingly, for years

Foster’s donations had come biweekly. It was often said that “Foster was the first” not only in

time but also in the hierarchy of generosity. (I am not aware of whether Foster also provided

18

charitable aid outside Adamorobe, so I do not claim that this pattern of dependence goes

beyond this particular village.) Compared with Foster’s donations, my gifts of reciprocity

were meager, and when Kwame Osae told me his Foster stories, he often lashed out at me:

“And you, do you do that? Think about it, now that you know about him!” Foster’s sudden

death in 1987 is often seen as the end of a golden era, putting an end to the time when deaf

people were never hungry—this despite the fact that it appears his donations stopped more

than 10 years before his death. Agnes Bomo stated that a white man had come to announce the

cessation of Foster’s donations, arguing the principle of “feed yourself”: “Everybody should

work hard themselves to get food to eat.”

Not only did Foster’s donations stop, but evidently the deaf people also received fewer

donations from churches, NGOs, and individuals than in the past. Kwame Osae regularly

complained that “In the past, white people came here so often, and they distributed money and

food and clothes, and now that’s all over. White people haven’t been coming for such a long

time now.” It was believed that a number of donations that the chief received after

“announcing in America that there are lots of deaf people in her village” were not passed on to

Adamorobe. Aid to Africa was at its peak between 1970 and 1998 (Moyo, 2009), so I surmise

that the decrease in donations might also be attributed to the fact that international discourse

about charity has gradually shifted from aid to development cooperation and microfinancing.

Although acknowledging the value of self-sufficiency and hard work, a number of deaf

people also admitted to feeling disappointed and abandoned, and sometimes they even blamed

“white people” or the church for their current poverty. Thus, these deaf people do not tend to

regard donations as merely a nice extra but as substantial support that they rightfully deserve

because they are unschooled and needy farmers. The history of deaf education in Adamorobe

has demonstrated that deaf people’s own actions contributed to the “failure” of their formal

schooling and their other attempts at work (such as stonecutting); however, in the context of

19

aid, deaf people explain the failure of schooling as something that was done to them, not as

something in which they were themselves active agents.

Deaf villagers also connect the discontinuation of donations to the feeling that they are

obliged to work on their farms. In a conversation Kwame Osae commented: “Foster is dead,

he does not come anymore . . . so now I have to go to the farm again and again and again.”

The farm is associated not only with being strong but also with being thin from all the hard

work. For the deaf people of Adamorobe, their thinness and poverty, the lack of charity, and

farming are all interconnected. Maathai (2010) compares donors who bring money and

materials to Africa with Santa Claus, and this is very much how Foster was regarded. “The

people will clap and dance in welcome, until the tap dries up, which, with donor funding,

happens (as it should)” (ibid., p. 69). Maathai further wonders “how much good aid does

versus how much damage it may do to the capacity of the African peoples to engineer their

own solutions to their many problems” (ibid., p. 71).

Early Projects in Adamorobe

In the spirit of investing in development projects rather than aid, Adamorobe has been subject

not only to charitable donations but also (and mostly, more recently) to interventions in the

form of small projects.

Farm Project of the Ghana National Association of the Deaf

An early example is the farm project initiated by the Ghana National Association of the Deaf

(GNAD) in the latter half of the seventies. Behind the Anglican school, corn, cassava,

tomatoes, and yams were cultivated on a plot of land that had been assigned to the deaf

villagers in the sixties. Later they were also given the use of a second plot of land by the late

Kwasi Afari, who was a lineage head and the father of five deaf people. Samuel Adjei (who

20

was GNAD president from 1980 to 1983 and was involved in the venture) told me that it was

organized by Foster’s right-hand man, Seth Tetteh-Ocloo. Tetteh-Ocloo was one of the first

Ghanaian deaf education teachers trained by Foster and was also the founding president of

GNAD when it was established in 1968. The previously mentioned Odame was also involved.

Samuel explained that the project was designed to benefit both the GNAD and the deaf

people of Adamorobe. Deaf people from Accra came on their days off to work on the land,

and the produce that was grown was sold by the GNAD. Deaf people from Adamorobe

sometimes helped on the plots (e.g., planting, building sheds, harvesting) and occasionally

received resources in return, such as rice, secondhand clothes, oil, wheat, or a little bit of

money. They told me that they were unhappy with the situation: The land was vast, the

harvests were big, and they worked hard on the land, but they received almost no profit from

their labor. For this reason, they sometimes took produce from the farm, believing that this

was their right. Although they felt exploited, Samuel complained about their attitude: “The

Adamorobe deaf didn’t really want to work. They said they were hungry. They wanted gifts.

They didn’t want to work without gifts.” The project was closed down in 1988. Different

people gave various reasons for terminating the venture: The farm no longer yielded a profit,

and/or the landlord had sold the land.

Several other smaller projects have been organized in Adamorobe. For example, some

years ago, an American man bought seven sheep and goats for the deaf people to breed and

sell for money. The animals were apparently not well cared for: Some of them were stolen,

some became ill and died, and the meat was sold or eaten. In another small project, Nyst, a

linguist who researched Adamorobe Sign Language, arranged to have deaf villagers learn to

make soap to sell in Adamorobe, but the enterprise was not successful. The deaf people

seemed unenthusiastic about making soap, which is an exhausting process. Ama Korkor said,

“I decided to stop with it. I like to go to the farm.” Such activities are often contrasted with

21

farming, although it is more realistic (and common in Adamorobe) to combine farming and a

trade.

The Corn Mill Project

Recently the Lutheran church attended by Adamorobe deaf people organized a project with

the stated aim of providing these villagers with a self-contained financial buffer and safety net.

The Wisconsin Lutheran Church Mission in the United States financed a piece of land (called

the “deaf land”4) for the deaf people, who constructed a building to house a corn mill (with

materials provided by the mission; see figures 2 and 3).

Figure 2. The building in which the corn mill is located.

Figure 3. The deaf people’s corn mill.

The intention was to attract customers to process the corn from their farms by milling it into

flour; this flour would then be used to prepare local dishes such as banku and kenkey,

described earlier. Profits would be used to pay for expensive hospital visits for severely ill

deaf people, insurance for deaf persons in serious financial distress, deaf children’s schooling,

and Akorful’s wages and transportation costs for his weekly trips to Adamorobe. Essentially,

the idea was to establish a formal deaf support network. The project was not suggested by the

deaf people themselves but by Akorful, who said, “Reverend Reinke [of the Wisconsin

Lutheran Mission] came here, [and] he asked if there were any problems. Kofi Pare and Kwasi

Boahene said they wanted rice. Well, you just can’t say that. Reinke doesn’t know AdaSL, so

I translated: ‘They want a piece of land and a corn mill.’ ”

22

So even though the deaf villagers were inclined to ask for consumables, Akorful tried

to nudge them in a more productive direction: a group-based development project. During that

time, it was an established phenomenon in Ghana that NGOs and other agencies are

preoccupied with group projects as a route to development. Enterprises such as these are, in

the eyes of donors, simpler to finance and organize (Porter & Lyon, 2006). However, such

collective projects in Ghana often ignore the contextual and cultural specifics of the locations

where they are initiated, and as a result, local people are not unanimously enthusiastic about

them but harbor concerns about quarrels over how to manage them and distribute the income

these efforts generate (ibid.).

In Adamorobe, this group-based, corn-milling project for the deaf residents did not

entirely suit the local dynamics. Everything was established in 2006, but in 2008, when I

arrived, I was told that the mill had not been operational for a year or so.5 The corn mill was

located outside the village center and was therefore less appealing to customers because at

least two or three other corn mills were operating in the center of Adamorobe; moreover, this

one was located uphill. In addition, some management conflicts seem to have arisen due to a

lack of clarity about who should manage different aspects of the project. Another problem was

inequality in the division of work: A few deaf men did most of the work although they did not

get paid for it; moreover, when they worked at the mill, they could not work on their farms.

Because the project did not make enough money to achieve the financial aims listed earlier,

the funding for the children’s schooling was endangered as the Lutheran church stopped

sponsoring it, hoping that the corn mill would enable the deaf people of Adamorobe to finance

the children’s education themselves. In 2007 this dependence shifted to another sponsor in the

form of the previously mentioned Signs of Hope International.

Although several deaf people obviously felt frustrated by the problems with the

project, they gave the impression that they did not feel responsible. For example, when a task

23

had to be done, such as weeding a patch of land or moving spare bricks from somewhere in

the village to the “deaf land,” they refused to take part, arguing that “if we do that work, we

don’t get food for it in return!” One woman said, “I already go to the farm every day. If I also

have to work [at the mill] on my day off, then I will become ill, and is Akorful going to pay

for the hospital?” So, just as Foster’s donations created an undesirable effect, Akorful’s

objectives and actions did not seem to resonate on the ground. The rationale for the corn mill

project was not supported: The deaf people of Adamorobe did not want to work to pay for

each other’s health expenses or for deaf children’s schooling, which they regarded as a family

responsibility, not a deaf responsibility (see Kusters [2014a] for a more in-depth discussion of

this argument). Even though this was designed to be a collective project, the deaf people

wanted individual employment or businesses, just like hearing people. I received several

requests from a number of deaf villagers and their pastor to support the Adamorobean deaf

people in setting up such individual businesses, which I describe in the next section.

Microbusinesses

Prior to my arrival in Adamorobe, a Finnish woman had applied to the Finnish Lutheran

Mission to finance vocational training (such as sewing and hairdressing) and a few individual

business projects for the deaf people of Adamorobe. When her application was turned down, I

was asked by Akorful and a number of deaf people to pursue the idea. More specifically, I was

asked to invest in microbusinesses for the deaf adults. In Ghana, people buy bulk supplies

(such as soap, okra, canned tomatoes, salt, and fish) in the city to sell individually in a stall or

small shop for a tiny profit or to hawk while carrying the items on their heads. Also, women

prepare Ghanaian dishes such as jollof (a rice dish), kenkey, and banku to sell per plate. Men

can invest in machines such as grain or pepper grinders or pesticide sprayers and offer their

24

services. At the time, only two or three deaf people in Adamorobe were maintaining such

microenterprises.

After I succeeded in obtaining funding for these ventures from sources in Belgium and

the UK, an elderly Ghanaian lady who is an NGO expert in microfinance businesses and

revolving loan projects with experience throughout Ghana came to Adamorobe to explain the

philosophy behind the projects and to advise the deaf people on their choice of businesses.

This was not a microfinance project per se as the equipment was a gift rather than a revolving

loan; moreover, the deaf people did not accept the idea of paying off a loan even though the

logic of revolving loans meant that the money would flow back to them through future

investments or would serve as financial buffer during crises (perhaps the reluctance to pay is

due to the easier access to money and other resources through past charity). After her visit, I

went to Accra several times to meet with this expert again to get her advice. I supported the

establishment of almost 25 microbusinesses, including pesticide spraying, tomato blending,

cutlass grinding, goat rearing, and the sale of cutlasses, kerosene, frozen and prepared chicken,

smoked fish, soap, snacks, kenkey, and “red red” (a bean-based dish) (see figure 4). Okyere

Joseph, my research assistant, helped with the practical side of the projects, and we drove to

Madina, Accra, and Nsawam with the deaf people in small groups to buy what they needed.

Figure 4. Microbusinesses.

When the projects began, they initially thrived, and most of the deaf people involved

expressed enthusiasm, but this proved difficult to maintain. After a few weeks, some of the

people became indolent, and, although they put social pressure on each other and reprimanded

those who were not actively working to promote their businesses, some of the deaf people

started postponing visits to buy supplies in Madina. Some of them also started requesting

25

more things, such as a table to sell their products on, a shed for the goats, or a loan if they had

overspent their profits. Also, some of them sold too many items on credit, which is a known

problem in the village—for hearing sellers as well.

When I left Adamorobe, Akorful agreed to do the follow-up, and Okyere Joseph

consented to support the microbusinesses in practical ways if needed. For the first few months

after my departure I got positive SMS messages from the pastor and Okyere Joseph that a

number of the deaf people were continuing their work. However, 6 months later I was told that

most of the deaf people had discontinued their businesses for various reasons. When I visited

Adamorobe again in 2012, all of the ventures had been discontinued. Explanations ranged

from “I am just taking a break; the money is being kept safe at home” to “this hearing person

interfered with my work.” When explaining the failure of other people’s projects, though, the

deaf people often said, “He has eaten from his money.” Moyo (2009) similarly observes that

aid is paired with a decline in domestic savings: When money becomes available through aid,

it is typically spent on consumer goods rather than saved. This is a known problem for

microfinance projects, too: Rather than investing in the business (e.g., by buying a machine or

a goat), a TV is bought, or the money goes to general consumption (Sinclair, 2012). I also

think there might be a connection with the ingrained pattern of receiving donations and thus

easier access to resources in that this pattern made it more difficult to maintain or succeed in

these business projects.

For example, when the Finnish woman I mentioned earlier obtained a few sewing

machines, she planned to lend them to young deaf people in Adamorobe who wanted to sew

for a living, and she would then donate the remaining machines to other deaf vocational

training programs in Ghana. We agreed that I would support the nonsewers in setting up their

businesses. This decision caused an enormous and long-lasting commotion among most of the

deaf people, who believed the Finnish woman had betrayed them and that I was associated

26

with her and harbored bad intentions toward them. First, they were angry that they did not get

the other things that they had asked the Finnish woman for; second, they all wanted a sewing

machine and a business project. It was argued that the Finnish woman and I were “separate”

benefactors, so they should have the right to get something from both of us rather than accept

our common effort to provide them with a means of making extra money. Most of them

planned to give their machine to family members or to have some fun with it in their free time,

or they said they would work with the machine even though it was clear that they were not

planning to make a living with it.

After I returned to Adamorobe for more fieldwork, another instance occurred when I

announced that I had collected enough money to educate two deaf children,6 pay for medical

insurance for all of them, and finance the aforementioned businesses. There was significant

dissatisfaction that I was not planning to distribute part of “their money” to them in cash so

they could “eat from it.” I explained that the sponsors would never have contributed if the

funds were just for distributing. I explained that the sponsors’ rationale was that “if you give

someone money for food, tomorrow he’s hungry again, but if you financially support him with

setting up his own business, he can provide for himself.” The deaf people’s reply was

typically “but we are hungry NOW,” and they demanded that I give in as they were convinced

that the suitcase I had brought (which contained my clothes) was actually a box full of money.

When the businesses were established, I was told that many deaf people were “keeping

up appearances” when I was around and would just “eat from their money [i.e., the profits]

and go back to the farm” after my departure. Maathai (2009, p. 69) argues that “donors’

money can further corrode responsibility. . . . [A]n attitude exists that one doesn’t have to be

as responsible with, or accountable for, the use of funds or materials that have originated

outside the country from a donor agency or private philanthropist.” She further states that

people “completely misunderstand or subvert the donors’ intention in providing the money in

27

the first place” (ibid.). Maathai argues that it is not necessary for people to have to pay for

something to care for it, though: Individuals and communities need to understand and

recognize the value of items offered for free. It could be that the deaf people of Adamorobe

did not really think that the projects had value for them, especially not in the light of easy

access to donations in the past.

Conclusion

Illiteracy and a lack of sustained vocational training have influenced Adamorobe’s deaf

residents’ perceptions of their own capability to follow a sustainable “get-out-of-poverty” plan

rather than living for the “now” and “eating from money” when it becomes available. In their

discussions, being unschooled is inextricably bound up with a sense of neediness: Because of

the failure of formal education, they are limited to farming, and being a subsistence farmer

means being needy. This sense of neediness seems to be at least partially instilled (or at least

reinforced) by the charitable donations from benefactors in the past (e.g., various NGOs and

churches, starting with the frequent donations by the Rev. Andrew Foster himself). The belief

that they have a right to such gifts is very firmly established among the deaf people of

Adamorobe, and my hypothesis is that this adversely affected the efforts put into early

development projects. Given the rhythm of farming, being accustomed to handouts (regarded

as extra resources that should be free and not require too much effort on their part), and a

lifetime of poverty and on-the-edge subsistence living, deaf people weighed the options and

determined what would have a more immediate effect on their daily lives; thus, they strongly

preferred donations to projects. Paraphrasing Moyo (2009) to emphasize this point, by

discouraging enterprise, aid is a kind of curse.

The more recently experienced lack of aid and failed interventions have further

consolidated the sense of neediness and, with it, the notion of farming as a repetitive practice

28

that is connected with limitations, as expressed in bitter and disappointed utterances of “to the

farm, again and again.” In this expression, deaf people complain that farming has a rhythm

that is very difficult to break or change. Even though they appear to feel inner resistance to the

insurmountable repetitiveness of this rhythm, they also demonstrate a certain acceptance of

their “fate” as “strong deaf farmers.” It seems to me that the deaf people of Adamorobe

complain about being farmers mainly to justify their poverty-induced frustrations, not because

they strongly dislike farming in and of itself. Farming constitutes their identity: They hold the

more deeply rooted ontological idea that farming is in their blood; therefore, deaf people who

are “too lazy to farm” are condemned. This discourse also further relegates the deaf people of

Adamorobe to the practice of farming, thereby contributing to the perpetuation of the rhythm,

much like the lack of education and the failed projects.

The farms were also described as havens. They were places the deaf people probably

believed would always be there for them to escape to. To summarize, the farms can be seen as

their second home, the beginning (they are essentially farmers), the start of the problems (they

have limited financial capital because of being subsistence farmers), and a sturdy base (they

can always fall back on the farms). However, being a deaf farmer in Adamorobe might soon

fully come to an end as well. During my last visit to the village in May 2012, I found that

much had changed in the years since my research due to recent development in the area (and

in fact in large parts of Africa). Previously, most people were peasants of similar economic

standing and had the use of an area of their family lands in the environs of Adamorobe. Land

was thus not a direct source of wealth because it was given on loan by lineage heads and not

sold. However, recently there has been a move away from family or community stewardship

to individual ownership of lands (Ubink & Amanor, 2008). Adamorobe’s location in peri-

urban Accra is an important factor in land sales nowadays. Most of the land surrounding the

city has been bought up; therefore, as Accra has expanded, the land in Adamorobe’s

29

immediate vicinity has become attractive to property developers and migrants, mostly to

construct bungalows (oriented to single families) rather than compound housing (oriented to

extended families) (see Doan & Oduro, 2012, and Grant, 2009).

Land disputes have also brought general unrest to Adamorobe. Research on land sales

and litigation in peri-urban areas in Ghana and on clashes with local cultural values and family

values raises questions (and disputes) about who has the authority to sell family lands (Ubink,

2008); who wins or loses depends on the strength of one’s negotiating position (ibid.). It has

been suggested that deaf people in Adamorobe might be disadvantaged in three ways: having

weak negotiating positions; receiving unequal shares in the distribution of proceeds; and

experiencing the loss of their farmlands, which are sold to estate developers. Farming is

relegated to the margins not only in terms of the ongoing diversification of job opportunities

but now also quite literally in terms of space.

Hence, when I visited Adamorobe in 2012, the deaf villagers were bitter because many

of them had lost their farmlands and, as a result, had to use land located much farther away.

The crops they had grown were destroyed to clear the land for the people who had bought it.

During my research in 2008 and 2009, deaf people used to say, “I am a farmer, so I have no

money.” In 2012 they said, “My farm has been sold, so I have no food or money.” This new

form of land development rendered less important the complex ambiguity I observed in

Adamorobe’s deaf people’s assertions about farming in the 2008–2009 period; the question

now is what their lives will look like, both for patterns of economic subsistence and for

identities, in the longer term.

Notes

1. The belief that deaf people are hardworking is not unique to Adamorobe: Devlieger (1994,

p. 87) remarks that “begging is not a common practice among deaf people [in sub-Saharan

30

Africa], who are known to be hard-working and sometimes possessing special skills.”

Interestingly, deaf people as hard workers is apparently commonplace in a “signing village” in

Bali, which is similar to Adamorobe relative to hereditary deafness and sociolinguistic

characteristics. Friedner (2013) states that deaf people are hired in coffee chains because they

are hard and focused workers who are believed to make better coffee.

2. In the past, the elders used human heads to drink water or alcohol in the chief’s palace and

human blood to perform rituals.

3. The Deaf people of Adamorobe called this school “Foster-school-here” (while Mampong is

known as “Foster-school-over-there”). Many people, including Nyst (2007), link the

establishment of this government-funded school to Foster even though it was apparently

established by the Ministry of Education instead.

4. The long-term goal was also to place a deaf-owned church on the “deaf land” because the

deaf church services were currently being held in a classroom at the Anglican school.

5. Some deaf people expected that Reverend Reinke would come from the United States to

repair a broken grinding disk. When it was finally repaired, financed by the church offerings

from the deaf people themselves and a small addition from me, they said they would start up

the mill again after Christmas 2008. However, when the mill was not used again throughout

the whole of 2009, I realized that the problem was complex and more deeply rooted.

6. They were just about to start or resume schooling and did not yet have a sponsor.

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