Uncovering Radical Histories: Anna Budu-Arthur’s Everyday Politics of Decolonization and Transnational Solidarity

Abstract This article foregrounds the life and times of Anna Budu-Arthur—a Ghanaian political organizer, middle-school leaver, and seamstress in Ghana’s attainment of independence from Britain in 1957. While this article reiterates increasing scholarly attention to women in African decolonial politics, it is not simply an exercise in recovering and recentering African women within nationalist and decolonization discourses. Rather, Budu-Arthur’s story reveals the ways African women were conscious of their roles in the making of their own political histories, often in connection with local and transnational Black diaspora allies. Interviews with obscure but important centenarian African women such as Budu-Arthur invite us to examine how segregated, but cosmopolitan, colonial urban spaces, as well as African and diaspora liberatory ideologies, informed anticolonial activism and cultural pride in the former British Gold Coast. Ultimately, Budu-Arthur’s transnational alliances and friendships and local rootedness underscore the need for an examination of African political and cultural activists beyond the framework of the nation-state.