When a Place Becomes a Label: What Does “Northern Ghana” Tell You About Me?

 
Where are you from?

“Where are you from?” sounds like a simple question. It is one of those questions we often ask when meeting someone for the first time. But after our recent class discussions about place, race, identity, and spatial justice, I started thinking about this question differently. Sometimes, knowing where someone comes from does more than tell us their geographical location. It can immediately create assumptions about who they are, what their life is like, or even what they are capable of. This made me think about a question that stayed with me during our class discussion: How does where someone comes from influence what other people assume about them?

Figure 1. Northern children participating in a learning activity in a traditional compound setting in northern Ghana.

I come from Northern Ghana, specifically the Upper East Region. In Ghana, there are many ideas and assumptions associated with being from the North. Northern Ghana is often described in terms of poverty, rural communities, farming, drought, migration, limited opportunities, and underdevelopment. These challenges should not be ignored because some reflect real inequalities between northern and southern Ghana. However, I think there is a difference between recognizing inequalities in a place and allowing those inequalities to become the identity of the place and its people. When poverty and underdevelopment become the main stories told about Northern Ghana, it becomes easy to assume that these stories tell us everything about the people who come from there.

Figure 2. A scene from northern Ghana, representing the place and the environment that shape how the region is understood and represented

Who gets to define a place?

This is why Kay J. Anderson’s The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the Making of a Racial Category made me think about Northern Ghana. Anderson (1987) helped me understand that a place is not simply a physical location on a map. Places are also given meanings by society. Institutions, policies, histories, and social relationships can influence how we understand a place and, eventually, how we understand the people associated with that place. What interested me most was the relationship between place and identity. A place can become associated with certain characteristics, and those characteristics can then be transferred to the people who are believed to belong there.

Of course, Anderson (1987) is writing about the racial construction of Chinatown, which is different from the regional identity of Northern Ghana. I am not suggesting that the two experiences are the same. Instead, her argument gave me a new way of thinking about my own experience. If a place is repeatedly described in a particular way, what happens to the people associated with that place? If Northern Ghana is constantly represented through poverty and underdevelopment, can those descriptions eventually influence how people perceive Northerners themselves? This raises another question for me: Who has the power to tell the story of a place?

Our Spatial Justice reading by Kenneth Bailey, Lori Lobenstine, and Kiara Nagel also helped me think about this. The authors define spatial justice as the intersection of space and social justice. They argue that by examining how societies organize space, we can see how justice and injustice are produced through both visible and invisible arrangements. Their framework includes the right to be and become, the right to thrive and express, and the right to access and connect. Importantly for my reflection, the authors make clear that spatial injustice is not only an urban issue. They specifically mention the spatial isolation and poverty of rural communities as examples of how spatial injustice can operate outside cities.

Is poverty simply part of Northern Ghana’s geography?

This question led me to look outside our class readings. A study by Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai, Justice Nyigmah Bawole, and Emmanuel Kojo Sakyi titled Rethinking Persistent Poverty in Northern Ghana: The Primacy of Policy and Politics over Geography. Abdulai et al. (2018)  acknowledge the long-standing north-south inequality in Ghana, but they challenge explanations that treat Northern Ghana’s poverty mainly as the result of its unfavorable geography. Instead, they argue that agricultural policy and the relative neglect of agricultural products in which the North has comparative advantages are important parts of the explanation. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12250 

Figure 3. Map of Ghana showing the regional geographical locations of the country.

When geography follows the person

This discussion also made me think about how geographical identities operate at different scales. I can say that I am from the Upper East Region. I can say I am from Northern Ghana. In another context, I might simply say I am from Ghana. Outside Ghana, the category can become even larger: Africa. I am still the same person, but each geographical label may create a different picture in someone’s mind.

That is what I find fascinating about geography. Sometimes we physically leave a place, but the ideas associated with that place can follow us. Geography can become part of how other people read our identity. Anderson’s work helped me to appreciate why we should not only ask where people live or come from. We should also ask what meanings society has attached to those places and where they originated from. At the same time, I do not want to respond to negative stereotypes by pretending that Northern Ghana does not experience poverty or development challenges. That would also be an incomplete representation. Northern Ghana has real inequalities that deserve attention. But it is also a place of culture, knowledge, agriculture, family, history, creativity, resilience, and diverse communities 

Our readings and class discussions have therefore made me think that social justice is not only about asking whether resources are distributed fairly. It can also involve questioning how places are represented, how inequalities between places are created, and how those geographical inequalities shape the way we see people.

I leave this question here for further discussion;

"How much of what we think we know about someone actually comes from assumptions we have already made about the place they come from? And who gets the power to create the story of that place?"

References

Abdulai, A. G., Bawole, J. N., & Kojo Sakyi, E. (2018). Rethinking persistent poverty in Northern Ghana: The primacy of policy and politics over geography. Politics & Policy, 46(2), 233-262.

Anderson, K. J. (1987). The idea of Chinatown: The power of place and institutional practice in the making of a racial category. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 77(4), 580-598.

Bailey, K., Lobenstine, L., & Nagel, K. (2012). Spatial justice: A frame for reclaiming our rights to be, thrive, express and connect. Retrieved June, 12, 2022.