A Concatenation of Rumour

Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding
stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the
Humanities. Named after the original title of Richard Rathbone's
book on Nana Ofori Atta I, the King of Akyem Abuakwa in Ghana, this
talk will be the first that celebrates the paperback edition of
Nana Oforiatta Ayim's celebrated novel The God Child. Both books
have the kingdom as their centre, with Nana Oforiatta Ayim's book
drawing on that of Richard Rathbone, as well as on her family's
memories, for her fictional narrative. In this live event the two
discuss the interplay of academia and fiction and how narratives
are shaped and reshaped according to the telling. They also talk
about the nuances of privilege, leadership, and of royalty within a
West African kingdom and how this has evolved through time. Nana
Oforiatta Ayim Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a Writer, Filmmaker, and Art
Historian who lives and works in Accra, Ghana. She is Special
Advisor to the Ghanaian government on Museums and Cultural
Heritage, leading the country's museums restructuring programme.
She is also Founder of the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge,
through which she has pioneered a Pan-African Cultural
Encyclopaedia, a Mobile Museums Project, and curated Ghana’s first
pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She published her first novel The
God Child with Bloomsbury in 2019, and with Penguin in German in
2021. She has made award winning films for museums such as Tate
Modern, LACMA and The New Museum, and lectures a course on History
and Theory at the Architectural Association in London. She is the
recipient of various awards and honours, having been named one of
the Apollo ’40 under 40’; one of 50 African Trailblazers by The
Africa Report; a Quartz Africa Innovator in 2017; one of 12 African
women making history in 2016 and one of 100 women of 2020 by
Okayafrica. She received the 2015 the Art & Technology Award
from LACMA; the 2016 AIR Award, which “seeks to honour and
celebrate extraordinary African artists who are committed to
producing provocative, innovative and socially-engaging work”; a
2018 Soros Arts Fellowship, was a 2018 Global South Visiting Fellow
at Oxford University, is a Principal Investigator on the Action for
Restitution to Africa programme, and was appointed to the Advisory
Council of Oxford University’s Cultural Programme in 2020. Richard
Rathbone Richard Rathbone was born in war-time London. His father
and mother worked for the BBC but during the war his father was an
RAF pilot and he was killed soon after my birth. His childhood was
largely spent in and around London. In 1964 Richard began his
research career at the School of Oriental and African Studies where
he worked under the pioneer historian of Africa, Roland Oliver. He
was appointed o teach in the history department at SOAS in 1969,
where he worked until early retirement in 2003. During that time
Richard served as Chairman of the University of London's Centre for
African Studies and as SOAS' Dean of Postgraduate Studies and was
promoted to a chair in modern African history in 1994. Life was
episodically interrupted by a series of research trips to Ghana and
a variety of fellowships to universities in Cape Town,
Johannesburg, Harvard and Princeton as well as for shorter periods
to Bordeaux, Lesotho and Toronto. Richard's current appointments
include Emeritus professor and professorial research associate at
SOAS and honorary professor in history at Aberystwyth University.
He has also served on the Council of the Royal Historical Society,
most recently as one of its vice-presidents. In 2017 he was elected
a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. Chaired by Dr. Laura Van
Broekhoven Dr. Laura Van Broekhovenis the Director of the Pitt
Rivers Museum and Professorial Fellow at Linacre College,
University of Oxford. Previously she led the curatorial department
of the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures, was Senior Curator
for Middle- and South America and was departmental lecturer in
archaeology, museum studies and indigenous heritage at Leiden
University. Laura strives to develop a more equitable decolonised
praxis in museums including issues around shared and negotiated
authority; restitution, reconciliation and redress and the queering
of exclusionary binaries and boundaries with relation to social
justice and inclusion. Her regional academic research has focused
on collaborative collection research with Amazonian Indigenous
Peoples and Maasai communities from Kenya and Tanzania; Yokot’an
Maya oral history, Mixtec Indigenous market systems and merchant
biographies, and Nicaraguan Indigenous resistance in colonial
times. She serves on numerous advisory boards, is a member of the
Women Leaders in Museums Network (WLMN) and the European
Ethnographic Museum Directors Group and is co-chair of the Oxford
and Colonialism Network.