African studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

A borrower once asked our library to obtain a map of 'Ashanti Province, 1930' for her family history research. When the scan arrived, the legend described the area as a colony, a protectorate and a province on different sheets, depending on which office had printed it. Sorting out that confusion for her took an afternoon, and it reminded me why I want to study Africa properly. The categories through which the continent has been described were often made by people far from it, yet those categories still shape what archives contain and how they are catalogued.

I studied History and Geography at undergraduate level. My interest in West Africa began in a second-year course on decolonisation, where I read Frederick Cooper's Africa since 1940. His argument that independence should be understood as part of longer struggles over labour, citizenship and development changed how I approached the period. I had expected a clean break in 1957. Instead I found continuities, and I wanted to see how they appeared at a local scale.

My dissertation examined cocoa cooperatives in the Gold Coast during the 1950s, using digitised colonial reports and the published papers of agricultural officers. I focused on how officials wrote about farmers who left or refused to join cooperatives. The reports often described them as conservative or poorly informed, but a closer reading suggested many had sound reasons, such as debts to local brokers who also lent money in lean months. I was careful about how far I could go. I had no Ghanaian voices except where officials quoted or paraphrased them, and my conclusion was framed around what the colonial record made visible and what it obscured. My supervisor noted that this caution was a strength. It was also a frustration, and it is a large part of why I am applying for postgraduate study: I want the training to work with a wider range of sources, including oral histories and African-language material.

Since graduating I have worked as a library assistant at a city public library, mainly on interlibrary loans and enquiries. The work is routine in places, but it has made me practical about research. I know how to trace an obscure pamphlet, how to read catalogue records critically, and how often material about African societies is filed under the name of a European author or administrator. I have also helped run a fortnightly reading group for older patrons. Last spring we read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and listening to people with no academic background discuss them taught me a lot about explaining context without lecturing.

I have been learning Twi for a year, using an online course and weekly conversation practice with a volunteer tutor. My level is basic, and I can manage greetings, market vocabulary and simple questions. I do not expect to be fluent soon, but I want my future research to rest on more than English-language records, and steady study fits the way I like to work. Outside work and study I volunteer on Saturdays at a community allotment, where I mostly dig, sort seed orders and keep a planting log. The log is unglamorous, but keeping it accurate over two seasons has made me appreciate the kind of record-keeping my dissertation relied on.

At postgraduate level I hope to develop an interdisciplinary grounding across history, anthropology and political economy, and to think more rigorously about method and positionality as a researcher based in Europe. I am particularly interested in agrarian change and in how rural West Africans negotiated development schemes from the late colonial period onwards. I bring careful source work, patience with messy records and a habit of questioning catalogues rather than trusting them. I would like the chance to build on these with sustained, critical study.