A Legacy of Empowerment and Rhetorical Leadership
Tributes for Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings have flooded in since her passing on 23 October 2025. For many Ghanaians, her extensive empowerment work as the leader of the 31st December Women’s Movement is a testament to her enduring impact. This non-governmental organization began as a women’s political movement and continues to be active today.
Born on 17 November 1948, she became the wife of Jerry John Rawlings, who led Ghana from 1981 until he stepped down in 2001. Mourners, including Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama, have highlighted her social welfare initiatives through her organization, which include credit facilities, advocacy for women’s and children’s rights, daycare centers, adult literacy programs, and edible oil extraction industries.
A dimension of Agyeman-Rawlings’ politics that has often been overlooked is her rhetorical leadership. This refers to the various persuasive methods she used to fulfill her roles as a public figure. As a scholar of English, I have studied how people use language and other communicative forms to influence public discourse. My research includes a personal interview with Agyeman-Rawlings conducted in 2017.
Her speeches and writings reveal her motivations for shifting prevailing ideas about women’s social roles, her responses to public anxieties about her power, and her attempts to disrupt historical narratives by narrating herself into history.
Advocating for Change
Agyeman-Rawlings’ rhetorical leadership transformed the role of the first lady in Ghana. In her own words:
“A first lady’s work does not end with the collection of flowers and doing some protocols … I’d rather work and be emulated than to sit down and not do anything and not change anybody’s life.”
For this reason, Agyeman-Rawlings spoke and wrote extensively in national and international contexts. Her rhetoric of empowerment centered on the plights of women, children, and the poor. For instance, she asserted at Beijing that “for us in Africa, the girl child is a special concern.”
Agyeman-Rawlings articulated a cosmopolitan ideology shaped by multiple influences, including UN rights discourses, the language of mothering (such as nurturing, protecting), liberal feminism with its emphasis on gender reform through legal means, and the populist rhetoric of the Rawlings regime, with its emphasis on people power.
An assessment of Agyeman-Rawlings’ legacy must recognize that speaking and writing for change involves extensive physical, mental, and emotional energy. And for many years, under her husband’s military regime, she performed this role without the professional support of a communications team.
Contesting Power
Agyeman-Rawlings had an intense political life. One could say that through her gendered advocacy and mass mobilization, she politicized the first lady role. For that reason, she was highly scrutinized during her active political years. In response to efforts to restrain her power, she drew on ambiguous gendered rhetorics, moral values, and familial legacy.
She was variously accused of being corrupt, power drunk, and ostentatious, often with sexist undertones. People rumoured that she, as first lady, was the real power behind the presidency. When her husband was preparing to leave office, there were stories that she wanted to succeed him. One news report claims that she countered such allegations by saying: “I have never said anywhere that I want to be president” while implying that she could change her mind if her husband said so. It takes a keen rhetorical intellect to navigate the slippery political terrain Agyeman-Rawlings found herself in.
She remained politically active after her tenure as first lady ended. In 2011, she contested against John Evans Atta Mills, Ghana’s president at the time, for the candidacy of the National Democratic Congress, which she helped form. She would later defect from the party to form her own, the National Democratic Party.
In these complex political tussles, she consistently appealed to morality and truth. In one instance, she countered ten years of media “bashing” by claiming that she had been raised right. Her 2016 acceptance speech for the National Democratic Party candidacy centred on “what is right” for the “people.”
Disrupting the Archive
Agyeman-Rawlings wrote a memoir, unusually for a Ghanaian woman politician. As the historian Jean Allman suggests, there is a connection between the erasure of women in Ghanaian politics and the absence of autobiographical writings by nationalist women. My studies argue that Agyeman-Rawlings’ narrative (though incomplete) should be read as a rhetorical disruption of the postcolonial archives. These archives tend to erase or subordinate women’s contributions within a dominant masculine framing of the nation-state.
Agyeman-Rawlings is not the only woman to have laboured for the nation-state. Other women like pro-independence activist Hannah Kudjoe, who were involved in similar social welfare activities, have been written out of Ghanaian history. Agyeman-Rawlings understood that despite her extensive work, words still mattered if she was to be remembered.
By asserting that “it takes a woman” to “birth” the strength and future of a nation, she boldly inserts a feminine voice into a postcolonial national allegory that centres men. By so doing, she demands a rereading of “great men” like Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and Jerry Rawlings. And in the absence of a Jerry Rawlings autobiography, Agyeman-Rawlings’ writing becomes doubly subversive.
Because women have been historically marginalized from the public sphere, a female politician would be scrutinized whether or not she was vocal. Agyeman-Rawlings chose to be visible and outspoken.
