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At the swimming pool in Maxine Ankrah’s home town when she was growing up, there was a sign that stated, “Whites Only.” Also, churches there were separated by colour.
She did not grow up in apartheid South Africa, but in the “deep South” of the United States of America before the Second World War.
“My name is Elanor Maxine Ankrah, but I’m actually called Mac,” said Ankrah in an interview.
Born Eleanor Maxine Moore on 29 January 1934 to Rodges and Minnie Moore, in North Carolina, she is the great-granddaughter of slaves.
Coming of age in the South, her formative years in the segregation of the time is evocative of the cruelty awaiting people of colour in apartheid South Africa, under a similar system in a different hemisphere.
“Churches were separated by colour, with the White and the Blacks worshipping separately. Indeed, direct segregation prevailed throughout society with Blacks always occupying an inferior status,” she writes in her autobiography, “A life without baggage.”
A lifetime connected to the churches
Ankrah has spent a lifetime connected with the World Council of Churches (WCC), though never working directly for the WCC.
“I am a Methodist as a foundational church, but in Uganda, I’m connected with one of those independent churches founded by the Canadian Pentecostals, and with the Anglican church. It was the Anglicans that caused my husband and me to go to Uganda through the World Council of Churches.”
She says, “I never worked for the church in my lifetime, but the church was always a part of my life,” and of course that of her husband who, when he retired in 2003, was an academic at what is now the Uganda Christian University.
While a student, she longed to go to Africa to do mission work and she went to Hartford Seminary where she met her husband Kodwo E. Ankrah from Ghana. He spent a lifetime working for the Anglican Church of Uganda but died in 2015.
In their later years, they set up the Ankrah Foundation, initially founded with the aim of promoting science education for aspirant university students.
They had married and went to live in Ghana in 1962 in the heady days of Pan-Africanism under the rule of Kwame Nkrumah.
“I have been in Africa for 55 years,” said Ankrah noting that they moved from Ghana to, to Kenya, with a short spell in Geneva and later to Uganda. “I have never left Uganda from1974.”
After an upbringing in the restrictions of the American South, in her autobiography, she observes, “that Africa permits one to break loose – if one dares – from all systems that enslave if the will exists.”
After five years in Nairobi, the family moved to Geneva where Kodwo Ankrah was to work on development and refugees at the WCC.
Life under Idi Amin
The family arrived while Uganda was under the dictatorial rule of Idi Amin, who ruled the country with an iron fist and expelled a then-prospering Asian community originally from the Indian sub-continent.
In a letter of consolation to the family and friends of Canon Kodwo E. Ankrah of the Church of the Province of Uganda, WCC general secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit expressed sympathy following the death on 29 May 2015 of “this great Pan-Africanist and ecumenist”.
Born in Anomabu, Ghana in 1928, Ankrah served in a variety of key positions for the Christian Council of Ghana, Christian Service Committee, and All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC). He also worked as a coordinator for planning, development and rehabilitation within the Church of the Province of Uganda. From 1970 to 1974, he was the WCC executive for English-speaking Africa.
Maxine Ankrah holds a master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Connecticut and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Nairobi.
While she was in Geneva, she did a work stint in the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, but found its style of bureaucracy did not suit her.
The church sent her husband to Uganda, but she forged a career as an academic lecturing in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Makerere University, one of Africa’s top universities from the mid to late 1970s to the early 1990s, rising at one point to become the head of the department of Social Work.
Makerere University was alma mater to many post-independence African leaders, including former Ugandan president Milton Obote and former Tanzanian presidents Julius Nyerere and Benjamin Mkapa. The former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Joseph Kabila, and former Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki are also Makerere alumni.
In Uganda, Anrkah has lived through diverse times and tribulations. The nation now has as president, Yoweri Museveni, aged 74, who looks set to stay as he has repealed a law on time limits and now is looking to do the same for another on age limits.
From 1985, drawing inspiration from the Nairobi Conference on Women, to 2010 Ankrah said the women’s movement was vibrant and females were able to aspire to top positions in Uganda, as she notes how life was a constant struggle against patriarchal society.
She left Makerere University, and she and her husband started the Ankrah Foundation at Mukono Farm near Kampala, and the foundation has become connected with the Deliverance Church of Uganda and Uganda Christian University.
In present-day Uganda, she says there is the battle against poverty for younger people and a new form of economic power from Chinese institutions is taking, but Ankrah looks forward with her faith and optimism.
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