Obruni Journal: Hales Group 2011

Jun

Elmina: Public History & Memory

By kholt | Heritage Tourism, Homeland & Memory

When I teach courses on Atlantic Slavery, we usually spend the final weeks of the semester discussing popular ideas about the history of slavery in the U.S.. In class discussions and in their blog posts, students consider what they had been taught about slavery before taking our class. Drawing on a wide range of student experiences from touring Gettysburg or Colonial Williamsburg on family vacations to the presentation of slavery in elementary classrooms, we analyzed the historical narratives teachers and park rangers constructed as well as the implications these representations of America’s slaveholding past have for contemporary discussions of race.

Last fall, the students and I focused on the controversy over Our Virginia, the newly-adopted textbook for fourth-grade Virginia history. In her analysis of Virginia during the Civil War, author Joy Masoff included a claim that “Thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson.” When this information about black participation to defend the Confederacy was disputed by historians including Pulitzer Prize winner Jim McPherson, Masoff revealed that her source was a website created by the Sons of the Confederate Veterans. In an effort to reshape the reputation of their group and distance current members from the history of southern slavery, their website presented the Confederacy as a struggle supported by black and white soldiers alike.

This case about the state-sanctioned presentation of history in the classroom, coupled with readings from James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton’s 2006 edited volume Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, brought many of the debates we had about the ongoing significance of slavery and public memory. If the goal of public history sites is to get visitors to ask hard questions and see the past in a new way, how do educators balance the need to engage visitors to support the project with the need to present uncomfortable truths about slavery ands its legacies?

Elmina

These discussions about slavery and public history were fresh in my mind as the Hales Group visited Elmina and Cape Coast castles. How would the Ghanaian government present the sites’ histories to a diverse audience of Ghanaians, African-American, and white tourists? What would be the tour guides’ “take-home message” about the contemporary and historical significance of the Atlantic slave trade? How would tourists drawn to the site for so many purposes react?

Elmina Wreath

For the first section of the tour, the guide at Elmina emphasized the horrors of the conditions in the holding dungeons. The details of captives’ experiences of sexual violence, unsanitary conditions, separation from family and friends, crowding, and the intense heat were all too easy to imagine when faced with the physical site. Centuries later, the stench of the suffocating air in the dungeons lingers. Having visited many other Portuguese forts, I was awed by the sheer size of Elmina. The structure is massive – certainly many times larger than contemporary military forts in Bahia or Rio de Janeiro, suggesting its central importance to the early Portuguese colonial empire. On the dungeon floors, we saw the floral wreaths honoring the many slaves who died before and during the Middle Passage. The guide told stories of resistance, and the harsh punishments that awaited men and women who fought back. The physical impact of the space created a profound sense of empathy with the Africans sold into slavery here. I was impressed by the emphasis on Elmina as a site to bear witness.

Unfortunately, our guide’s final summing up left me more cynical about the Ghanaian tourist board’s presentation of Elmina as a historic site. With his tourist audience clearly in mind, our guide finished with a plea for the need for forgiveness and racial unity. We should leave history and especially the need to place blame for the atrocities he had described behind, and instead work together for a better future. Although I was prepared after reading Bayo Holsey’s Routes of Remembrance for a discourse that distanced contemporary Ghanaian life from the history of the trade, and I recognized the difficulty with constructing a narrative that would speak to his diverse audience, I was still disappointed with what seemed to me like such blatant pandering. For me, the message that we needed to “forget the past” betrayed the emotional power of the site, the stories of suffering and courage, and the continuing legacies of European imperialism in contemporary Ghana.

Impacts of European Contacts Display, Elmina

The site included a display highlighting the “impacts of European contacts”, including “Education”, “European languages”, “Religion”, and “Multiracialism”, illustrated with photos of light-skinned Ghanaian families.

And yet this depoliticized message was itself formulated in response to the need to market Elmina as a tourist site appealing to a national and international audience. When members of our group asked our guide about how he formulated the final section of his tour, he acknowledged that it was largely in response to complaints from European tourists who felt they were blamed for the slave trade. Ghana needs the tourist dollars that are their fourth largest source of foreign income.

Tourists pose for a photo at Cape Coast

And as our photos from touring Cape Coast show, not all Ghanaian young people view the sites with the same sense of reverence that Diasporian visitors do. Exposing as many visitors as possible to the site itself seems key to honoring the memory of those who died there and pushing the visitor to ask new questions about the historic legacies of the trade.

Jun

Haikus: Form and Function

By bmuellner | Ecotourism

Early on in the trip, clearly inspired by the “real” poet in the group (Dan), we joked that haikus might be a good way to capture some of our many impressions briefly and concisely while underway. Because of the nature of our road travel (bumpy, windy, and dusty – the A/C in the van broke the first day), we were prohibited from writing anything legible during the day, (unless Dan can read his notes!). Most of the time the computer was out of juice, with no way to plug it in during our long and numerous road trips. Sharing the computer between the six of us meant that we didn’t always get to type out our thoughts once in our rooms, much less send them to the blog given our connection difficulties. Most evenings were spent in deep conversation and debate about our various impressions and experiences during the day, and so not much time was left to the solitary endeavor of writing. By the time we did head to bed, we usually collapsed. So haikus were a quick way to capture highlights of the day, and brought about interesting and playful collaborative writing attempts. (See also Raymond’s haiku that begins his entry about water (or the trickle-and-bucket-bath-narrative).

I thought I’d add two haikus that were inspired by events experienced in Mole National Park.

Mole I

The Safari walk

is not what you think it is

until elephants

Mole III

Rikki will love this

shopping tourists take pictures

then, baboon mayhem

May

i guess that’s why they call it a rainforest (w thanks to D. Bourne)

By cpeterson | Default

: 40 meters above the ground

: View from a bridge

: Canopy view

: Rainforest 3

: Waiting on the rain

: Rainforest 2

: The Rain Season

May

Romantic Notions

By cpeterson | Default

El Mina (The Mine)

16 years ago, I sat in the SUNY- Brockport Study Abroad in Ghana program van and as any diasporic African of a certain cultural and political orientation will do in the face of their experience in an African country, I struggled with the emotional idea of being an African. Or rather I struggled with the fear of the uncertainty of my sense of my Africanity. By way of apologizing for my romanticism I will say I was never a red black and green died in the wool motherlandier. I did not believe the blood of Zulu warriors flowed through my veins or that Kiswahili came naturally to my tongue (yeah, really). But I did take comfort in the idea of being descended from African peoples cause that was important. It was important because the histories I studied told me something happened that led to my existence in the West and that something was an erasure of sorts or rather the hanging of a vast veil separating one epoch of living from another. And my experiences told me that the repercussions from the hanging of that veil, the severing of those lives and there the erection of that difference led to gross distortions of the lives of past, present and no doubt future millions.
Yet sitting in that van, driving through the small towns that led to Kumasi, walking through Makola Market, noting the difference in the speech cadences of me and a Ghanaian and a thousand other observations made me re-think the firmness of my Africanity. And not just the firmness of the identity but the reason why it was important .
Central to diaspora is the sense of separation that one is living in someone else’s here instead of ones own there. Despite whatever reasons why one lives in a diaspora the not being home implies a loss. Perhaps one has lost status, property, position or even something ineffably you. Regardless diaspora is cored (sic) by a yearning for something lost that can only be replaced or retained or found in the “utopia” that is home.
Maybe it is a sense of un-belonging that derives from the constant sense of being an unloved child in the national, cultural or racial family\ies of the West. “If I am not wanted here then where,” a lost child’s lament. It is a struggle to deal confront such feelings, it seems that no amount of formal education, learned disposition or critical acuity can eliminate being a part of the African diaspora whether one acknowledges it or not. Even Stanley Crouch (grumble, grumble, grumble) is a part of the diaspora, the question is whether one has the something to admit that looking at the door of no return, imagining what could have been had 10 millions or more of indigenous peoples from African societies had not been stolen and refracting all of that through the lens of the last 400 years of African life in the west, necessarily creates a belief in the loss of a better life.

One of many doors of no return

May

Memorial Day

By sking | Heritage Tourism, Homeland & Memory

As I sit here in my apartment, only two days back in Wooster from Ghana, I stare at my unpacked suitcase. Although I left the apartment clean and straightened, my books that need reviewing now crowd the rug. As I wonder what I want to do today, I admit to myself and now to you that I am still spiritually in Ghana, thinking about the long road trips, Ghana’s beautiful land and people, and my own imaginings of Africans packed tightly in slave dungeons. In homage to Countee Cullen’s poem Heritage, I reflect on what Memorial Day means to me.

On most memorial days, I generally think about African American veterans, those courageous warriors fighting gallantly for a nation that denied them first-class citizenship. But now, I will remember the ex-slaves who staged one of the first and largest memorial day parades on May 1, 1865 in Charleston, SC.

Today on this Memorial Day, I think about our sojourn in Ghana. I think about the arduous and almost endless 12 hour drive from Accra to Tamale. It was a beautiful struggle! I remember the red gravel and the bumpy roads as well as the spirited conversations and the collaboratively created haikus.

While we were in the van, I spent most of the time looking out the window in silence, mesmerized by children playing on the land, Ghanaians selling goods alongside the roads and in the streets, and goats foraging for food.

What I remember most are the slave castles. I can still smell the dungeons. I remember first walking into the women’s dungeon in Elmina Castle. The deadly funk of the rebellious women’s defecation, blood, and skin hauntingly lingers. I remember standing outside the Cape Coast’s Door of No Return, transfixed by the volatile waves of the Atlantic Ocean, wondering what stories they could tell if they chose to speak. I admit I felt a sense of loss. How could I not? On the first day, we visited Nkrumah’s and Du Bois’s burial sites.

Looking out onto the ocean, I remembered Equiano’s description of the slave ships and his fear of being eaten by white men. I remember the intractable Africans lost at sea, especially those committing suicide, choosing spiritual freedom over worldly life.

I remember Ghana . . . .

May

the stillness of it all

By cpeterson | Africa & Brazil, Ecotourism

I am not a “nature” person by any stretch of the imagination. The jazz standard “Nature Boy” is a s close as I want to get to it. Despite I looked for the 7am safari hike at Mole National park Monday morning. It was a crisp morning and still, very still. we followed our guide Christopher swinging into single file line, almost hypnotized by the sway of his single shot rifle. The crunch under our sleepy feet made me whisper to Katie that we would make terrible hunters. She replied that was a good thing, you didn’t want to sneak up on anything in this park. The crunch of the feet and the scattered sounds of birds set a perfect condition for drifting into one’s thoughts. I though about having visited the park in 1996, only more about the red dust of the northern region, than the purpose of the park. I thought about how hungry I was, no time for breakfast before the hike. I thought about missing my sons and how much I couldn’t wait to break them up from jumping on our living room furniture, which has seen better days but were in great shape before a certain set of little boys began to . . . . and then I heard it. Absolutely nothing. Not a peep, not the crunch, not my weary breathing only the silence of a perfect morning where the sun was peeking from behind somber clouds and thinking in the moment how having a job where I could take extended walks and show new groups of people, something that most people will never see and feel apart of the preservation and protection of something wondrously beautiful and simple as life in its day to day course. I will need to re-think my position on “nature”.

May

Good Roads

By dbourne | Heritage Tourism

Heritage Tourism in NE Ghana

It was easy to think about good roads, bouncing along in the red dirt kicked up by the tires of our Nissan van, the corduroy bumps jarring our teeth as we headed to Salaga, the site of a 19th century slave market. Often it seemed that what was happening to the roadbed was a mirror of the land; subjugated to the upheaval caused by drought and flood, the small washes that ran beside us out in the scattered ant hills and low-growing trees in the surrounding terrain had become recreated here in the road itself, the roadbed slowly—or quickly—reverting back to what it had been before humans tried to grade and pave it. Indeed, the fact that parts of the pavement still remained made it even harder to navigate, the van’s tires banging up on the small scattered mesas of remaining hardtop then slamming back down into the dust. Then every so often we’d hit a patch of corduroy and the Nissan would start acting more like a boat than a car, shuddering over the top of the nasty little washboard ridges as the driver turned his wheel with the slide in the attempt to retain control.

It boils down to access. When we finally got to Salaga itself, what we saw from and of the past was mainly in the mind: “just” a tree that had been planted in the same place where the “original” tree marking the spot of the Slave Market had stood until it gave up the ghost in 1970. “Just” a nearby sign that said “Salaga Slave Market,” right in the same busy intersection where the tro-tro buses we met on the red road to Salaga now stopped to pick up passengers. Maybe we could have taken up the wisdom offered by the Ghana guide book Katie had brought with her for the trip, and approached the local chief to see if he would open up the local doors so that we could view some of the remnants of the market place scattered about in people’s houses, but we didn’t—all those shackles and collars and other pieces of iron and wood and leather that back then had been meant to capture and process the slaves heading off to market, and now, if collected in a museum somehow, would be a way of capturing that experience for those wanting to come here to learn and to feel and still not understand.

But how to get there when the world has changed—even physically? Could there be any economic or commercial reasons to improve this stretch of road? Both the financial as well as environmental costs of trucking in non-indigenous paving materials might be a problem. To think now of Salaga as a transportation hub as it had been back in the 1800s (and whose location probably came about in the same way that the Nazis built Auschwitz near the little town of Oswiecim in occupied Poland because it was positioned near the confluence of several railroad lines that could ship in Jews from the far reaches of their growing empire) might just be plain folly. The previous construction of Lake Volta through the damming of the White and Black Voltas would mean that river crossings make more sense in other places now than they would have during the slave trade period back in the 1800s. The logical locations of bridges or ferries or fordings are not necessarily the same, and thus the way the network of roads would connect the dots of commerce would have to change as well. Thus, even a successful effort to develop trade among the countries of the region—Burkina Faso, Volta, Cote d’Ivoire, etc.–still might not make Salaga regain its former prominence as a transportation or commercial center.

So would heritage tourism be the answer? A paved road would bring more outside travelers to visit the site–which might at some point be quite “Smithsonified,” to use a term Charles used today on the road down here to Kumasi, with a small museum and artifacts and captions and small hotels and memorial plaques—yet this heritage initiative might also open up the area to more trade opportunities as well. There might even be more international interest in building up local schools and health centers, and as a result the villages along the red road from Tamale to Salaga would sport numerous signs mentioning this new clinic or that new pure water initiative, just as they do along the roads leading to the Mole National Park.

But does this place even want more trade, and what things might it give up? Does the local chief want to upset the status quo? And who amongst us—except for Charles—would have thought of the key role a local chief might play in such a question?

And, even if such a heritage site might become a huge success, might not the traveler who encounters the story of what happened here only in his or her head actually be the true pilgrim anyway, the worthy traveler? Do we want people to come here who are more interested in leather goods and ice cream?

The American desert writer Edward Abbey says that to really connect with the land you need to earn it. At the start of Desert Solitude, his book of essays about the canyonlands of eastern Utah, he even admonishes the prospective pilgrim to the land not to just get out of the car, but to then get down on his hands and knees. And crawl. And crawl. And maybe, just maybe, after his knees and hands start to bleed and he comes to realization that he hurts and aches so bad he can’t go any further, then maybe, just maybe, he might have reached his goal of connecting with the land.

“Probably not,” Abbey then adds quickly, pretty much dismissing all hope.

There might be something here that connects with the notion of improving the road to Salaga, but there are differences. Granted, it might always require that the person deciding to go to this site already has some desire to get there, an appreciation of what might be there, and a fear of the turmoil inside that might await him or her. Yet, even if a full-blown museum is erected there, with trained interpreters , so much of heritage tourism will still occur in the head. Indeed, maybe the best time to go there is now, when one can stand alone in the dry riverbed outside of town (where supposedly when the stream was full enough, the slaves were bathed and slathered in shea butter to make them gleam for sale)—a contemplation possible only without other heritage tourists around, without signs to point the mind in certain directions and not others. Sometimes it’s better to be alone. It’s just you and history.

But, what applies to eco-tourism might not so justly apply to its heritage counterpart. Distance as well as the difficulty of the physical road might be an untoward impediment to the heritage traveler, who in many cases comes here to see stories involving people more than the landscape itself. Indeed, when later we headed off to Mole and our future encounters with elephants, baboons, and warthogs (I’ll let others fill you in on this), we still had to pay an entrance fee from our own bodies—to do without water pressure in our bathrooms or to sweat in more than just our armpits as we headed down the escarpment, on which the hotel complex is located, to skirt along the edge of the waterholes in search of kobs and crocs. No sweat, no discomfort, no gain. And, to me, that’s the way it should be. But, with heritage tourism, I feel that the exertion is more mental, more existential, and, I must admit, dependant on more than just the existence of good roads. To get people to go to Salaga means they must also go to history. And let’s hope that will happen.

Let other voices talk now. But one more thing I’d like to say is this:

Perhaps in the end, in terms of America’s position in global tourism, I also look forward to a time when we can then deal with another challenge—to get more African Americans to visit Mole and more European Americans to visit Salaga. The conveyance itself, whether on knee or in a car, can occur however it occurs.

Kumasi, May 24, 2011

May

Imagined Spaces

By cpeterson | Default

The foundations of the New World

I watched the progress of our plane to Accra on the video monitor and as we passed from Ivorian airspace to Ghanaian airspace, I noticed the squiggly line that snaked the boundary between the two countries. The result of the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, where western European powers, without indigenous consultation, rudely defined what Africa was. It was definition based on power as any definition was. Whom has the ability to say what meaning a thing has comes down to the ability to enforce/impose that meaning by getting others to believe it. One can debate the nature of the “is” of something but what can’t be argued is that we have an access to an independent imagining of places, spaces and people. It is that imagining that gives most of the sense of the “is” of a thing. The line defining Cote D’Ivoire as distinct from Ghana or NIgeria as distinct from Benin was the wave of a pen and the tramp of an army. To some degree the local people have invested in that belief. No doubt the peoples had their own imaginings of who they were and where they were and what that meant but the imperialists were waving the pens whose writings were read and commanded the armies that won. Now some 130 years later that definition of these spaces takes on weight as an idea of these places, informed by the cultures and histories of the colonizer and the colonized breaks through a veil and through focus on specific sites places and events, tell visitors a story about themselves. That story can be called history or memory or re-collection or propaganda. Or tourism.

May

May 19 – Day One in Ghana (En Route to Tamale)

By bmuellner | Default

Our first day was spent touring the city of Accra, where we landed this morning at around 10am, only three hours behind our original ETA (you do not complain when the airline is taking care of maintenance problems). We flew Delta, which we have since learned from Wooster alum Christabel Dadzie is referred to by Ghanaians as “Air Tro-tro.” You can only understand this joke once you’ve experienced road travel in Ghana. Tro-tros are little minivans out of which the seats have been removed in order to fit in about five rows of seats, providing for extremely cramped and hot travel. Which is not fast either. We spent a big chunk of time sitting in traffic, moving at a snail’s pace. Our minivan has air-conditioning and leg room (ok, except for Dan’s long legs), but these comforts that we take for granted in the US mark us as the Obrunis that we are.

It is somehow fitting that the two main locations we visited today are memorial sites. We are, after all, on an exploration of how heritage or memorial tourism is constructed in Ghana. Our local Ghanaian travel agent, Dr. Michael Williams (formerly of Washington, D.C.) narrated a quick bus tour through an ever-developing Accra, past the old Parliament building, (where Malcolm X spoke), Independence Square, a soviet-style arena on the sea (where Clinton spoke), and to our first stop, the Nkrumah Mausoleum. Our guide, Yaw, led us to statues of Nkrumah (Ghana’s first president) and to the place where he first declared Ghana free from British rule (1957). Then we entered the actual mausoleum, a large modern structure made of Italian marble, in which Nkrumah has found his final resting place (after being buried three different times, as Yaw pointed out on several occasions). We then entered a white stone building that houses photographs and various artifacts of Nkrumah’s life, pondering before entering, why the carvings on the outside looked like Egyptian figures. We soon learned, in his efforts to unite Africa, that Nkrumah took an Egyptian wife Fathia (who resembled Jackie O. with her big sunglasses, but never seemed to smile in any of the photographs).

Our next stop was to the W.E.B. DuBois museum. It consisted of two buildings: one was the house in which he lived from 1960-1963 (and died), and another smaller structure, again, a mausoleum for his remains. Our young guide here, Byrum, was a recent convert to DuBois’ writings and life, claiming not to have known him just five months ago. Interestingly however, he made it clear through his gestures and body language that he was a believer in DuBois’ ideas of Pan-Africanism, almost to a religious degree. In fact, in our visit to the mausoleum, Byrum gently insisted that we all sit on stools (each of the seven carved with different Adinkra symbols); indeed, he refused to speak until we did so. Then he proceeded to speak of DuBois – with us in an enforced silence – as if giving a eulogy.

Given the importance of the celebration of death in Ghanaian culture (wakes are the biggest party in town as reported in a recent NYT article about Ghanaians living in the US), beginning our journey with visiting these sites that celebrate the lives and memories of these prominent national heroes seems appropriate. The fact that we were the only visitors (aside from three other individuals at the Nkrumah site) suggests a tempered approach to at least the celebration of this national history through tourism in Accra.

May

May 18, 2011—The First Step (While Still on the Plane)

By dbourne | Default

This morning, making coffee, looking out my kitchen window a mile or so out in the countryside beyond Wooster, I saw a white-crowned sparrow hopping under our feeder. This bird with the big white stripe on the top of its head is not a local resident, but passes through about this time of year to its breeding grounds in northern Alaska and Canada.

It was on its way to the Yukon, and I was on my way to Ghana.

Of course, the white-crowned sparrow, in a way, was travelling because of work and family. But why was I off to Accra in just an hour? Well, the short answer is that I’m a tourist off to study tourism, and though my intent to travel is not perhaps as essential to my life as the white-crowned sparrow’s migration might be to its, I still want to earn my keep. But one nagging concern I have is about whether I will be able to undergo some sort of transcendence, to somehow rise up above the usual tourist behaviors, and the usual jokes about these behaviors, to get a sense about how and why humans move all over the world for purposes other than job and family, and why this movement is both good and bad.

And all of this in the course of a few days. Yes, I am supposed to get to know Ghana, its intertwined narratives of slave castles, canopy walks, and markets, to see how it presents itself to the world, and even perhaps to glimpse the way it tells stories to its own people.

If I’m lucky, and if I pay attention.

But we’ve not even landed, and I feel I’ve already fallen behind. What will I learn, and what will I forget? Here is an excerpt from the Ghanaian poet Ellis Ayitey Komey’s poem, “Oblivion.”

I want to remember them well

The sight of the green-eyed forest

The jubilant voices of the frogs

And the pleading crises of the owls.

I want to walk among the palms

With their razor-edged leaves

Shadowing the yam and cassava shrubs…

I want to remember them all

Before they die and turn to mud

When I have gone.

Of course, Ghana will not die when it is time for me to leave. It won’t even notice my departure. But I do want to remember all the Ghanas I will encounter, the ones of the past as well as the future—and that complicated landscape in-between we call the present.

Daniel Bourne

P.S. Because of internet connection difficulties, we have not been able to post until now, here in Tamale in Northern Ghana.

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