¶ Intro / Opening
Hi, Donovan Woods here.
Hey, hey, it's me, Tom Patty.
We're here to tell you about our brand new podcast, it's called The Big Five.
What is the big
Yeah, exactly. What is the big five? That's what the big five is all about. Every week Tom and I will sit down with a special guest and dive into new topics, debating things like what are the big five farm animals, the big five types of hat, the big five guys named Paul.
Martin, Revere, Mezcal, McCartney, John Paul.
The debate is settled by a listener from somewhere across the country. It's like a game show. The big five available now wherever you get your podcast.
This is a CBC Podcast.
🔊 Vehicle
¶ Elmina: A Town of Stark Contrasts
Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayat. The street sounds of Elmina, a bustling fishing village on the Atlantic shores of Ghana.
This is the fish market. of Elemina. Over here they get all kinds of fish like Grupa.
Thank you.
So, Red Sniper, Scrape. Shrimps, herrings and all kinds of fish. They get it over here.
In the harbor, countless long wooden fishing boats.
How many bolts?
Amen.
About five hundred.
Wow.
The brightly painted boats are called canoes by locals, each one decorated with foreign flags waving in the breeze.
Flags on the canoe. Those flags have to identify that. That's my canon. Some of the owners of the canon have in those countries before. Some have not. But a friend. a relative who is staying over there, have been financially enduring it. And the last one, the football team that they support is the flag that they put on the air, as you can see, Chelsea.
Ha ha ha. Yeah, yeah, that's it, Barcelona. That's the Chelsea.
When you go further, you can see um uh Spanish flag over there. You see uh British flag? Have you seen it? Yes. So it's a very Unique place to be.
It's uh Tuesday, the one day of the week where fishing is not permitted, out of tradition and respect for the goddess of the sea.
you know, in Ghana on Tuesday. Across the coastal area. We don't go for fishing on Tuesday. From the morning till 4 p.m. you're not allowed to go to fashion. Why? Because it is believed that the goddess of the C which is on Tuesday.
Yeah.
No Ghanaian will go and mess around on the sea on a Tuesday. You just don't do it. So that's where the resilience comes from. That uh despite the centuries of violence against the belief system. Aspects of the belief s belief system have still persisted.
Nana Bena Shrine. You know we have the the capital G, we have the small G.
The persistence of honoring the god of the lagoon goes back centuries before European contact. Back to a time before millions of Africans were forced onto ships and into slavery. Turn away from the vibrancy of the harbor, and now look up towards a mostly desolate embankment looming on the ocean's edge.
You know, as soon as you arrive in Elmina, you see the
Thank you.
The slave castle. It's this towering building that's much larger than anything else in the town. And so it's quite striking. It's this large white edifice that sort of stands out against the smaller buildings and against the sea. It appeared to me as quite a a an ominous sight, I would say.
But think of it in terms of a medieval castle. That is where the architecture was inspired from. Think of it also as being larger than any building around the township.
It is quite a contrast. Right outside the castle you have this bustling community, you know, that stands apart from this violent history that the slave castle represents.
🎵 Music
for me Yeah.
a colonial relic, a monument, an origin. A wound that is being nursed. سلولی پچھولی
As the site of the first so-called slave castle, built on Africa's gold coast by Europeans, Elmina can be considered ground zero for the transatlantic slave trade. And the echoes of its legacy are still very much alive today.
The history of the slave trade is just central for any understanding of our contemporary world. It is that kind of starting point, that crucial historical node. for thinking about the development of a global economy, of global capitalism, and very much tied within that of a notion of race and racism. And so we have to understand the slave trade in order to understand any of those things.
Elmina is a paradox, the castle with its dark and brutal past, and the town, its colorful and vibrant present. that clash can seem irreconcilable, leaving a simple but insistent question. What does Elmina itself represent?
It represents transcendence. So Elmina is home. a w a world of of peculiar two sided um wonder, if you like.
Two sided wonder what do you mean?
When I say two sided wonder, I mean that Elmina as a coastal town was a welcoming destination and it was also a gruesome departure. So that juxtaposition between the welcome and the departure. that double-sided paradigm to live in
🎵 Music
As part of our series on significant ports around the world, ideas producer Nikola Lukshic brings us into the two-sided wonder, that is, Elmina.
¶ Uncovering Elmina's Ancient Past
Good morning.
Philip Almoa Mensa is a tour guide. And do you know everybody here? Everyone seems to know you or is everyone just being friendly?
Yeah, that's great. I've been doing the walk and drive a very long time, so they know me. A lot of people know me, yeah.
For the last twenty years he's been taking tourists on walks through the town, the harbor, and of course, the infamous slave castle.
Amen.
Where we are standing now? Where's the old Elvina village?
Thank you.
Elimina! It's not the name of the town. It's a borrowed Portuguese word.
Okay.
Almina meaning the mine. So our people at that time couldn't pronounce it properly and it was corrupted into this word El Mina and that invariably became the name of the town. But we had a name before they came. This place was called Anomansan. And Anomansan simply means inexhaustible water.
inexhaustible water, and the lagoon a natural harbor. Rewind the clock about six hundred years. There are only two to three hundred people living in the settlement here, fishing, trading in spices.
Thank you.
And there was gold, lots of it. That gold is what first attracted a Portuguese explorer who arrived on its shores in 1471.
🎵 Music
His name was Fernal Gomez. Now, for now, Gomez came into prominence in the 1460s. Specifically in 1469, he received a charter from King Alfonso XI. And King Alfonso V granted him a charter to control all trade. Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE and he discovers much to his surprise a booming gold trade Now the gold trade was especially significant because it was alluvial gold. Alluvial gold simply means that it was washed over the river b riverbank.
So it wasn't a mined gold which we typically find now. But it was just it wo the the the gold would wash on the surface and you will start to find that even little kids had gold on their footwear. It was all over the place. So he thought he had chanced upon El Dorado.
🎵 Music
My name is and I am professor of English of the Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University.
Professor Kwayson is originally from Ghana, and he's one of Africa's most notable literary critics. He's interested in points of transition and the relationship between architecture and its social impact. Every year he brings students to Elmina.
It was the first castle built on the old. So Elmina is a prototypical example that we can explore, examine to understand the consequence of any of the castles that followed after it.
🎵 Music
¶ The Castle's Violent Construction
At first, the Portuguese appeared to be relatively cooperative trading partners, sending gold and spices back to Portugal. But about a decade after first contact, the Portuguese decided to build a full-scale European castle on its shores.
It must have been really jarring. Think of it in contrasting terms. It did not resemble any of the existing architecture. The existing architecture would have been small huts with grass thatched roofs. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that the fabric of the castle was all imported from Portugal. That is to say the king, King Yao II in fourteen eighty two, when he was desirous of building it, he shipped every component of the castle from Lisbon.
So these are stones though.
Everything. The wood, the stones, everything, metal, the locks on the doors and everything. He shipped them out to Elmina. on uh a ten they call them caravels. Caravels are cargo transporting ships of the period and then two ships. Along and this is really important, along with uh a hundred Portuguese artisans Plus five hundred armed men.
This is it's really important to note the number. So imagine two to three hundred people in this settlement and then suddenly this uh building em emerges on the shore. and not only that it now brings in almost twice the number of people that lived there before but this time armed So white folk, men, all of them are men, armed. The consequence of this was a shock. A shock.
And not only that there was resistance to the initial building of the castle which uh led to mayhem, you know, so there were running battles between the locals. who were being displaced because when they were given their land close to the shore there were people living around there but they wanted to dispose of them so they could take more of the land.
And they were running battles, some Portuguese soldiers died and they just uh set fire. Basically they adopted a scorched earth policy and they scorched the place. So there was resistance from the inception.
¶ Imposing New Orders and Beliefs
All attempts at resistance failed. The locals were outnumbered and outgunned. The Portuguese went ahead and built the castle, and added a moat and cannons. Some locals were hired as cooks and artisans, in effect, day laborers who'd enter the castle, work, early.
But what they left with was stories of the new hierarchies, racial hierarchies, that they the that were made evident to them inside the castle. uh in the sense of uh how they were given orders, how they were treated as heathens. Because the other thing that the Portuguese wanted to instill was Christianity. So they were trying to get people to convert and so on. So the workers in the who went to the castle, the Ilminans, also came out with stories
of uh humiliation, the you know, the disavowal of their habits and practices. In other words, the castle was also the site of new views of their subjugation and oppression. So the castle was not just a physical injury onto the spatial environment, but it was also instituting a new epistemic uh order of social and and racial relations.
That new epistemic order basically meant the Portuguese superimposing their worldview onto the belief systems that the people in Almina had, for centuries, defined themselves by.
They had their own pantheon of God. you know starting with Nyami or Onyankopon as they are called. But the Onyankopon or Nyami had subsidiary deities which were all connected to nature. So forest god, sea. The sea was really important obviously. The sea god, the god of rocks and so on. Now people would describe this as a form of animism. But I think it's a little bit more complicated than animism because the idea is that human life is closely connected to nature.
And there's a volatile proximity between the natural world and the human world. So the human world requires a certain acknowledgement or recognition of nature. but also that the boundary can always be breached. And that's how their world system and their belief system was constructed. Suddenly they see this um this monstrous edifice. which clearly is unnatural in every possible regard. They've also brought the worship of a new god.
that they tell us is meritocratic because that's what Christianity tries to preach that we were all one before God. It's a meritocratic religion and yet the practitioners of the religion
also demonstrate signs of racial hierarchy. So on the one hand the religion is meritocratic, everyone is equal before God but on the other hand the practitioners of it disavow other people's cultures and their humanity so how do we marry that they are telling us that or the fact that they are telling us that Jesu Christi is the son of God and he loves everyone and everyone is equal with the fact that they disdain us they cohabit with our our women without any uh regard for our culture norms.
¶ From Gold Trade to Human Trafficking
It didn't take long, just a few decades, for the Portuguese to shift from trading in material goods to trading in humans. Women and children were captured far from shore, bound and brought to the castle where they were imprisoned.
We are at Elimina dungeon. Built by the Portuguese. in fourteen eighty two. When the attention shifted from gold and others to human trait, these same warehouses were converted into dungeons where the Africans were kept. And in total the castle is talking of a minimum of one thousand Africans at the time, four hundred women, six hundred men. The cactus had to walk as far as Cameroon. Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
And from there, they came to Sandima, Salavugu, to the southern part of Ghana. And over here, they were imprisoned. for two to three months before they were shipped away. In the dungeons, language barrier was a problem and communicable diseases was at its highest peak.
What happens on the institution of slavery for the Elminans, they now see Other black people and this itself must have been a shock to start with, other people who look like them, they are not white, they are black, are uh shepherded in chains. into the castle. There were many instances of resistance against slavery in both at Elmina and Cape Coast and other places. So it was offensive.
But what then happens is that for the workers inside the castle, the Elminan workers inside the castle They will also have seen the the enslaved in the various dungeons in the castle praying in different tongues to different gods and Which deities and gods obviously were not hearing them otherwise they will not be shackled and thrown on these ships. What does it mean to cry to a God who does not seem to answer?
🎵 Music
What does it mean?
In the scheme of our belief system that now men and women who look like us Are wailing and crying. Please visualize the scene. The people who were brought in chains, they were emaciated in many instances. There were sores on their bodies from their shackles. They were extremely hungry, and many of them had never set eyes on the sea before. This m monstrosity called the ocean. The ocean hitting the shore, They were shocked and scared, they were crying and wailing. So the Elminans
would have borne witness to this. What does it mean that these white folk in the castle who have shown us very clearly that they completely disregard our life way? and even threaten us with violence for trading with another entity. What does it mean for them to absorb these black populations wailing into the belly of this whale, this castle.
Thank you. Thank you.
¶ Horrors Within the Female Dungeon
The largest female's dungeon. 150 of the women were sleeping on the floor. We had to walk barefoot. From their various countries to this place and some very, very weak and many die. And when they died, they were not buried. They were removed and thrown into the ocean for the fish to feed on. They gave them something more to eat just to keep them alive. Some ate. Some refused to eat. They preferred to die.
Okay.
And we're the stones we're walking on are Very dark.
Yeah, this is um made up of stones. This was where they were sleeping on it.
Yeah.
They defecated, they vomited, there are everything on the floor.
Thank you.
I don't really have the words. It's harrowing, even now, to recall those dark stained walls we pass by. And the ground we were walking on, with its dark buildup that was found by forensic tests to contain centuries of human matter blood, skin, feces.
🎵 Music
¶ Poet's Homage: Feeling the Walls
In the dungeons I could almost feel as though The walls through them, through their inscriptions, their blood and sweat on these walls were speaking to be spoken for. My name is Sapong Osei Asamoah. I'm a Ghanaian poet and educator. I'm the author of Yanom. uh poetry chapbook on postcolonial pandemic.
Sarpong's visits to Elmina Castle have profoundly shaped his work as a poet. He was permitted to walk through the castle barefoot.
I was given the privilege of doing that, which I'm told was rare. In my culture Um, of the voto region and the action people. One of the greatest signs of respect is to take. your shoes off, which means that you are become one with the earth, the soil. Homage, reverence. Deference to have lowered yourself before whichever titan you were in front of. So for me. To enter a place of so much power and presence. they wouldn't have felt respectful to the ghosts I had come to see to walk among them.
insulating myself from the floor and the ground on which they stepped. It was a sign of respect. It was my own way of Joining them.
In that act.
My best lesson is was in the castle. Because the silence, right, spoke so much. than any other worlds could have ever done. The silence It was a rumbling silence. It's it was A vibration
Silent.
you could feel it and not hear it, considering that the Almina Castle is built upon rocks that are in between the lagoon and the Atlantic. I like to think it received language vibration, right? Which w is where l language begins from all of the creatures that populate this water body, including all the ancestors, the They are ghosts. It was a vibrational one. It was not deafening. It was not absolute. You could feel the silence. You just
Hear it.
¶ The Door of No Return's Legacy
world upwards of one thousand people. They'd be held for two to three months, cramped in windowless cells together. Those who survived in these holding cells would then be crammed once more onto ships before heading across the Atlantic. This is ideas, I'm Nala Ayed.
Hi, Donovan Woods here.
Hey hey, it's me Tom Power.
to tell you about our brand new podcast is called The Big Five.
Donovan, what is the big
Five. Yeah, exactly. What is the big five? That's what the big five is all about. Every week Tom and I will sit down with a special guest and dive into new topics, debating things like: what are the big five farm animals? The big five types of hat? The big five guys named Paul.
Martin, Revere, Mezcal, McCartney, John Paul II.
debate is settled by a listener from somewhere across the country. It's like a game.
It is a game show.
The Big Five, available now wherever you get your pocket.
After the Dutch took control of the Elmina Castle in sixteen thirty-seven, the scale and pace of the slave trade escalated across West Africa. But while records aren't complete, it's estimated that thirteen million Africans were forced into slavery. before the transatlantic slave trade was largely abolished in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Elmina Castle in Ghana is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Museum.
It is just one of the roughly forty castles and forts built along the west coast of Africa and used to hold enslaved Africans.
🎵 Music
In the courtyard of the Almina Castle grounds stands the church.
Yeah.
Dach, czeć, 6, 10, 10, 10, 11, 12, 12, 13, 14, 14, 15, 16, 16, 17, 17, 18, 18, 19, 20, 20, 21, 21, 21, 22, 22, 23, 24, 24, 25, 25, 26, 26, 26, 27, 28, 29, 29, 29, 29, 29, 29, 29, 29, 30, 29, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 31, 31, 31, 31, 31, 32, 31, 31, 32, 31, 32, 31, 32, 31, 32, 31, 32, 31, 32, 31, 32, 31, 32, 31, 32, 32, 31, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32
And in the church there's an inscription. Zion is the temple of the Lord. The Lord lives here forever.
🎵 Music
Forever. The walls of the
Omina Castle. I mean, symbolically ironically built just beneath the beautiful walled cortoces of dungeon police and the church. of of the castle was was defaced and you can take that as a metaphor for the treatment of the inmates, if you like, of the people, of the slaves that were brought there, the defacing of the walls. The defacing, not just the defaced, but to live legacy, to live inscription, to live to live some kind of recollection, reminder, a record.
For us who would come after them to know. even writing, even inscription, was defiance, was art and was a way, a channel. For us to. understand them, for us to feel them, because in feeling the grooves in these walls, in the in their desperate attempts to leave some kind of record, you can Feel them because they left this there for for reading. They left this there so we can feel. All of the blood, all of the suit. You know, for the space there.
I've I've never been so claustrophobic. For me All of that made Elmina the Elmina Castle dungeons.
Okay, let me go straight to the most profound uh location in the entire castle. And that is uh the door of no return.
We've seen the door of North 10.
And so this is where we're going to be able to do
The men will go through from this point, the woman joined from the other side to the door of Narutan. So we're going to the door of Narutan.
Each of the European castles along the coastline would have had a door of no return, through which each individual would be forced to pass before being packed into ships. The castle in Almina is among the few that remains intact, still in its original form.
Mr. Gosh.
I do have a flashlight. It just makes me feel a bit
It was dark as it as you see from that time to now.
Okay.
They always make sure that they can be controlled.
Wow, even with the flashlight you can barely see anything. Okay, and now another passage where you have to completely crouch, probably about the height of my waist, but crouch down. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
This is the little room back.
Thank you.
This is the way to make the passage.
Thank you.
Before the sea was touching the castle, but it has receded. So when the ships came a smaller boat was brought here to convey them to the big ships before they were taken away, taken to Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, Liverpool, the Caribbean and America.
The most poignant thing about this doll is that if you're an African American with diasporic blackface, and you stand before that door, you know that one of your ancestors made it through and lived.
And many people break down when they see it. Actually of all races, both uh black and white, but but African Americans having seen it or Africans or the diaspora caribbeans and so on Jamaicans and Barbadians and so on if you are a black descendant and you stand before that door you know that one of your ancestors passed through and lived The story is told that of every twelve slaves that made it from the hinterland.
Sometimes uh up north, way up in northern Ghana to the south, and then to the New World. At least nine died. Of every twelve, nine died. So if you stand before that door and you are a black heritage person, one of your ancestors, not only did they pass through that door, but they lived. That is such a poignant and as I said the poignancy do Elmina Dove of No Return I've seen people uh react like they throw up. They have a visceral the reaction is so visceral.
They break down in tears. Even me. I've been there many times, but there's no day time that I stand before that door and I don't shudder in horror at what happened.
🎵 Music
¶ Academic and Personal Reflection
It was very important to me personally to visit Olmina. It is it's very difficult. Um it's it's a very moving experience to be there. Um
Bye.
It's something that It takes a while to recover afterwards, frankly. Um yeah, it it's um it takes quite a while to process. My name is Bio Holsey. I'm an associate professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at Emory University. I I think I've always been drawn to the history of the slave trade. I've had this desire to understand it. Um and in I think in the process to understand my own family's history.
history and to understand my own identity as an African American. And so visiting these sites was a way to
Yeah.
really make that history palpable. For me, I could, you know, attempt to imagine my ancestors in this space or in a similar space, imprisoned, tortured Hungry, separated from family, all of the horrors that are associated with that experience to kind of Imagine that. Imagine this moment before the middle passage before this. forced migration to the Americas, the centuries of enslavement that followed. It's a very, very painful history to uh to recall.
But also as a descendant of enslaved people it
Uh
I also always think about this history in terms of the fact that my ancestors survived it, right? And that I am the product of their survival. And so for me it's a history. To always honor, to honor their suffering and their survival, because it is the reason why I'm here today.
¶ Elmina's Contemporary Identity and Legacy
Professor Bioholsey first came to Elmina in 2001 as part of her PhD research as an anthropologist. She was struck by the juxtaposition of the castle and its unspeakable cruelties, and the vibrancy of life not far from its walls.
It is quite a a contrast because right outside the castle you have this bustling community, you have fishermen who are constantly coming in.
🔊 Chant
and they're mending nets and so forth. You have market women who are selling goods, you have people walking um through the thoroughfare. So there's a great deal of activity going on. Um Um that is you know that stands apart from this violent history that the slave castle represents. And that's precisely what I was interested in exploring. In fact, is thinking about the contemporary community within Almina and how they understand this history.
history given that they are living kind of in the shadow of this slave castle, but of course it's not determining every aspect of their lives.
Is it something that's just ignored or tolerated or how how would you describe that relationship?
Yeah.
Well when I first began my research in Almina and I was asking people about the history of the slave trade, asking what they knew about it, what they had learned about it. So for many people, especially at this time, many people were not interested in publicly discussing the slave trade. They may have known various things about that history.
But it wasn't considered appropriate to have public discourse about it. At the same time, I also discovered that for a lot of young people, kind of teenagers and young adults. They were increasingly interested in this history. They were kind of tied into more global black discourses about the slave trade that has used it as A means to critique the racialized global economy that we exist in today. So I discovered this.
Sort of dichotomy between how older generations were approaching the history and how the younger generation was thinking about it. Right? So they were thinking about this history which is really at the root of um the emergence of capitalism and points to the integral nature of race. to global capitalism that was allowing them to connect that to their current day um situation and and speak about contemporary forms of global racism.
Well it it it it is in some ways really um the ground zero for uh global economic and racial injustice.
Absolutely. It's the the sort of А старт в інеклолізта ви тоді.
On the streets of Almina today there are other visible reminders of the colonial imprint. Liverpool.
Yeah, it's
Why Liverpool?
The British had an influence here.
Yeah.
Yeah. So when you go to Cape Group, you have the London Bridge.
Okay.
They called the London Bridge. Since the British were in Cape Coast, enslaving Africans over there. So that small bridge there they call the London Bridge. And in the meeting we have the Liverpool Street. So this is the Liverpool Street.
And not far off Liverpool Street are the crumbling brick remnants of European homes dating back centuries.
감사합니다.
Wendy
Uh
After being over here For a while.
Thank you.
They never brought their women. So they were sexually abusing with a woman in the dungeons.
Yeah.
And some of them, you might call it decent ones, they went to town at the old Adwina village. God married. They stay with their wives. They had children and they gave their name to their children. So as you walk within town I will show you one of the typical European builders. You know, the Dutch brought in. Yellowish band bricks and the body brought in reddish band bricks. So I'll show you a typical house that is not in a good shop at the moment, but it's a pure European building in town.
So they would be four hundred years old?
Продолжение следует...
Thank you.
Five hundred.
कर दो कर दो
Thank you.
Liverpool Street is still called Liverpool Street. The old abandoned Dutch houses are still standing, even in their crumbled form. The fishing boats lining the harbor are decorated with flags of European countries and football or soccer teams. Looking at the mashup of past and present, it's hard to fully grasp the complexity that is Almina.
It is important to understand Elmina as a site today that is a marginalized town within a marginalized nation within the global economy. And so there are these levels of experience. exclusion uh that people who live there are grappling with people who many of whom do not have a lot of uh economic resources, do not have a lot of opportunities, um people for whom Travel to other countries is extremely difficult, um often out of reach. And so there's
this um this sense of sort of stuckness, of exclusion that that people are living with. And In that context, recalling a past in which their town was this central site of global trade, where the Dutch decided to set up their headquarters, is um A source of a kind of pride, right? It it's a way of remembering a time in which their town was central to the global economy. And I think also recalling that history is in fact a way to make a claim on a a future
of greater uh inclusion in the global economy. And that's what I think is really important to understand. That I feel like that that That's the claim that people were making and it wasn't a claim about the slave trade not being important or anything of that nature, but it was a different sort of understanding of this history. Um but it so happened that uh often what occurred in the process was this silencing of the history of the slave trade because of course
that was what the Dutch were engaged in while they were uh headquartered in Almina. So there's this very strange relationship to that history that uh emerged in Almina.
¶ Silence and Re-membering as Strategy
Yeah, that's interesting. And I'm I'm quoting from your work where you you say that um that silence is a strategy that groups can employ in order to negotiate opp oppressive conditions. Can you can you elaborate on on silence as a strategy and how you see it manifest there?
Yes, I think uh silence is a strategy to negotiate their position in the global economy. So thinking again about, for instance, the kinds of Stigmatizing narratives that uh European colonial historians constructed. discussing African participation in the slave trade by silencing those histories, by kind of sequestering them from discourse. Um people are are trying to
negotiate that stigmatization, fight back against that stigmatization. And so in that regard, that silencing is in fact a a political act where they are trying to kind of repair their communities in a global context in which they face a great deal of um exclusion.
And Here's another question that I'm drawing from your book'cause you you meditate a a little bit on on the idea of remembering and you add the hyphen between the re and the and the member. So what does it mean to remember?
I did want to play with that idea of both Recalling the past and reconstituting it or and reconstit reconstituting communities in the process. And I was drawing on Jennifer Cole and an another anthropologist who uses the term remember in in that dual fashion as well. Also it's a bit of a playoff of Tony Morrison and her notion of rememory which
Which is thinking about the influence of the past on the present. So to remember then is much more than just sort of thinking about the past, but it has this deep influence on the present and it has a deep influence on our communities and on the integrity of those communities, how we think about them, protect them, reassert their importance in the present. Uh memory plays a central role in all of that.
¶ Poetic Expression of Ancestral Pain
I climb like sea salt up bedrock. I swear. My feet clump upon the good great teeth of the old gods. I want them to hear me coming. My bit. I touch the walls to feel their skin. It is not a caress. But it is close to its secret. I put my fingertip against the markings on every wall here and beg for translation. I press till I lose feeling in my forefinger blood. My only remittance. Then I hear them. They called to me. Plead with us. On the shore I hold out my forefinger.
and let my blood fall onto God's tongue.
And you know, um Normally, because this is a fishing community, because they don't go through Fishing on Tuesday. That is where when somebody died.
Amen.
¶ Elmina's Transcendence and Defiant Joy
Elmina has gone through so much um tragedy. I will say overcome so much story. When you go to Almina today And you didn't know anything about Elmina, you would think um the Elminans built a huge castle. And after that, mid towns around it. Um Omina is bustling. Omina is fishing. Omina is creating light. Um but it has not always been so. So I say Elmina's gone beyond tragedy and death to to propagate life and prosperity and joy.
Hmm. Is that how you come to the idea of transcendence?
Yes. to go beyond to move beyond, to be much more than the town that had the um Elmina Castle that saw so much gruesome happenings to go beyond that to to choose to remember life. Chooses to You know be resilient. I count it as well. A wound that will heal. It's healing. You find that the people of homina are And It is this buoyancy, it is this this joy in their hearts. um this this defiant joy not to succumb to their recent history.
I mean, Omina is such a capacious place. It's such a an interesting creation, if you will, of of history and of the present. For me, my heart is is joy. It's gladness that I feel that this group of people have been able to, you know, transcend and live an amazing um existence.
Yeah.
Ghanaian Poet Sarpong Osei Assamon We have a link to his poetry from our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. Thank you to all the guests who contributed to this episode.
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My name is Philip Vamormeza.
My name is Attu Queisen and I am professor of English. Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University.
My name is Bio Holse. I'm an associate professor of African American Studies and Anthropological. at Emory University.
Ghanaian poet?
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This episode was produced by Nicola Luxich. Technical producers, Sam McNulty, Emily Kieran. Gary Francis and Gabriela Gonzalez. Web producer Lisa Producer Nikola Lukshic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed.
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For more C BC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcast.