Rhizomorphics of race and space: Ghana's slave castles and the roots of African diaspora identity

Journal of Architectural Education

Volumn 60, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 48-59

  Jordan, Coleman A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 48549107903     PISSN: 10464883     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1531-314X.2007.00108.x     Document Type: Review

References (68)

1. Darell Wayne Fields, Architecture in Black (New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, 2000), pp. xxvii, xxviii
2. Christopher DeCorse dates the shift in trade to slavery to 1600 in "The Danes on the Gold Coast: Culture, Change and the European Presence," in The African Archaeological Review, no. 11: 149-73, 155
3. Paul Gilroy, "Living Memory: A Meeting with Toni Morrison," in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Culture (London: Serpent's Tail, 1993), p. 237
4. Tommi Shelby's We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 40, Shelby mentions Martin A. Delany's efforts to Africanize the origins of modern architecture
5. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 4
6. Gilroy's "rhizomorph" echoes Deleuze and Guattari's "rhizome." See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). This botanical metaphor of horizontal stems, roots, and shoots, also signifies some plants' ability to move from host to host, thus emphasizing its kinesthetic qualities
7. This inquiry involves a confrontation with mindsets and ideologies on both sides of the color line, echoing Gilroy's point in Black Atlantic, p. 36, that "talking seriously about the politics and aesthetics of black vernacular cultures demands an embarrassing confrontation with substantive interracial differences that make the easy essentialism from which most critical judgments are constructed simply untenable."
8. Interview with Toni Morrison, in Gilroy, Small Acts, p. 178
9. Cheryl Finley explains, "this type of leisure travel is ... called roots tourism, ... after Alex Haley's popular novel and later television miniseries, Roots, which spurred the first big wave of African American heritage tourism in the late 1970s. "This followed the designation of Elmina and Cape Coast as World Heritage Monuments by UNESCO in 1972
10. see Cheryl Finley, "The Door of (No) Return," Common Place 1, no. 4 (July 2001); www.common-place.org
11. See Craig Barton, ed., Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), p. xiv
12. This number reflects the tentative status of some of these structures, many of which have been preserved only partially and have been deteriorating due to looting and climate. Malcolm Billings's "Ghana's Slave Castles," History Today 49 (August 1999): pp. 2-3, lists "over sixty such strongholds," p. 2
13. "Appellative" comes from "appellation," the term, Albert Van Danzig explains, that was used to describe a class of things that were best known, Forts and Castles of Ghana (Accra: Sedco Publishing, 1980), pp. i-ii
14. Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992) uses "contact zone" to describe "colonial encounters ... the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures ... whose trajectories now intersect," pp. 6-7
15. Richard Wright, Black Power, a Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (New York: Harper, 1954), p. 340
16. Kwesi J. Anquandah, Castles and Forts of Ghana (Paris: Atalante for Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, 1999), p. 52; see Finley, "The Door," n.p
17. Billings, "Ghana's Slave Castles," p. 2
18. See also Edward M. Bruner, "Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora," American Anthropologist, New Series 98, no. 2 (June 1996): pp. 290-304, 292
19. A. W. Lawrence's Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963) claims that "an old belief that Elmina Castle was sent out to the Coast prefabricated is based on a misunderstanding," p. 91
20. Van Dantzig, Forts and Castles, pp. 5, 6; Bruner, "Tourism," p. 292. Billings, "Ghana's Slave," notes another instance of the convergence of political and religious forces with architectural design when he mentions that the "merchants and administrators [who were] adherents of the Dutch Reformed Church, had refused to worship where Catholics prayed before, and built their own chapel in another part of the castle," p. 2
21. DeCorse, "The Danes," mentions that the castle was used by the Gold Coast Police Force and the Ghana Police as "a headquarters and training center until 1972, when it was transferred to GMMB," p. 109
22. William St. Clair, The Grand Slave Emporium: Cape Coast Castle and the British Slave Trade (London: Profile Books, 2006), p. iii
23. Billings, "Ghana's," p. 2
24. See Bruner "Tourism," pp. 292-3
25. Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriation and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 276-84
26. and Finley, "The Door."
27. I heard this reported by one of the visitors in 1995. Bruner mentions name-calling and physical attacks related to this kind of crosscultural misunderstandings "Tourism," p. 296
28. Renee Neblet, an African-American artist and founder of Kokrobitey School in Ghana, created an exercise for the tour guides that used their own cultural tools of storytelling and superstition. She asked them to write down and then tear up and throw away the names of their beloved family members. This struck a chord with her students, who felt they were participating in a metaphorical destruction of their families. Many of the Ghanaian tour guides and administrators were actually brought to tears by this exercise, rather than by the raw emotions of the black American visitors
29. Billings, "Ghana's," quotes research by Prof. Akosua Perbi of the University of Ghana that "has shown a substantial African involvement in the trade," pp. 2, 3
30. Bruner's "Tourism" mentions "domestic African slavery and an earlier period (1400 to 1600) of Arab slave trading across the Sahara to the Middle East and the Mediterranean," p. 295
31. Benjamin W. Kankpeyeng and Christopher DeCorse, "Ghana's Vanishing Past: Development, Antiquities, and the Destruction of Archaeological Record," The African Archaeological Review 21, no. 2 (June 2004): 89-128, 91
32. Bruner, "Tourism," 302
33. The six leaders of the United Gold Coast Convention (U.G.C.C.): Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey, Mr. Ako Adjei, Mr. Edward Akuffo-Addo, Dr. J. B. Danquah, and Mr. William Ofori Atta
34. Akosan-Sarpong, "The Osu Castle: The Trophy," http://www. ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/features/artikel.php?ID=70008 (accessed November 18, 2004)
35. Finley, "The Door," n.p
36. Akosan-Sarpong, "The Osu Castle."
37. Anquandah's Castles and Forts defines a "lodge" as a "sort of miniature fort" and an "indefensible trading post ... small-sized, built often of earthen material or wood but sometimes of local stone," p. 10, while the fort "took the form of a permanent, durable structure built in brick or stone ... [and] had up to 50 guns installed in it." A castle covered "a wider area than did a fort, was larger in size and had a more complex network of buildings ... [and] capacity for a much larger population ... [including] up to 1000 slaves ... equipped with up to 100 guns and extensive logistics," pp. 10-11
38. DeCorse, "The Danes," p. 159
39. Lawrence, Trade Castles, p. 199
40. see also Anquandah, Castles and Forts, pp. 24-8
41. Van Dantzig, Forts, pp. 31-2
42. Ibid
43. For accounts of journeys to the Gold Coast and conditions at the castles, see also Leif Svalesen, The Slave Ship Fredensborg, trans. Pat Shaw and Selena Winsnes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 211-35
44. Ludevig F. Rømer, Tilforladelig Efterretning om Kysten Guinea [A Reliable Account of the Guinea Coast] (Copenhagen, Denmark, 1760)
45. quoted in Lawrence, Trade Castles, pp. 213, 214, 206
46. Svalesen's The Slave Ship provides Rømer's story, pp. 13-14
47. I lectured on the early findings related to this project in Århus and Odense in 1997, and was struck by the resistance of my audience of students, high school teachers, and faculty towards the Danish involvement in the slave trade
48. DeCorse, "The Danish," p. 155
49. Anquandah, Castles, p. 46
50. See Steven Buckley, "U.S. African Blacks Differ on Turning Slave Dungeons into Tourist Attractions," The Washington Post, Washington D.C., News Foreign (April 17, 1995), section A, p A-10
51. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana, p. 280
52. See Anon., "Stones of Shame," Review of The Grand Slave Emporium by William St. Clair. The Economist (July 29, 2006): 75
53. Gaines, American Africans, pp. 280-82
54. Tom Feelings, The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo (New York: Dial, 1995)
55. Joanne Braxton, Crossing Deep River: A Ritual Drama in Three Movements (Unpublished play, 1999)
56. June 19, 1865 is considered the last day of slavery in the United States
57. This is a direct quotation of the guide's words. Lawrence, Trade Castles, estimates life expectancy for Europeans at four to five years; this often had more to do with "unsuitable living-quarters, poor diet and habitual drunkenness" - than the local climate, pp. 61, 62
58. Male slaves may have been sexually abused, too; so far, there are no written records
59. This statement was also used by Elmina guides
60. James Baldwin, Perspectives: Angles on African Art (New York: The Center for African Art and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987), p. 115
61. This facade resembles the entry of Palazzetto Zuccari in Rome, which S.E. Rasmussen called the "gaping jaws of a giant" in Experiencing Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962), p. 20
62. Phillis Wheatley, "On Being Brought from Africa to America" (1773), in Patricia Liggins Hill et al., eds., Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 98
63. Neville A.T. Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies (Mona: The University of the West Indies Press, 1992), pp. 44-45
64. Robert Hayden, "The Middle Passage," in A Ballad of Remembrance (London: Paul Breman, 1962), p. 64
65. The original exit was placed at the end of a narrow passage that is now blocked off
66. Lydia Polygreen, "Ghana's Uneasy Embrace of Slavery's Diaspora," New York Times (December 27, 2005): 1
67. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2003), pp. 87-9
68. Kwame Anthony Appiah, "The Case for Contamination," The New York Times Magazine (January 1, 2006): 30-37, 34