Elmina as Postcolonial Space

Abstract

The town of Elmina in Cape Coast, Ghana, is usually associated with the Elmina Castle as a key site within UNESCO’s Slave Route project, whereby tourism becomes the vehicle for remembering and mourning the memorial consequences of the Atlantic slave trade. Abutting the tourist-oriented Castle, however, is a crumbling yet lived-in urban space, in whose town planning and architecture we see evidence of another shaping force: creolization as the occluded other to slavery and colonialism within the story of Western Africa. Moreover, the town is also home to the Elmina Java Museum, which memorializes Elmina’s links to the Indian Ocean world, especially as invested in the textiles that moved between Africa and Asia during different phases of world history. Through this variegated postcolonial space of Elmina, I excavate sedimented histories of transoceanic creolization that connect the continent to both Atlantic and Indian Oceans. From this reading of Elmina through the lens of a transoceanic creolized past and its relationship to the present, I prise open the contours of postcolonial spatiality to propose for it a genealogy both radically compromised and promisingly porous.

Keywords:

• creolization
• Dutch postcoloniality
• Elmina
• inter-imperial histories
• postcolonial memorialization
• postcolonial spatiality

Notes

1 I understand “creolization” as the process of innovative adaptability under circumstances of coerced and violent co-habitation in a delimited physical space, which results in new cultural products arising from the unpredictable mixture of elements taken from pre-existing cultures, whose encounter has been enabled through expansionism, mercantilism, colonialism, and empire. The demographic transfer necessary to initiate creolization includes the displacement of Africans and Asians precipitated by slavery and indentured labor, as well as the movement of Europeans to Africa, the Americas, and Asia within the above-named larger historical processes. The literature is vast, but useful entry points are Chaudenson (2002) and Cohen and Toninato (2010).

2 I conducted two field visits to Elmina (January 2017 and December 2017), within the framework of the ERC-Advanced Grant funded project, Modern Moves, which I directed (2013–2018). The impetus for these visits was to inventory the ways in which Afro-Latin social dance practices in West Africa intersect with the tourism industry that has developed around the memorialization of the transatlantic slave trade. The second visit was also motivated by my emergent research interest in the transoceanic history of Elmina. Hence I deliberately commenced that visit at the Java Museum rather than the Castle.

3 See https://www.vlisco.com/fabric_story/angelina/. “Angelina” is an example of Java print that, although popularly conflated with “Dutch Wax” (as by Manus Ulzen), is technically distinct from it in that it is not created through wax resist processes.

4 These concluding words on the note are those of Inneke Van Kessel, whose research excavated the full story of the family for the illumination of its descendants; it was in collaboration with her that T. P. Manus Ulzen wrote Java Hill, supplementing his family and personal memories with the archival work she had done. See also Vergès (2013, 41–42), where she cites Van Kessel (2005) and this story as proof of the “south–south exchanges triggered by European imperialism.”

5 Ibrahim Mahama, “A Straight Line through the Carcass of History 1649” (2016–2019), Ghana Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2019 (smoked fish mesh, wood, cloth, scrolls and archival materials). 1649 is the year that the Dutch built Ussher Fort to consolidate their hold on what subsequently became the Dutch Gold Coast. The stench of smoked fish emanating from the mesh filled the Ghana Pavilion and permeated its surrounding pavilions in the Biennale’s Arsenale site.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by H2020 European Research Council: [grant number ERC-2012-AdG-324198)].