Books by Kalamu ya
Salaam
The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts
Movement /
360:
A Revolution of Black Poets
Everywhere Is Someplace Else: A Literary Anthology
/
From A Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets
Our Music Is No Accident /
What Is Life: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self
My Story My Song (CD)
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The
Forts and Castles of Ghana
By Kalamu ya Salaam
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In the absence of any
physical landmarks of this historical journey into
chaos, other communities of African people may seek
refuge in collective amnesia as a natural defence
against the unbearable trauma of the savageries of the
slave trade. But for the people of Ghana, there can be
no escape from a historical reality as palpable as the
slave castle. Ultimately, Ghana's Pan African
consciousness reaches far into a fractured, deeply
wounded collective unconscious that insists on being
uncovered so that it may be healed back to wholeness.
The slave forts and castles are the most immediate
though confusing gateway into the collective
unconscious. To contemplate and, above all, to penetrate
the puzzling, even frightening mystery of these
monuments
of enslavement is to come to terms with our history of
fragmentation, the basis of Pan African consciousness
and struggle. -- Excerpt
from Slave Castle, African Historical Mindscape &
Literary Imagination by Kofi Anyidoho, University of
Ghana.
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Elmina - 1482. Built by the Portuguese, is
the first of the slave castles. I ask questions. The more I try
to find out, the less I learn. There is broad confusion as to
how many castles there are in Ghana. In West Africa.
Castles. These military forts which served
as administrative centers for colonial government and the
administration of the gold and slave trade, including the
temporary housing of items of trade: guns, beads, alcohol, cloth
from Europe and, sine qua non, gold and human flesh from
Africa's interior.
 |
In Elmina I find one small book,
Forts
and Castles of Ghana by Albert van Dantzig, and one small
pamphlet, The Castles Of Elmina by Tony Hyland of the
Department of Architecture, University of Science &
Technology, Kumasi.
In her prescient manner, Nia somehow
strikes up a conversation with Albert van Dantzig who just
happens to be passing through at that time. I am upstairs in the
little gift shop, feeling prideful because I have purchased
these two writings and a few other books about Ghana. When I
descend the steps clutching my catch, Nia introduces me to Mr.
Dantzig. He is seventy some years old, from Holland, now living
in Ghana. We talk briefly. He autographs his book for us.
Danzig's book focuses on a chronological
summary of the construction and administration of the 50 forts
and castles of Ghana.
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Danzig suggests "To our knowledge the
following list of castles, forts and lodges -- from west to east
-- could be regarded as complete." Complete? Can there ever
be a complete history of the slave trade and all of the
institutions it engendered? For me Dantzig's book is a
beginning, a point of departure, an indication, a partial map,
the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
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Tradeposts, fortified or not, have been
built in various parts of the world, but nowhere in such
great numbers along such a relatively short stretch of
coast. At various places, such as Accra, Komenda and
Sekondi, forts were actually built within gun-range of
each other. Within three centuries more than sixty
castles, forts and lodges were built along a stretch of
coast less than 300 miles (500 km) long.
Many of these buildings are still in existence at the
present, and if some of them could be regarded as
important individual monuments, the whole chain of
buildings, whether intact, ruined or merely known as
sites, could be seen as a collective historical monument
unique in the world: the ancient 'shopping street' of
West Africa. The 'shops' varied greatly in size and
importance. If some could be
compared with department stores, others were
hardly more than village stores. (p. vii)
* * *
The essential purpose of all these buildings was to
serve as store-houses for goods brought from Europe and
bought on the Coast, and as living quarters for a
permanent commercial and military staff. If the earliest
of these buildings were mainly fortified on the
land-side against enemies expected from that side, soon
the real danger appeared to come rather from the side of
the sea, in the form of European competitors. During the
sixteenth century a growing number of French and English
ships came to trade in what was supposed to be a
Portuguese monopoly area. An even more serious threat to
Portuguese supremacy on the Coast came from the Dutch,
who had arrived in large numbers on the coast by the end
of that century...(p. xii)
* * *
It should be pointed out that the Europeans did not
have any territorial jurisdiction beyond the walls of
their forts; the very land on which they were built was
only rented. Each European nation tried to reserve
exclusive trading rights for itself with the local
rulers. It is therefore not surprising that political
disintegration set in all along the coast, and
consequently the tradeposts had to be armed not only to
drive competitors away, but also to protect the traders
inside the forts or the people on whose territory they
were built against attacks by neighboring African
states.
It was also for geographical reasons that all this
European commercial activity concentrated in this
relatively small area: first of all there is the obvious
fact that Ghana is the only area where there are
substantial gold deposits comparatively near to the
coast. But Ghana's coast is also suitable for building
forts because it is rocky, thus providing building
material and strong natural foundations, and access from
the interior to the sea is not, as in neighboring areas,
interrupted by lagoons and mangrove swamps... (p. xiii) |
The 96 page book has only eight indexed references to
slavery, and most of those are cursory.
* * *
Since 1876, down through the current
administration, Christiansborg Castle has served as the seat of
government.
Some castles are used as prisons.
Others as administrative offices, post offices and the
like.
Others are museums and national monuments.
Some are in total disrepair.
Some are merely decaying archeological sites.
Elmina has been recently painted and
remodeled. Ironically painted bright white. Whitewashed. Inside
there is a photo exhibit with a narrative. The exhibit was
created by the French. Plaques have been placed. Some original
plaques have been preserved. A few new ones have been added.
There is a sign listing the admission prices.
All kinds of subterranean rumblings bash
the stones of Elmina. Something, I can never get the straight of
the story to say exactly what the "thing" was, but
something about slavery was put up and then taken down. Taken
down allegedly because the Ghanaians didn't want to offend
whites.
|
Didn't want to offend. Whites.
Diaspora Africans living in Ghana
are rightfully incensed by the vacillations.
Outside Elmina there is a beach
party.
Butts shaking on sacred ground. |
Dr. Robert Lee who went to Ghana during
Nkrumah's days. Whose son and wife died in Ghana. Dr. Lee who
has spent over thirty years of his life in Ghana. Who operated a
clinic for the poor of Ghana. Dr. Lee's pocket was picked during
the solemn commemorative program at the castle.
|
A brass band played. People danced.
The procession was not so solemn.
There was no written program. There
were no informative speeches. No story telling. No
rituals of remembrance. |
Frankly, this whole recognition effort is
just now seriously getting underway and Ghana is not quite sure
how to do it.
I am told: If anything substantial is to
happen with respect to the castles you people will have to make
it happen. It will not be given to you. You will have to take
it.
|
They took the old door down. They
painted everything pretty and new.
When will the truth be told? |
Within the stones of the castle our
ancestral spirits are entombed. They silently await excavation.
Await our detailed investigation.
A sankofa seed is planted. I want to return
to Ghana and do a collaborative work with a Ghana scholar. I
want to focus on the impact of the slave trade on Africans, both
continental and diaspora. Towards the end of our trip, as the
idea becomes clearer, I approach Kwadwo Tgyemang. He eagerly
accepts.
It's on. There is no concise, point of
origin history of the slave trade, not to mention no afrocentric
assessment of the impact of slavery. Let's look at the real
history, who played what role. Let's investigate and meditate,
confront and come to grips with the positives and negatives of
our history.
As significant as the castles are and as
many of them as there are in Ghana, there is a paucity of
documentation. This lack is a clear manifestation of Ghana's
historic amnesia. But also a clear manifestation of diasporan
ignorance. Yet what goes around, comes around.
We were cast out. We shall return. Like a
stone flung at the sun. Like a boomerang. Like a child separated
from its mother.
* * *
The history of people is movement. I can
sense in the diaspora a slow turning. A serious seeking for
alternative. In conversations throughout our stay in Ghana
invariably the thoughts we expressed amongst ourselves pivoted
on the notion of moving. Africa, in general, and Ghana, in
particular, is a magnet.
No news here, but certainly relevance. The
communal implosion and resultant disintegration of social life
in the United States will invariably fling individuals away from
that center toward the peripheries where other realities exist.
For practical reasons: life and
development. For historical reasons: birth and essence. For
cultural reasons: temperament and lifestyle. For the love of
self and Blackness -- Africa. Africa, in all its contradictions,
in all its weaknesses, revulsions, convulsions, repulsions,
internal chaos and material un(der)development. Africa, remains
a pulsing heart attracting her blood, her brood, back to
herself.
Most of us will not voluntarily go -- but
more of us will return than have ever thought about it since the
fifties. A significant number, providing leadership by example,
will begin the pilgrimage back into ourselves. Of that number,
some will remain and others won't, but life will go on. America
will continue downward and Africa will keep struggling upward.
This is not theory but the inexorable march of the life force.
After maturity there is decline and death.
Before maturity there is the opportunity for growth and
development. Who is in a period of "decline after
maturity" and who is struggling to develop? The distinction
is plain. Especially when we look at the African world
collectively, who we are, where we are, and what we have to live
for.
* * *
The forts are brute manifestations of
penetration. Male movement into fecund
earth. Testimony to the mauling of Africa by marauders
and by co-conspiratorial African merchants and mercenaries.
Facing a fort, I feel my foreigness, my
estrangement from this birth earth, but also I feel my essence,
my connections. Both rupture and reproachment, as well as
reentry and embracement.
As an individual, I was born in a nation of
immigrants, movement is my history -- and yet everyday, folk in
America give you 57 arguments, 997 facts as to why going back to
Africa is unrealistic. Just five hundred years ago the American
migration started in earnest and now these conquering nomads
argue that migration is an exercise in futility.
The majority of Whites are less than five
generations on American soil. Most came not speaking English and
with only as much possessions as they could carry. When nomads
council that it is foolish to migrate, who should listen?
Why are these forts here if moving here is so
undesirable?
There is more than gold in them there hills of Ghana.
The old itinerant preachers and blues bards
used to forcefully sing: "You got to move / When God get
ready / You got to move!"
Could it be that those castles, the last we
saw of Africa, those prisons where we were held, could it be,
that those symbols of slavery will become beacons, lighthouses,
guiding us back into ourselves?
Moreover, we are each other's completion.
Africa may need the diaspora more than the
diaspora needs Africa because Africa can never be whole until
the diaspora is embraced.
On purely a material level, our skills and
resources are needed. On a social level, because we are without
specific ethnic interest, we may be the only Africans capable of
helping Africa transcend the limitations of tribalism. On a
psychological level, we may be the lever to force Africa to turn
over the rocks of colonialism and examine what has been hidden
beneath.
We may be the epiphany that sparks the
memory, that shatters the amnesia, that cleanses the wound of
slavery, that immense maiming that arrested the continent and
continues to unbraid every developmental effort that does not
confront this awfulness.
If and when the diaspora returns, the
returning will force the host to deal with a historic reality
which, for so long, too long, has been ignored. Perhaps it's a
larger plan than individuals in the diaspora returning home
"to drink water from an ancient well" in hopes of
quenching a thirst for completion that no other liquid can
satisfy. Suppose that's only the romance.
Suppose the real deal is that Africa can
not rise without us. Suppose Africa needs us far more than any
of us have yet admitted. Far more than any of us have ever
imagined or thought about.
Suppose we are the seed that must be
planted in fertile soil, the only stone upon which the future
can be built. I do not mean this as self flattery but rather as
a reflecting on a most terrible reality: what continent can
stand the removal of millions and millions and millions of its
strongest and still develop?
In some ironic manner befitting the
convolutions of what it means to be African, the diaspora is the
Africa that the continent is struggling to become. The Africa
concerned with the whole of itself rather than self-defeatingly
focused on specific and antagonist ethnicities and
nationalities.
I don't know. Fathoming this is more than
my brain can contain. All I know is that I want to know more. I
want to return and learn what I left, I want to return and
understand the origin of what I brought over with me. I want to
return. I am seeking myself.
Rummaging through the history of a fort.
Sitting next to a centuries old cannon. Standing in an empty
storeroom, perhaps in the very spot a not too distance ancestor
stood.
Everything I know is nothing compared to
the immensity of what this fort teaches me I do not know. And
the fort also teaches me an even more brutal reckoning: as
ignorant as I am, I still know more about what happened than do
the majority of Africans on the continent. As ignorant as I am,
I am more aware of my Africaness precisely because I have no
African nationality, no African ethnicity. I have no one tribe
or nation. I have all of them, and in having all I transcend
each one.
Both my consciousness and my ignorance are
deep. Deep knowing. Deep ignorance. But that's no news. I'm
African. Source: Kalamu ya Salaam.
Tarzan Can Not Return to Africa,
But I Can
-- PanaFest 1994
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Chiefs in Cape
Coast, Ghana /
Grand Durbar Parade
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Guarding the Flame of Life
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New Orleans Jazz Funeral for tuba player Kerwin
James /
They danced atop his casket Jaran 'Julio' Green
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|
Track List
1. Congo Square (9:01)
2. My Story, My Song (20:50)
3. Danny Banjo (4:32)
4. Miles Davis (10:26)
5. Hard News For Hip Harry (5:03)
6. Unfinished Blues (4:13)
7. Rainbows Come After The Rain (2:21)/Negroidal Noise (15:53)
8. Intro (3:59)
9. The Whole History (3:14)
10. Negroidal Noise (5:39)
11. Waving At Ra (1:40)
12. Landing (1:21)
13. Good Luck (:04) |
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music website >
http://www.kalamu.com/bol/
writing website >
http://wordup.posterous.com/
daily blog >
http://kalamu.posterous.com
twitter >
http://twitter.com/neogriot
facebook >
http://www.facebook.com/kalamu.salaam
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
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update 16 January 2012
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