tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-358059432024-03-07T15:20:38.401-08:00Tror Na Foe (To Return and Find Again)The continuing saga of how one family, separated by slavery for over two hundred and fifty years, is reclaiming itself from the great transatlantic lost and found.David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.comBlogger24125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-43714352966095009882008-09-26T21:38:00.000-07:002008-09-26T21:56:51.050-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEtYpB4sl22RMnaH6RKz0QjdLLXKBwV9Ux7PdV5YAng2A4GJeIa0MNtOH0AGUHjAdoEPb3i7QdfkjEZSAHroWVrWRPvrFGrLmlXVwetDNJRqyjDjuy868UrttHDUo1MgZWx2VN/s1600-h/Ghana1+023.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5250557116672946098" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEtYpB4sl22RMnaH6RKz0QjdLLXKBwV9Ux7PdV5YAng2A4GJeIa0MNtOH0AGUHjAdoEPb3i7QdfkjEZSAHroWVrWRPvrFGrLmlXVwetDNJRqyjDjuy868UrttHDUo1MgZWx2VN/s400/Ghana1+023.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">photo: members of the Tovie clan gather to meet the author under an ancient man-</span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">go tree at the old Agbemabiese family compound in Tegbi, Ghana. </span><br /><br /><br /><em>Woezor </em>(welcome)! If this is your first visit, I invite you to scroll all the way back to the very beginning to see how this journey began and where it has led us thus far. This is the fourth of six installments of a chapter called, "<em>I Would Know You by Your Feet</em>." Please come back and visit again soon.<br />-----------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br />I had already forwarded one specific question to them in advance, through Lawrence, that I’d hoped someone might be able to answer, something which had emerged from the historical research I’d done about Anlo before coming. I’d learned that between 1688 and 1704 there had been a cultural upheaval in Anlo which, at its core, was about religion. The Ewes had for most of their history lived as a confederation of villages whose livelihood was farming and fishing. Ewes who lived in the population centers of West Africa’s great empires were known for their abilities as craftspeople and traders. The Ewes placed a high premium on peaceful relations with their neighbors, and over the centuries, when attacked, their response was to migrate to new territories where they felt safer.<br /><br />But in the early 1680s, just as the slave trade was gathering momentum, they had arrived in Anlo with their backs to the sea. The marauding Ashanti, Ada, Akwapim and others pressed them on their west, while Oyo pressed them from the north and east. Tired of being relatively easy pickings for slave raiders, and with nowhere left to run, the loosely confederated Ewe military organized and centralized its command in order to more effectively defend themselves. By the mid-1680s, they had not only beaten their enemies back, but in the east, had begun to turn the table on their old Yoruba enemies, and were capturing and selling them as slaves. The generals in this new militaristic culture became the most powerful element of society, and with them, the God of war. For a time, forsaking the worship of the old agricultural Gods and joining the generals in worshipping the God of war was necessary for ambitious people who wanted to advance their family’s position and fortune. After a while, this switching of religious allegiances became mandatory. Some refused to buckle under. What happened to them? So far, I haven’t come across any accounts of the consequences they paid. Were some killed? Were some sold into slavery? Is that what happened to my ancestor? Was he one of those who resisted? Was being sold away his punishment? If so, I thought, then I might well be sitting now with the descen-dants of some of the kin who sold him away.<br /><br />But no one among the people in the courtyard could shed any light on this for me either. They’d have to get back to me on this question as well.<br /><br />In the meantime, the elders who’d gathered to meet me made it clear they would do their best to tell me as much as they knew. And so, everyone took their seats, Mr. Dzisam made introductions all around, and the formal part of our meeting began. There were twenty four of us in the courtyard now, including the children. Kwaku was sent out to the Groovy Spot to buy soft drinks. These would be refreshment for the women and children. Only the men would be passing around the schnapps after the opening libations.<br /><br />As soon as Kwaku returned, Kwadzo, aided by Eric, performed a libation ceremony with one of the bottles of flavored shnapps Gideon and I had bought in Woe for the occasion, asking the ancestors to enjoy this auspicious moment with us and to bless it. Eric scooped a little dirt from the courtyard into a bowl and swirled some water into it. Kwadzo poured in some of the schnapps and swirled the mixture again. Whether they had planned it before-hand as a group, or it was a spontaneous expression from Kwadzo’s heart – or perhaps a whispered inspiration from the ancestors themselves – an attempt to begin to bring our differing narratives together began now with this libation. As Kwadzo chanted prayers, pausing periodically to pour some of the mixture upon the ground, Gideon leaned into me and whispered an interpretation of his words. He offered thanks that one who had been lost to them had returned, and asked the ancestors to bear joyful witness to this. But he also invited my ancestors to come and be with us, to bless and to be blessed on this occasion. In the distant past, my ancestors the ancestors of the people gathered here were one and the same, but tradition holds that the ancestors’ presence is strongest in the places where their lives were lived on earth. So mine, who were among the many ancestors torn from their midst long ago and made to live out their lives on foreign soil, were asked to come join us too. And then for the entire assembly, seen and unseen, Kwadzo asked that there be healing for those who had been hurt by slavery, and forgiveness for those who had been involved in the cycle of capturing and selling which fueled the trade.<br /><br />As Eric and Kwadzo closed the ceremony and returned to the circle, the women and some of the other men spontaneously offered up additional prayers of thanksgiving. Then, while Kwaku handed out soft drinks to the women and children, the men passed the bottle of schnapps, each reverentially pouring a little onto the ground for the ancestors, then taking a sip before passing it on. Everyone gave me strong eye contact when my turn came. Everyone except Agibota. He didn’t seem hostile, just cool and reserved, still perhaps a little unsure about me; unsure about this whole enterprise. Who could blame him? My sudden appearance among them, and the way in which it had occurred was a big thing for people here to make peace with and fully comprehend.<br /><br />In general, the history of African American outreach to Africa and Africans has a very checkered past, though not without its highlights: the good feelings, the sense of unity, the pride and optimism generated during the high water marks of Pan-Africanism; the way in which the American struggles for civil rights and the African struggles for independence inspired one another. Yet for a long time, the racist poison internalized during slavery and its lengthy afterlife had the effect of leading a great many African Americans to reject association with anything African. But once great numbers of black people throughout the entire African diaspora experienced, in the fifties and sixties, a new awakening of pride in African heritage – a longing to connect with the continent in meaningful ways – that pride awakened with a vengeance. The descendants of African slaves were driven by a deep longing to break through the historical fetters of the slave past and connect with an African identity before slavery. But most who tried to satisfy that longing by making the pilgrimage to Africa, found that the history they had come to seek was still bound by the shackles of slavery, even there. They’d found that once they had toured the slave forts of Ghana and Senegal, the heritage trail had hit a dead end. There were no signposts for pilgrims to point the way from there back to the ancestral village.<br /><br />Now that DNA matching holds out to African Americans the tantalizing possibility of connecting with Africans who are at least our distant blood kin, that sense of longing has a very personal dimension. What would it mean – socially, culturally, politically – if hundreds and then thousands of us eventually make this journey and begin to reconnect in significant ways with members of the families our ancestors had been forced to leave behind? Even in this post Pan-African era, Africans clearly see the potential for the continent if African Americans were to “come home,” literally or figuratively, and put their shoulders to the wheel in order to help accelerate the pace of development. They understand full well how an energetic and focused African/African American collaboration in business, education, science, and the arts could prove a powerful dynamo for the uplift of our peoples on both sides of the Atlantic; a positive and hopeful development for the rest of the world as well.<br /><br />But for now, Africans see us coming and cringe. Too many of us have come with heads full of romantic notions, expecting to feel instantly at home and unconditionally embraced. Others come with paternalistic ideas about what Africans want or need. Our assistance might be nice, but… will we be more trouble than we’re worth? Perhaps much more? What do we really want? What, specifically, do we want from them? Is there any evidence of an African longing for a connection to us? On what basis might we begin to construct a shared narrative which expresses an authentically mutual need for each other?David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-6118885831255006172008-09-18T13:56:00.000-07:002008-09-18T14:17:47.928-07:00<div align="left"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXZGPz7NynnUhVVw9im34lMxLyqudTKC6I4ILtemZOg7Wqp_kJvCpd7BQ8SwhepdL_mKMCRaj8nr8M76PPGlbT6cMA0V-l-lW3GNoaWVrDO0QiEroWbEXfpLv8O9KYyt8c_GWG/s1600-h/DSC_0129.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5247468441129092162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXZGPz7NynnUhVVw9im34lMxLyqudTKC6I4ILtemZOg7Wqp_kJvCpd7BQ8SwhepdL_mKMCRaj8nr8M76PPGlbT6cMA0V-l-lW3GNoaWVrDO0QiEroWbEXfpLv8O9KYyt8c_GWG/s400/DSC_0129.jpg" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-size:78%;">Ruins of Haxormene's palace at the old family compound in Tegbi, Ghana</span><br /><em></em><br /><em><span style="font-size:130%;">"I Would Know You By Your Feet"</span> - Part 3 of a six part series <span style="font-size:85%;">(expanded from 4 to 6 parts)</span></em><br /><em></em><br /><em>Woezor </em>(welcome)! If this is your first visit to this site, I invite you to scroll all the way back to the beginning to see how I arrived at the moment I've been describing with this particular series of posts.<br /><br />At the point where I left off last time, Cousin Gideon and me had just arrived at the family's ancestral village of Tegbi, just west of Keta, near the border with Togo. Madame Desawu, caretaker of the old family compound, had just given me a warm greeting.<br /><br />----------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br />Her words moved me deeply. When she saw that my eyes had welled up as full of tears as her own, she walked over and pressed my face between her hands. They were rough, calloused, country woman's hands, but somehow, as soft and comforting as a warm blanket on a cold night. Then, she abruptly wheeled about and returned to her cooking in the outdoor kitchen where we'd found her when we first entered. Gideon, Kwaku and I sat nearby under the courtyard’s nearly two hundred year old mango trees to await the arrival of the full delegation from the Tovie clan.<br /><br />While we waited, Kwaku peppered me with questions about my life and family in the States. The smell of Madame Desawu’s food on the fire, redolent with just enough vaguely recognizable notes to summon memories of long ago summers in the country with my southern relatives, the squeals of the children at play, the casual wandering of the odd farm animal across the courtyard here or there, and the warm conversation, all worked to make this entire scene very comfortable and familiar. All my earlier apprehensions about the day had melted away. In fact, I found myself feeling more relaxed and content than I had in many months. I had expected my first meeting with these long-missing relatives to be complicated with at least a few jarring notes of culture shock. But so far, this had felt like the afternoons I used to spend on summer vacation in North Carolina, out “pop calling” with my father or my grandmother, visiting far-flung relatives we hadn’t seen for a while. We’d turn up some long driveway and one of them would say, “Well, this is Althea and Robert’s place, David. You remember Althea and her children, don’t you?” There’d be a pretty good chance that no, I didn’t remember any of them at all. But that never mattered. They were family, something that always interested me, so I’d usually end up enjoying myself. And the food was always good.<br /><br /><em><span style="font-size:130%;">Narratives of Longing</span> </em></div><em><div align="left"><br /></em><a style="mso-comment-reference: SB_1; mso-comment-date: 20080910T1616">As these newfound kin and I sat with each other in the compound courtyard that day, I began to realize that some of them had found a similar way in which to think about their relationship with me too. It felt as if most of them found it hard to wrap their minds around the idea that the relative of one of their ancestors had been taken long ago as a slave to </a>America, and that one of his descendants had found them through a DNA match, and had now come to seek them out. It was far easier to think of me this way: as the son of some long-lost branch of the family who’d been away in America his whole life, but who had miraculously returned to them. In West Africa, extended families are large, and with relatives often spread out over substantial distances these days, it’s practically impossible to keep close tabs on everybody. People emigrate to neighboring countries for work, and seldom get back home as often as they’d planned. People emigrate to Europe, Canada or the U.S., and many of them get back home only rarely. Some of them never come home again at all. So, the narrative of an almost entirely unknown but long-missing relative suddenly come home seemed to be a familiar and comfortable fit in this situation<a style="mso-comment-reference: SB_2; mso-comment-date: 20080910T1617">. </a>It’s a narrative that’s simple and benign. All that it would require of them is their hospitality, and then our mutual commitment to a happy family reunion.<br /><br />As the men who had greeted us at the gate returned with their wives and the other clan members who’d been asked to come, it was pretty easy to guess who among them were thinking of our relationship on the basis of this narrative, and who among them might be steeling themselves to deal with me from another, less comfortable one. Unlike the people who were beaming at me, or simply trying to get a good look at me without seeming to stare, the clan members preparing themselves to deal with me from this other narrative looked sober and grim, because they knew this second narrative requires confronting slavery – always a difficult subject for Africans and African Americans. Our ancestors’ lives were viciously savaged by the same prolonged, almost incomprehensively brutal holocaust, but in the midst of that evil time, our stories diverged. My ancestors were among the twelve million souls who were its victims, murdered or carried away as slaves. Their ancestors were among the millions who found a way to ride out the storm and survive. One of the strategies the Ewes used to survive that time was to become major players in the slave trade themselves. Like the Yoruba-speaking Oyo Empire to the east of them and the Ashantis to the west, they raided other communities in order to capture slaves whom they could trade for guns and powder, which were then put to use to capture more slaves, and to prevent their own people from being captured by others. The ancestors of the people gathered around me now had been successfully protected by this Ewe community from capture. Mine hadn’t. Why?<br /><br />The subtle tension rising between us around that circle in the courtyard was due to the fact that both I and these clan elders knew that I would have some questions about this that they couldn’t answer… or would rather not. One reason for the inability or reluctance to do so is the history of the malevolent and dehumanizing ways in which the slave trade lured Africans to victimize their own. The most familiar image of “the trade” is of slavery on the wholesale level, where kings and generals and strongmen devastated whole communities, afterwards selling the farmers and soldiers of the losing side with their wives and children to the Europeans, perhaps keeping some slaves for themselves. Much less familiar is the gut-wrenching reality of slavery on the retail level – the cold-blooded and tragic choices made by ordinary commoners to sell away their own kith and kin. Poor families who became desperate enough might sell off a child or two so that they could better manage to feed the ones who remained. A man might lose a son or daughter, seized to settle a debt he couldn’t pay. Chiefs sentenced some criminals to captivity as punishment. And so it went, decade after decade for hundreds of years. If the reason for my Ewe ancestor’s captivity had a story like this behind it, it was easy to understand how this was the kind that might survive as a dirty little family secret for a couple of generations, eventually to be lost completely. These aren’t the kinds of stories that people tend to cherish and commit to passing down for posterity.<br /><br />But I also knew there was another over-arching reason the elders might not be able to answer many questions about my ancestor. For generations, not just in this village but throughout the continent, the transatlantic slave trade and the people who went missing because of it simply haven’t been very much on African minds. This is because the African narrative about slavery is so different from the African American narrative. Their narrative is about survival, resistance and triumph, first over slavery and then over colonialism. It’s also a celebration of deep cultural roots and continuity. The narrative I inherited about slavery celebrates survival too – and the courage and faith required to achieve it. But mine is also a narrative about the loss of deep cultural roots and continuity, about feeling, “like a motherless child, a long way from home.” These Ewes have a heritage of songs and stories which celebrate the history of their resistance and its heroes that are widely known and frequently sung. I was told that there are also songs which tell of and mourn some of those who went missing during slavery, but no one gathered that day knew any of these, nor could they think, at that moment, of anyone who did. Elders in far-flung villages who might be able to sing us these songs or tell us these stories are being lost to us, one by one and two by two with every passing year. I was promised that they will ask around until they find someone. Essentially, they were saying, “We’ll get back to you on that.” </div>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-20491858667302010712008-09-06T20:58:00.000-07:002008-09-09T20:01:14.716-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAPGrEGZkfiJ5KLdqK_YXWrSMJeh3povBXy9KGMULMLqvQg_1hBl3uNzyDPLRPn2RsvVySSGL64qFmHtJrSdZ8bTZ3gtMMGuaWTuRq_agZTpp0W4CR-joTIsBjdOTxHeOVV6n_/s1600-h/Ghana+049.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5243131413021814754" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAPGrEGZkfiJ5KLdqK_YXWrSMJeh3povBXy9KGMULMLqvQg_1hBl3uNzyDPLRPn2RsvVySSGL64qFmHtJrSdZ8bTZ3gtMMGuaWTuRq_agZTpp0W4CR-joTIsBjdOTxHeOVV6n_/s400/Ghana+049.jpg" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-size:78%;">photo: The "Groovy Spot", Tegbi</span><br /><br /><br /><div><br /><br /></div><div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><strong>Part 2 of a Four Part Series, "<em>I Would Know You by Your Feet</em>"</strong></div><br /><br /><div align="left"><em>Woezor </em>(welcome)! If this is your first visit to this blog, I invite you to scroll all the way back to the beginning in order to pick the story up where it begins. At the point where I left off last time, Cousin Gideon Agebemabiese and me had stopped on the way to the ancestral village at Tegbi to purchase two bottles of schnapps as gifts for the elders. These would be used to perform ablutions meant to honor the ancestors and ask their blessings on the occasion of our reunion.</div><br /><div align="left">-------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><br /><div align="left">Every once in a while, there’d be just enough of an opening through the trees and the underbrush to allow us a glimpse of the vast Keta Lagoon, which is the great, defining natural feature of Anlo-Ewe country. Many of Anlo’s most important towns are sandwiched in between the lagoon and the sea, spread across a long spit of land that grows narrower and narrower as you travel east until, near Keta, both the lagoon on the one side and the sea on the other, are each only a stone’s throw away. Its shallow, brackish water was too hard for heavy war canoes to navigate, so it became a safe haven to which people fled during the slave trade. Its islands became densely packed homes for many thousands. We could see dozens of their descendants fishing its waters from small boats or working their fishing nets as they waded the sandy shallows. Residents know the pathways from island to island through the shallows very well. At low tide, you can see them trudging home with the day’s catch or with sundries from the market balanced on their heads, giving the impression, from a distance, that this is a place where the people have mastered the secret of walking on water.</div><br /><br /><br /><div align="left">Just outside the gate of the old family compound in the heart of the village of Tegbi, there's a small, family-owned liquor store/snack bar called, "The Groovy Spot." As soon as Gideon pulled the truck up next to it, several clan members suddenly appeared and crossed the road to greet us. We alighted from the truck and Gideon swung into high gear, working the group like a politician, managing the introductions in both English and Ewe as we walked together to the compound gate. There to greet us were the chief’s secretary, Agibota, in his black leather cowboy hat, and a small delegation of respected elders, led by Mr. Dzisam. Youngsters Kofi and Kwaku opened the gate for us and we were ushered through it into the compound. "We have heard of you, Cousin, and we are very glad to meet you," said Mr. Dzisam. "We welcome you home." Madame Desawu, a distant cousin who has been caretaker of the place for many years, rose from her cooking in the big outdoor kitchen and approached so that we could be introduced to her as well. Following shyly in her wake came her daughter, Agnes, and Agnes’ young children.</div><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5243129824690727314" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ7ZjNPzaAq7ce6qidyTd8p-ICTM0FVFQ4K18N32gMOUt-Sjb_-2940I8mUO5IJqgYU4ktpY0IGXdfMPfunmjeGESXj1q-meUnX0sXwyA4PEl9Ti-AeKSVE7fqvQu0okY2U5jv/s400/Ghana1+002.jpg" border="0" /><span style="font-size:78%;"> Photo: Cousin Gideon with Madame Desawu and her daughter, Agnes at the old</span><br /></div><div><span style="font-size:78%;">family compound<br /></span><br /><br /><br /></div><div align="left"></div><div>"<em><span style="font-size:130%;">It's Like a Miracle</span></em>"<br />Our escorts spoke with one another in Ewe for a moment, and then excused themselves, saying they'd be back in a few minutes. Agnes’ children peered at me from behind their mother’s long skirt and giggled. Madame Desawu spoke animatedly with Gideon in Ewe while I had a look around. I’d been warned that the old family palace built by Gideon and Lawrence’s grandfather George (Haxormene I), was in a complete state of ruin, but I wasn’t prepared for the degree of ruin in which I found it. It looked almost as if it had barely survived wartime damage from bombs or shelling. But it was only time and neglect which had done the damage – time as measured by the relentless pace of ruin in the tropics. The neglect was due to the fact that once George’s son, family patriarch John Kofi Agbemabiese, moved his large family away to Kumasi and Accra in order to be close to his growing business interests, there were no more direct descendants of that line left in Tegbi to occupy either the palace compound or the stool of chieftancy.</div><p align="center"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdh5SqV5UjQQq5WUtbDDvWjDuTZXtUb7ZWszEG8NBz9TUEIP7vMFavAFE3u8uiOetkXAJPcVU_oUzHf8pZBWj_f6C5rCPof5rQ14u6Sj9DW9hZ8ZMASiQws2CgbTwfTY4czTOz/s1600-h/DSC_0129.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5243133198554587362" style="CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdh5SqV5UjQQq5WUtbDDvWjDuTZXtUb7ZWszEG8NBz9TUEIP7vMFavAFE3u8uiOetkXAJPcVU_oUzHf8pZBWj_f6C5rCPof5rQ14u6Sj9DW9hZ8ZMASiQws2CgbTwfTY4czTOz/s320/DSC_0129.jpg" border="0" /></a></p><p align="left"><span style="font-size:78%;">photo: Ruins of Haxormene's palace<br /><br /></span><br />A building made of unadorned stone might last here, but there was little native stone to be had. A building made after the European style – with materials and a design originally meant for a temperate climate – simply won’t survive a tropical seacoast locale for long without constant up keep. The cycle of dry and wet seasons, each of them hot, conspires every hour of every day, year in and year out, to rot everything beneath the sun away, most especially anything built by human hands. The salt air makes it hard to keep even a coat of paint looking fresh for more than a year or two. Still, the old palace’s advanced state of decay made it hard to believe it was built only a little more than a hundred years ago.<br /><br />It took a lot of imagining, but I began to see, as I poked around the place, how truly grand it once had been. It had eight bedrooms and two indoor baths at a time when these were rare anywhere on the continent. Its historical significance is that when it was built in about 1902, it was the first “story” building – simply meaning a building more than one story in height – ever built in this whole region of West Africa by a black man for himself. During the entire first half of the twentieth century, any other building of this size would have been built as a colonial administrative office of some sort, or as the headquarters for a European owned business concern. They say that for years after it was built, the sheer audaciousness of the project drew people from a hundred miles around just to see it.<br /><br />While I explored and took photos, Kwaku, Agnes and a couple of others helped get white plastic chairs set up in the center of the compound courtyard for everyone who was expected. Madame Desawu chatted excitedly with Gideon as they traded family news and passed along greetings from people spread far and wide who’d passed along their regrets that they couldn’t be with us this day, but who wanted to say they were with us in spirit. Many times, she paused in the middle of her rapid fire conversation with Gideon in Ewe, looked over at me and smiled. Every time she did, I heard the same refrain. “She keeps saying, ‘It's like a miracle,’ said Gideon. ‘She says she took one look at you, and she was sure it’s true you are one of us. ‘Oh, it’s like a miracle’, she says.” </p>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-46259869867112241502008-08-29T21:19:00.000-07:002008-09-06T20:58:20.938-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnYEAClDvXZXfCuqRDFcx77vAvMHGnZE3AE1cla8oTSwRbLGBYegAA32ugpMYYR4sVkJjeJqhY_F3T_zLW3OYist4tLP2jZ4nKPEfdkPU_kHVEMyPjnkAw_Rw9dj1Z_Uke6hFk/s1600-h/DSC_0012.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5240161616740839602" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnYEAClDvXZXfCuqRDFcx77vAvMHGnZE3AE1cla8oTSwRbLGBYegAA32ugpMYYR4sVkJjeJqhY_F3T_zLW3OYist4tLP2jZ4nKPEfdkPU_kHVEMyPjnkAw_Rw9dj1Z_Uke6hFk/s400/DSC_0012.jpg" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-size:78%;">photo: Old fishing boat on the beach at Tegbi, Ghana</span><br /><br /><strong>This entry is Part 1 of a Four Part Series</strong><br /><br /><em>Woezor</em> (welcome)! If this is your fist visit to this blog, please consider scrolling all the way back through these posts so you can pick the story up at the beginning. If you're a return visitor, please look around. I've been active again after a long break, and there may well be many new posts since you were last here.<br /><br />Visitors who've been around lately know that I am serializing the book I am writing, "In Search of My Father's House," on these pages. This week, I begin sharing sections of the chapter, "I Would Know You by Your Feet." Thanks for visiting. Enjoy.<br /><br />------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />“<span style="font-size:130%;">I Would Know You by Your Feet”<br /></span><br />“<em>It’s Like a Miracle</em>”<br />The highway east from Accra to the river crossing at Sagakofe had been the best stretch of main road that Gideon and I had traveled since I’d arrived in Ghana. Less than two hours after escaping the insane traffic of the capital, we were crossing the Volta River into the family’s ancestral home country of Anlo.<br /><br />Not many years ago, there was a ferry at the place where the bridge now stands, and that was the only way across for many miles. This was true even back in the days when Keta, a few miles to the east near the border with Togo, was a major port. During the days of the slave trade, when this stretch of river was deeper, slave ships used to lie at anchor just south of here in the delta. On this particular afternoon, a few fishermen in dugout canoes were the only river traffic, but during the dark days of “the trade” slaving ships in the delta would be lying in wait for dugouts like these and larger war canoes to come downriver bearing cargoes of slaves from the interior. The Volta wasn’t the first African river to serve as a water highway for the transport of slaves, but it does have the dubious distinction of being the last. The very last ship known to have carried a cargo of slaves from Africa to the Americas, possibly within site of this bridge, weighed anchor for Brazil from here in 1866.<br /><br />From Sagakofe to the Togolese border, the road narrows and its quality isn’t quite as high, but compared to the roads on our trip west during the week before, it was still easy going – much like traveling a typical two-lane blacktop “blue highway” in the U.S. We veered south to connect with the road that carries travelers east along the coast through Srogboe, and Anloga, the regional capital; then through Woe and Keta and finally, Denu and Aflao, the last two towns before the border. The big “Ghana National Investment Bank” logo on Gideon’s truck had the desired effect, and we were waved through every police check point with a nod or sometimes a salute and a smile, without even having to slow down. We were getting close now. The butterflies I had begun to feel when we crossed the Volta soon morphed into a whole torrent of butterflies. I’d never experienced exactly this kind of “nerves” before. This must be, I thought, like the butterflies the groom in an arranged marriage might feel before meeting his prospective bride and her family for the first time. There’s so much riding on that first impression… for all concerned. Will we feel like we fit hand in glove, or will we somehow feel just all wrong together? When we first look into one another’s eyes, will we see a glimmer of mutual recognition there – enough to recognize one another as family in any real way – or will we see… nothing? Or worse yet, will we feel repelled, or simply disappointed; sorry that we’d gone through all the trouble to arrange this meeting in the first place?<br /><br />I knew Gideon was nervous too. Relations between the Agbemabieses, their close allies, and the rest of the Tovie clan had thawed some over the last couple of years. And there’d been a generally warm and positive reception to the news of my coming. But still, as Gideon had said on our journey here, even though he’d been back and forth between Accra and the village a few times, it had been twenty years since he had actually spent a night there. The process of fence-mending after a long time away is always awkward and complicated at best. Figuring out where and how my own agenda might comfortably fit into the mix could be like tip-toeing through a minefield, given the complexity of Ewe social etiquette – especially when my first introduction to the culture would come at the very same moment as my first introduction to the people who would be my hosts.<br /><br />But neither Gideon nor I felt like talking about any of it now. In fact, this was the longest stretch of silence that there had been between us during the entire trip. The silence didn’t break until we arrived in Woe, the last town before Tegbi, a stop where we had to take care of a piece of business which turned out to be an important preliminary part of the social etiquette I needed to learn. Half-way through town, Gideon slowed to look carefully down every side road until he spied what he was searching for: a little liquor store at a dusty crossroads. Gideon explained that I should give him a little cash now so that he could buy two bottles of schnapps as gifts for the elders: one for the clan elders at the old family compound, and one for Uncle Wakachie. Because of the feud over the land, Wakachie wouldn’t be welcome at the compound, so we’d have to visit him separately. We’d meet with the clan elders today, Friday, and pay our respects to Wakachie on Sunday. In the old days before colonialism, libations to the ancestors would have been made with home-brewed palm wine, but during the time when this area had been part of German Togoland, it had become fashionable to use store-bought schnapps for this purpose instead, and the tradition stuck.<br /><br />The liquor store was shabby and dark and felt a little dangerous. As we rolled through the crossroads and up to the door, I was surprised to feel the internal radar that most urban dwellers learn to develop suddenly swing into high alert. It was the first time since I’d been in Ghana that I’d felt the least bit unsafe. It was jarring. We were only a quarter of a mile off the main road at most, but now, suddenly this. One minute, we’d been in the middle of a bucolic, tropical countryside scene from a picture postcard, the next, right in the middle of a place that felt like the hardest, most hopeless corner of the hardest neighborhood into which I’ve ever stumbled.<br /><br />The bank vehicle and Gideon’s obviously foreign passenger quickly drew a curious crowd. My inclination was just to get out, wade through them and go with Gideon into the liquor store, but he asked me to lock the doors and stay put. I did as I was asked and watched him disappear inside. A few more neighbors shuffled down the street and joined the people crowded around the truck. It’s hard to be the object of that much attention, especially when you are truly not looking for any. If people somewhere stare at you when you walk by, no matter how uncomfortable certain stares may make you feel, that’s a different thing because you know it’s soon over. All I could do was relax, make eye contact with a few folks and nod. A few people nodded back and waved or smiled. There was nothing malevolent in their stares; just curiosity. I understood. It was a slow afternoon in a slow, hard-bitten little town, and the two strangers in the official looking government truck were, quite simply, the only show in town just now.<br /><br />Soon enough, Gideon emerged with the two bottles, wrapped in the ubiquitous black plastic bags which comprise half the litter in Ghana. When the wind blows hard in Ghana, because the flora is tropical, very few leaves, other than a few fronds of palm, will come flying at your face along with all that red dust. What you will get is shredded bits of black plastic bag on your clothes, in your face, in your mouth and in your eye if you’re not careful. I slipped the bottles into my backpack, and we were off.<br />----------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><strong>Part 1 of 4 part series<br /></strong>Please join me again next week as I continue on with this account of what happened as Gideon and I made our way to the ancestral village, only a few miles to the east.David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-6269678459167171642008-08-14T20:22:00.000-07:002008-08-14T20:57:52.308-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXwafU_sKxL5XmQELN8q6OI9x_t40RLz0dzD_FjK46RjajbvP7tiyUEILwfnoPHI128rPvIrVznOMnKqaJGoFnC1t9g1h_RA8RkBJQuG9WG3Gj5ogN-gSzdhRtyn8qYolxylUw/s1600-h/DSC_0343.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234581483866370050" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXwafU_sKxL5XmQELN8q6OI9x_t40RLz0dzD_FjK46RjajbvP7tiyUEILwfnoPHI128rPvIrVznOMnKqaJGoFnC1t9g1h_RA8RkBJQuG9WG3Gj5ogN-gSzdhRtyn8qYolxylUw/s400/DSC_0343.jpg" border="0" /></a><em> Woezor</em> (welcome)! If this is your first visit, I invite you to scroll all the way back to the beginning to find out how this adventure began. If you're return visitor, welcome back. After a long time away from the blog, you can see that I've been working hard on adding new posts on a more regular basis!<br /><br />As promised, I've begun to publish on these pages some substantial portions of the book I've been writing about finding and reconnecting with some of the descendants of the African family that the founder of my father's line had to leave behind when he was captured and brought to America during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.<br /><br />The previous post talked about <em>how different the African narrative about slavery is from the African American narrative</em>...<br />------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br /><br />Up north where we now were, that narrative was about how scattered groups of people, tired of being victimized by slave traders, banded together and fled, or stood together and resisted, until finally, the threat of being captured was over, and they emerged from this long, dark time, victorious, proud and free.<br /><br />There are songs and celebratory dances to commemorate their stands against notorious and fearsome raiders like Samory Turi. But there are no songs or dances in memory of those who were carried away into captivity. At least nobody I met could tell me of any. The stories of the disappeared, are, for these descendants of those who managed to escape that fate, stories of loss and defeat. These are tragic stories that happened to other people. And those other people and their descendants are, quite simply… gone.<br /><br />After dark, if a woman in some tiny village feels afraid to venture out to the pump at night for water, because most nights when she does, she can’t shake the feeling that there’s someone walking beside her, a dark, mournful presence on the periphery of her vision; if the dogs begin to bark and howl because they sense someone close by, even if, past the dying embers of the evening’s fires, they can’t see it or smell it, and if their baleful crying makes a man turn over in the night and look, just in case, to see if his heavy walking stick is within easy reach; perhaps that’s as close to the long-missing ones that the people up here ever get.<br /><br />----------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />That's the end of the chapter, "Into the North." Next week, I'll begin publishing chapter six, which is entitled, "I Would Know You By Your Feet." It deals with what happened on my first visit to the ancestral village, and how the clan elders gathered to meet me that day officially confirmed me as their long-lost kinsman.<br /><br />Look for it soon.David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-72104085284064972472008-07-17T20:36:00.000-07:002008-08-14T20:11:44.432-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-0DY56fmbjKghra-JaWy4EaGMqGa0BlaKheLsTeUSi7FMS0uAbAXPe1gMWSnA3DbSYqKI6n6r8Ha8A5b2Zcj2LwvEIJIMcmwZcZ-5aTYokeM4rLPN5rWbYJf9htvdy0XFki1n/s1600-h/DSC_0229.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5224198877781191138" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-0DY56fmbjKghra-JaWy4EaGMqGa0BlaKheLsTeUSi7FMS0uAbAXPe1gMWSnA3DbSYqKI6n6r8Ha8A5b2Zcj2LwvEIJIMcmwZcZ-5aTYokeM4rLPN5rWbYJf9htvdy0XFki1n/s400/DSC_0229.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;"> Photo (Amahl Grant): Kid outside Mosque at Larabanga </span><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><em>Woezor </em>(welcome)! If this is your very first visit, I invite you to scroll all the way back to the beginning so that you can follow along with this journey from its start. Two years ago, through a DNA match, we found and connected with some of the missing African kin from whom my father's line had been separated by the trans-Atlantic slave trade! This is the story of how that happened, and what has been happening since.<br /><br />One result of this adventure is the post you are about to read, which is an excerpt from the book I am now writing about the experience, tentatively titled, "<strong>In Search of My Father's House</strong>." Be on the lookout for it. In the meantime, however you found your way here, thanks for joining me on this journey thus far.<br /><div></div>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><div>In the previous posting, I wrote about how difficult it usually is to talk with either Africans or people of western European descent about the history and the legacy of slavery. This new posting picks up where the previous post left off, as I traveled into Ghana's Muslim north on an STC bus, having this very conversation with a couple of my Ghanaian fellow travelers.</div><br /><div>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><br /><div><br />The man in the seat next to her jumped in, “Well, you know, yes, there were many here who once held slaves, and even some who participated in the trade that sold some of your ancestors away, but we are your brothers because we were victims too. Oh, yes, you know it’s the Ashantis and many others who did the greatest evil by far. By far.”<br /><br />I nodded. Yes, I knew. But I also knew what I’m reasonably sure he knew: the extent to which northern kingdoms like Gonja, which our bus was now entering, were heavily complicit in the transatlantic trade as well. It was an exchange that sparked another vivid memory from childhood. I’d been out fishing for crab with my grandmother, Addie, on vacation in the North Carolina tidewater region. We’d stopped at a farmer’s roadside stand to buy some honey when two white-bearded men, one in his sixties and the other in his eighties, emerged from a trail at the bottom of a wooded hill across the road and approached us. The older man was grizzled and raggedy, and had the wildest look about him, certainly the wildest eyes, I had ever seen. He scared me a little. But it was me he really wanted to talk to; me to whom he had something it seemed he needed to say.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>My grandmother sensed my alarm and she pulled me next to her as he came closer. His fierce eyes burned a hole right through me as he spoke urgently in a language I could not understand. The other man, who must have been his son, spoke with the thickest Scottish brogue I had ever heard, even in this region where the local accent is flavored with a decidedly Gaelic lilt. “Don’t be scared son. He means no harm. The old man, ever since he turned eighty, he just stopped speaking English. Refuses to speak it anymore. He’ll only speak Gaelic now.” The ancient one spoke to me again; something sober and sad. “The old man, he wants you to know – that slavery, you know – that were a terrible, terrible thing, that. And he’s saying, he wants you to know… it weren’t us what done that to you, you know? That were the fookin’ Brits!”<br /><br />I surely appreciated the obviously sincere anti-slavery sentiment, but even at the age of eleven, I knew better. I knew that the Grants who had owned my father’s people in North Carolina, and after whom my family took our last name, were immigrants from the Scottish lowlands. I’d seen photos of the huge, triumphant Klan rally of thousands that had once marched down Washington D.C.’s Pennsylvania Avenue in the nineteen twenties, a corps of what must have been over a hundred pipers dressed in highland kilts at the fore. The photo had, for me, a chilling resonance with a photo I’d seen in Life Magazine of German troops marching triumphantly into Paris during the midst of World War Two. And as a serious young Civil War buff, I knew about the cherished southern conceit that liked to link the cause of secession with the struggle for Scottish freedom from English tyranny during the days of the great patriot hero, William Wallace. In this skewed view of history, the south was Scotland and the north represented the cruel English oppressors.<br /><br />Most of the conversations I’ve ever had with white southerners about slavery have eventually devolved into defensive protestations about how it really wasn’t all that bad; that its alleged horrors may have had a germ of truth to them – in some places – but that the worst of the reported depredations were mostly Yankee propaganda, and so forth and so on. And occasionally, I’d hear acclamations not unlike the one I heard that hot, long-ago day in North Carolina; like I had just heard from the African man on this bus that, “Well, yes, we certainly had slavery around here, but if you want to be mad at somebody about it, be mad at those other bastards on down the road. ‘Cause if you’re looking for the real villains, the <em>real</em> evil ones, that’s who you want, not us.”</div><br /><div><br />Our conversation petered out without resolution. But I can’t say it ended without any greater understanding on either side, because, speaking strictly for me, I think I did come out of it with a more sympathetic understanding of how this issue looks to them. Because as I had already learned earlier on this trip, <em>Africans have a whole other set of narratives going when it comes to slavery</em>. </div>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-16480053591918722592008-07-06T20:42:00.000-07:002008-09-11T22:34:29.568-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM0mzG432SWUfhS6KoDZY9ZwcFB-5e-ZF7x16bMip6UFfMMAUCSjwauqC5KsLV7s0yc10XcnyWzw1zsQ_oJeOMU2FiUd6o7qCfjpzOI3oMl214fb0wMd7ATHmnsv4Y_Y9j1Vsu/s1600-h/Ghana4+154.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5220114367336649074" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM0mzG432SWUfhS6KoDZY9ZwcFB-5e-ZF7x16bMip6UFfMMAUCSjwauqC5KsLV7s0yc10XcnyWzw1zsQ_oJeOMU2FiUd6o7qCfjpzOI3oMl214fb0wMd7ATHmnsv4Y_Y9j1Vsu/s400/Ghana4+154.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;"> photo: Wild flower on the trail at Mole National Park, northern Ghana</span><br /><br />If this is your first ever visit to this blog, <em>woezor</em> (welcome)! If you're a return visitor, welcome back. This week's entry is the continuation of the chapter, "Into the North" from the book on which I'm working, tentatively titled, "In Search of My Father's House:<em> the story of how one African American family is uncovering its pre-slavery roots and reclaiming its long-lost African kin from the Great TransAtlantic Lost & Found</em>." Next week, I'll finish this chapter and we'll begin another, so be sure to keep coming back!<br />_________________________________________________________<br /><br />Arguably, no region in West Africa is more haunted by the ghosts of its slave trade past than the northern and eastern areas that begin a couple of hundred miles inland from the coasts. Farther south, the losing soldiers in the constant battles between the great nation states might be sold as slaves, or the youngest children of families fallen on hard times who suddenly found themselves with too many mouths to feed, or, perhaps, the children of people too poor to pay their debts. This was how southerners sold their own people away into slavery. But up north where David and I and our fellow passengers on the STC bus now were, and deeper on into Africa’s interior, like southeastern Chad or the Congo, whole villages; whole clusters of villages, were swept up into slavery, their inhabitants chained together in long coffles and force-marched hundreds of miles to the sea. And much of this destruction was wrought by northerners upon themselves. The powerful empires to the south demanded an annual “gift” of slaves as tribute from vassal states. So, in order to fulfill this annual quota, on top of their own internal desire for slaves to serve the households and raise the crops of the wealthy, less powerful northern kingdoms went in search of victims too, raiding towns and villages in their own region for slaves – and it’s in this region where the most visible scars can still be seen, if you train your eyes to see.<br /><br />Up north, the baobab is the tree of life. It is shelter, and a natural storage depot for water, as well as the source of a hundred different useful things: wood; strong rope; food; seasoning; medicine; beer… many, many things. A tree can live for two thousand years or more. Their symbiotic relationship with humans is such that if you spot a cluster of them where there is no village, it’s a pretty safe bet that there once was a village on that site, especially if you also find shea and fig trees close by. I had learned when the clan elders took me on a tour of the ancestral village at Tegbi, that if you find a shallow depression in the ground where there’s no obvious natural reason for one, that’s almost certainly the site of an old well.<br /><br />Once I really started looking for them, these echoes of the past began to make themselves quite plain. Here, close to the road, is a living village with goats and children running about; and women pounding the northern version of fufu or doing the wash. But just a bit farther back is a ghost village: a couple of lone baobab; a couple of shea and some withered fig trees; a circular depression here or there where a well might once have been. Maybe some of these villages were abandoned because a well ran dry, maybe some of the villagers who had once lived here managed to escape the invaders and find safety in numbers somewhere else. But knowing the history of this area, I felt certain that many of the people who once lived here were among the millions marched to the sea, never to see home again.<br /><br />The woman across the aisle from me, one of the friendly neighbors who had offered me food and conversation on this trip, noticed my grave expression and the tears in my eyes. “What’s wrong, brother?” Cousin David was napping. Quietly, I tried to explain, but I could tell from her expression that my words weren’t connecting.<br /><br />Her query suddenly took me back to a moment in my childhood when her role and mine were reversed. I’d been traveling by train from my hometown of Washington, D.C. to visit my paternal grandparents in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. I was seated next to a German tourist visiting the south for the first time. He was an interesting man, and talkative, and I’d enjoyed his conversation, but during the last couple of hours before our arrival in Rocky Mount, he’d suddenly grown very quiet and pensive as he looked out the window – <em>sad,</em> it seemed to me, about something. After a long while, I’d summoned the courage to ask him why. “These people, they really had it hard down here during the war, and after, didn’t they? They really suffered.” His voice had cracked with emotion, and I was taken aback by it. “War? What war?” And then it dawned on me. “Oh, man, is he talking about the Civil War? Can’t be.” But yes, he was. As a teen-ager, he and some of his family had survived the bombing of Dresden - had lived through the difficult aftermath of the war. And the experience of surviving the war had, of course, forever changed his way of looking at the world. One thing that war had changed was his way of looking at and reading a landscape. And as he surveyed the countryside we could see from the train, his eyes could clearly see, nearly a hundred years on, what the southerners in this immediate area had lost - the price they had paid for their bid at secession. As a kid who loved history, I was more than willing to let him teach me to see these things through his eyes – not as perfectly, to be sure, because I’ve never myself lived through the experience of war – but enough to begin to understand.<br /><br />It’s hard enough to train your eye as an observer to see with clarity what’s right before your eyes; harder still to learn to see what’s not there; to know what should be there; what once probably was there in a certain place, but now is gone. That’s why, as my neighbor across the aisle asked me to explain what I was seeing out the window that moved me so, it was hard to make myself plain. But even without this complex dimension, the conversation would eventually have become difficult and then stalled, because as I had already learned from my earliest days in Ghana, it’s as hard to have a conversation with many Africans about slavery as it is to talk about the subject with many American whites, especially southerners. The phenomenon is certainly easy enough to understand. Nobody likes to start a conversation they’re reasonably sure will leave them feeling bad by the time it’s over: 1)defensive or angry; 2)put-upon and misunderstood; 3)offended; 4)personally, and therefore, unjustly accused; 5)guilty, or 6)some combination of all the above.<br />---------------------------------------------------------------------------------David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-20948374086012386212008-06-29T19:06:00.000-07:002008-06-29T19:57:15.045-07:00<div></div><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8xQ3U0DqOi-oq1NaZaIUQln-2PcczkNqAxpiO1TIAOm6335Z52ucbOGxNrgh3SulzIX4DZR96Et66h22uBYjSnDZKeK-JMerkCSTTwLfASSxkjD35y2mJ-i2vgkS6WsMzp95P/s1600-h/DSC_0232.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5217497596321181826" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8xQ3U0DqOi-oq1NaZaIUQln-2PcczkNqAxpiO1TIAOm6335Z52ucbOGxNrgh3SulzIX4DZR96Et66h22uBYjSnDZKeK-JMerkCSTTwLfASSxkjD35y2mJ-i2vgkS6WsMzp95P/s400/DSC_0232.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><br /><div></div><br /><div>Woezor (welcome)! If you are new to this blog, I invite you to scroll all the way back and read about how we have found and connected, through DNA-based research, with one of the African families from whom our ancestors here in the U.S. were separated by the trans-Atlantic slave trade!<br /><br /></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div>Below, you'll find the next segment of a chapter in the book I'm writing about this adventure. I'll be adding some video soon too, so do check back here often. Thanks for joining me. Enjoy.</div><div><br /></div><div>-----------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div><br /></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div>The areas along west Africa’s coastline were the source of most of the transatlantic slave trade’s earlier victims, but the brunt of slavery’s weight fell on the north for the longest period of time – persisting right up until the early twentieth century. When powerful empires like Ashanti in modern day central Ghana, or Oyo in modern day Benin and Nigeria went raiding for slaves who they could trade to Europeans on the coast for iron, fabric, beads, guns and cowrie shells, the relatively defenseless, subsistence farmers and river fishermen of the north became their primary victims of choice.</div><div><br /></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div>Even before the Europeans came, the northern regions were often raided by their more powerful neighbors to feed Africa’s ancient internal market for slaves. Many Africans are fond of saying that the nature of slavery in Africa was fairly benign before the Europeans came and turned it into the world’s first truly international business, because African slavery had no racial basis like the transatlantic trade came to have. Hundreds of eyewitness accounts of the cruelty of this trade, recorded by African and Arab travelers and European missionaries alike, tell us otherwise. But we don’t need historical accounts of African slavery for evidence.</div><div><br /></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div>There’s plenty of evidence to be seen in the class divisions which exist to this day between the descendants of those who did the buying and selling, and the descendants of those who were bought and sold; between those “of the blood” and those merely “of the house.” Every year, word of some surviving pocket of modern slavery comes to light somewhere on the continent – and then some embarrassed governor, president or prime minister marshalls the modern machinery of public relations to cover up or ensure that the story dies as quickly as possible. For the most part, those reports of modern slavery come out of remote, isolated areas of the continent, and no casual visitor to Africa is likely to encounter it. But its distant echoes still exist in many forms, one of which is the ubiquitous but low-profile army of house servants who staff the homes of even barely middle-class Ghanaian families. Some commute to work every day; many, perhaps most, live-in.</div><div><br /></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div>They perform their daily toil in compliance with a social norm not unlike that of Edwardian England – that servants should be like “living furniture.” The evidence of their work should be easily visible throughout the house and garden, but they themselves should remain as nearly invisible as possible. When you visit someone with servants, the servants will be surprised if you stop to ask their names, and thrown for a complete loop if you ask them to pose for a photo. You’re supposed to pretend they’re not there.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Slaves were the ultimate invisible people. Ripped forever from their homelands, they were denied the basic elements of life that made people fully human in African societies: a deep, life-long connection to their ancestral land; a connection to the ancestors who were the very soul of that land;<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=35805943#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">[1]</a> passage, through being given a proper funeral and being properly mourned, into the eternal role of ancestor themselves someday. Sooner or later, the slave was destined to lose his or her mother tongue as well.<br /><br />Once the memory of your own language, the memory of everyone you once knew and loved, and the memory of the person you yourself once were has faded, who are you? You have truly become nobody. You are whoever and whatever the person who has purchased you wants or needs you to be. And if your people can’t mourn you in your own language and bury you in your own soil according to the ancient rites that are part of your blood, gristle and bone, then once you are dead and gone, you are truly gone – not an ancestor, still spoken of, and spoken to; honored; cherished, but a ghost, a homeless wraith whose presence can only trouble the living with a gnawing sense of unease and dread. This was the fate of at least twelve million souls, northerners and southerners alike. When they fell by the wayside on the march to the coast, they were left to die and rot where they lay. The ones branded incorrigible resistors at the slave “factories” of the coast were starved to death and then, so that their end might serve as an example to the others, fed to the sharks.</div><div> </div><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5217502423011487266" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKL13H4NlAVnGHiYk98ehAHyerb4U80pkV79g4La1kp3tE0yyHreV4jzvuE9MZpDDy1iouG2Mu13Gm45cQEBJY7LWB7fxrc5mZVZGHiI37uL1jbT74Q76GrU4oVNZWQEZ0qGy9/s320/Ghana3+036.jpg" border="0" /><span style="font-size:78%;"> photo: Chamber into which resistant slaves were thrown without food</span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"> or water until death claimed them, El Mina, Ghana<br /></span><div></div><br /><div></div><div>The sick and resistant were thrown from the decks of the slave ships, their bleached bones on the bottom of the Atlantic marking the pathway of “the middle passage.” The fate of those who survived the passage, once their lives were used up, was to be buried in shallow graves hastily dug on foreign soil. The collective lore of the entire world agrees: people who’ve left this life never come back to haunt the places where they once found happiness and peace. It’s those who were done some terrible, unredressed wrong, some great, violent injustice, who come back to trouble the living. They haunt the places where the injustice was done. Large swaths of the Americas, Africa, and the passage across the Atlantic between them are haunted places.<br /></div><br /><div><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=35805943#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1"><span style="font-size:85%;">[1]</span></a><span style="font-size:85%;"> Ancestors were, and are, not literally worshipped. It’s simply that though they now live in the spirit world, they are acknowledged as a still vital part of the family, even wiser now than they were in life. Their council, guidance and support are important for the family’s and the community’s well-being. They are the champions and guardians of continuity and the preservation of culture. </span></div>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-20463528534345413842008-06-19T20:04:00.000-07:002008-06-29T23:06:46.708-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiM-cSrFL7Q9_xidZiswLX5OkNeWG7Ai3ARysF-_lpVxo5_aUQ6L0357wGRJJfREqYuXRONG4r-IkpsdObfW9PFXttJ_T6YM393Xi_YbuAhjFj9MOvtOHYbSh_GCUF_cxFuybt/s1600-h/Ghana3+040.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5217551844922197442" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiM-cSrFL7Q9_xidZiswLX5OkNeWG7Ai3ARysF-_lpVxo5_aUQ6L0357wGRJJfREqYuXRONG4r-IkpsdObfW9PFXttJ_T6YM393Xi_YbuAhjFj9MOvtOHYbSh_GCUF_cxFuybt/s400/Ghana3+040.jpg" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-size:78%;">Photo: Detail of skull and crossbones above doorway to death chamber for resistant slaves at El Mina, Ghana</span><br /><br /><p><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></p><br /><p><em>Woezor</em> (welcome). This blog is all about the adventure on which my family in the U.S. was launched, when, through DNA-based genealogical research, we found and connected with an African family from whom my father's line was separated by the transAtlantic slave trade!</p><br /><p>If this is your first visit, I invite you to scroll all the way back to the 2006 entries and pick up the story from the beginning. Those of you who have been with us for a while know that I am in the middle of writing a book about what I discovered on my first journey to Ghana to meet these long-lost kin, and and all that has transpired since then. This week's posting is the next installment of the chapter, "Into the North." </p><br /><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><br /><p><span style="font-size:180%;"><em>Ghosts<br /></em></span>We were only a few hours north of Kumasi, but the landscape had begun to change from the lush green farm land and forested hills of the central region to semi-arid scrub brush and savannah. Banana, mango, cashew and avocado trees gave way to stately baobab, shea nut and fig. Small towns with modest houses of painted concrete gave way to tiny villages with conical houses of mud, wattle and thatch. A landscape liberally dotted with churches of every conceivable denomination, stores and produce stands named in the classic Ghanaian style, “Why Can’t I Just Thank My Jesus Grocery,” or “God is Able Beauty Salon,” now gave way to mosques, and to stores and stands named, “Insh’Allah Blade Sharpening” and “Allahu Akbar Small Electronics Repair, Computer Training Institute and Internet Cafe.”<br /><br />Not long after we’d crossed the bridge over the White Volta, the landscape changed again… as if the river itself were a barrier keeping the wetter air of the verdant, more prosperous south out, and the drier, sub-Saharan air of the dusty, more impoverished north in. If, before the river, we had been in the border lands of this “other” country, now it felt like we had entered its heartland.<br /><br />In much of the Ghanaian south, the rural poverty was reminiscent of the American south of my youth. I mean by this the kind of poverty that might be symbolized by the shotgun shack that needs repair and a fresh coat of paint, whose front windows may have cracked panes and torn screens, whose backyards, busy with rusty-kneed children, dogs and chickens, might be full of old tires and other discarded things meant for possible reuse someday, but whose hardscrabble front yards were always clean and well-raked, and whose windows sported miraculously white curtains fluttering in the breeze.</p><br /><p>Relatives and friends of mine who were once the rusty-kneed country children of houses like these now mostly sing the same refrain about the experience, and I believe them when they say, “Oh, man, we never thought of ourselves as poor. We knew we didn’t have much, but we never went without something to eat. And we were <em>clean</em>.” But even if you did think of your family as poor, everybody knew some other folks somewhere farther on up the road who were truly<em> po’</em> – the joke being that if you were the latter, you were from people too poor to afford the “r” and the other “o.”<br /><br />The houses of po’ folk might feature only pieces of fabric hung over the openings where the doors and windows should be, and no difference between the front yard and the back. And the rusty-kneed children of these houses sometimes do have to go without something to eat. And the junk in the yard is just junk. The forlorn look of these places always seems to say that perhaps the folk who live in them lack the dogged optimism of their slightly more affluent neighbors – people who are working and praying for a better day they truly believe will someday come. For people at the very bottom of a poor country’s socio-economic ladder, it’s hard to find the energy and the focus to nourish a dream – any dream at all – when all of each day’s energy and focus must be devoted to the tasks of basic daily survival.<br /><br />The north has many pockets of relative prosperity, but in comparison to the Ghanaian south, much of the northern region feels po’ like that. This north/south axis is not unique to Ghana. In fact, this is the fault line along which much of west Africa’s fractious internal politics is organized. Even conflicts whose foundations seem to the outside world to be primarily ethnic or religious often feature a strong element of this basic bit of geography underneath it all.<br /></p><br /><p>The social geography in this region of the world is the opposite of how we think of the North/South axis of the wider world. In that model of <em>real politic</em>, the North is the developed world and the South is the developing world. In the U.S., the cultural divide between “the north” and “Dixie” is complicated and has many layers to it, but reduced to its simplest, most stereo-typical absolutes, the divide is similar: haves vs. have nots; urban vs. rural; sophisticated, cultured and worldly vs. unsophisticated, uncultured, country bumpkins. In much of west Africa, you flip that geographic axis upside down. Northerners have to fight both for respect from their countrymen and for attention from their government. Southerners look down their noses at them and consider them the great unwashed.<br /><br />Much of the reason for this north/south split is the legacy of slavery. Just as some areas of persistent poverty in the rural American south, equally persistent pockets of poverty in urban black America, and the grossly disproportionate numbers of African Americans who are incarcerated stand as evidence that slavery is having a vigorous afterlife in the United States, the persistent poverty and second-class status of west Africa’s “north” stands as evidence that slavery is having a vigorous afterlife there as well. The legacy of slavery is only one of the complex and interconnected reasons for the region’s poverty. But it is one central reason.</p><br /><p>And this is something about which there should be no surprise. </p><br /><p><span style="font-size:85%;">Read more about why this is so when we continue this story next week at <em>Tror na Foe</em>.</span></p>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-23273112912287577032008-06-12T22:25:00.000-07:002008-06-12T22:55:50.543-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZqfhUUuCOpQgThGwrEPOCsw_IwXsECZ-kXKiRdr3C0C4z0rLw5ROgKRWrbb8BH_5vRcROWNjpQ17tkCUNfivw-2Qmx4okN8pP6hrFbrE5yZ9ChP-F1smvF74IydXHARv1G_jR/s1600-h/Ghana4+089.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5211238474585817090" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZqfhUUuCOpQgThGwrEPOCsw_IwXsECZ-kXKiRdr3C0C4z0rLw5ROgKRWrbb8BH_5vRcROWNjpQ17tkCUNfivw-2Qmx4okN8pP6hrFbrE5yZ9ChP-F1smvF74IydXHARv1G_jR/s400/Ghana4+089.jpg" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-size:78%;">Photo: Students at cousin Lawrencia's Sky Limit International School in Kumasi<br /></span><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKVD1dbv9YtnWtvREVKtYKtLnNa5MT131apj8AAIb5UNqoe0cqad3l0AMYRB09FSVH8hZOzYUE9F4b7y0eI38BQZldc5muFhRShXmvubiAigUmsdBZVR713wpMVZlOWV9nYNka/s1600-h/Ghana3+001.jpg"></a><br /><br /><div>(<em>Troh-nah-fway</em>) a phrase in Ewe, the language of my father's forbears from Ghana, Togo and Benin, meaning, roughly, "to return and find again."</div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>Below you'll find the second of several installments which comprise the "prequell" to the previous four part story, "I Hold High My Beautiful, Luminous Q'uran." Look for another installment next week which will take you farther "Into the North." With that installment I'll begin in earnest the process of sharing with you some excerpts of the book I'm writing about the adventure of finding, through DNA-based genealogical research, one of the African families from whom my father's side was separated by the trans-Atlantic slave trade!</div><br /><div>If you're new to the blog, please scroll all the way back to the beginning so that you can follow along with what's happened so far. Thanks for keeping company with me on this journey. </div><br /><br /><div>--------------------------------------------------------------</div><br /><br /><div>Wesley started having trouble keeping the engine from killing whenever we had to slow down. He grew uncharacteristically quiet, the better to listen closely to what was going on under the hood. The problem seemed to right itself for a while, but then, an hour north of town, the engine simply quit. Fortunately, we were very near a gas station, and Wesley was able to coast the bus off the road, up onto the grass just beyond the entrance. He apologized profusely and promised us a replacement bus would come soon.<br /><br />He phoned Kumasi, and then we piled out onto the shoulder of the road in a light rain. Everyone pitched in to help offload the luggage. People bought snacks from the service station; used the bathroom; crowded in together under the shelter of the service kiosks – which was fine, because no customers needed access to the pumps anyway. The station was completely out of gas.<br /><br />We huddled together in small groups and chatted quietly while we waited… and waited… Wesley looked under the hood and cursed; then held court with a small group of passengers, loosing a torrent of complaint about the STC. A business man who was not a charter member of Wesley’s fan club leaned into me and said, “Oh, my, you see how he plays the victim now. I’m sure the STC mechanics knew when we left that this bus had only a fifty percent chance of making it to Tamale at best. But the thing is, I’m sure our driver knew it too. Whatever’s wrong, I assure you it was completely foreseeable, but they just didn’t take care of it, you see? And so now, here we are.”<br /><br />I spotted another STC bus headed in our direction. I said, to no one in particular, “Hey… looks like maybe here comes our chariot now. This wasn’t so bad.” A young, dreadlocked man behind me chuckled, “Not yet. <em>This be Ghana, oh</em>.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=35805943#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">[1]</a> It’s a refrain uttered by millions of people, millions of times a day. Every nation has a national flag; a national anthem; most even have an official national flower and a bird too. But not every nation has an official national sigh of futility and resignation. Ghana does.<br /><br />Sure enough, it was another hour before we were back on our way. It was a true first class bus this time. The new driver wasn’t a showman like Wesley, but he was pleasant enough. And at least this time, David and I could sit together. The good things about first class were the air conditioning and the comfier seats; the bad things: lousy Nigerian gangster movies and an even lousier sound system only capable of two settings – loud, or off. So, for the next seven and half hours, those of us who weren’t following the action of the movies had to shout just to carry on a conversation with our neighbors. Still, there were people who closed their eyes and managed to nap. Even though I usually can’t sleep well in my seat while I travel, I was tired enough to think that maybe I could pull off that feat myself this time. I tried, and was soon rewarded with a brief period of sweet, badly-needed sleep – not quality sleep, for sure, but enough to take the edge off. And when I awoke, it was as if we had arrived in some other country. </div><div></div><div></div><div><br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=35805943#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1"><span style="font-size:78%;">[1]</span></a><span style="font-size:78%;"> In Twi, the most widely spoken and understood language in Ghana, “oh” is often added to the end of a phrase for no particular reason… like the “eh?” is used in Canada.</span></div></div>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-53805632043475064372008-06-05T21:20:00.000-07:002008-07-18T20:29:40.837-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFoKLYVuXEnZ6sUAFl6LdRVLX8WB_2sCvUvsBWUD61PXX0SE5mqJGwNzr0TrePjcOB04eo5fHBovFYh1EYaKbSoCHRJpgtDdWBmJqxgeT31XlJDndpci0ioiXj-EW-S_LZW2rM/s1600-h/DSC_0223.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5208619964882187794" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFoKLYVuXEnZ6sUAFl6LdRVLX8WB_2sCvUvsBWUD61PXX0SE5mqJGwNzr0TrePjcOB04eo5fHBovFYh1EYaKbSoCHRJpgtDdWBmJqxgeT31XlJDndpci0ioiXj-EW-S_LZW2rM/s400/DSC_0223.jpg" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-size:78%;">Photo, Amahl Grant: The ancient mosque at Larabanga, Ghana</span><br /><p><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></p><p>Tror Na Foe (troh-nah-fway), a phrase in Ewe, the language of my father's forbears in eastern Ghana and Togo, meaning, roughly to return and find again. </p><p>If you are new to this site, I invite you to scroll all the way back to the very beginning and follow along with the journey that began when, through DNA-based genealogical research, we found and connected with members of the family from whom my father's line was separated by the trans-Atlantic slave trade.</p><p>If you're a returning reader, <em>akpe nowo</em> (thank you very much) and welcome back! Sorry I haven't posted for a while... but your patience is about to be rewarded! You may remember that I said at the outset I intend to write a book about this adventure. Well, I've been busy doing exactly that, and it's my intention now to share major portions of that book with you as it comes along. </p><p>Here's the first half of the "prequel" to "I Hold High My Beautiful, Luminous Q'uran." Enjoy. I'll offer up the second half next week. See you then. </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------</p><p><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>“This be Ghana, oh”<br /></em></span><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Cousin David showed up at the KNUST Engineering Guest House with a cab and driver right on time, at 5:00 a.m., for the early STC bus to Tamale. David, who had squired me around Kumasi to meet relatives and to see the town, had recently lost his job. When Gideon told him of my desire to visit Mole Park, he’d jumped at the chance to accompany me. I was paying, and he had the time. “We don’t do enough internal travel,” he said. “We have so much beauty here, but we Ghanaians, we hardly ever get the chance to see and enjoy our own country.” Travel in west Africa - even in a country like Ghana with better than average infrastructure – is hard. And it’s not cheap, in a society where the economy just limps along and almost everyone is chronically underpaid.<br /><br />Mole had held a special allure for me, ever since I first read about it in the process of preparing for this trip. I’d loved every minute of my time on the coast, the hill country north and northeast of Accra; the rain forest. But so much of my long-imagined Africa had always been about the savannah too – the land of baobab trees, mud houses and mud mosques; the sahel region at the edge of the great Sahara – the home of mythical, ancient towns like Timbuktu and Djenne. And the other savannah; the home of big game and the safari. Mole is one of the only places in all of west Africa where visitors can have that quintessential east African experience of close encounters with some of the big, endan-gered animals with which Africa is forever linked in the popular imagination. And this is a place where you don’t need to hire a guide and rent an expensive four-wheel drive vehicle to see the park and its animal life. Anything which even vaguely evoked echoes of the whole “great white hunter” safari of the colonialist past was not for me. At Mole, you get to do your safari as part of a small group led by a ranger, on foot. You can also explore the park’s miles of trails by rented bike. Just my speed, all of that. I had to go.<br /><br />The burly, charismatic driver hopped onto our bus at the Kumasi STC station like a performer taking the stage. “As Salaam aleikum,” he shouted. The two-thirds of the passengers who were northerners going home – and some of the rest of us too – shouted back “Wa aleikum, salaam,” as he launched into his good-natured apology on behalf of the STC that this vehicle on which we’d be spending the next nine hours or so was second class, not the first class bus we were supposed to have. But, no worries, said Wesley, after he introduced himself with a flourish. We should settle back and enjoy the trip, because, “That first-class bus was crap anyway. This bus, my bus, she’s the queen. I’m telling you, you don’t know how lucky you are to be on this bus. And me, I’m the best driver they got, too.” He flashed a huge grin as his eyes scanned the crowded bus. “Some among you know me well. They’ll tell you.” And sure enough, some of his regulars laughed and nodded at the rest of us. “You see; you see? It’s gonna be a good ride. Oh, yes! Schmoooo-ve, man, I’m telling you! No troubles; no worries. If you’re ready, I’m ready. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!!” He cranked the engine and gunned it extra hard just for show. Well, at least, I thought, this is one brother who will not be falling asleep at the wheel. Not a single goat or chicken between here and Tamale was likely to end up as road kill on this man’s watch. And Wesley promised to be entertaining enough that we wouldn’t for one minute miss the bad Nigerian movies they show in first class.<br /><br />So, David and I settled in for the ride. My only anxiety now was that cousin Lawrencia had promised to see us off, and she wasn’t here yet. She is a woman of her word, and I hated the thought that, driven by this powerful sense of family duty she’s got, she was fighting the unbearable Kumasi traffic to get to us, but would almost certainly arrive too late. Then she’d have to turn right around and fight that traffic going the other direction, with only the slimmest chance of making it to school in time to unlock the doors. I never did see her, but just as the bus pulled out of the station, I heard David call my name from the back of the bus (our seats were supposed to be together, but the ticket agent had messed it up). Slowly, but surely, a plastic bag snaked its way from passenger to passenger until it reached my hand. “Lawrencia,” David shouted.<br /><br />It was a breakfast sandwich of scrambled egg and vegetables, one of two she’d lovingly made for us in the pre-dawn darkness while she fed her husband and kids and got ready for school. Then she’d made the mad dash to the bus station, spotted David in the window, and managed to hand them up to him as the bus pulled away. Miraculously, my sandwich was still warm. After being up since before dawn myself to catch this early bus, I was suddenly very hungry too. I don’t know when I’ve appreciated a meal more.<br /><br />Wesley really did know half the people on that bus. As we got underway, good-natured ribbing bounced back and forth between Wesley and passengers who were obviously part of his considerable fan club. And as he cheerfully and expertly navigated the big bus through chaotic traffic and the aggressive sea of street vendors on our way north out of the endless urban sprawl of Kumasi, a half-dozen people leaned in toward him, the better to keep themselves in earshot so they could hear, above the din of the engine, the traffic, and the lively conversation in the aisles, his steady stream of stories and rant. The people on either side of me offered conversation, fresh fruit and cookies. Somebody in back cranked up the reggae music a local radio station was playing. All of a sudden, it was like having wandered into a pretty good party. But like all good parties, it was over too soon. </span></p>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-42571086035141449802007-11-26T20:40:00.000-08:002007-11-26T21:12:04.312-08:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrznqMxsIADaGelAxeDDRebQnGRiEFPjwX5z60IXZL7hFHNEIGmW8U_2mTXYztPvWV80dLV5sc6opROKERyPTA0EX_HmdSfzLZzuVbik2J1jTX0rVS3JfINlTnk812qjhBM2Z0/s1600-h/PIC_0514.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5137376345987402562" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrznqMxsIADaGelAxeDDRebQnGRiEFPjwX5z60IXZL7hFHNEIGmW8U_2mTXYztPvWV80dLV5sc6opROKERyPTA0EX_HmdSfzLZzuVbik2J1jTX0rVS3JfINlTnk812qjhBM2Z0/s400/PIC_0514.JPG" border="0" /></a>(<em>Troh na- fway</em>) a phrase in Ewe, the language of my father's ancestors from Togo and southeastern Ghana, meaning, roughly, "to return and find again."<br /><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;">photo: a "calendar wall" in Larabanga, Ghana</span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:180%;">Part 4: I Hold High My Beautiful, Luminous Q'uran</span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><br /><div>This is the fourth and final installment of a series about a graduation party of some new park Rangers I attended while at Mole Park in Ghana's Muslim north last year.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>If you're new to the site, I encourage you to scroll all the way back to the beginning and read about the adventure of finding, through DNA-based genealogical research, the African family from whom my father's side was separated by the slave trade. Next posting, I'll share some photos, and hopefully, video of last year's Hogbetsotso festival (Ho-bay-jo-jo), which, every November, commemorates the 16th century exodus of the Anlo-Ewe people from bondage in the town of Notsie. See you back here again soon.</div><br /><div>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------</div>I threw on a few clothes and headed back up the hill. The first thing I saw was all the hands waving in the air, in unison. The dancing had more heat; more sensuality. And then, as the DJ skillfully mixed the next song into the foreground, I noticed the big difference between what he had played earlier in the evening and now. This was an all-instrumental set. I got it. If you’re a DJ up in this country, this is how you get around social stricture when you run out of the music with the pious lyrics. You create a hot mix that has no lyrics at all.<br /><br />I took a seat on the far perimeter of the action. Only the colored party lights were on now, and as far as I could see, no one had noticed my return. This suited me fine since all I wanted was just to perch here for a little while and satisfy my curiosity.<br /><br />The boys and the girls were still very much apart, but the dynamic between them had, indeed, changed. It was subtle, but there it was. What had seemed before like almost completely separate parties had become one. The boys and the girls were still dancing in separate packs, but they seemed to be dancing for each other now – showing off for each other; flirting across the space that divided them. I couldn’t help but be struck by the sweetness and the innocence of it all.<br /><br />There’s a strong tendency in the West, especially with regards to the cultural traditions of the Islamic world, to look with a jaundiced eye at such anciently cherished social conven-tions – an easy readiness to judge them pathologically backward and old-fashioned. But as I watched the big fun these kids were having, I had to wonder, “Is it a bad thing to pre-serve a little mystery and innocence about male/female relationships and sexuality for young people making their first tentative steps toward adulthood?” If a culture’s dance traditions reflect in some larger way on the dynamics of relationships between men and women, is it a bad thing to dance in a manner which affirms the fact that men and women live most of their lives in intimately connected, but parallel universes? At the end of the day, is this really so very different from how things are between the genders in the West?<br /><br />The dancers and the DJ took a break and headed for either the bathrooms or the punch bowl. Latif spotted me and excitedly made his way over to where I sat.<br /><br />“Ah, Daddy, you camed back. You camed back to us!”<br /><br />“Yeah; I couldn’t sleep. And you know I love the music.<br /><br />“Yeah, it’s good, yes?”<br /><br />“Very good.”<br /><br />I nodded toward the girls. “Who have you got your eye on over there?” He looked at me blankly.<br /><br />“I mean, of the girls over there, is there one who’s special?” His eyes lit up.<br /><br />“Ah, yes… my love, my wife, Aisha.”<br /><br />“Your wife? Get outta here, man, you ain’t married yet. Does she know? Does she know<br />that’s how you think of her?”<br /><br />“Yes.”<br /><br />“And does she approve?”<br /><br />“Yes.”<br /><br />I was dying of curiosity, of course, so I asked him to point her out. She was a real beauty, with a magnificent smile and bright eyes that could light up any room. I grinned at Latif and slapped hands with him.<br /><br />“My man. She’s the most beautiful girl here, no doubt.”<br /><br />“Smartest too.”<br /><br />She spotted us, obviously talking about her, and headed our way with another girl in tow.<br /><br />“How long have you known you were made for each other?”<br /><br />“All our life. Since we are five years old. Our families approve.”<br /><br />As Aisha and her cousin Maryamu approached, he introduced us. We sat down on a bench, the girls on my left, and Latif on my right. I was surprised at how close Aisha sat by my side. It was like being treated as a favorite uncle might be, even though we had just met. I guessed that Latif’s obvious affection for me and the fact that he’d taken to calling me Daddy was good enough credentials of my trustworthiness for her.<br /><br />“Latif is real proud of how smart you are,” I told her. “So, you’re a really good student<br />I’ll bet. What’s your best subject in school?”<br /><br />“Science.”<br /><br />Maryamu shook her head. “Maths.”<br /><br />“Science and math, yes, I like them both.”<br /><br />“And what do you plan to do with your education?”<br /><br />“I’ll be a doctor, <em>insh’allah</em>. The kind that works with children”<br /><br />“I’m going to study for electrician,” said Latif. “We’ll get married, and then I’ll<br />support us while she goes to school.”<br /><br />“No children ‘til I’m done with school.”<br /><br />“Just one,” said Latif. She shot him a look.<br /><br />“After school.”<br /><br />She nodded, satisfied. “Then, I will support us while he takes his second degree.”<br /><br />“I go for electrical engineer. Then, we have one more child, but just one. With<br />only two, we can give them the best of everything and see well to their education.”<br /><br />It was like talking to two grown folks. I’ve never met a sixteen year old couple with such a clearly thought out game plan for their lives. Nor such complete faith in it.<br /><br />Before long, the music started up again and it was hard to hear ourselves talk over it. I bid the kids farewell, and watched as they took the floor once more.<br /><br />I made up my mind to linger only another minute or two. I had to try and get some sleep. As I surveyed the dance floor one last time, I suddenly had a stunning revelation – something my outsider’s eyes had missed when I first returned to the party. Yet, it was so clear to me now. These boys and girls weren’t dancing for each other, they were dancing with each other. Just as water will find its way down a hill, young love will find a way around whatever social conventions may restrict its path. With respect for tradition, but with great creativity and force of will, I saw that these kids have figured out how to use intense eye contact and body language to shrink that twenty feet of space between them down to what must feel more like two inches. Or less.<br /><br />It was crystal clear when I watched Latif and Aisha. I thought I’d test the premise with Maryamu. She hadn’t mentioned a boyfriend, but did she have one here? I did my best to<br />trace the eye contact she was making straight into the crowd of male dancers… and sure enough, there he was. Young Muhammad, a friend of Latif and Osama’s whom I had met<br />earlier in the evening, was making strong eye contact back at her, his movements synchronized with hers in every way.<br /><br />I searched the crowd now for Osama. Did he have a mate here somewhere? This would be interesting. I didn’t see him. Maybe he’d already left. But just as I turned to leave, there he was, alone, still dancing like a madman; like someone who’d caught the Holy Ghost. His body jerked rhythmically to and fro, his eyes rolled back up into his head as if he were dancing at a party in yet another parallel universe… located someplace where the rest of us couldn’t follow.<br /><br />I finally turned to go in earnest. As I made my way back down the hill, I noticed that a gorgeous crescent moon sat low on the horizon over Larabanga, painted pink from the red dust raised by the early-arriving Harmattan wind. And in the darkest part of the road, my eyes drank their fill of starlight too. The music was still playing up on the hill, but as I walked on, I was suddenly startled to realize how razor-sharp all my senses felt, especially my sense of hearing. I knew that, as busy as the savannah is during the day, when all of us diurnal critters are out and about, it’s actually much busier at night. I couldn’t see any of this activity that takes place in the deep and dark, but I could hear and feel it all around me… I smiled to myself, relishing the thought that I must surely somehow have caught a little bit of Osama’s Holy Ghost, because all of this sounded like music to me now – the rhythmic throbbing of the insects; the shriek of a small animal only yards away who’d just become someone else’s late night meal; the frantic, urgent beating of bats’ wings; the breeze, like someone’s soft breathing, in the long grass.<br /><br />And even though I was only walking, it felt like dancing, because I was dancing in my head. And I stopped worrying about launching into a long, hard day’s travel on only two hours sleep. I felt good. The day would be fine. I walked down the hill to my room, fully surrendering into the embrace of this good, velvet-black African night.<br /><div></div>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-82189401420302028902007-11-07T11:30:00.000-08:002007-11-07T15:32:26.079-08:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJXt-I0z5AowFe6i2NxvEufu15iLcQ813ZJvixzMkg2N9tXNR_NiF9XT4RbE8L6mV77DqbxzIMTp3rdGF8TzwkZGJaRIGdUrmgJmXMVgoubsagOFAC7s0jk0xTp2RKe093xct_/s1600-h/PIC_0498.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5130184013154975026" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJXt-I0z5AowFe6i2NxvEufu15iLcQ813ZJvixzMkg2N9tXNR_NiF9XT4RbE8L6mV77DqbxzIMTp3rdGF8TzwkZGJaRIGdUrmgJmXMVgoubsagOFAC7s0jk0xTp2RKe093xct_/s400/PIC_0498.JPG" border="0" /></a><br /><div>Tror Na Foe (<em>troh-nah-fway</em>)</div><div>A phrase in Ewe, the ancestral language of my father's ancestors in the southeastern corner of Ghana, meaning roughly "to return and find again."</div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><em><span style="font-size:85%;">(photo: children in the park rangers' quarters at Larabanga, Nov. 2007)</span></em></div><div><em><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></em></div><div><em><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></em></div><div><em><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></em></div><div><em><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></em></div><div><em><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></em></div><div><em><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></em></div><div><em><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></em></div><div><em><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></em></div><div><em><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></em></div><div><span style="font-size:180%;"></span></div><div><span style="font-size:180%;"></span></div><div><span style="font-size:180%;"></span></div><div><span style="font-size:180%;"></span></div><div><span style="font-size:180%;"></span> </div><div><span style="font-size:180%;"></span> </div><div><span style="font-size:180%;">I Hold High My Beautiful, Luminous Q'uran, Part III</span></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div> </div><div>Here's the third part of my four part story about a graduation party to which I was invited in Ghana's Muslim north. See you next time with the fourth and final installment. Enjoy. And if you are new to the site, I invite you to scroll all the way back to the beginning, so that you can read all about the adventure our family on this side of the Atlantic has been enjoying since finding and making contact last year with the original African family from whom we had been separated by slavery for some two hundred fifty years!</div><div>--------------------------------------------------------</div><div>Watching [the kids dance] made me think of other kids in other places on earth on this Friday night, eagerly looking, even within the mannered confines of a well-chaperoned dance, for the hot, electric thrill only a little proximity with the opposite sex can give.<br /><br />From time immemorial, when men and women have partnered up to dance, dance has been a metaphor – a meditation in motion – encompassing every aspect of our relationship with one another: communication, both spoken and unspoken; nurture; longing and desire; sex. The European tradition is full of slow, courtly dances which leave a lot to the imagination. Subtlety is the point. Boys and girls taught to dance in this tradition learn, literally, to turn slow, cautious circles around each other as they take their first baby steps toward deciphering the deeper mysteries of intimacy between men and women. Generations of youth have taken some of their most important and memorable steps toward adulthood as they promenaded awkwardly onto the floor with a partner at a middle school dance, watchful adults in the wings making sure that all major body parts remained a respectable distance apart.<br /><br />But Africa, the original Land of A Thousand Dances, is the home of the beat that created rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and jazz, and funk. The dances people do to this music are more primal and leave a lot less to the imagination. Some are an exuberant and unapologetic celebration of sex and desire. Just as changing beliefs and understandings about sex in western culture gradually freed love-making from the insanely limiting confines of “the missionary position,” dances eagerly adopted in the West from the Afro-Caribbean-Latin tradition have profoundly energized and underscored a liberated consciousness that there are, indeed, many, many wonderful ways to make whoopee.<br /><br />Yet even with their evolution into styles which are, at base, a celebration of all things carnal, the dances which have sprung from this tradition have still left at least something to the imagina-tion. But lately, as any adult who’s recently chaperoned a dance will tell you, one popular style, even with the middle school set, is nothing more and nothing less than just raw, simulated sex. No matter where parents find themselves between the extreme right and the extreme left of the culture wars continuum, there is, generally, a feeling that this trend away from at least a thin veneer of subtlety has drifted too far.<br /><br />So, I was intensely curious about how this concern over what is widely perceived as a coarsening of world youth culture might play out in a rural village where fundamentalist Islam holds sway. How much would these kids care to mimic the styles they see in American and European hip-hop videos? How far would their adult chaperones let them go in a culture which forbids both close dancing and dating as we know it?<br /><br />It dawned on me, as I strained to hear and understand the lyrics of the music being played that a big part of what made this dancing halal (like saying “kosher”, or theologically acceptable) was the lyrical content of these songs. I speak very little Hausa, and no Gonja, the languages of many of these lyrics, but as I listened, the chorus of my favorite song of the evening so far seemed to be saying, “Whatever I do in this life, I know I’m alright as long as stick to my glorious Q’uran.” I checked this out with one of the new ranger graduates when he passed my way to grab himself another cup of punch.<br /><br />“Yes, yes, exactly so,” he said. “It says, ‘I know I can never stray too far in life as long as I hold high my beautiful, luminous Q’uran.’” As I surveyed the enthusiastic dancers, many of them were singing, some shouting this chorus. So, that was it. As long as the sentiments being expressed by the music were not only innocent, but positively righteous, and the boys and girls were not dancing together, the dancing could be whatever the kids wanted and needed for it to be. And the style they were into was furious and intense.<br /><br />As the kids with whom I was sitting and I watched, the competition on the floor between the boys was heating up. The dynamic that revealed itself was that one boy or man would make a move toward the center of the pack and then, all eyes on him, he’d bust his best moves, holding the floor for half a minute before fading on back into the pack.<br /><br />Some of the boys who’d been holding it down on the floor in this manner began to look at Osama expectantly. He and Latif gave each other a look, and then rose in unison, heading straight for the center of the action.<br /><br />They were both really, really good… fluid; athletic; artful. But Osama’s odd body type gave him whole other set of tools, and he used them well. What he was doing out there is hard to describe, simply because I’ve never seen a human being move like that. It was urgent; crazy… like what "krunk" strives to be, but isn’t quite. His moves were like a rapid-fire ritual in which his purpose was to remove his own skin, not out of some tragic and bizarre self-loathing, but out of sheer joy – as if he wanted to say, “Hey, y’all ain’t gonna believe what I got inside of here! Now, watch; I’m’a show you. Stand back!” Like <em>that</em>.<br /><br />As he danced on into the next song, neither he nor Latif faded back into the group to let someone else step up into the center. It didn’t feel like a selfish choice on their part.<br />It was as if the collective mindset of the entire male group was, “Hey, the competition’s over, and we all know who won; let’s just dance.” And dance on, they did, letting these two bring the energy of the whole group up to a fever pitch while the chorus of the current tune raved on, “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!” (God is great), their arms flailing; fists pumping skyward to accentuate the words.<br /><br />I glanced at the time on my cell phone and frowned. The evening was young yet, but I had to pack and try to get some sleep before rising at 3:00 a.m. to catch that 4 o’clock bus to Tamale. I waded onto the dance floor, gamely shaking my rump, shouting to my new friends that I had to leave.<br /><br />Night falls early and hard in this part of the world. I stumbled and twisted each ankle more than once as I made my way back down the pitch dark gravel road to my room. I washed; I packed, and then I fell heavily onto my bed. It had been a very good day, and the party had provided a perfect ending. Now, there was a knock on my door. It was my cousin David, saying he’d come wake me at 3:15 if he didn’t see my light on. We wished each other a good night, and I settled in to catch some sleep.<br /><br />Some other time, in some other place, the insistent thump, thump, thump from up on the hill would probably have felt like a real irritant right about then. In fact, I’m sure I would have been lying there feeling more and more pissed off by the minute. But not tonight. Despite the fact that I desperately needed to catch some sleep, the music just made me smile. I pictured the kids I’d met still at it up there; the DJ expertly plying his trade under that glorious velvet black African sky full of stars.<br /><br />But instead of lulling me to sleep, those thoughts kept me awake… kept urging me up out of bed and back outside. That jet-black African sky, for instance. “When, ever again,” I was thinking, “Am I going to have a chance to gaze at stars in a sky like this?” I’d noticed on the way back down to the hotel that there was an area by the side of the road almost completely free of the little bit of light pollution thrown up by the hotel and the rangers’ living quarters. In fact, gazing up at the glory of it as I walked back down was at least half the reason for my twisted ankles. That thought alone got me half way out of bed. But the clincher came only moments later, when, faintly, behind the sound of the music from up on the hill, I could hear the muezzin’s call for evening prayers from the mosques of Larabanga. Soon, the music came to a dead halt; there were a few announce-ments over the p.a. system… then silence, except for the final chorus of the call to prayer.<br /><br />O.K., that’s it, I thought. Party over. And now, the call to prayer will be my lullaby, and I’ll get some sleep. Perfect. But within what seemed a span of just a few minutes, I heard the party music start back up again. And this time, it was different. Faster; harder. An Afrobeat/</div><div>Techno/Rave thing going on. “Now, this is interesting,” I thought. If most of the adults and some of the youth had all gone down to the mosque to pray, leaving only the die-hard dancers and the DJ up there, what were they into now? Had some of the dynamics on the dance floor changed now that things might be a little looser? Would boys and girls dare to dance together with their chaperones gone? I had to know. If it meant getting through the next hard day’s journey on even less sleep now, or perhaps no sleep at all, I was curious enough to risk it.<br />------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div>I'll have the conclusion of this story for you next time. See you then.</div>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-37947655020311630192007-09-17T11:15:00.000-07:002007-09-17T11:40:35.557-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji0BNmLlrHm7N1HIrFYpuIJbNP1yl1AELO5_fB0R9cYezqSdF6ehLLyOFYYV4kJRQEvPVt5hrRgd9HXVZd5S6qfPRrv1VUGzFC2gdJsYnIEUS5RdIdDZblcebkyEzuTCZb18b8/s1600-h/PIC_0523.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5111244154161458594" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji0BNmLlrHm7N1HIrFYpuIJbNP1yl1AELO5_fB0R9cYezqSdF6ehLLyOFYYV4kJRQEvPVt5hrRgd9HXVZd5S6qfPRrv1VUGzFC2gdJsYnIEUS5RdIdDZblcebkyEzuTCZb18b8/s400/PIC_0523.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>(<em>Troh-na-fway</em>) in the Ewe language spoken by my father's ancestors in Ghana, Togo and Benin, means "to return and find again."</div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><div><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><div><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><div><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><div><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><div><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><div><span style="font-size:85%;">(photo: The chief Imam of the ancient mosque at Larabanga)</span></div><br /><div></div><br /><div>Here, folks, is part 3 of a story about a party I got to attend in a village in Ghana's Muslim north while exploring the country with one of my new-found African cousins this past November. If you follow this blog, you know that nine family members from this side of the Atlantic made the trip together just last month. Look for video and photos from that trip soon. Meanwhile, please enjoy this installment of the continuing story...</div><br /><div></div><div><span style="font-size:130%;">I Hold High My Beautiful, Luminous Q'uran</span></div><br /><div></div><div>When the announced start time of 6:30 rolled around, David and I were the first guests to arrive… the only guests for a while. We watched as a couple of local women turned up, matronly, but like butterflies in their brightly colored, party best. As they got the punch bowl and some refreshments arranged on a side table, the DJ set up his turntables and his soundboard, fiddling endlessly with the mix on the microphones that would soon be used for speeches. He started messing around with the speaker mix for the music, and the four nervous ranger graduates got up to shake off their growing anxiety about having to speak and be the center of attention by dancing with one another – tentatively at first, but then with more energy. Soon, a few kids from the rangers’ quarters turned up and began to dance too, around the edges of the outdoor employees’ canteen where the festivities were being held. Before long, they were joined by a growing number of kids who came by bike, on foot and by motorbike from the nearby town of Larabanga, and other smaller villages a little farther up the road.<br /><br />But still, things were a little disorganized, and it became clear to us that nothing was really going to happen for a while. Quite hungry now, David and I decided to take advantage of this lull in the action to wander back down to the hotel for some dinner.<br /><br />When we sauntered back up, our bellies full after a pretty good meal, the party was finally in full swing. A couple of young European back packers had wandered up there, but, even after repeated entreaties over the p.a. system that were easily heard downhill at the hotel, David and I were the only other guests who came.<br /><br />The four graduates received their diplomas, to much applause, and then the music, which had otherwise been blaring constantly, was cranked back up. But this time, it was serious. The obligatory speeches and ceremony were done, and now, it was time to dance.<br /><br />David excused himself, reminding me not to stay too long because we had to get up well before the sun to catch a 4 a.m. bus into Tamale the next morning. I said I’d be along soon, but I’d been anxious to hear some more of this music, and now, here it was.<br /><br />The dancing, which had until this moment been confined, except for the graduates, to the outside perimeter of the open-air canteen area, now slowly took over the entire space.<br />Anyone who’s ever been to Africa will tell you, there’s no such thing as a wallflower at a party. Even non-dancers with their amateur anthropologist hats on like me will eventually have to get up and dance. In my case, it was young Latif who called me out. He’d seen me smiling at him and some of the other youth as they warmed up to take the floor, and they’d been curious about where I was from. After I gave them a good laugh with my spirited but Cosby-esque gyrations on the floor, we talked – shouted at each other – over the booming, compelling sounds of the pop music of their native land.<br /><br />It was a big deal to them that I was from the U.S. Huge. When they asked me about my work and I told them I’m a writer, mostly a screenwriter and playwright, they got really pumped. Now, the excited, rapid-fire inquiries were all about who I know. “Damn,” they were thinking, “Brotherman must know all kinds of incredible people we’ve heard of.” I hemmed and hawed… and it hurt me to watch creeping disappointment suddenly dull the bright, expectant sparkle that had lit up all their faces just moments before. I was losing major cool points by the millisecond. I rattled off a few people they might know, before the well ran pretty dry, and I had to dig deep for stories from friends and associates who have at least been in the same room with some of the people they’ve heard of. This did the trick. Very quickly, joy returned because, just like that, the huge space between them and the epicenter of all things cool had shrunk considerably, and they were basking in the glow of how it suddenly felt to be a mere two degrees of separation from Tupac, Snoop, Jay-Z, J-Lo and Oprah.<br /><br />As my official host, my new friend Latif had just scored major cool points too, and I could see it in his eyes as he drank in their admiration – especially the awed expressions of the girls on the periphery of the action here. An already pretty good party was suddenly much more full of intriguing possibilities for him. He spoke mostly in rapid fire Gonja, but the sense of it was easy enough to understand. “See, I told you he was cool,” he was saying.<br /><br />And as I scanned their beautiful, sparkling faces, it hit me like a ton of bricks – about a third or more of the people gathered there were female, but so far… between the graduates; the emcee, the DJ; the dancers – it had been an all-male show. The grown women had been in the background applauding the speeches, serving food; watching the kids. But in the dark fringes of this outdoor café turned party room, they had literally become invisible now. And the girls – all in hijab; all in colorful party clothes – they’d hung together in a pack, in their own space out on the edge of things, their eyes on the boys they knew, watching their moves; tittering back and forth with each other about them like birds on a wire.<br /><br />Suddenly, my eye caught something else that turned my attention entirely away from them. Into the party walked a lanky youth whose t-shirt sported a very familiar face.<br /></div><br /><div>Back in Accra, I’d seen several sidewalk stalls that press images onto plain white “Ts” for you. It seemed to be the same basic choices everywhere. You could get white Jesus, brown Jesus, Nelson Mandela, Bob Marley or, interestingly, Osama Bin Laden. I’d been thinking, if I had a spur of the moment opportunity, that I’d buy that brown Jesus. No lame, schlocky t-shirt Jesus, he, with his deep, beautiful eyes. And he wasn’t merely the white Jesus, but tinted brown, either. He had his own face; his own impressively deep persona. So… brown Jesus, Nelson Mandela and Bob Marley, I was thinking. One of them for me, and the others for gifts. I’d had yet to actually see anybody sporting one of these shirts, so ubiquitous at the street stalls. But now here came Osama, big as life, rippling like a limp flag on the chest of this gangly, dust-covered kid from the village.<br /><br />Before he could advance even a few steps from the entryway, Latif shot like a bolt to his side and pushed him up against the fence. I was alarmed. I stood up to see what was going on back there where almost no light managed to seep over from the dance floor and the area around the refreshment table. But it didn’t feel like a fight. Nobody back there seemed to feel it was necessary to separate them. All I knew for sure was that Latif was speaking to him very urgently about something, then gesturing back towards me. And then I watched Osama remove his shirt, turn it inside out, and put it back on. Latif seemed satisfied and returned to the area near where I’d been sitting. Now I understood. Latif was looking out for me. He hadn’t wanted me to feel offended by the sight of a local kid sporting a Bin Laden t-shirt.<br /><br />I caught Osama’s eye and called him over. Now, in the light, I could see something that I’d only caught a tiny glimmer of when I’d first spotted him in the near darkness of the entryway. It was the way he moved. It wasn’t just the awkward gangliness of an adolescent who hasn’t quite grown into his suddenly larger frame yet. He seemed to me now an oddity of nature – someone whose every joint is not merely double, but entirely elastic – a rubber man. As he approached, I smiled broadly at him. “Hey, kid, your t-shirt’s on inside out. That the new style or something?” He grinned sheepishly and looked down at his feet. “I saw you have Osama on your shirt.” He looked confused. “Osama… Bin Laden. I saw you have his picture on your shirt.” Latif spit some terse words at him in Gonja. “Oh,” said Osama. “The shirt. You saw.”<br /><br />“Yeah. I saw. You a big Bin Laden fan?”<br /><br />Osama shrugged. “He fight for Islam.”<br /><br />“Hmmm. Well, there’s all kinds of ways to stand up for your faith without killing folks, don’t you think?”<br /><br />He nodded slowly, his eyes never rising to meet mine.<br /><br />“You like to dance, huh?”<br /><br />Suddenly, for the first time, he gave me his eyes, and they sparkled. “That’s why I’m here.”<br /><br />“Well, don’t you know, if Bin Laden ran this town, y’all wouldn’t be holding this party tonight? Would’ve been some speeches, and a lot more praying. But no music… and no dancing.”<br /><br />He looked a little sheepish and shrugged. I got it. I wasn’t going to break this kid’s balls over his damned t-shirt. It occurred to me that for kids in this part of the world, wearing a portrait of Bin Laden on your chest <em>might</em> mean you want the world to know he’s your personal hero, but I’d bet my last dollar that for most, it’s probably much more about wearing a big “F.U.” on your chest… a way, like anywhere else on earth, for a kid to wave the flag of rebel youth in the face of every adult who crosses his path, the point being to offend or piss off as many people as possible. Osama was no heavily-politicized young jihadi. He was just a kid who likes to dance, looking for a little action on a Friday night in a place where there’s generally little action to be found.<br /><br />“Let’s see your moves then,” I said. “Let’s see what you’re all about.”<br /><br />He cracked a wry grin. “Let’s see yours first.”<br /><br />“I already did mine,” I said. “You missed it.”<br /><br />Latif backed me up. “He was funny.”<br /><br />The DJ was into a furious mix now; wonderful stuff; and the crowd was eating it up, girls in their corner and the guys in theirs - parallel universes – a guys’ party and a girls’ party, sharing the same space, but, at least on the surface, only tentatively connected to and aware of each other. Yet all were dancing, on fire, to the same relentless, throbbing beat.</div>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-88281818792918953032007-08-29T20:15:00.000-07:002007-08-29T20:49:01.402-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_HVAjT-hTGBnhVGV8kDZTKiK3ZJjDNihrxYluiYjzeywak3BEKa6248UzLPaXwk762fg80qsEZk3TayYMHx2s1ASuOTRqU-V72U7o1uvx2akyNES7hF1QPKWDqyN568OH84Tk/s1600-h/PIC_0506.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5104327454480664994" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_HVAjT-hTGBnhVGV8kDZTKiK3ZJjDNihrxYluiYjzeywak3BEKa6248UzLPaXwk762fg80qsEZk3TayYMHx2s1ASuOTRqU-V72U7o1uvx2akyNES7hF1QPKWDqyN568OH84Tk/s400/PIC_0506.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><span style="font-size:180%;">Tror Na Foe</span> (troh-nah-fway)</div><div></div><div>A phrase in Ewe, the language of my Ghanaian forbears, meaning, roughly, "to return and find again."</div><div></div><div></div><div>(<em>Photo: Main entrance to the fabled mosque at Larabanga, reputed to be the oldest in west Africa</em>)</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>If you come back here from time to time to see if I've added anything new, thanks very much for your loyalty and your interest. It's been hard to devote much time to the blog, since making a living at the kind of writing I do means spending an awful lot of time working on projects that help put bread on the table or hustling new work. I'm trying to step up my game and be much more regular again about posting. If you are brand new to this site, welcome! I invite you to scroll all the way back to the beginning and work your way forward.</div><div></div><div>My family and I have just returned from a glorious two weeks in Ghana together - nine of us! Look for details of this momentous trip in the coming weeks. The photo above was taken in Larabanga, at the legendary mosque for which the town is known. We all agreed it is one of the most beautiful buildings we have ever seen. And it's very relevant to the continuation of the taveler's tale I began sharing with you last time in part one of "I Hold High My Beautiful, Luminous Q'uran." Here now is part two. See you again soon.</div><div>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div><span style="font-size:180%;">"I Hold High My Beautiful, Luminous Q'uran" part two</span></div><div><span style="font-size:180%;"></span></div><div>Heading north from Kumasi, it didn’t take long before we saw the landscape begin to change from the lush green farm land and forest of the central region to semi-arid scrub brush and savannah. Small towns with modest houses of painted concrete gave way to tiny villages with conical houses of mud, wattle and thatch. A landscape liberally dotted with churches of every conceivable denomination; stores and produce stands named in the classic Ghanaian style: “Why Can’t I Just Thank My Jesus Grocery;” “God is Able Beauty Salon;” gave way now to mosques, and to stores and stands named, “Insh’Allah Blade Sharpening” and “Allahu Akbar Small Electronics Repair, Computer Training Institute and Internet Cafe.”<br /><br />As we neared the center of dusty Tamale, I noticed that there was nowhere near as much new construction going on here as I’d seen in the rest of Ghana … but out of the three nearly-finished buildings I’d seen thus far, two were mosques. We neared the STC bus station and suddenly, the call to evening prayer erupted from a dozen minarets; some only steps away from our bus; some from distances too far to see. The same words, but sung/recited in different keys by a diverse set of voices, overlapping; slightly out of synch with one another: “<em>Ashadu la illaha il’Allah</em>.” And yet, far from dischordant, the rising crescendo of this chorus - “<em>Wa Muhammadu Rasul il’llah</em>” – created a compellingly beautiful music that seemed to rise, like the red dust lifted by the Harmattan wind all around us, from the earth itself. Some passersby outside our windows dutifully scurried along toward the nearest mosque; others went about their business, anxious like all of us passengers on the bus, to get to their destination before evening could finish painting the dark blue sky of dusk to velvet black.<br /><br />As David and I alighted from the bus, we knew we didn’t have long to procure ourselves some reliable transport out to the park. We’d heard that Mole, even though only about 85 kilometers distant, was not an easy journey from here. The way there was all over very bad road, and it might take as long as four hours of rough travel to reach it. And we knew we’d already missed the only bus of the day that goes all the way. When we started asking cab drivers how much they’d charge to take us, some balked because of the condition of the road; others quoted us prices that were insane.<br /><br />Frustrated, we went in search of a tourist bureau I’d read about in a guide book. But even if we found it, would it still be open at this late hour? Suddenly, a voice called David’s name from a nearby market stall. It was Mary, a distant relation from the old village. Up in this Dagomba and Gonja-speaking region, it was like music to David’s ears to hear someone warmly and familiarly address him in Ewe. After introducing me, and explaining our situation to Mary, she quickly made it clear we were in very good hands. Her husband, John, also an Ewe from the Volta region, is the accountant and de-facto station manager. She led us across the STC station to his office. After a brief strategy session, John and David decided it would be best to stash me out of sight behind the counter at Mary’s stall – too obviously a foreign tourist with my relatively nice luggage and my camera case – while they negotiated with a couple of drivers who owed John a favor or two. I chatted with Mary and her assistant, and bought bottled water for David and I while I waited.<br /><br />After a couple of minutes, they returned with a surly driver who’d been talked into a price he wasn’t happy with. He had a very dubious looking cab, too. I couldn’t imagine this rust bucket, barely held together with spit, rubber bands and paper clips, had even one more 170 mile round trip in it, much less 170 hard miles. After only two weeks, I’d already traveled in far better looking cabs that broke down after just a few miles of challenging road. But I needn’t have worried. This driver and this car were true road warriors in the best west African tradition, and four hours later, we arrived. We’d been shaken as though tossed into a blender and whizzed for a while, and we were covered from head to toe in fine, red dust… and the hour was late. But we were there. I saluted and hugged both the car and the driver, and gave them the fattest tip I could manage, saving out just enough for the bus trip back to Tamale.<br /><br />The hotel is nice; clean, sunny rooms, but no frills, and the water is only on for a few hours each day. But it’s safe to drink. And there’s a pool. And a decent restaurant with a bar. And just down from the pool, there’s an observation deck, perched in a perfect position for guests to sit and watch the action at the two watering holes on the wild, species-rich savannah below the escarpment on which the hotel sits.<br /><br />That next morning, just after sunrise, David and I enjoyed a three hour hike with park ranger John, and a very pleasant retired German couple enjoying their second holiday of the year. Our “safari” didn’t disappoint. We saw herds of two different species of antelope; several species of birds; elephants and crocodiles. And later in the day, at very close quarters, we saw dozens of baboons, warthogs, and collubus monkeys. Great stuff. I shot a lot of photos and video.<br /><br />But the most memorable part of our stay happened during the night hours, when all kinds of activity is going on in the park, invisible to all but those who have a great, hidden perch and night vision glasses. David and I lamented the fact that we didn’t have these. But fortunately for us, these are not necessary for night <em>people</em> watching.<br /><br />Early that evening, a staff person made the announcement that at 6:30, there’d be a graduation ceremony just up the hill in the park rangers’ quarters for several new rangers, and that any guests who wanted to come were very welcome. As soon as we heard, David and I knew we were going. We wanted to support the new rangers, just out of principle. In a region where few good jobs are available, these are good jobs. And local guys like these new graduates are precisely the ones who have the best chance at convincing old friends, family and neighbors not to poach on park grounds; to participate in making this area safer for all the endangered animals and more tourist-friendly at the same time.<br /><br />I had another reason for wanting to come. The music of this region has always spoken to me in a special way. My cd collection at home is full of the Islamic-flavored music of the sahel: Salif Keita, Thione Seck, Ba Cissoko, Oumou Sangare, Ali Farka Toure, Sekouba Bambino, and Issa Bagayoyo, among others. Wandering through the rangers’ quarters that afternoon, I’d heard intriguing bits and pieces of northern pop music in the air: the music kids were dancing to while they played, blaring from radios their mothers had placed in windows so they could listen while hanging laundry; wafting out from kitchen doorways while they began work on the evening meal. It was wonderful – melodic; complex; flute and voice driven, with rolling base lines and undulating percussion underneath, and I wanted to hear more. And since every African party is a dance party, I was pretty sure that tonight, at the graduation, I’d get my wish. </div><div>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div>Next time, part three. See you again soon.</div><div></div>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-4763617023143878072007-08-06T20:22:00.000-07:002007-08-06T20:42:04.077-07:00<span style="font-size:180%;">Tror Na Foe</span><br /><br /><em>(Roughly, "to return and find again" in Ewe , the language spoken by my ancestors on my father's side).</em><br /><br />This blog documents the story of how, through DNA-based genealogical research, we have found and connected with the original African family from whom my father's line had been separated by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. I invite you to scroll back through the earlier installments to pick up the story from the beginning. I've been working on a book about this whole adventure, but as I write this now, I'm switching gears a little and preparing to get the rest of my family on this side of the Atlantic in on the excitement too. On Friday of this week, nine of us are headed to Ghana together!<br /><br />I don't have time now to share details of everything that has transpired with the continued development of ADFaR (African Diaspora Family Reunion) but I promise I will shortly after our return from Ghana at month's end. Meanwhile, I thought I'd share with you a story I wrote for the travel magazine trade shortly after my return from that first trip to Ghana in November. It's LONG... so I've broken it up into installments. May it help in some small way to build bridges to the Muslim community, in Africa and elsewhere.<br /><br />--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><span style="font-size:130%;">I Hold High My Beautiful, Luminous Q’uran<br /></span><br /><em>How do kids in a rural, West African Muslim village manage to “get krunk” with each other on a Friday night in a culture that doesn’t allow dating, or even holding hands?<br /></em> <br />In mid-November, 2006, my cousin David Agbemabiese and I visited Ghana’s Mole National Park. My agenda for this first trip to Ghana had been unbelievably rich and deep, so this expedition up to a game preserve in the savannah of the far, Muslim north had been only tentatively penciled in… something I’d try to pull off if it didn’t interfere with my primary business. I was here in Ghana because, through DNA-based geneaolog-ical research, I had just recently found and connected with the African family from whom my father’s line had been separated since slavery – a very big deal, indeed. And I had just dived head first into the writing of both a weekly blog and a book about the experience.<br /><br />I had found a large group of blood relatives here in Ghana, separated from my family in the U.S. by an ocean and about three hundred years of history. And they were anxious to meet me and see, if after all this time and distance, there was anything at all about us that might still make us identifiable to one another as family. We had discovered to our surprise, joy and delight, that yes, indeed, there was. Incredibly, strong physical resemblances had survived; shared interests; attitudes; a dozen different little recognizable traits of family character. Amazing. And there was so much family to meet. Patriarch John Kofi Agbemabiese had, over his long, successful and highly interesting time on earth, sired forty-one children with seven wives. I spent a couple of very intense weeks being escorted around the ancestral Volta region, Accra, and Kumasi, getting introduced by one group of relatives to another. In between, I stole time to write, and occasionally, to be a tourist too.<br /><br />My cousin David, who squired me around Kumasi to meet relatives and to see the town, had recently lost his job. When another relative told him of my desire to visit Mole Park, he’d jumped at the chance to accompany me. I was paying, and he had the time. “We don’t do enough internal travel,” he said. “We have so much beauty here, but we Ghanaians, we hardly ever get the chance to see and enjoy our own country.” Travel in west Africa - even in a country like Ghana with much better than average infrastructure – is hard. And it’s not cheap, in a society where the economy just limps along and almost everyone is chronically underpaid.<br /><br />Mole had held a special allure for me, ever since I first read about it in the process of preparing for this trip. I’d loved every minute of my time on the coast, the hill country; the rain forest. But so much of the long-imagined Africa I’d kept in my head and heart had always been about the savannah too - the land of baobab trees, mud houses and mud mosques; the sahel region at the edge of the great Sahara – the home of magical, mythical towns like Timbuktu and Djenne. And the other savannah; the home of big game and the safari. Mole has developed a reputation among travelers of being one of the only places in all of west Africa where visitors can have that quintessential east African experience of close encounters with some of the big, endangered animals with which Africa is forever linked in the popular imagination. And this is a place where you don’t need to rent a guide and an expensive four-wheel drive vehicle to see the park and its animal life. At Mole, you get to do your safari as part of a small group led by a ranger, on foot. You can also explore the park’s miles of trails by rented bike. A sure ‘nuff wild-animal-spotting safari, but free from the stereotypical, “great white hunter” echoes of the colonialist past? The prospect was much too good to resist.<br /><br />The burly, charismatic driver hopped onto our bus at the Kumasi STC station like a performer taking the stage. “As Salaam aleikum,” he shouted. The two-thirds of the passengers who were northerners going home – and some of the rest of us too – shouted back “Wa aleikum, salaam,” as he launched into his good-natured apology on behalf of the STC that this vehicle on which we’d be spending the next nine hours or so was second class, not the first class bus we were supposed to have. But, no worries, said Wesley, after he introduced himself with a flourish. We should settle back and enjoy the trip, because, “That first-class bus was crap anyway. This bus, my bus, she’s the queen. I’m telling you, you don’t know how lucky you are to be on this bus. And me, I’m the best driver they got, too.” He flashed a huge grin. “Some of you know me well. They’ll tell you.” And sure enough, some of his regulars laughed and nodded at the rest of us. “You see; you see? It’s gonna be a good ride. Oh, yes! Schmoooo-ve, man, I’m telling you! No troubles; no worries. If you’re ready, I’m ready. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!!” He cranked the engine and gunned it extra hard just for show. Well, at least, I thought, there should be no worries whatsoever about this guy falling asleep at the wheel. Not a single goat or chicken between here and Tamale was likely to end up as road kill on this man’s watch. And Wesley promised to be entertainment enough that we wouldn’t for one minute miss the bad Nigerian movies they show in first class.<br /><br />So, David and I settled in for the ride. My only anxiety now was that cousin Lawrencia, who runs a school in Kumasi, had promised to see us off, and she wasn’t here yet. She is a woman of her word, and I hated the thought that, driven by this powerful sense of family duty she’s got, she was fighting the unbearable Kumasi traffic to get to us, knowing that by the time she arrived at the STC station, she almost certainly would miss us anyway. She’d have to turn right around and fight that traffic going the other direction, with only the slimmest chance of making it to school in time to unlock the doors. I never did see her… but just as the bus pulled out of the station, I heard David call my name from the back of the bus (our seats were supposed to be together, but the ticket agent had messed it up). Slowly, but surely, a plastic bag snaked its way from passenger to passenger until it reached my hand. “Lawrencia,” David shouted. It was a breakfast sandwich of scrambled egg and vegetables, one of two she’d lovingly made for us in the pre-dawn darkness while she fed her husband and kids and got ready for school. Then she’d made the mad dash to the bus station, spotted David in the window, and managed to hand them up to him as the bus pulled away. Miraculously, my sandwich was still warm. After being up since before dawn myself to catch this early bus, I was suddenly very hungry too. I don’t know when I’ve appreciated a meal more.<br />------------------------------------------------------------<br />That's all for now. Watch for Part II in a couple of days!David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-31865397736248718352006-12-03T21:18:00.000-08:002006-12-21T00:10:11.599-08:00<strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Tror Na Foe</span></strong> <em>(</em>troh-nah-fway<em>) - a phrase in Ewe, the language of my father's ancestors from the southeastern portion of Ghana's Volta region. Roughly, it means "to return and find ag<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrLxVQElnKQg-jUTivwxehYH8ATB7aed7vdBqYEY6ghaub7oyaBIlKDmtAl24p_1i8Wj5iIQvI5Q9xEr01UHHwmtz_4KuzjErhJIQClN91WlXrnQnHqwhpGjTxP-_ykRabkhJ7/s1600-h/Ghana+029.jpg"></a>ain".</em><br /><br /><div><br /><p><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5007463643396888338" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaWX9LJzsofFwZrenzicFIHiOe1yOSY530rDXYU7Xl8-ANqWfsvMIycxuwgFNVI5Ic_1o-neseKYKH_fQHsOwE5ltmC-reOP8nhMstCdTybNV_qzSRC2n1vgywzznq-NEPFkcT/s400/Ghana1+029.jpg" border="0" /><span style="font-size:85%;">photo : <em>a girl and her mother prepare to take center stage during a break in their tradtional Ewe dance troupe's performance in Anloga at the Hogbetsotso Festival, November, 2006.<br /></em></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><strong>Note:</strong> Once again, I extend a warm welcome to all those readers who may be new to this site. If you are one of these, I invite you to settle back and spend a little time catching up with where we are now by scrolling all the way down to the first installment and reading your way back up. If you don't have time right now, I'm glad you've joined us anyway - just know that this is entry number 8 in a story that has been unfolding since earlier this year, and eventually, you might want to go back to the first few installments to see where and how it all began. Welcome! </span></p><span style="font-size:85%;"></span><br /><div><span style="font-size:180%;">Settling Back In... For A While<br /></span>After an enjoyable and mostly relaxing Thanksgiving week-end, I slowed down my pace even more for a couple of days, just to finish recovering from jet lag. As I write this, I have to admit I'm <em>still</em> not completely recovered. But I can feel myself bouncing back... and not a minute too soon! The holidays are here, with all the hustle and bustle that entails.<br /><br />I may not be as regular with the blog as I have been until we arrive at the new year, but rest assured, I'll still be posting new installments, so <em>do</em> keep checking in. The number of days from now until Christmas is quickly slipping away, and like many of you, I've got to take some time now to deal with preparations for the season. And suddenly, there's <em>more</em> to do this year than usual. This recent trip to Ghana and the gift of all this new-found family means our Christmas card list just grew by about 40%!<br><br></div>Although it's great to be back in my own house and in the company again of the family, friends and neighbors I've missed, the truth is, I can't wait to get back to Ghana again. I may get the chance as soon as late February, just in time for Ghana's fiftieth independence day on March 6th!<br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">Parsing Out The Story of That First Ancestor</span><br />When my wife Celeste and I had our first meeting with Lawrence Agbemabiese, the cousin with whom I made that preliminary contact, before he said almost anything else, he apologized for slavery. It clearly wasn't something he'd planned to say. Our first meeting was an emotional moment, and I think, suddenly face to face with a long-missing relative whose ancestors had been victimized by the slave trade, the enormity of the realization that some of his ancestors may well have been involved in these crimes hit him right between the eyes.<br /><br /><br></div><div></div><div></div><div>"They had no idea what they were selling people into, you know," he said. "The slavery then practiced in Africa had a completely different character. It was devoid of any idea of racial inferiority, of course. Or permanence... the idea that once a slave, not only were you a slave for life, but your children too, and <em>their</em> children."<br /><br />The next time we talked, the conversation kept coming back to two things: 1) what a wonderful, unexpected and near-miraculous thing it was to hear from a long-missing African American relative out of the blue; 2) how strange it is that a member of their family of heriditary chiefs could have ended up being taken as a slave. The unspoken subtext of this conversation could be summarized as, "People from our social strata didn't often get sold; we were the ones who did the selling!" That's a touchy and awkward place from which to begin developing a relationship and unraveling a complex family history... but it wasn't for nothing that slavery was called, "the peculiar institution!"</div><div></div><br>Right before I left Ghana, Lawrence and I had a lengthy conversation on the phone about what our next steps should be, in terms of striving to reach that much longed-for "Kunte Kinte moment" that will identify for us who that first African ancestor of mine was, and unravel the story of how he came to be a slave.<div></div><br>Our new-found Ghanaian relatives told us that during the latter chapters of the dark days of slavery, many Ewe were, indeed, heavily involved in both slave trading and gun running, cozying up, when it seemed most expedient to their survival, to either their neighbors, the powerful Ashanti empire, or to the British. We had read some of that history too. But we had also learned that earlier on, from the mid 1600's until the mid-1700's, many, many Ewe were taken as slaves.<div></div><br><br /><br />In addition, I knew from the family lore of my English ancestors in Virginia that they had started buying slaves in the 1660's. And it just so happens that the 1660's were a catastrophic decade for the Anlo-Ewe people - the beginning of a period that saw many of them sold away to the New World. There were costly wars with their Ga neighbors, among others, to the west, as well as with the kingdom of Dahomey and the Oyo empire to the east.<br /><br /><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><br>The decision to engage in warfare was a very difficult and weighty matter for the Anlo-Ewe. There was, on the one hand, an ancient and proud warrior tradition, balanced on the other by a powerful belief in the sacredness of human life. That belief is so strong that the Ewe also have an ancient tradition the militaries of the world would do well to study and copy today. After a war was concluded, all veterans were required to move together into a special encampment - a soldiers' village - that was maintained for the exclusive purpose of helping soldiers "decompress" and heal from the stresses and horrors of battle for a time before they were allowed to return to their families and normal life.<br /><br /><br>The core idea was that being forced into a situation in which one had to break the ultimate taboo - the taking of human life - was so devastating to his immortal soul that he needed to be in a setting where he and the others with whom he had marched in battle could now be prayed over together, and forgiven, as well as publicly thanked for their sacrifice. One has to wonder how much emotional and spiritual suffering might be avoided among veterans and their families around the world if such comprehensive "re-entry" programs existed elsewhere(not to mention such a powerful reluctance to engage in war in the first place)!<br /><br /><br></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><br>Given this aversion to killing, whenever faced with the expansionist drive of aggressive neighbors, the Anlo-Ewe had always preferred the passive path of migration to meeting fire with fire, but by the early 1600's - just in time for the slave trade to start heating up - they found themselves with their backs to the sea; one set of powerful enemies to the east; another to the west. The military leaders who stepped up to the challenge received the full support of the people, and before long, the Anlo-Ewe had pushed back their enemies from the Ga country, Dahomey and Oyo, firming up their hold on the territory east of the Volta River that is still the heart of their homeland today.<br /><br />Fighting back and winning felt good. And within a very short time, the clans which produced the generals and the chiefs who had carried the day against their enemies became the most powerful and prominent families in the culture. With their rise to prominence, worship of their patron deity, the god of war, began to supplant the ancient worship of the matriarchal deities who had ensured good crops and a blessed home life.<br /><br /><br></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>Within a generation, those who remained faithful to the old ways of worship - and to folkways that were more matriarchal than patriarchal - began to suffer oppression at the hands of the leaders of the new order. So now, here comes the question my Ghanaian family and I need to ask. Is this social turmoil, commencing in 1668, the root cause of the chain of events that led to my ancestor being shipped away in chains? Was he a member of the Yewe cult, which championed the old ways, publicly challenging and resisting the new, martial culture? Were prominent cult members sold off as slaves, to serve public notice that dissent would not be tolerated?<br /><br /><br></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>Anlo-Ewe culture has kept alive many songs and stories commemorating some of the horrors that occured during the centuries of the slave trade. We haven't found a song or a story that mentions my ancestor yet. But this doesn't mean that one doesn't exist. One of my earlier posts on this blog, filed from Ghana, relates the details of that special day on the 4th of November when clan elders read out for me the known history of our clan, the Tovie. But the list of "begats", as far as we can tell now, doesn't begin until around 1750 - about 50 years too late to include the ancestor we're searching for. The answer may lie, however, with some of the contemporary elders of the Yewe cult. Their oral record, their songs, may hold the key to the largely unsung history of their repression and survival... as well as the key to the fate of some of those who were martyred, one way or the other.<br /><br /><br></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>My next trip to Ghana, which I hope will be soon, will include at least a couple of visits to Yewe elders who may be able to help us shed some light on this critical question. Whatever we find will be faithfully reported right here at "Tror Na Foe."<br /></div><br /><div><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5007530498320333602" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhffw9wTi0PHKKRmvQHnz5ge6pMkfrKkqY4pCK0LKpQye8ysUcpfAe9U59f_2Vo3GBFmpHSjAMb9UJS9WHFNOlY-irUrlLBgKyojSfCE6aAZ1CXf3OlSqD-MEVrsson7peBDwNo/s400/Ghana1+030.jpg" border="0" /></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size:130%;">Another "Next Step: The Advent of ADFaR (African Diaspora Family Reunion)</span><br />Good work has been done in west Africa by Dr. Kittles and others but, given the limitations placed on that work by funding, the geneaological sampling that's been done has been carried out on diverse <em>groups</em> of people. The end result is that someone of African descent here in the North or South American diaspora might be able to identify an ethnicity and/or a region that has a high probability of being the point of origin for at least one family line. But as anyone who knows who has looked at the statistics regarding who's part of the large and growing database at "Y-Search" or "Mito-Search," the number of<em> individual</em> Africans and people of African descent who have participated so far is very small. Tiny.<br /><br />While I was in Ghana last month, Gideon and I did a lot of talking about what a great thing it could be if more <em>individual</em> west Africans were to be sampled and have their results uploaded into a database. Our discussions are still very preliminary, and the project idea is extremely ambitious. After all, at a ballpark price of $100 per test, it would cost $1,000,000 just to get 10,000 people tested! But we are determined to help this idea grow. Stay tuned! We have already met with Ghana's Minister of Health to "pitch" this idea, and we had a great interview on JOY 97, Ghana's most listened-to radio station. People see clearly how such a thing would be a "win/win" for Ghanaians and African Americans both. We're going to keep on pushing this idea, and we'll be letting you know how it goes... as well as how you can help!</div><br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj51GPMqZKQN3h7Ma25x36d-uk83wgzdYkrzqrcszEC2gjK3gy0sgXO9lm5Qwacr92K9ZqQ5Yy_Zwd8XnaahdUBlgffQlz3M3OIL4iH3uQc5xXu7QGYGSTCTwvOpNSWizlTQ-Sq/s1600-h/PIC_0262.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5007531413148367666" style="CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj51GPMqZKQN3h7Ma25x36d-uk83wgzdYkrzqrcszEC2gjK3gy0sgXO9lm5Qwacr92K9ZqQ5Yy_Zwd8XnaahdUBlgffQlz3M3OIL4iH3uQc5xXu7QGYGSTCTwvOpNSWizlTQ-Sq/s400/PIC_0262.JPG" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><p><span style="font-size:130%;">An Appeal for Sky Limit School</span></p><div><br /></div><p>Once again, I remind readers that Cousin Lawrencia Agbenyefia runs a primary school near Kumasi (see photo above). I carried some supplies to her in November, but you know how restrictive the airline luggage allowances are these days. So, I'd like to enlist your aid on her (and the childrens') behalf. They need math and science texts and workbooks, appropriate for the early elementary grades; educational games, toys and puzzles; age appropriate books for the library; computer CDs and DVDs; etc. Lightly used items will be fine, but brand new is ideal. If you can help, you may send items or checks to her in care of her church at:<br /></p><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><p>Mrs. Lawrencia Agbenyefia</p><div>Deeper Christian Life Ministry<br />P.O. Box 539<br />Obuasi, Ashanti Region,<br />Ghana<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Many thanks! See you next week!! </div>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-23532840600692803222006-11-27T20:02:00.000-08:002008-04-14T22:07:33.910-07:00<div align="left"><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" onclick="BLOG_clickHandler(this)">Tror</span> Na Foe</strong> (<em><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1" onclick="BLOG_clickHandler(this)">troh</span>-nah-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2" onclick="BLOG_clickHandler(this)">fway</span></em>) is a phrase in Ewe, the language spoken by my father's forbears, who lived in Togo and the southeastern tip of Ghana. It means, roughly, to return and retrieve something which one has lost.</div><div align="left"><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/6903/4370/1600/Ghana1%20031.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/6903/4370/320/Ghana1%20031.jpg" border="0" /></a></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:85%;">photo:<em>A little girl and her mother take center stage among a group of Ewe traditional dancers at this year's <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3" onclick="BLOG_clickHandler(this)">Hogbetsotso</span> Festival in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4" onclick="BLOG_clickHandler(this)">Anloga</span></em>.</span></div><p><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></p><p><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></p><p><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></p><p align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></p><p align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></p><p align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;">Heritage</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">(excerpt from <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5" onclick="BLOG_clickHandler(this)">Countee</span> Cullen's poem)</span></p><p align="left"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><em>What is Africa to me:</em></span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="font-size:100%;"><em>Copper sun or scarlet sea,</em></span></p><p align="left"><span style="font-size:100%;"><em>Jungle star or jungle track,</em></span></p><p align="left"><span style="font-size:100%;"><em>Strong bronzed men, or regal black</em></span></p><p align="left"><span style="font-size:100%;"><em>Women from whose loins I sprang</em></span></p><p align="left"><span style="font-size:100%;"><em>When the birds of Eden sang</em>?</span></p><p align="left"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><em>One three centuries removed</em></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><em>From the scenes his fathers loved,</em><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><em>Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,</em><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><em>What is Africa to me</em>?<br /></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><strong>Note</strong>: We've had many new readers join us these last few days. If you are one of these, welcome! I invite you to scroll down to the bottom of these posts (seven of them now) and read from the beginning, just to understand where we are now in this journey of self-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6" onclick="BLOG_clickHandler(this)">discov</span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7" onclick="BLOG_clickHandler(this)">ery</span>, sparked by the DNA-based <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8" onclick="BLOG_clickHandler(this)">geneaological</span> detective work which has made the journey possible.</span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">Identity<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">I sat at my cousin Happy's house, sipping a tall glass of cool water in her very pleasant, middle-class home, chatting with her husband, Victor, about African American perspectives on Africa. "So, honestly, what do you think of Ghana so far?" he asked. I said nice things, but their little sideways glances at each other made it clear they thought I was being <em>too</em> nice; too easily glossing over the every day issues - some little; some not so little - that wear Ghana's citizens down: an econ<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9" onclick="BLOG_clickHandler(this)">omy</span> improving just enough to inspire frustrated expectations; power blackouts; mile after mile of streetlights that don't work; a national rail system that no longer works. Lots and lots of things that don't work, or which work poorly, at best. "I've been to America twice," he said, "And I must say, although I know you have your problems, it seemed like God's own country to me over there. Your climate makes people energetic; everything works... at least as far as I could see. And you see how things are with us over here. So, I'm always a little bemused about it when I see African Americans here in Africa with stars in their eyes, you know, looking to move 'back home'. I suppose, really, at bottom, it's an emotional thing, isn't it?"</span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">"Yes," I said. "That's exactly it. Something extremely precious and important was taken from us, and many of us have a real sense of mission about taking it back, you know... a specific ethnic and national identity. You're Ghanaian, and you're Ewe. Your language; your culture; your sense of shared history with each other is rich and deep. You've lived it and breathed it all your life. You've been able to just take it for granted. And even though this is an impossible question for you to really answer, I'm going to ask it anyway: can you imagine what your life might be like if you'd never had any of that self-knowledge?" He looked me soberly in the eye and shook his head. "Listen," I said, "I get it when Africans here tell me, 'Man, you'd better appreciate what you have back there in the States. People never understand how precious political and social stability are until they lose them'. "And there are all kinds of material blessings many of us enjoy that the rest of the world envies. I know that too," I told him. But there are many human wants and needs that material things can never satisfy.</span></p><p>Later that night, another Ghanaian asked me about this issue of identity, and I told him of a newspaper story I once read about a young man from Atlanta whose father was African American and whose mother was native Hawaiian. He was raised by his dad in an all-black, east side Atlanta housing project. He'd always been accepted by his community as black, but many outsiders looked at his reddish-brown skin; his wavy hair; his nose; his eyes; and thought he must be Latino... or maybe partly Asian. He never worried much about what others thought, and he never had much curiosity about the Polynesian/Hawaiian half of his heritage... until the summer he turned eighteen. All of a sudden, now it mattered. His mother, newly in recovery from years of drug addiction, was suddenly fully available to him for the first time in his life. And he found himself eagerly drinking her in - needing to know her. This led very organically and naturally to a deep desire to know her people, and to meaningfully connect with that side of his heritage.</p><p>With his father's full blessing, and his mother's advance work on his behalf, the extended family back in Hawaii prepared a huge welcome for him. Over a hundred people, mostly blood relatives, met him at the airport. Even though he spent only two weeks there among them, he had been so immersed in their love and attention that when he returned to Atlanta, he came back feeling <em>very Hawaiian</em>. It's not that he no longer felt black. There was no "either/or" about his situation. His life had changed in a fundamental way, and now his identity was a case of "both/and". If others couldn't understand that and accept it, he figured that was their problem, not his. He understood now that to know the people from whom you come is to know yourself.</p><p>That's how I feel today. In this mysterious, wonderful universe of ours - a world in which light is both wave <em>and</em> particle - I claim the right to proclaim myself African American. There's something ambiguous and "squishy" about the definition for many, I know, but not for me. I know exactly what <em>I</em> mean by it. I mean both fully American <em>and</em> fully African. Out of simple respect, I make a point of never, <em>ever</em> arguing with people's choices about how to define themselves. Your life circumstances and the perspectives which flow from that are your own, so if being an "American of African descent", a "black American", a "Negro" or "colored" or "American" or simply "human" is what suits you best at any given moment, then <strong>be</strong> that. And know, too, that you have the right to change how you choose to define yourself according to how you feel in any given circumstance, and that when you choose to do so you are being neither weak nor disloyal.</p><p>Many different bloodlines meet in me, making me deeply rooted in this American soil. My Cherokee and Creek ancestors had loved and cherished this land for twelve thousand years before my first English forbears turned up here to make their own kind of claim on it. And my African ancestors, whose toil built so much of this country's early wealth; who sacrificed for a brighter future they knew they would never live to see; who willingly shed their blood in every one of this country's major battles, from the struggle for independence from England right up to the present - they paid several times over for my right to this land. This country and every good thing in it, from sea to shining sea, belongs to me. Bought and paid for.</p><p>But I've always felt I owed my African ancestors another kind of debt too. They are the ancestors with whom I feel the closest bond, because when I look in the mirror, theirs are the faces I most clearly see. It's the part of my ancestry most clearly visible to others, too, of course, and it's an ancestry that ties me to the land from which they came. So, I have always craved a deep and fluid relationship with that land - as a way to better know both them and myself. When they were wrenched away from their homes, their past was deliberately and cruelly erased. The sacred circle of family and cultural tradition was broken. I had always hoped, from an early age, that one day, I would be able to identify from what parts of Africa they had been torn - to go there, as their living representative, and get to know the places they'd had to leave behind; to look for some meaningful ways to make life a little better for the descendants of the kinfolk from whom they'd gone missing. Those who have been following this blog know that DNA-based geneaology data has made it possible for our family to go further than this - to identify some people in a very specific place who are blood kin on my father's line.</p><p>And so, on November 2nd, I went to Ghana to seek them out. And in a parallel experience to the young man from Atlanta whose story I told that night in Ghana, I came back to my home in Minnesota feeling very African.</p><p>The book I'm writing will have much more detail on this phenomenon, but for now, just to document and demystify it a little, here's my thumbnail version of what it's like to find yourself... </p><p><span style="font-size:180%;">Turning African in Four Easy Steps</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Geneaology - </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Going to Africa for the first time, not as a tourist, but <em>as a member of a family who are eagerly awaiting you</em>, is all about immersion. I brought a camera and a tape recorder, but hundreds of photos went untaken; hours of video and voice recordings went unmade, because I kept having to put these tools down or give them to someone else's keeping. I could never be the observer for more than a minute or two. I had to BE there - a full participant - in everything. So that was step number one - getting comfortable with finding myself thrown into the deep, deep end of a very deep pool. And if this happens to you, as your level of comfort and familiarity rise, you'll find yourself turning African... because on some deep level, that's exactly who and what you are. Had I been a tourist, I would have stood out like a sore thumb everywhere I went. But seventy-five percent of my waking hours, I was with at least one family member; often with several. It didn't matter whether or not passers -by thought I looked Ghanaian;"blended in" with my surroundings. The fierce love of my new-found family radiated an attitude clearly tangible to anybody who came our way - and it said, "He's one of us... and that's all you need to know."</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Climatology - </span>I had always known my body felt more comfortable in the tropics than in a cold climate, but when I moved to Minnesota, my wife, who is a native said, "Quit whining. Just learn to dress for it." I did. And until now, I'd always bought the logic that, by comparison, there's little you can do to make relentless sun and heat more bearable, beyond light-weight clothing and a good hat, maybe. In Africa, with the time to be a <em>traveler</em>, not just a vacationer, I quickly learned that this isn't true at all. Here's what you do:</p><ul><li><strong>Drink lots more water</strong>. Seems obvious, I know, but good, potable water is available everywhere you turn in Ghana, even if only from the ubiquitous little plastic bags that every other street vendor sells. Stop frequently, buy some, and drink up.</li><li><strong>Relax, and listen to the more subtle things your body's trying to tell you</strong>. Your body knows, long before your brain, that it's time to... 1) slow down all movement and conserve energy; 2) seek shade without consciously thinking about it - like a sunflower just naturally seeks the sun; 3) eat fewer meals, eat less at each meal, and take your cues from what the locals eat - hot and spicy food keeps better, and, paradoxically, it cools you when you eat it... as do all those huge mounds of fresh, luscious, local fruit.</li><li><strong>Start "seeing" the coconut man</strong>. His wholesome offering will give you both the liquid refreshment you need and boost your blood sugar too. And here he comes, right on time. Pay him a good price, and then let him chop the coconut fresh for you. Let him lopp off the top, so you can drink the cooling juice released by the blows of his machete. It's a healthy snack <em>and</em> a show, for one cheap price. Stop and have this pleasure often.</li></ul><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Funkology - </span></span></span></span></span></span></span>Defining "funk" can be such an arcane and esoteric thing that I almost don't want to go there. The readers of this blog are a very multi-national, multi-cultural bunch, so not all of you are familiar with the term. If you are, cool - you know what it means to you. If you're not, just think of it as another way of saying "soul." By this I mean...</p><ul><li><strong>The joy of discovering all the many little things you know without knowing <em>how</em> you know</strong>... like somehow knowing how to play your proper part in a ceremony offering libations to the ancestors without having been coached beforehand... like learning to move fluidly and without fear, as do the Africans around you, across eight lanes of insane traffic... like knowing how to move on the dance floor, even if this <em>particular</em> dance is not familiar... like knowing which mango off the tree is the very one, perfect and ripe, that was meant just for you... like quickly developing an ear for languages you've never studied, such that you move from being the <em>butt</em> of a joke within your earshot (a joke about awkward foreigners) to being <em>in</em> on the joke - even if everybody knows you didn't really get it all.</li><li><strong>"Snap"ology</strong>. Ghanaians finish a handshake with "the snap." You let your middle finger hook onto your friend's and linger there for a beat as your hands withdraw, and then, hands separate now, but close enough to still touch, a loud finger pop puts the exclamation point on a proper greeting. For the first two weeks, most Ghanaians I met assumed from my body language as I offered my hand that I wouldn't know "the snap", so it wasn't offered. Just a western-style shake. But by my third week, my body language <em>must</em> have thoroughly changed, because I got "the snap" without hesitation, everywhere I went. Something subtle in the way I move through the world had changed. I met some women at a cafe who had whiled away a little time by guessing, among themselves, where I was from. "We were sure you were diasporan," one said, "But no one thought, 'U.S.' The bet here was Jamaican."</li></ul><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Geography</span> - (sorry; no clean way to add an "ology" to this one) But this one's big. I keep talking about <em>the land </em>because somehow every subject - identity, history, ethnicity, geneaology, politics, economics, and even spirituality - keeps leading back to it. When I was a boy, one of my peak experiences in terms of the development of my idea about <em>who I am</em> came when my grandmother took me out in the North Carolina countryside to meet some cousins who still owned and farmed a major chunk of land on which that part of our family had once been slaves. A cousin about her age took me out with him and we walked that land in silence. That walk was a graduate-level course in African American History and an intense lecture on our family history and identity all rolled into one, sublime hour. Yet during that hour, neither of us said more than five words to the other. There was no need. Our silent, walking meditation imparted a deeper, richer knowledge than language can carry. The day's lesson was, and is, deeply inscribed on my very heart and soul.</p><p>So, imagine the depth of my emotion when, forty years later and five thousand miles away, I find myself reliving this powerful, life-altering experience with yet another relative - another man who had been a total stranger up until today; up until... this very moment when we rise from his porch, and he bids me keep pace by his side as we walk his land in silence. This is land worked by his father before him, and by his grandfather's father before <em>him</em>, and Uncle Wakachie says, "You say you think you may buy land around here. Why? You already have this. Build your house here, or over there. Whatever you like."</p><p>And we walk the land in silence, in this powerful meditation sacred to fathers and sons; to uncles and nephews everywhere in the world. And I know in my heart that even though I am deeply rooted in the soil of the land where I was born, I have deep roots here as well. And all of it belongs to me - both there and here. And there is no contradiction between these two things. None. We walk this land in silence, but each footfall speaks whole volumes of rich meaning. With each footstep we say, "This... <em>this</em> is mine."</p><p>Enough said, for now. See you next week! Be well. </p>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-83876753436773602142006-11-19T16:01:00.000-08:002006-12-05T23:09:46.798-08:00<img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6903/4370/320/713844/Ghana4%20007.jpg" border="0" /><strong>Tror Na Foe</strong> (<em>troh-nah-fway</em>) A phrase in<br />Ewe, the language of my father's ancestors from Togo and the south-<br />eastern corner of Ghana, meaning "to return and find again."<br /><br /><br /><br /><em><span style="font-size:85%;">(Photo: earnest young students at cousin Lawrencia's school near Kumasi)<br /><br /></span></em><em><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></em><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">The Long Good-Bye</span><br />A couple of posts ago, I wrote about the profound experience since I arrived here almost three weeks ago, of finding that these long-missing relatives of mine and I have been able to so clearly recognize each other as family.<br /><br />As I prepare to come back to my other home in the States a couple of days from now, I've got so much to say about all this that it's going to take me several weeks worth of feverish blogging to even begin to tell it all. For starters tonight, I sit here humbled and truly overwhelmed by the farewell party the family threw me this evening. I have so much, and many of them have so little - at least materially - so I couldn't help but be overwhelmed with gratefulness at the lavish send-off they'd prepared. There were mountains of great home-cooking (let me bear witness that my cousins can throw down in the kitchen!) - enough to feed about thirty relatives who'd gathered at the old family compound in Accra, as well as a large troupe of local drummers and dancers. And to top it all off, there was a table full of gifts for me, and for my wife back home.<br /><br />(<em>see photos below</em>)<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6903/4370/1600/298690/Ghana4%20229.jpg"><img style="CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6903/4370/320/685799/Ghana4%20229.jpg" border="0" /></a> <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6903/4370/1600/969661/Ghana4%20224.jpg"><img style="CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6903/4370/320/437198/Ghana4%20224.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br />After an evening full of praying, singing, drumming and dancing and speeches, no doubt I should feel tired, but I don't. That's probably because so much has happened here these past three weeks that I'm experiencing "event horizon lag" - much more serious and harder to shake than jet lag. My mind just hasn't been able to adequately wrap itself around certain things that happened earlier in this journey until a few days afterwards. And new information keeps flooding my senses and my consciousness much faster than I can absorb it, every waking moment of every day. That's just how it is. So, my mind is constantly racing; running on adrenaline. And as I prepare to leave, I find myself missing these wonderful people already; missing my daily mound of fresh tropical fruit; my nearly daily "fix" of <em>nkontomire</em> and <em>shitoh</em>;<em> </em>the ocean breeze<em>;</em> the rain forests; the northern savannah; classic highlife, reggae and Ghanaian pop on the radio, even the bad Nigerian movies. But most of all, of course, it's the people I'll miss.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">On How We Know What We Know</span><br />Cousin Gideon Agbemabiese and I are in the middle of preparing a proposal for both the government of Ghana and private sources to fund an organization whose purpose will be to promote and pay for Ghanaians to voluntarily take DNA tests, adding them to a database that will enable many other African American and African families to find each other as our family has done. In the process of talking to a couple of physicians here about it, Gideon met with some skepticism on their part. "This seems like such a one in a million shot to find each other like this. How can you be sure? What additional evidence do you have that you are related, other than a DNA "match" that's actually one marker removed from being exact?"<br /><br />Well, first of all, a one marker variation on that twelve marker Y-chromosome test means that, in all probability, these Agbemabieses and I share a common male ancestor somewhere within the last seven to twelve generations. A small mutation in a single marker would be expected in a family separated by two to three hundred years. Think of this, just for a little perspective on the issue: only recently have most U.S. counties moved from the old nine marker paternity test to one using twelve markers. An exact match on that old nine marker test used to be considered strong enough evidence for the courts to establish biological paternity! In and of itself, that test result might mean little. But it means <em>everything</em> within <em>the context</em> of answering the question of whether or not a particular man who admits to a sexual relationship with a woman is the father of her child. It's corroborating and relevant facts that make a DNA match truly meaningful.<br /><br />Well, I know this: that first African ancestor on my father's side arrived in Virginia during the window of time between 1660, when the English settlers who are also related to me by blood began buying slaves, and 1704, when their branch of the family emigrated to North Carolina. I've read the family documents, and these things are there in black and white. We know that significant numbers of the slaves shipped to the ports of Baltimore and Portsmouth during those years (including George Washington's slaves) were from modern day Ghana, Togo, and Benin, including all of Ewe country. And we know that from 1668 to 1704, there was a major social upheaval in Anlo (the specific sub-group of the Ewes to which the Agbemabieses belong) which resulted in large numbers of Ewes being sold away into slavery. These are among the historical bits of "evidence" we possess.<br /><br />We've been searching for that perfect "smoking gun" bit of evidence ... that fragment of an Ewe story or song that will result in the "Kunte Kinte" moment for which we've been longing - a powerful and ironclad way to identify that first African ancestor of mine, and the circumstances of his entrapment and his fall into bondage. We're going to keep on searching.<br /><br /><br />Until then, some may choose to dismiss what we have found so far in each others' presence as unscientific and subjective. We don't care (please see post number 4 of this blog). My acceptance into this family here in Ghana has been profound, unambiguous and unconditional. A big part of the reason for this has been my strong and universally acclaimed resemblance to one prominent family member in particular: Chubi, the first son of now deceased family patriarch, John Kofi Agbemabiese, Sr. John Kofi had been his mother's only son. She admonished him to have many children to compensate for this. Seldom does a son fulfill a mother's wish more completely. John Kofi went on to have forty one children with seven wives.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Walking In Chubi's Shadow</span><br />After a while, this resemblance to Chubi started getting a little spooky for me. Everywhere my cousins took me, with no prompting, relatives and family friends would say, "Oh, my God, it's Chubi. He's his very image. If you darkened him up some, and put them next to each other, anybody would say they are twins." "Oh, see, he walks like Chubi... ahh, that sounds like Chubi talking." Chubi, Chubi, Chubi. And yet, ominously, it slowly dawned on me that nobody ever seemed to really<em> </em>want to <em>talk</em> about Chubi. Until Uncle Wakachie broke the ice when Gideon took me around to meet him. Ever notice how old folks, staring mortality in the face, just seem to stop caring about certain social conventions? They'll say things some people wish they wouldn't; spill the beans about family secrets - just because they see no point in them anymore. "Ah," he said, with obvious disgust, "Chubi is a destroyer." He explained how when John Kofi died, the family looked forward to enjoying the considerable legacy he had built - successful businesses and many real estate holdings all over the country. But Chubi and a couple of the other older brothers had held fast to their assertion that the managment of their father's wealth was <em>their</em> concern, not the family's as a whole. And they sold their father's considerable legacy away, piece by piece, leaving precious little to show for it.<br /><br /><br />Now, Chubi lives in virtual exile, somewhere deep in the Cote D'Ivoire. And he doesn't exactly go out of his way to stay in touch. So, you'll understand what I mean when I say it's difficult to walk around in this man's shadow. He's a character - charismatic, bright, creative... and apparently, still well-loved by many, despite everything. But all these attributes, although they can be real positives, are also, famously, the attributes of the Devil too. My relatives here understand that I'm <em>not</em> Chubi, and they are enjoying the process of sorting out just exactly who <em>I</em> am. But I can never feel completely free from the grim realization, even if the feeling is as subtle sometimes as a light evening breeze, that the person of whom I most remind them just happens to be the prince of darkness.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Like Language in A Dog's Ear</span><br />When I listen to my relatives converse in Ewe, my ear picks out the words I know, and it's like conversations in any language must sound to a dog. <em>Yackety, yackety, yak... </em>bad doggie... <em>yackety, yak</em>... go, <em>yack, yack</em>... your kennel, now! Except for me, in this place, my excellent ears (just ask my daughter-in-law, Erika, how good they are!) easily pick out the murmuring at the corners of a room - each little sideshow to the main conversation. And invariably, I hear, "<em>Murmur, murmur, murmur</em>, Chubi, <em>murmur,</em> Chubi, <em>murmur</em>, Chubi."<br /><br />At my glorious going away party tonight, I thought, when I got up to dance, that the excited chatter, laughter and tittering that suddenly exploded around me was due to my embarrasing lack of fluidity on the dance floor. But, for once, my feet didn't fail me, and my ears, which have never failed me yet, quickly sorted out their collective reaction. It wasn't that I was dancing so badly. It's that... I dance like Chubi.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Enter, Uncle Emmanuel</span><br />Last week, at his carpentry workshop up in Kumasi, I met Uncle Emmanuel, and suddenly, it was my turn to be amazed. Here before me stood a man who could easily have been one of my grandfather's brothers. The physical resemblance was powerful and strong. But here's where another disturbingly dog-like part of my nature, a part I have always kept secret up until this very moment, comes strongly into play. I am possessed of an unusually strong sense of smell. I never mention this special gift of mine to people because it's just too damned wierd. But I'm sure it's part of the reason for the deep bond that exists between me and our family dog, Julie, who's half blood hound.<br /><br /><br />So, this wonderful man who feels so utterly familiar - like the experience of suddenly discovering a favorite old thing you thought had long been lost, at the bottom of a forgotten trunk somewhere - invites me to enter his shop and sit by his side. And I find myself exploding with emotion. It's because - unmistakeably - this man has my grandfather's <em>smell</em>. If you've ever loved somebody, you know that everyone has their own disticnt smell. And sitting with this old man, my nose was working in overdrive. The experience was so powerful because I realized at once how much I've <em>missed</em> that smell since he's been gone. And I hadn't smelled it since the last time I saw him in 1991. Well... that's not really true. The last time I saw him was in his bed at a nursing home in Oxford, North Carolina. I'd gone with my wife, Celeste, to see him for what I feared was the last time. It was. Dementia had robbed him of his ability to connect with us, and his stay in the nursing home had completely erased his smell.<br /><br /><br />(<span style="font-size:85%;"><em>photo: Cousin David with Uncle Emmanuel at his shop</em></span>)<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6903/4370/1600/256790/Ghana4%20210.jpg"><img style="CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6903/4370/320/622162/Ghana4%20210.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />So that means it's been since 1989, the last time I visited him at his home in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. It's a complex, layered smell. Fresh sweat, mixed with the smell of stale sweat, the dust and dirt on his shirt; the old cigar smoke mixed with some that's fairly new, floating on a mixed bouqet of cheap schnapps and some pretty decent whiskey. Not a lot of either. Just a hint. This is a rock solid and sober man; a good man, but very complicated. There is a smell carried on the sweat that is the result of one's physical labor; a much more subtle smell that results from each person's unique body chemistry. Mental and spiritual effort makes you sweat too. And in my grandfather's case, it occurs to me that the biggest daily psychic strain on his being came from from how hard it is to be a man who doesn't suffer fools gladly... in a world full of fools. Emmanuel must inhabit that same inner space, I thought. So maybe this unique smell shared by these two men who never met is, at least in part, the result of the constant effort it takes when you're a hard, fiery, and sometimes difficult man, to stay cool, and patient and kind.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">"I Would Know You By Your Feet"</span><br />When Gideon and I visited Uncle Wakachie, he imparted a piece of information that filled in another huge piece of this identity puzzle for me. At some point in a long, rambling converstaion we were having, he stopped, glanced down at my feet and smiled. "Even if I had not yet seen your face," he said, "I would know you by your feet." This is a <em>very</em> important tidbit of information, because I have, arguably, the ugliest pair of feet I have ever seen on anybody, anywhere. All the years my kids, Malaika and Amahl, were growing up, anytime they had occasion to gaze upon these famously ugly feet, they'd let me know how deeply thankful they are that this was one particular feature they did not inherit from me. They both got their mother's beautiful, perfect feet.<br /><br />But now, I have seen for myself that these feet have a long history. And I've let them free to be themselves here. I've got several pairs of unworn socks to take home. These feet have darkened up under the African sun almost as much as the rest of me because I've let them come out to play... in sandals or bare in the sand. They feel easy and free here because, for once, they are among their own kind.<br /><br /><br />When Malaika and Amahl have their own kids, everything about them will seem utterly perfect to me. But my heart will feel a special, secret joy if, when I first kiss those little newborn feet, at least one pair of them looks like the feet I looked down at when Wakashie and I walked the family farm together at the end of our first meeting.<br /><br /><br />More about that next time, when I bring you the installment called, "Turning African In Four Easy Steps."<br /><br /><br /><br />Peace,<br /><br />DavidDavid Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-72412160506160373832006-11-08T05:25:00.000-08:002012-02-14T14:45:13.825-08:00<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/6903/4370/1600/Ghana%20002.2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right;" border="0" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/6903/4370/320/Ghana%20002.2.jpg" /></a> <div><div><div><div><div><div><strong>Tror Na Foe</strong> (<em>troh-na-fway</em>) - a phrase in the Ewe Language spoken by my father's forbears from Anlo-Ewe state in south- eastern Ghana, which means, roughly, "to return and find again."<br /></div><br /><br /><div></div><div><span style="font-size:85%;"><em>(photo: from left, Gideon Agbemabiese, Madam Desawu Agbemabiese, daughter Agnes Ablayo Agbemabiese, and two of Madam Desewu's grand-children, in the old family compound at Tegbi) </em></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">The American Cousin</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">[<em>First, a note:</em> <em>Normally, I try to file each new installment of this blog on Friday. Last week, it was late due to difficulties with high speed internet access. But this week, it comes a couple of days early because the connection I've got at my wonderful hotel, The Mahogany (HIGHLY recommended) is so great. I don't know when I can count on another connection this strong, so I figured I'd better get this installment out there now, while the gettin's good</em>!]</span><br /><br />At the place where I last left you, I'd said I felt rather like a kid tossed into the deep end of a very deep pool. And I promised I'd explain what I meant.<br /><br />It's been such a full, intense week that I feel like I've been here for a month. After one night in Accra, cousin Gideon, a banker, picked me up in the company car of choice for a trip like the one we were about to take - a rugged, double-cab, four wheel drive truck, emblazoned with the First Ghana Building Society logo, an asset which would help us pass more smoothly through the police check points on the way east to the old ancestral village.<br /><br />He revealed that although he has visited the old village a few times over the years, it's always been a quick day visit; up in the morning and back to Accra or Kumasi by evening. People have been buzzing about the imminent arrival of "the American cousin" for weeks. And without anyone actually saying it out loud, there's been a strong feeling in people's hearts that this auspicious moment - this surprising visit from a long-missing part of their family - would be a perfect time to re-cement ties between the urban segment of the family and thr rural, who don't see each other all that often.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>The trip there was my first glimpse of rural west Africa. I had been mentally prepared for the poverty I'd see, but the depth and the extent of that poverty was harsher up close than I had even expected. On the other hand, I've seen rural poverty in southern Mexico; in China; in Peru - and there's a difference in the "feel" of a poor community that is buoyed both by pride in its culture and a genuine hope for a better future, compared to one in which those spiritual elements are harder to find. Anlo-Ewe country is of that first type - poor, but energized by a hopefulness about the future and a profound spirituality; the ragged edge of their poverty softened by a culture that stresses and upholds ancient values of communal effort and sharing.</div><div><br /></div><div>Just outside the old family compound in the heart of the village of Tegbi, there's a small, family-owned, tin-roofed convenience store/snack bar called, "The Groovy Spot." As soon as Gideon pulled the truck up next to it, several clan members suddenly appeared and crossed the road to greet us. Introductions were skillfully managed by Gideon in English and Ewe as we were ushered in through the gate into the compound. </div><div><br /></div><div>"We have heard of you, cousin, and we are very glad to meet you," said Mr. Dzisam. "We welcome you home." The men spoke among themselves in Ewe for a moment, and then excused themselves, saying they'd be back in a few minutes. Kwaku, Agnes and a couple of others helped get white plastic chairs set up for everyone. Madam Desawu chatted with us and made us comfortable. She kept looking at me and smiling as she talked with Gideon in Ewe. "It's like a miracle," she kept saying. She came over and pressed my face between her hands. They were calloused country woman's hands, but somehow, as soft and comforting as a warm blanket on a cold night. There were tears in her eyes, and I'm sure there were tears in mine too.</div><div><br /></div><div>She returned to her cooking in the outdoor kitchen where she'd been when we first entered, and Gideon and I waited with Kwaku under the giant, nearly century old mango trees by the west compound wall.</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>Soon, the men returned with other members of the clan. There were eighteen of us there now. Everyone took their seats and the meeting began. Mr. Dzisam made introductions all around, and Kwadzo, aided by Eric, performed a proper libation ceremony with some flavored shnapps Gideon and I had bought in Anloga for the occasion, asking the ancestors to enjoy this auspicious moment with us and to bless it. Kwaku ran out to The Groovy Spot for soft drinks while others spontaneously offered up prayers of thanksgiving. While Kwaku handed out soft drinks to the women and children, the men passed the bottle of schnapps, each reverentially pouring a little onto the ground for the ancestors and taking a sip before passing it on.</div><div><br /></div><div>Then, for nearly an hour, Mr. Dzisam read from a notebook the entire known geneaology of our clan. Gideon and I haven't figured it out yet, but we're dedicated to searching the oral record of diverse clan elders for clues about known historical events that can help us date some of these "begats." What we've got looks like it probably gets us back to the late eighteenth century, but that's too late to identify an ancestor who was probably snatched from their midst no later than the <em>early</em> eighteenth century. Our later meeting with Wakashie filled in some gaps for us, but didn't provide "the smoking gun" we were looking for either. I'm still holding out hope for that "Kunta Kinte moment" someday.<br /></div><div></div><div><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/6903/4370/1600/Ghana%20022.jpg"><img border="0" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/6903/4370/400/Ghana%20022.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><br /></div><div><span style="font-size:180%;">Science</span></div><div>That moment may come, and it may not. If it never does, what am I left with here? If you've been with me since the start of this journey, you know the concerns I had before leaving home about paying due respect to the science involved in this kind of search. Before you can make any real sense of a DNA match or near-match, you've got to be able to construct a reliable record of "begats" to positively identify a missing ancestor and see where they fit into the family tree you're attempting to flesh out. Anlo-Ewe culture is known to have a rich oral record regarding the traumatic years of slavery. And as I've explained before, the branch of the family from which this ancestor of mine appears to have sprung is prominent now and was very prominent <em>then</em>. The chance that there may be some specific stories somewhere out there about him are reasonably good.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the meantime, here I sat under these ancient mango trees, and on and off - for hours - all eyes were on me. It was the women most of all. Of course. In every culture on earth, they are the keepers of the family tree - the ones who do the begetting, and the ones who keep the <em>records</em> of all "the begats," whether they're written down in the family bible or not written at all except in memory, carefully kept and preserved.</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>In the rural south I remember, if a young man in the extended family was alleged to have gotten some young woman from the neighborhood pregnant, at some point, the women in his family needed to see this baby and pass judgement. Only five percent of the examination was about easily observable physical things. "Well, he's got our nose... and hands like Big John's... and our color." It's a thousand, subtle little things that go into that judgement, most of which the women who pass that baby around the parlor couldn't really explain to you if their lives depended on it. But somehow, they just <em>know</em>. If great-grandma snorts and says, with certitude, "Now, you know this child ain't none of ours," that's probably all she wrote. It's not a callous or casual rejection. Every little baby needs and deserves love. It's just that, if somebody who can't even hold up his own head yet is about to be given all your unconditional love, the keys to the family treasure, a whole lifetime of everyone's blood, sweat and tears, and a license to break everyone's heart the way only a family member can, they'd better damned well be right about this. </div></div><div></div><div><div></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>That's another kind of science. And I'm pleased to be able to tell you that having gone through something like this process in the courtyard of that compound under those towering mango trees, not as a helpless baby, but as a full grown man, I have been duly examined (as in having been thoroughly looked up and down) and <em>cross</em>-examined (as in prodded to see what's in my heart), and the extended family has unequivocally recognized me as one of their own. </div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>And if that's good enough for them, it's good enough for me. </div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>I'll be back with you from some corner of this wonderful country next week. Oh... and if you or a loved one happens to be coming soon, I've got two words for you. Mahogany Lodge - at #9 Kakramadu Link, East Cantonments, Accra. +233 21 761162.<br /><br />Peace. Be well.<br /><br />David</div><div></div><div><br /><br /><br /><br /></div><div></div></div></div></div></div>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-21876202028017297872006-11-06T08:14:00.000-08:002006-11-08T09:23:42.835-08:00<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/6903/4370/1600/Ghana%20001.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/6903/4370/320/Ghana%20001.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/6903/4370/1600/Ghana%20003.0.jpg"></a><div><span style="font-size:85%;"><strong>Tror Na Foe</strong> <em>(troh-nah-fway) A phrase in Ewe, </em></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><em>the language spoken by our father's ancestors, who lived in southeastern Ghana, which means, roughly, "to return and find again."<br /></em></span></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><span style="font-size:130%;">"It's Like A Miracle,"</span><br /></div><div></div><div><span style="font-size:100%;"><div><span style="font-size:85%;">... exclaims cousin Madam Desewu (center) at a meeting of the Tovie (toh-vee-uh) clan on Saturday, November 4, in the ancestral village at Tegbi. With her are Gideon Agbemabiese and her daughter, Agnes Ablayo Agbemabiese.</span></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div><span style="font-size:130%;">The American Cousin</span></div><div>Before heading out to the airport with my son, Amahl, I had the usual pre-trip butterflies I always seem to get before I leave for somewhere. It's about anticipating whatever lies ahead; it's about fretting over what I might have forgotten or left undone in the last minute rushing around. Organization is not my strong suit, so there's <em>always</em> last minute rushing around, no matter how carefully I try to plan. But these butterflies were of a whole other order. I was about to fulfill a dream I'd harbored since I was a kid - the dream of finding and meeting our long-missing kinfolk in Africa.</div><div></div><div><br />The older and riper a dream becomes, the higher are the stakes if the reality can never quite live up to all the hope and emotion you've invested in it. How would I be received? How <em>should</em> they receive someone whose ancestor went missing from their fold between two hundred ten and two hundred forty years ago? That's a very long time. And much, much water, as they say, has gone over the dam since then... on my side of the Atlantic, as well as theirs. So given that, how are they <em>supposed</em> to feel about me? And for my part, I've always harbored a big romance about how I would feel if I ever found them. But in a few hours time, there we'd be, face to face for the first time, for real. Would the gulf created by time and culture turn out to be too wide and too deep to breach? Or would that sense of connection I have so deeply desired rise up and become a tangible thing? Would I feel, in their presence, like I was home?</div><div></div><div></div><div><br />The trip to Amsterdam, my stopover destination, was not an auspicious beginning. It wasn't a disaster... just kind of drag, like a long flight can be when there's not much conversation to be had, despite all of us back there in coach jammed together like sardines. A sourness hung in all that dead coach cabin air that was so oppressive, I couldn't wait to get off that plane.</div><div></div><div><br />But once in line for the flight to Ghana, things got much better. Ghanaians happy to be going home were talking animatedly, and allowed me to float in and out of a half-dozen different conversations as the line slowly snaked its way through security. I talked to ex-pat African Americans on their way home, missionaries; African Americans, like me, on their first trip to Africa. Once on the plane the lively hub-bub of the airport gate became more like a party. Tired of the usual airline swill, I'd ordered the "Hindu Vegetarian" meal this time, and it was great.</div><div></div><div><br />Two and a half hours out of Amsterdam, our plane cleared the coast of southern France, and all of a sudden, the butterflies returned. I knew that the next major land mass I'd see below would be Africa.</div><div></div><div></div><div><br />But as we approached the African coast, our arrival was anti-climatic. Algeria was covered in dense clouds... and the moon was rising; dusk already rolling in. Then, just in time to enjoy the view for a while before darkness fell, the clouds parted and, from 35,000 feet we could finally gape at the almost unimaginable vastness of the Sahara. That first clear view was the only moment of silence during the entire trip. A Ghanaian stretching himself in the aisle leaned over to look out the window just ahead of mine. "Mama Africa," he said with a smile. I smiled too, grateful that this most pleasant flight had given me what I felt must be a little taste of being in Ghana already... like the experience of dangling your feet in the pool for a beat before slipping fully into the water.</div><div></div><div><br />Shortly after the plane landed to the sound of loud applause from the passengers in coach, that pool analogy turned out to be profoundly apt. Because within just a few hours, I'd find myself feeling like a kid tossed into the deep end of a pool - the deep, deep end of a very deep pool. </div><div></div><div> </div><div>Come back and visit me at this blog in a few days and I promise, I'll explain.</div></div></div></span>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-66088933845519132752006-10-26T22:32:00.000-07:002006-10-27T22:15:55.383-07:00Tror Na Foe (troh-nah-fway): a phrase in Ewe, the language spoken by the people from which my family on my father's side descends, in southeastern Ghana. It means, roughly, "to go back and retrieve something that one has lost." <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/52/Sankofa.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/52/Sankofa.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Sankofa<br /></span>This image is an ancient version of the Sankofa Bird, a mythical being from the cultures of the Akan-speaking peoples of central Ghana, who moves forward while looking behind, mindful that confidently and creatively moving ahead into the future requires a keen knowledge of and respect for one's past.<br /><br />From the Akan words San ko - (to go back) fa - (to get).<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><strong>A note to readers:</strong> If you're new to this site, you might want to scroll all the way to the bottom</span> <span style="font-size:85%;">and read these posts from there to the top, just to follow the story in the right sequence!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">After A Two Hundred Forty Year Absence, A Family Begins to Re-Connect!</span><br />At the point in this story where I left off last week, Lawrence Agbemabiese and I had begun to correspond. We were excited to know that our DNA results showed us to be only a one-step variation away from an exact match with one another. But that result raises many more questions than it can begin to answer. It signifies that we probably share a common male ancestor somewhere within the last seven to twelve generations. It could mean that we share, for instance, the same eight or nine-times-great grandfather, and that the one-step variation in our DNA is the result of a small mutation that has crept in over time. It could mean that his eight or nine-times-great grandfather was brother to my corresponding direct ancestor... or cousin on the paternal side.<br /><br />In most cases, there would be no likely way to ever answer these questions. We'd find ourselves stuck at yet more geneaological dead end... except for one potentially very important detail of family history revealed in Lawrence's first letter to me.<br /><br />"Our Dad, John, was the son of George Agbemabiese, an Anlo Chief whose title was Haxormene II of Tegbi. This is a small coastal town on the southeastern coast of Ghana."<br /><br />With that all-important nugget of information, our chances of finding the answers to these questions - and much, much more - suddenly increased a thousand percent. Why? Because the family's status as hereditary chiefs goes way back. Sadly, when a farmer or a fisherman out doing their work, or a soldier caught up on the losing side of a war went missing, their families mourned them, but no record remains about the details of how they became victims of the trade in slaves. But when a member of a royal family went missing, <em>that</em> was news. The west African tradition of court poet, clan historian and praise singer - widely known as the "griot" in the former French colonies - means that the details of how this particular African ancestor of mine became a victim just might known. The story of why and under what circumstances he was seized and sold away just might be part of the carefully preserved oral record of our people back home. Somebody may know his story. <em>Somebody may know his name</em>.<br /><br />So, as I prepare to leave for Ghana next week, you'd best believe I am well-armed with a digital voice recorder and camera, ready to record as many hours of interviews with clan elders as it takes to see if enough precious nuggets of oral history survive to help us answer our questions.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Lawrence and I Get The Chance to Meet</span><br />As good fortune would have it, my wife and I already had plans to visit friends in Paris this past summer, and Lawrence, as I mentioned last week, is a Program Officer at the United Nations Environmental Programs offices there. Naturally, we seized the opportunity to meet. In the first installment of this blog, I published the photo my wife, Celeste, took when we stepped off the train into Paris and Lawrence stepped up to meet us for the first time. It was an electric and emotional moment I will never forget.<br /><br />And it only got better. As soon as Lawrence dropped us at our hotel, he put plans into motion for us to spend some quality time with him and his family while we were there.<br /><br />He and his wonderful wife Caroline told us later that she tried to cool down his excitement and enthusiasm a little. "Don't get your hopes up so high," she cautioned. "We can't be so sure about all this just yet." "Look; it's science," Lawrence had countered. "There's no doubt. The connection may be distant, but we're related." Still, Caroline had decided she'd wait until she could personally lay eyes on me; talk with me; be with me a while, before she'd be convinced. "I know your family well," she'd said. "<em>I</em> will know if he's really one of you or not."<br /><br />So, the die was cast. If I felt like family when she met me, she'd willingly accept me as such. But if I didn't, she wasn't buying into this one bit.<br /><br />When Lawrence and his sons, Marc and Carl, picked us up at the train station near their suburban Paris home, the boys and I couldn't stop stealing furtive glances at each other and smiling. Lawrence urged them to think of me as an uncle and to go ahead and refer to me as such. But I think they were waiting for their mother's unambiguous stamp of approval as much as I was to make this status official.<br /><br />We needn't have worried. It only took a couple of minutes for Caroline to become convinced. Standing next to each other in person, no one would have trouble believing Lawrence and I are cousins. And Caroline was immediately and emotionally struck by how very much I resemble one of Lawrence's older brothers, one of the offspring of Lawrence's father by his first wife. But the "resemblance" goes much deeper than that. It's the way we walk; the way we talk; the sound of our voices; what we talk about; the <em><strong>way</strong></em> we talk about what we talk about. These are the things that convinced her. "Be prepared when that side of the family first sees you back home," she said. "It's going to be emotional. I'm telling you, they will cry."<br /><br />She and Lawrence threw us a great party in their back yard with a few of Lawrence's colleagues from the U.N. and a couple of close family friends. We ate well and had big fun, and Caroline kept turning the music up until somebody said, "Hey, somebody's gonna call the police!" but Caroline just didn't care. A woman after my own heart. Besides, it wasn't that late. And it WAS Saturday night. And having felt the wonderful, lively vibe of the neighborhood, I've got to believe the neighbors were enjoying it as much as we did. I can't prove that, but nobody ever did call the police, and a good time was had by all.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Onward!</span><br />I told Lawrence and family when we left that my goal was to make it to Ghana in November. And the ancestors MUST be urging us on and blessing this whole enterprise, because sure enough, on November 1st, I'm bound for Accra! Look for new posts from Ghana over the next several weeks as I push on with my quest to interview elders and see if we can parse out the story of our first ancestor to arrive in the "new world" from this line of the family. Cousin Gideon Agbemabiese is meeting me at the airport and helping me dive into this quest with both feet. Look for new photos and video too, as I visit Anloga for the annual Hogbetsotso Festival (more about that later), and walk about the family's ancestral town of Tegbi for the first time. Stay tuned!<br /><br />And please don't forget, if you're so inclined, to help me collect and send school supplies to cousin Lawrencia's school near Kumasi.<br /><br />The address:<br />Mrs. Lawrencia Agbenyefia<br />Deeper Christian Life Ministry<br />P.O. Box 539<br />Obuasi, Ashanti Region<br />GhanaDavid Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-86952486837618978402006-10-17T11:28:00.000-07:002006-10-26T23:41:30.139-07:00<strong>Tror Na Foe</strong><br />(troh- na- fway) Is a phrase in the Ewe language (the people from whom our family sprang in the southeastern corner of Ghana) which means, roughly, "to come back and retrieve something that one has lost."<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">May The Circle Be Unbroken</span><br />Since I began sharing the story of how we have managed to find and connect with one of the <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/6903/4370/1600/Paris%20-"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/6903/4370/320/Paris%20-%20%2706%20004.0.jpg" border="0" /></a>African families from whom our ancestors were separated during slavery, many people have peppered me with questions about we did it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><div align="right"><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:85%;">That's me (left), with cousin Lawrence Agbemabiese and family in Paris,</span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:85%;">summer, 2006. Left to right, son Marc, Lawrence, wife Caroline, son Carl. </span></div><span style="font-size:78%;"><div align="right">(photo, Celeste Grant)</span></div><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;">I</span>n last week's inaugural installment of this blog, I promised to use the next two installments to write about how it all came together, and what it felt like for members of our families to meet, face to face, for the first time.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Finding One Another</span><br />Celeste and I have two adult children, Malaika and Amahl, and they teamed up to give us DNA kits from the National Genographic Project for Christmas last year. "Yep, it's the gift that keeps <em>on</em> giving," our daughter said with a smile. She knew that the information the test results would yield will ultimately mean just as much to her and her brother and <em>their</em> children as they do to Celeste and I.<br /><br />What they are about at National Genographic is collecting as diverse a sampling of human DNA as they can, in an effort to map out in detail the history of humankind's dispersion from its African cradle, so that we may begin to understand more than we ever have before about, in their own words, "who we are, where we came from, and how we relate as members of one extended family."<br /><br />You can connect with this worthy effort at <a href="http://www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic">http://www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic</a><br /><br /><br />The kit includes some excellent printed information on genetics and the story of how humankind spread out to cover the planet in ancient times, as well as a great National Geographic documentary on DVD about the genesis of project leader Dr. Spencer Wells' and his colleagues' groundbreaking work in this area.<br /><br />Participating is a simple process. You use the soft, serrated swab and the sterile lab vials provided by the kit to collect cells from the inside of your cheeks; you pop both vials into the mailer pouch, and send it off to them. Their labs use those cells to isolate a good sample of your DNA (the X-Chromosome, if you're a woman; the Y-Chromosome if you're a male). The tests take weeks, but eventually, they'll get back to you via mail, or e-mail (your choice). If you've had your X-Chromosome tested, the information they share with you about your genetic heritage will pertain <em>only to your female line</em> - and this is very important to understand - which means strictly mother to daughter to mother to daughter, on back into deep antiquity. In other words, none of the genetic heritage of any female ancestor's <em>father</em> ever comes into play. Same thing with your Y-Chromosome. It's strictly your paternal line - father to son, to father to son - all the way back. The results that return tell you to which "haplogroup", or specific branch of the human family tree, you belong.<br /><br /><p>For me, there were some surprises right away. Like many African Americans, some of my ancestry is European. That's one of the legacies of what they used to call, "the peculiar institution." Slave-owning men had endless, easy access to the women they owned as slaves, and this resulted in the births of huge numbers of so-called "mulatto" children. We own a photograph of the four Sams in our family: brother, father, grandfather; great-grandfather. Now, great-grandfather Sam is a very light-skinned man. So I had always assumed, given the history of slavery, that <em>even though there was no oral history to back this up</em>, he must have been the son, or at least the grandson of our family's slave master, or perhaps, overseer. I thought it pretty likely that when I got my DNA results back, the story they told would really be about his European ancestors, whoever they were, all the way back.</p><p>Surprise! The sample came back listing me as a member of the large African haplogroup E3(a). This is the haplogroup to which most west Africans belong. Great-grandfather Sam's father was a veteran of the civil war, and when I found the records of his unit, I found him clearly listed - twice - as black. Census and other records back then made a clear distinction between "black" and "mulatto," even though the decision about which of these catagories you'd fit into was based on the highly subjective judgement of whatever white person was doing the counting! But what this means is that my great-great grandmother, the woman he married and with whom he had his children, must have been very, very light skinned, indeed. The story of <em>her</em> father and mother remain a mystery for now. But the DNA results now clearly showed that my great-great grandfather and his father before him, going back to that first African ancestor brought here in chains, are connected to each other in a line leading straight back to Africa.</p><p>Now, for most of us African Americans, this is where we hit a huge dead end. Your sample shows you're E3(a)... but now, what?</p><p>The lab which sub-contracted with National Genographic to perform the isolation and identification of my DNA sample was Family Tree DNA, <a href="http://www.familytreedna.com">http://www.familytreedna.com</a> in Houston, Texas. They'll get in touch with you after your results are in, and ask if you would like to - 1) have them perform additional testing, based on the tissue sample they already have from you (ie; if you're male, upgrading the standard twelve marker Y-Chromosome test to include more genetic markers, or adding an X-Chromosome test to examine your mother's line; 2) join, at no charge, the large and growing international databases managed by organizations called Y-Search and Mito-Search ("mito" is a reference to mitochondrial DNA, which is another way of describing the heritage carried by the female X-Chromosome).</p><p>It's a great offer. You sign up; you upload the results of your sample, and instantly, you have a tool for comparing your DNA to samples from tens of thousands of participants worldwide. You will almost certainly find at least several people who match you exactly, or who are one or two "markers" distant. In the case of the Y-Chromosome, an exact match on the standard twelve marker test means that, in all probability, you and the match you've found share a common male ancestor somewhere within the last three to seven generations. In the case of a person who's got a one-marker variation from your sample (ie; say, at the eleventh alelle of your DNA strand, he's a 27, and you're a 28), that common male ancestor probably lived in the last seven to twelve generations.</p><p>The problem for African American geneaology researchers is that the overwhelming majority of these database participants, so far, have their roots primarily in Europe, the near east, and the Indian sub-continent. If your heritage is strongly linked to these parts of the world, you're in luck. But if it's connections with a sub-Saharan African heritage you're searching for, the going gets tough. Very tough.</p><p>The original homes of the vast majority of the slaves brought to these shores were in west and central Africa, and so far, the number of African participants in the big DNA databases from these areas is very, very small. That's no surprise. These are parts of the world saddled with great poverty, and participation in such studies requires 1) money;2) some free time; 3) ready access to a computer, and an e-mail address. Thousands of Africans have been sampled for DNA, but as members <em>of groups</em> for the purpose of academic study, not as individuals. Dr. Kittles of Howard University and his company, African Ancestry.com, <a href="http://www.africanancestry.com">http://www.africanancestry.com</a> have been sampling in west Africa for years, searching for and identifying patterns of DNA markers that can help African American geneaology researchers find a specific ethnicity ("tribe") to whom they are related, or at least narrow down their ancestral origins to a tightly-defined geographic area. The ability to get that close to nailing down the specifics of our African heritage has been a deeply cherished dream for so many of us!</p><p>But it's at this point that my story diverges from most others. In my case, there was, indeed, an African whose sample is a very close match to mine - that one west African in a million who had participated in the National Genographic Project (at the urging, it turned out, of a fellow scientist at the U.N. offices in Paris) and had then taken the next step of signing on with Y-Search.</p><p>Y-Search issues code numbers so that if someone in the database desires to contact a user who proves to be a match, or near match, a user's real identity remains hidden unless he or she chooses to reveal it - a protection for the privacy of everybody involved. Particpants are asked to list a "country of origin" for the most distant ancestor they know of. Many African Americans choose to list a country of origin in Africa based on some nugget of family oral history that's been passed down in their families. Sometimes that information will turn out to have a basis in fact; but more often, not. So, it was with great initial caution that I reached out to someone on my one-marker variation list who identified his country of origin as Ghana.</p><p>"... At first glance," my e-note read, "It certainly appears that we may, in the not very distant past, share a common male ancestor... Were you born in Ghana, or are you, like me, a U.S.- born descendant of African slaves?"</p><p>"What a nice surprise! Yep, I am from Ghana," his note began, and suddenly, we found ourselves launched on a voyage of discovery that has already yielded new knowledge and surprises far beyond any expectations I ever had about what might come of taking that initial cheek swab!</p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Coming Up Next Week</span></p><p>The story of how that respondent, Lawrence Agbemabiese, and I developed a profound connection through internet correspondence, and before long, had our first meeting, face to face. I'll also talk about beginning to parse out the story of who that first common ancestor may have been, and how we have begun the process of connecting our families on both sides of the Atlantic.</p><p><strong>And speaking of that growing connection, here's a post-script</strong></p><p>Cousin Lawrencia Agbenyefia (his sister) runs a primary school near Kumasi. I have offered to take some supplies to her, but you know how restrictive the airline luggage allowances are these days. So, I'd like to enlist your aid on her (and the childrens') behalf. She says they need math and science texts and workbooks, appropriate for the early elementary grades; educational games, toys and puzzles; age appropriate books for the library; computer CDs and DVDs; etc. Lightly used items will be fine, but brand new is ideal. If you can help, you may send items in care of her church at:</p><p>Mrs. Lawrencia Agbenyefia</p>Deeper Christian Ministry<br /><br /><p>P.O. Box 539<br /><p>Obuasi, Ashanti Region,<br /><p>Ghana<br /><p></p>Many thanks! See you next week!!<br /><br /><p></p></span></div></span><br /></span><span style="font-size:78%;"></span>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35805943.post-1160511344806340282006-10-10T09:39:00.000-07:002006-10-13T11:03:25.899-07:00<div align="left">Tror Na Foe</div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:85%;">(<em>troh- na- fway</em>) Is a phrase in the Ewe language (the people from whom our family sprang in the southeastern corner of Ghana) which means, roughly, "to come back and retrieve something that one has lost."<br /><br /></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:180%;">The Universe Is Made of Stories</span></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:180%;"></span></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:180%;"></span></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:180%;"><br /></span><a ref="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5535/3871/1600/Cousin%20Lawrence%20and%20I,%20Gare%20Nord%20in%20Paris,%20summer%202006.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5535/3871/320/Cousin%20Lawrence%20and%20I%2C%20Gare%20Nord%20in%20Paris%2C%20summer%202006.jpg" border="0" /></a></span></div><div align="center"><br /><em></em></div><div align="center"><em></em></div><div align="center"><em></em></div><div align="center"><em>"The universe is made</em></div><div align="center"><em>of stories, not of atoms"</em></div><div align="center"><em><span style="font-size:78%;">Muriel Rukeyser</span></em><br /></div><div align="right"></div><div align="right"></div><div align="right"></div><div align="right"></div><div align="right"></div><div align="right"></div><div align="right"></div><div align="right"></div><div align="right"></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;"></span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;"><br><br><br><br><br>First meeting between cousin Lawrence Agbemabiese</span></span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;">and I (left) at Gare du Nord, Paris, summer, 2006 </span></div><div align="right"><span style="font-size:78%;">(photo, Celeste Grant)</span></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><br>I have always been a lover and collector of stories, ever since I was a kid. No one who knew me back then was the least bit surprised when I became a serious young actor - that's one kind of professional storyteller; nor when as an adult, I became a writer, another time-honored way to turn storytelling into one's living.</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><br />As a screenwriter and playwright, I've always loved the challenge of bringing other peoples' stories to life. With the creation of the brand new blog you are now reading, I relish the opportunity, for once, to share one of my own. This is the story of how my family, separated by slavery between Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean; lost to one another for over two hundred fifty years, is in the midst now of reaching out across the historical and cultural divide to reclaim itself from the Great Trans-Atlantic Lost & Found. Through a stroke of Grace and great good luck, we have found not just the specific people from which one branch of our family arose in Africa; we have found a specific <em>family</em> with whom we have blood ties. They're in Ghana. And I'm getting ready, as I write this, to make my first trip - the first of many, many, I'm sure. It's been an incredible journey so far, but the truth is, it's really only just beginning. And I'm inviting you to come along this journey and walk it with me.<br /><br /></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;">A Longing In Our Hearts</span></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">The old folks in our family always knew that I was deeply interested in their stories - their personal reminiscences of the teens, twenties, thirties, and forties, for sure - but <em>especially</em> the stories that had been passed down to them from the days of slavery. The stories were full of intriguing and often edifying glimpses of these ancestors. Tales about their grit and determination in the face of the terrible reality through which they lived were always inspirational food for the mind and spirit. And every time I was able to piece together some of the details of lives yet one more generation back; <em>then another</em>... it felt like a huge victory. My window on the past kept getting bigger; the vision through that window a little bit clearer. But like the vast majority of other African Americans, that window on the past never let me see any farther than the shores of this country. Only rarely did the stories passed down to me give more than a tantalizing hint about our family's origins in Africa.</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><br />In fact, throughout African American history, it's only been that extremely rare, once in a million story that takes family researchers where we really long to go - back to a solid connection with a specific place in Africa. The Africans from whom we are descended were not <em>born</em> "darkies", "niggers", "jigaboos" nor "spooks." Neither were they "Negroes" nor "coloreds," nor ignorant savages by anybody's definition of the word. They did not come "from nothing" as the ideology that propped up slavery insisted. They were, in fact, people from diverse cultures with rich, complex histories. Many of these cultures were urban and highly sophisticated. They were Ibo, Yoruba, Hausa and Fulani; they were Mande, Wolof, Fula, and Ewe and Balanta. They were farmers, and traders and fishermen; soldiers, tax collectors and royal courtiers; troubadors, priests and magicians.</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><br />On these shores, each was reduced to something less than human - a chattel slave. But in each of our families, that first African ancestor to arrive here was <em>somebody</em>, from <em>someplace</em>. He or she <em>had a name</em>. Many of us have nourished in our hearts a profound longing to speak those names if we could but know them - to let their recitation help us properly remember and honor our dead; to let their recitation help us, our children, and their children remember who we are... keep faith with the past as we march forward into whatever future we will make for ourselves.<br /><br /></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;">Suddenly, Everything Changes</span></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">But now, DNA-based geneaological research is making it possible to fill huge gaps in our collective knowledge that were previously an almost impossible dream. I'll talk about how our family is using this new knowledge to make the connections we are now exploring, and provide you with links to people who are doing interesting and vital work in this area. I'll spend the next three weeks catching you up with what's happened on this journey so far, and how we've arrived at where we are. And then, starting in the first week of November, as I begin in earnest to write a book about all of this, I invite you to keep up with me through this blog while I make my first trip to Ghana. Look for photos and video as I attend the annual Hogbetsotso Festival near our family's ancestral village, and then visit with clan elders (griots) to see if we can piece together enough information to identify that first ancestor on my father's side to come to this country as a captive. I'll introduce you to my long-missing family as <em>I</em> meet them - cousin Gideon, at the ancestral village in Tegbi; cousin Lawrencia at the school she runs in Kumasi... and cousin Lawrence, whose picture appears on this page, once he arrives in Accra a few days later on business for the U.N.</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><br />Stay tuned. I'm pleased to know you, and glad to have you with me on this journey.</div>David Granthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03417310596527111488noreply@blogger.com11