Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes the histories and identities surrounding encounters, past and present, between Ghanaians and African Americans. With Ghanaian slave forts as the primary sites of interaction between African American tourists and local tour guides, we explore various struggles over the meaning of identities connected through histories of slavery. This paper argues that guides have designed “heritage tours” not only to provide a palatable historical narrative of slavery, but also to meet the expectations of Diasporan tourists whose pilgrimages to West Africa bring hopes of recovering a connection to an African homeland. The paper interrogates the notion of West Africa as a place for African Americans to “return” from both Ghanaian and American perspectives. It also examines divergent states of mind related to negotiations around the creation and interpretation of the history of slavery and the 200 years since the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. This paper pays particular attention to African Americans who visit Ghanaian slave forts, including Elmina, Cape Coast, and Fort Amsterdam, and their creation of fictive pasts and fictive identities in order to define their African heritage. We examine Ghanaian responses to the presence of tourists from the Diaspora and focus on misunderstandings that arise over various negotiations of defining race and belonging when and where Africans and Diasporans meet. Based on fieldwork interviews, slave fort guest books, popular culture commentaries, and autobiographies of expatriates in Ghana, this paper interrogates a history of tensions and misunderstandings that have resulted from the construction, interpretation, and contestation of the history of Atlantic slavery.

Paper long abstract:

Author: Isaac Xerxes Malki

This paper addresses the political history of a ‘middleman’ group in West Africa. It makes two claims. The first asserts that their ‘middleman’ isolation was created and enforced by the legal and political mechanisms of the state. The second claim problematises the concept of ‘middleman community’, maintaining that a ‘Lebanese community’ in Ghana did not develop in any sense other than a loose cultural one.

The research presented demonstrates the historical dynamism of social and economic categories by documenting changing political and legal processes in the state’s interactions with ‘middlemen.’ It also shows that in Ghana, the colonial government envisaged and enforced the concept of the Lebanese as ‘aliens’, institutionalising policies later deployed by post-independence governments. This took the form of a regime of control including deportation, immigration barriers and the denial of citizenship. These conclusions challenge prevailing sociological, economic and anthropological theories regarding ‘middlemen communities’, which tend to assert that the separateness of ‘middlemen’ arose from networks, kinship ties or internal exclusivity. The regime of control was necessary because colonial and post-independence governments saw the Lebanese as economic actors devoid of political agency. Significantly, the political economic function of the Lebanese changed at independence (1957) from intermediaries in the colonial “commercial pyramid” to industrialists intended to assist the country attain developmental goals.

Finally, this paper reveals that the pressures placed on the Lebanese by the state’s mechanisms of control undermined the formation of a ‘Lebanese community’, encouraging individual defection strategies by ‘aliens’ who sought citizenship, elite patronage and other forms of political protection. Ultimately, this work demonstrates the importance of citizenship in influencing integration outcomes. Without the possibility of attaining citizenship, many Ghanaian Lebanese had to operate in an arena outside of the domain of formal politics, which further undermined the legitimacy of their claims to political inclusion.

Paper long abstract:

African movement to Asia is a centuries old phenomenon but one which has not received much scholarly attention. There are communities of Afro-Asians in contemporary Asia. Moreover, some Asians can trace the migration of their African ancestors back to half a millennium.

Archival and oral accounts are complementary to an investigation of the silent history and forced migration of Africans. Through case studies, assimilation, social mobility, marginalization and issues of identity, perhaps we can begin to understand the current status of Afro-Asians.

This paper explores the vibrant African cultural influences that are alive in Asia today.