Something’s Got a Hold on Me: ‘Lingering Whispers’ of the Atlantic Slave Trade in Ghana
Interior of Men’s Slave Cells – Cape Coast Castle – Ghana, Image by Flickr User Adam Jones, PhD
I am standing in the mouth of the female dungeon. I hesitate to breathe for fear the hole will swallow me. It is competing with a rising tide of anguish that also threatens to eat me alive. The hole is dark, dank and noisome yet oddly comforting. After all, this is why I, and others, come to this site of torture—to fill in the gaps of our history, to make better sense of our lives, to find some comfort. But how does one find home in throbbing loss? Why must one dig for answers—that, ultimately, produce new questions—within the locus of pain? I run my fingers across the length of the thick, cavernous rock. It is brown like my skin…I can’t tell where it ends or begins.
In a 2010 interview with FADER Magazine, poet Gil Scott-Heron declared, “The spirit should be material. It’s your blood. Inside your bloodstream is your parents and their parents and their parents and their parents and they want you to make it, because when you do what you do and you’re successful, then they’re happy you made it. You’re the link with immortality” (88). What Scott-Heron articulates here is an ontological claim to spirit as inherently material and always already an eternal force over life’s struggles. The answers to the puzzle are embedded underneath the skin in an internal dialogue between spirit, mind, blood, bone and mass. This same ideological force is what pulls so many African American tourists back to Elmina and Cape Coast Castles in Ghana, in search of what Anne Bailey calls “lingering whispers” in African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade (3). We spin back the wheel of time to re-trace its deep grooves and recover the loss/lost in dungeons, burial sites, Donkor Nsuo (The Slave River), and the Atlantic Ocean.
Marks made by slaves in the Cape Coast Castle slave dungeons, Image by Flickr user Floris van Halm
Perhaps one’s DNA is a recording that is not only biological and racial but cultural and cosmological. Carolyn Cooper, in Noises In the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture discusses “noises in the blood and reverberating echoes in the bone” as genealogical discourses of race. Can one’s DNA be an embedded and embodied soundtrack that charts particular and interconnecting nodes of history? Are those memories, experiences, dreams and longings then “recorded on my body,” as Nancy Frey suggests in “Stories of the Return: Pilgrimage and Its Aftermaths” (101) ? If we broke down the strands into coherent codes, or notes, or rearranged them into other combinations, what would they sound like? Would it produce a series of mixtapes, like hip hop records that sample older Black music—blues, R&B, funk, soul and jazz—and re-articulate them with new and emerging sounds? Perhaps it’s like Nathaniel Mackey muses in Bedouin Hornbook, “The last thing I remember is coming to the realization that what I was playing already existed on a record” (5). The slave forts become the ontological point of racial and cultural identity because, according to Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, “the dungeon was a womb in which the slave was born” and where, by the performance of walking through the “Door of Return” one’s social life can be recovered, revitalized or remade (111).
I strain to hear any forms of life. As Slavoj Žižek suggests in “‘I Hear You With My Eyes’; or, The Invisible Master,” “ultimately we hear things because we cannot see everything” (90 and 92). According to tour guides at Elmina and Cape Coast Castles, the brick slave pens reverberate with the loss/lost of life, particularly at night, where bodiless moans, sobbing, screams and litanies can be heard rocking through the forts. But I can only detect distant sounds of activity beyond the back of the castle doors and “The Door of No Return.” The predominant noise is the Atlantic Ocean, crashing against the seashore. I hear the fishermen speak in rapid, hushed tones as their bodies struggle against the tiny canoes, their oars pulse against the waves as nets are thrown in with great precision. At the entrance of the castle, teenaged boys patronize African American tourists with “Sister! Brother!,” “Akwaaba”(Welcome), or “Welcome Home” as they pass folded letters with requests for contact information, money, or school donations, colorfully braided bracelets or other trinkets for sale. Market women pierce the air with unique calls for customers to try their products of bagged ice water, oranges, sugarcane, pineapple, and groundnuts. Cab drivers compete for tourists’ attention with loud, intermittent honks, verbal petitions or hisses.
Outside Cape Coast Castle, Image by Flickr User Abby Flatcoat
Outside the Door of No Return – Cape Coast Castle – Ghana, Image by Flickr User Adam Jones, PhD
The shops in the courtyard just beyond the reception area are now filled with traditional instruments—drums, guitars, piano boxes, and rattles—beads, cloth, masks, paintings, rugs and postcards. It is no longer a market in Black flesh but of “African” objects, or cultural artifacts that amplify the racial identity of diasporic visitors, and make them more “real” once they return home. Shop owners busy themselves making crafts, passing the day chatting with one another and potential customers.
This cell in which I stand is one of many at the Twin Castles, the gargantuan fortresses that after five hundred years continue to hold fast to the southern coast of Ghana. The intersecting trails of fine cracks rupture the once-pristine white paint on the walls. . .possibly one for every person stolen out of the dungeons. The hull is transfixing, the hold captivating. For some reason, I am suddenly reminded of Rev. James Cleveland’s gospel song, “Something’s Got A Hold On Me” where he proclaims, “Something hit me/Up over my head/And run right to my feet.”
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Cleveland is talking about the power of the Holy Ghost to re-fashion his troubled life through spiritual re-birth. He sings of transformation from a life of misery to a brand new liberation that is manifested like a shock through his entire being and body. This new shock counters the crisis he regularly experiences “in the world.” This new bodily sensation permeates his entire being and acts as a shield against daily strife. Similarly, Etta James’ secular version, “Something’s Got A Hold On Me” attests, “My heart feels heavy/my feet feel light/I shake all over/ but I feel alright.”
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James’ something is more possessive of her person; it is the overwhelming yoke of romantic love that seeps into her pores and won’t let up. This occupation of James’ senses is so startlingly pleasurable that she longs for and needs it. Similarly, The Miracles’, “You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me” pronounces, “Don’t want to leave you/don’t want to stay here/don’t want to spend another day here/oh, oh, oh, I wanna sit now/I just can quit now.”
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Robinson expresses the ambivalence of love and longing—frustration, disappointment, ecstasy and desire—that crowds the senses with the sheer torture of being powerless over this structure of feeling. The protagonist is unable to shake hold of the beloved object, which makes him question his own capacity.
The “hold” becomes embodied and acts out in ways the mind cannot comprehend or prevent. It is the same hold the castles have on many African American visitors—an enigmatic narrative of love, loss and longing that the progeny of slaves refuse to relinquish and attempt to retell by inserting their bodies into slave histories. African Americans tour the castles as a way of tracing what Ralph Ellison calls “the grooves of history” in Invisible Man (443). Like a phonograph record, grooves are meant to be linear and progressive, but diasporic African history is awkward, uneven and full of odd ruptures, gaps and distortions. As James Clifford insists in “Diasporas,” “Diaspora discourse articulates, or bends together, both roots and routes” (251). These grooves consist of a series of complex and overlapping relationships that are multi-directional and non-linear. Like an album record, the records of history indicate particular events of static (crisis), interludes (junctures), and rhythms (discourse).
78 Record grooves by Flickr User Roger Smith
“The music is mysteriously ‘in’ these physical recesses, pressed into the vinyl,” Steven Feld argues in Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues, “and listeners may imagine journeying there to merge right ‘into the groove’” (111). Grooves are doubly intentioned as: 1) the tracing of deep historical roots through specific routes of migration and 2) a physical and/or psychic space where utopic possibilities are imagined, alternative choices can be sought out, and past and future events are persistently contextualized within the present moment. To be “in a groove” is to be in tune with multiple realities simultaneously, to compress or stretch out time and space and one’s capacity in extraordinary ways.
Strangely, this cell is absent of all sound, even the static, white noise of silence. But it refuses to sound for me and tell me its history. I hear nothingness in the emptied hole. All that remains is a heavy vastness of what once was. As Mackey so profoundly articulates, “I wept for the notion of kin, as though the very idea were an occasion for tears, a pitiful claim to connection, a bleeding socket whose eye’d been plucked out” (21).
Over time, the cold stone has absorbed the blood, sweat, feces and bones of its inhabitants. It is the only material trace that proves the enslaved were once there.
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Sionne R. Neely received her Ph.D. in August 2010 in American Studies & Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. Her dissertation examines how music artists in Ghana create transnational work alliances in response to shifting political regimes under independence, from Kwame Nkrumah’s administration to the present. Since 2005, Dr. Neely has recorded and archived more than 150 interviews with creative artists and industry professionals based in Ghana. In 2010, Dr. Neely co-founded ACCRA [dot] ALT, a cultural organization that promotes the alternative work of emerging Ghanaian artists through innovative programming and international exchange with artists worldwide. In 2011, she co-produced the Accra homecoming concert and documentary film for hip hop artist Blitz the Ambassador and Afro-Pean soul duo, Les Nubians. She is co-producer of Gbaa Mi Sané (Talk To Me), a short documentary film that explores the creative process of young visionary artists in Ghana (to be released in Summer 2013). Dr. Neely will also publish an article on hip hop practices in Ghana in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion Series (Fall 2013).
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Decolonizing the Radio: Africa Abroad in the Age of Independence
I never meant to write about radio. Film, video, music, the Internet, television even– but radio had not made a dent in my scholarship or teaching, for embarrassing reasons: it seemed nostalgic even to think about it. It was a residual technology, obsolete even at mid-century, I thought.
And then I stumbled onto the transcripts of “Africa Abroad,” part of The Transcription Centre archives at The Harry Ransom Center.
I was doing research on African American playwright Adrienne Kennedy when two of the fantastic staff at the HRC (Molly Schwartzburg, now Curator at the UVA Special Collections Library, and archivist Gabby Redwine) shared their working African Collections finding aid with me. The description of The Transcription Centre caught my eye, as a radio and public media presence across Africa and the metropolitan diaspora at mid-20th century, whose work included the short variety radio program Africa Abroad (1962-1965) as well as Arts festivals and other cultural events based in London and headed by a former BBC employee. Africa Abroad, a variety show dedicated to the music, art, theatre, literature, and politics of Africa and the African diaspora, offers a compelling glimpse at Independence-Era Africa and some of the technologies that made it, briefly, the center of contemporary diaspora politics.
The transcripts of Africa Abroad document the progressive hope that theorists like Frantz Fanon had for the revolutionary potential of radio in the hands of the (semi)proletariat with cheap access to both production and distribution networks. The background materials on the Centre document its inception as the brainchild of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded effort to fund anti-communist, pro-democracy sentiment on the continent (a continent who was also being wooed by Russia and China at the time). Africa Abroad then stands as an attempt to rethink the relationship between politics and culture in a difficult, compromised time, self-consciously negotiating the media and mediated trade on Africa as a place and Africa as an international symbol. The radio program takes this moment of African celebrity and finds in it not teleology but proliferation, and a self-aware critique of ‘Africa’ and its public image as it is employed by the diaspora.
released on Riverside Records, 1961.
By the second installment of Africa Abroad on the 26th of April, 1962, what becomes the standard format of the programming emerges, one that begins to place culture as the center of diaspora identity—and politics. There is usually a musical lead—by the 4th installment to become the same “signature tune,” “African Waltz” by Canonball Adderley)—after an announcement of the location (London) and organization of the broadcast. The music and the site identification augurs the emphasis on the multiple and conflicting sites of the black diaspora that are performed within each episode and across the radio series as it continues, starting with an invocation of “Mother Africa”; in this particular episode, James Baldwin calls for the revision of the “American Negro” breaking free of representational binds via “the rise of Africa in world affairs,” then moving to a commentary on a Max Roach jazz piece by Nigerian Aminu Abdullahi that emphasizes the role of pan-African politics in Jazz music, then to a review of Ezekiel (later Es’Kia) Mphahlele’s book The African Image from a Nigerian literature Ph.D. in London, finally leading to a brief interview with Robert Resha, “one of the leaders for the ANC [African National Congress] which has been banned in South Africa, on the eve of his leaving London for a tour of African countries.” This eclectic mix becomes Africa Abroad’s signature format, and its particular concerns—that of the keen recognition that the world’s eyes are on Africa anew during this period of independence, and that Africa is starting to work as a symbolic geography of hope for African America as well as Caribbean emigres to Britain—are also those that inform the rest of its run.
Two friends listen to the radio in the Ivory Coast, 1960s, image courtesy of the BBC Archives
While the range of listeners for Africa Abroad is still hazy—transcripts and recordings were made available across the continent, but there is no record of where they landed or when or if they aired—the way that even its material presence in London acted as a hub for political, literary, and cultural figures from Africa and the diaspora winds up as another meaningful site of contradiction. The programs’ circulation of major literary and cultural figures began to construct and map the canon of African authors we recognize today as the “fathers” of the African renaissance. That gendering is specific as it reflects the kind of access to travel, education, promotion, and connection that was required to be a recurring part of Africa Abroad’s brief run—with a limited number of women being sent to London for education in the time period, and even fewer representing those in privileged political exile. Though what amounts to a handful of women are interviewed on the program, rarely are women writers and thinkers featured beyond actresses. Such representation helped to solidfy a generation of African writers and politics that were defined by the questions of an elite, masculine imagination around what the continent, and art from the continent, should or could be—and this vision of diaspora art and politics circulated via the radio.
In other words, Africa Abroad was produced through and as a representation of the new celebrity of the continent, with the radio program serving as the ideal format to showcase and interrogate the global phenomenon of African Independence and as a harbinger of the postcolonial struggle for its resources that would ensue. As independence struggles adopt and adapt new technologies into forms of “combat,” to use Fanon’s terms from “This is the Voice of Algeria,” radio moves from strictly a medium of the colonizer to a tool, “a system of information, . . . a bearer of language, hence of message” (73). But it is also already “obsolete” by 1962 as a residual cultural form in the Western metropole, taken over in the mainstream by television. Hence, like the flexible political strategies of the Cold War that relied on more than just force, radio at this moment becomes both a tool of cultural revolution (and new-found global relevance) and one of stealth colonial influence. As a program rooted in the West but disseminated across and produced by African continental interests, “Africa Abroad” maintains the complex, contradictory desire of communication post World War II that media communications could both connect us all in a progressive intimacy or hail us into, effectively, sheep. Africa Abroad sounds out this tension in form and in content, through the radio.
As the range of scholars I’ve thankfully met post my encounter with radio attest to, this significant, one might say descendent, moment in radio history is constantly weighted by race, gender, and empire. Ivy Wilson is working on sound and the Transcription Centre on the actual recordings of Africa Abroad. Judy Coffin is mapping the complex work that radio did in the careers of Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, and other intellectuals of the mid-century. Emily Bloom is tracing BBC radio alongside modernism’s literary pathways. This interdisciplinary community of scholars I’ve discovered alongside of radio signifies the important work being done to think through the possibilities for this medium after its dominant rise and into its political and cultural repurposing in the age of the Cold War—outside of the mainstream center at the same time that it serves to support and traverse new geographic and cultural fronts.
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Featured Image: original from a BBC collection of images from the Ivory Coast, 1960s
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Samantha Pinto is an Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the author of Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (forthcoming from NYU Press) and is working on a new project on early black celebrity and human rights discourse. This research on radio is part of an in-process series of articles on institutional failure in the African Diaspora, Women’s Studies, and other critical sites of progressive political desire.
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