Dr Stephen Collins’ short film ‘James Town and Slavery’ is an official selection for the Changing The Story Online International FIlm Festival. The film is a result of a research project which investigates the links between modern and historic slavery in James Town, Ghana. Capturing footage of a new walking tour developed in a collaboration between the project team and James Town Walking Tours, the film premiered on 1st June 2020.
As part of the delivery of cultural heritage training workshops that took place in Mombasa, Kenya from 12-16 November 2019 – as part of the British Council funded Cultural Heritage for Inclusive Growth project – Drs Stephen Collins and Allan Moore took a trip to Fort Jesus with colleagues from Mount Kenya University and workshop participants .
Built on the orders of the Portuguese between 1593 and 1596, Fort Jesus was taken over by Omani Arabs in 1698 and then the British in 1895. In 1631, the fort briefly fell under the control of the Sultan Yusuf ibn al-Hasan of Mombasa. Under the British, the site was used as a prison. Subsequently, the fort was declared a historical monument in 1958 and given UNESCO World Heritage status in 2011. Thus, as a site, it has had a colourful and contested history.
The purpose of the trip was to consider the UNESCO world heritage site, and Mombasa’s dominant monument, in terms of what had been discussed in the preceding workshops. Participants were invited to consider the site in terms of formal and informal uses of the space, who had the right to use the space, how heritage was foregrounded or promoted and what kinds of narratives were evident.
The following day, the conversation in which we reflected on these themes with reference to the fort was one of the highlights of the week. Curated by Dr Moore, participants identified several areas that they now felt were questionable in terms of how the space was presented. For example, they identified that there was very little mention of the local community in any of the displays, instead it was as though the fort had simply been a site of chronological occupation by foreign powers with no connection to the people living and working outside the gates.
Dr Stephen Collins speaking at the Cultural Heritage for Inclusive Growth workshop
Secondly, they identified that in the section recently renovated by a grant from the Oman government, there was a series of mannequins in traditional Omani dress. In spite of the presence of the mannequins, there was no critical information of the role that Omani Arabs played in the Arabic slave trade or the lives of the indigenous population. In fact, there was no mention of the role of the fort in slavery at all.
Similarly, the British presence, which lasted over several decades, was characterised as being administratively and scientifically progressive, rather than part of a theatre of imperial power.
As we left, we spotted a large group of school children arriving to view the site for themselves; they ran around the large expanses of grass and clambered over the crumbling walls. Over the following week, we pondered large questions concerning how funding has implications for which stories are told, how uncomfortable stories are passed down and whether or not historical sites need to have their history sanitised in order to be accessible.
As principle investigator for the Anti-Slavery Knowledge Network funded project Hidden Histories: the untold stories of Slavery and James Town, I have spent a good deal of time in Ghana over the last twelve months.
I have been traveling to, and working in, Ghana for nearly twenty years engaging in various applied theatre programmes (often with project partner the James Town Community Theatre Centre), researching the 2005 copyright law and eating kenke and hot sauce. This project has afforded me the opportunity to engage with the place and the project partners in James Town in a much more sustained way.
The project is a hard one; the focus – modern slavery – is disturbing on many levels and there are plenty of testimonies that we have heard that have been deeply affecting. The organised and sophisticated abuse of children and vulnerable adults and the normalising of exploitation and death is, obviously, awful. What is worse, if anything can be, is the denial that the situation even exists.
Over the course of the year, the project has enabled us to gather multiple testimonies, turn them in to a performance and show it to young people in the community and local schools. Consequently, we have been able to develop a discussion that did not really exist before at the community level and we have seen future community leaders engaging with the issues of modern slavery in James Town.