When the Danish author Thorkild Hansen went to visit the former Danish plantation Frederiksgave in the late 1960s, it was a ruin. However, recently it has been renovated with support from the Danish National Museum, and today – since 2007 – it stands completely rebuilt following historical drawings, on a steep hill with a view on a clear day to Legon Hill on the outskirts of Accra, about 25 km away. I visited the cultural heritage site with William Nsuiban who works for the National Museum of Ghana and with Anita Adjetey, the Cultural Officer at the Ga East Municipal Assembly. Immediately upon arrival – and to my great surprise – we were greeted by the chief of Sesemi, Nii Anum Mumli II of Sesemi, who resides in a building adjacent to the rebuilt plantation grounds.

In postcolonial scholar Lars Jensen’s book Postcolonial Denmark – Nation Narration in a Crisis Ridden Europe (2018) he touches upon the paradoxical role of restoration efforts in the former colonies (this quote relating specifically to Tranquebar in India): “On the one hand it is emphasized the physical remains of the Danish presence still dominate the township. Yet, the question is whether that would have been the case if restorations had not taken place […]. Hence colonial legacy is arguably continuously restaged through restoration work.” 

In the late 1960s the Danish author Thorkild Hansen wrote the docu-fiction trilogy Slavernes kyst (1967, transl.: Coast of Slaves, 2002), Slavernes skibe (1968, transl.: Ships of Slaves, 2007), and Slavernes øer (1970, transl.: Islands of Slaves, 2005).

Thorkild Hansen wrote his much lauded documentary book trilogy, for which he received the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 1971, on the basis of archival research, and we must remember in a time when access to archival material was practically more difficult – compared to today, when many sources have been digitized – due to the plain fact that one had to move physically about from institution to institution. Yet, he painstakingly researches his way through the archives, as a historian, and perhaps more extraordinarily he also travels to significant historical sites along the former Trans-Atlantic trade route between Denmark, Ghana, and the US Virgin Islands, conversing like a journalist with people he meets on his way.

William Nsuiban, head of public relations at the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, who also works for the National Museum of Ghana, shows me remnants of a tamarind allée that used to stretch all the way from Christiansborg (or Osu castle) by the coast to the Danish built and run Frederiksgave plantation at the foot of the Akwapim mountains. The enslaved would carry the colonizers in hammocks in the shadow up to the plantation.

Today there are 17 trees left at this particular spot. A sign has been put up by the National Museum of Ghana in order to help preserve the allée. The attempt to preserve the allée is carried out in dialogue with neighboring villagers who do not necessarily share the ambition to consider the trees primarily as important historical agents when they also serve as rather useful firewood, or, indeed, as a source of shade. In this environmental archive entangled narratives of past and present are caught in a power struggle for a possible future.

In the middle of the second wave of the covid-19 pandemic in Europe I’m leaving for Athens. What am I honestly thinking? I’m not a risk seeker, though. I’ve just been caught in my own company for too long. I’m thinking to escape claustrophobia. Maybe I’ll succeed. Maybe not. Never in my lifetime, perhaps apart from the surreal filmic event of the 9/11 crashes, have I had such an eerie, gloomy feeling about the state of the world. Let me set the stage: I spent the first month of the annus horribilis in Marais where the weather allowed us to drink coffee outside, on the local corner café, La Perle. How, in retrospect, undisturbed and fragile the normality of the scene was.

SEMINAR

How do we narrate colonial entanglements – of voices, places, archives – from a Nordic perspective today? This seminar explores formats of narrating colonial history, from travelogues and historiography, to new materialist approaches that might harbor a multi-perspectival and multi-voiced opening up of the colonial heritage. Can we imagine new agencies by emphasizing the entangled media ecologies and environments in which we are all still culturally brought together across distances in the vast global afterlife of slavery and colonization?

In the fall of 2019 as part of the seminar Colonial (Dis)appearances in the Art Museum, hosted by SMK (Statens Museum for Kunst), the National Gallery of Denmark, the curator Henrik Holm gave a tour entitled “Art Walk With the Ghosts of the West Indian Warehouse.”

Andreas Fickers and Annie van den Oever (2013) call for a media-sensitive approach to history, and I draw inspiration from their emphasis on the multi-sensorial and media-specific modalities of knowledge formation:

“In engaging with the historical artifacts, we aim at stimulating our sensorial appropriation of the past and thereby critically reflecting the (hidden or non-verbalized) tacit knowledge that informs our engagement with media technologies. In doing experimental media archaeology, we want to plead for a hands-on, ears-on, or an integral sensual approach towards media technologies”.

In the heart of Christiansted on the island of St. Croix, Free Gut stands as a testament to a rich yet underappreciated chapter of Afro-Caribbean history. This quarter, which covers two blocks between Hill Street, East Street, Fisher Street, and is delimited by King Street and Queen Cross Street, remains one of the most important landmarks of freedom in the Danish West Indies. Park Ranger Benito Vegas of the National Park Service, while giving a tour to a group of students on September 15, 2016, explains that Free Gut was a place of opportunity for free people of African descent, even though their lives were still subject to colonial restrictions.

I am standing in the backyard of CHANT’s house and talking with Frandelle about their development plans. She tells me that excavations have shown that there used to be a bread oven there which served the local community and simultaneously provided the family living in the home with a business. While Frandelle is speaking I stumble on a piece of porcelain half sticking out of the ground and I ask her whether or not this would be considered a piece of Chaney? We look at it together. It is white and thick and more colorful than the usual blue and white fragments painted in the English Blue Willow style that is so common and easily recognizable.

At first, Frandelle thinks it looks more like a modern piece of tile but because it is glazed on both sides, she decides that it very likely is a piece of old porcelain and allows me to keep it. I am thrilled. I have most likely found my own first piece of Chaney. Perhaps they know more about this particular type of porcelain in one of the workshops in Christiansted where artisans rework the shards into jewelry that I have planned to visit later.

The Crucian artist La Vaughn Belle takes multiple approaches in her material meditations over broken pottery as a metaphor for a fragmented Caribbean identity. In 2017 her Chaney series was expanded with an additional 12 hand-painted porcelain plates created in a collaboration between the artist and Royal Copenhagen for an exhibition at the Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen as part of the National Museum’s exhibition Bag guvernørens spejle (En. Behind the Governor’s Mirrors). It was one of many events marking the centennial year of the sale of the Virgin Islands. During the exhibition, Belle discovered an intriguing connection: Danish Queen Margrethe II sleeps in an antique mahogany bed from the Virgin Islands, linking the historical and contemporary in a surprising twist.