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Autoarchaeology: Decolonizing Christiansborg Castle in Accra, Ghana
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Archival illustration of Christiansborg Castle. (Courtesy of the Danish National Archives. Image provided by the author) 

Autobiographical Narratives

As a child, I grew up with the belief that my family was descended from a Danish Christian missionary stationed on the Guinea Coast (present-day Ghana). However, about 13 years ago, my aunt said to me, “Go to ‘The Castle,’ and see your name inscribed on a wall.” She meant our shared surname, Engmann. Slightly bewildered, I made an appointment to visit the castle, which, at the time, the President of Ghana occupied. 

At the castle, I met the President’s special advisor and toured the premises. My aunt was correct. Sure enough, in the courtyard, I discovered a water cistern inscribed with the name, Carl Gustav Engmann.

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Author in front of a cistern, Christiansborg Castle. (Image provided by the author)

Later, I consulted our family historian, my granduncle, Uncle Jorgen, who had compiled an extensive family tree. Shortly afterwards, I travelled to the Danish National Archives in Copenhagen where I examined archival manuscripts related to Christiansborg Castle and the Guinea Coast dating back to the eighteenth century. 

Carl Gustav Engmann was not, as our family had always thought, a missionary. 

I am the great great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Carl Gustav Engmann, a governor of Christiansborg Castle (1752–1757)1 and Ashiokai, an Osu Chief’s daughter.

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Carl Gustav Engmann’s manuscripts. (Courtesy of the Danish National Archives. Image provided by the author)

Christiansborg Castle, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is a former seventeenth-century trading post, colonial Danish and British seat of government, and Office of the President of the Republic of Ghana. I am the first researcher granted access to Christiansborg Castle to conduct the first archaeological excavation of the site. As principal investigator and a direct descendant, I work with other Danish-Ga direct descendants who trace their family genealogies, through both written archives and oral histories, to between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Danish-Gas were directly and indirectly involved with the transatlantic slave trade in multiple, complex ways. Apart from rarely discussing our slave trader heritage, we are recurrently absent in the written historical record. We study the Danish transatlantic slave trade from the perspectives of Danish-Ga slave traders. Therefore, the history and legacies that we unearth are not just my story, but the stories of many others like me. 

This essay introduces an experiential, work-in-progress, decolonizing approach to archaeological heritage at Christiansborg Castle that I term autoarchaeology.

 

The Castle

Christiansborg Castle is situated in Osu, Accra, Ghana on the West African coast, formerly and notoriously known as the White Man’s Grave. An imposing imperial fortification, the castle comprised a courtyard, residential quarters, storerooms, dungeons, chapel, ‘mulatto school,’ cistern, and flagstaff tower. 

Danes, Ga, and Danish-Ga lived, worked, and slaved at the castle, including a governor, civilians, surgeon, chaplain, and soldiers. The work of ‘castle slaves’ (e.g. domestics, craftsmen, laborers, and canoemen) also included supervising captive Africans who were incarcerated at the castle prior to their deportation to the Americas.

Commerce at the castle depended on strategic political and economic alliances between Ga, Danish, and later, Danish-Ga individuals and communities. The Danes were minor European actors who faced fierce Dutch and English competition on the coast, an economic crisis, military weaknesses, and heavy losses at sea. Thus, the Danes collaborated with the Ga people to further their political and economic ambitions. Similarly, the Ga exploited the sociocultural, economic, and political possibilities represented by the transatlantic slave trade. 

At the castle, gold, ivory, and captive Africans were exchanged for a combination of gold dust, cowrie shells, and/or trade items (e.g. guns, gunpowder, liquor, iron, household items, brass objects, cloth, and beads). Christiansborg Castle was so vital to the Danish economy, that between 1688 and 1747 Danish coinage depicted an image of the castle with the inscription “Christiansborg.” 

Between 1660 and 1806, the Danish transatlantic slave trade transported approximately 100,000 - 126,000 Africans, approximately 2 percent of the total transatlantic slave trade.2 Enslaved Africans were transported to St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas islands in the Danish West Indies.

Tim Tam Sarah Malm C1840 Copy
Tim Tam, also known as Sarah Malm, a Danish-Ga mixed-race woman in the nineteenth century. (Courtesy of the Danish National Maritime Museum. Image provided by the author)

During the Danish transatlantic slave trade, Danish-Ga social and familial relations played a significant role. Danish men established relationships with Ga women and had mixed-race Danish-Ga children. Danish-Ga individuals and families were  political and commercial elites who formed prominent cosmopolitan creole coastal communities. As Danish-Gas, their names, status, power, and wealth were portrayed through social and material practice. For instance, the consumption of imported personal items, clothing, furniture and household items was one just means through which self-identification was performed and enacted. This was significant since it distinguished between slave traders who profited from the slave trade and those who could be enslaved.

 

Autoarchaeology at the Trowel’s Edge

In autoarchaeology, the subject positions of researcher, practitioner, and descendant are held by the same person. It explicitly foregrounds the Self. Since archaeological work is a collective endeavor, the Self in question does not just belong to the Principal Investigator; here, we may speak of many Selves.

Autoarchaeology is simultaneously archaeological, anthropological, and autobiographical. It deploys the traditional research processes of historical archaeology and archaeological ethnography, but it is explicit about just how inextricably intertwined the personal is with this process. Consequently, its focus lies in the notion of shared personal and emotional experiences.

It is a self-conscious, reflexive process and product, one that explicitly recognizes a heritage site’s direct descendants as knowledge producers, while simultaneously underscoring the many, intricate, contingent narratives and counter-narratives that surround knowledge production. 

Archaeological work at the castle comprises excavation, photography, documentary filmmaking, and ethnography under the Christiansborg Archaeological Heritage Project. Together, we design research questions, hypotheses, and interpretations of the material record.

To date, we have excavated an extensive pre-colonial settlement. This includes house foundations and a kitchen. We have also retrieved a large collection of local and foreign manufactured objects: ‘African trade beads’ (manufactured in Italy and Holland); Chinese, European, and local ceramics; African and European clay smoking pipes; and European glassware. Other small finds include writing slate, faunal remains, seeds, metals, stone, daub, cowrie, and other shells. These objects provide evidence for the ways in which the castle was just one node within a wide global trading network. With the assistance of local fishermen, we excavated a canon immersed in the sand that had fallen from the castle above onto the beach below. Under the castle, we also discovered the entrance to an underground tunnel that is said to lead to the nearby Richter House, formerly owned by a successful mixed-race Danish-Ga trader. This tunnel meant captive Africans could be transported from the house directly onto slave ships at sea and avoid escape or insurrection. Such a clandestine strategy also meant human trafficking continued out of sight, even after abolition.3

 

Decolonizing Archaeological Heritage

Autoarchaeology imparts a unique opportunity and perspective, as well as access to forms and pieces of knowledge that are not often readily shared. Studying slave traders lives at the micro-historical level crafts an alternative script of Euroafrican agency, emphasizing local voices, choices and responses in the history of the transatlantic slave trade.  Privileging direct descendants of Euroafrican slave traders as producers of knowledge and narratives enriches understandings of the histories and legacies of trauma and violence. It sheds new light on the issues of heritage, ancestry, transgenerational shame and guilt. Autoarchaeology is also committed to recognizing and including direct descendants in research and fieldwork. Ultimately, it contests archaeologists’ legitimacy, authority, and self-proclaimed exclusive rights as stewards, interpreters, and narrators of the material past.4 And in so doing, autoarchaeology represents just one approach to a decolonized archaeological heritage.5

 

Acknowledgements 

Grateful acknowledgement is necessary to many people without whom this project would not have been possible. Special thanks to His Excellencies, the Presidents of Ghana: Nana Addo Akufo-Addo, John Dramani Mahama, John Atta Mills, John Agyekum Kufour and Flt Lt. John Jerry Rawlings. My gratitude also to Nii Okwei Kinka Dowuona VI, Nii Bonne V, Nii Dzamlodza VI, Nii Kwashie Aniefi V, Nii Ako Nortei IV, Aawon Klotey, Aawon Opobi, Naa Ashorkor Obaniehi I, Theophilus Ollennu Chuasam, Nii Kwabena Bonnie IV, Saban Atsen, Nii Sorgla and Earl Teddy Nartey and the Osu Traditional Council. I owe thanks to Nana Asante Bediatuo, Akosua Frema Osei-Opare, Samuel Abu Jinapor, Col. Michael Opoku, Dr. Raymond Atuguba, Dr. Hon. Agyeman-Rawlings, Col. Mark Alo, Julius Debrah, Yaw Donkor, Prosper Dzakobo, Col. Mantey, Gen. Larry Gbevlo-Lartey, Fritz Baffour, Henry Wood and Ayiku Wilson. Thanks are due to Kofi Amekudi, William Barnor, Edward Nyarko, Daniel Kumah, Ernest Fiador, Gideon Agyare, Raymond Agbo, Anokye and Samuel Nobah. Thanks also to the people who requested not to be mentioned by name. Thanks of course, to the entire team. My deepest appreciation to the people of Osu. Research was made possible thanks to grants from Stanford Archaeology Center, Stanford Anthropology Department, Joukowsky Institute, Whiting Foundation, Rappaport Foundation, Martha Joukowsky Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation. Community outreach education was made possible thanks to donations from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, British High Commission Accra, Egality Law, Kadijah Amoah, Benjamin Elegba and other anonymous donors. Thanks are due to the Danish Maritime Museum, Danish National Archives and British National Archives for their support. My thanks also to Lynn Meskell, Ian Hodder, Barbaro Martinéz-Ruiz, Beverly Stoeltjie, Akinwumi Ogundiran and Rodney Harrison for their continuous encouragement. My thanks to Patricia Kim, Editor at the Bulletin.

Carl later worked for the Danish King, on the Board of Directors of the Danish slave trading organization. It is also believed that he returned to the Guinea Coast in the 1760s and survived the Fredensborg slave shipwreck off the Norway coast in 1768 (Leif Svalesen, The Slave Ship Fredensborg. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000).
Holger Weiss, Ports of Globalization, Places of Creolization: Nordic Possessions in the Atlantic World during the Era of the Slave Trade (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
The Danish Edict of 16th March 1792 officially marked the abolition of the Danish transatlantic slave trade, but it was not enforced until 1803.
Lynn M. Meskell, Cosmopolitan Archaeologies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
Rachel A.A Engmann, “Autoarchaeology: Decolonizing Thought, Method and Praxis,” in Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage 6.3 (2015): 204-219.
Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann, PhD

Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann is an associate professor and director of the Christiansborg Archaeological Heritage Project  in English, Ga, and Twi). She received a B.A. in anthropology from Columbia University, an M.A. in museum anthropology from Columbia, an M.A. in heritage from Stanford University and a PhD in archaeology from Stanford University. She is particularly interested in decolonizing approaches to heritage. She has given a number of lectures and workshops in Africa, United States, Europe, Asia, Caribbean and the Middle East. She has published several book chapters and articles in African Art, African Archaeological Review, Review of Middle East Studies, Africa, African Studies Review, Cambridge Archaeology, Community Archaeology and Heritage, Material Religion, African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage, Contemporary Archaeology, Heritage Tourism, Ghana Studies, Post-Medieval Archaeology, African Studies Quarterly, Society for Clay Pipe Research, UNESCO Annual Report, and The Conversation. 

www.christiansborgarchaeologicalheritageproject.org
ChristiansborgP