Examining the Legacy of European Names in the Elmina-Cape Coast Area of Ghana

Posted in Africa, Anthropology, Articles, History, Media Archive on 2012-05-28 03:15Z by Steven

Examining the Legacy of European Names in the Elmina-Cape Coast Area of Ghana

Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies
Volume 1, Number 3 (2007)
22 pages

Amma Kyerewaa Akrofi
Texas Tech University

Lawrence Owusu-Ansah
Texas Tech University

The prevalence of European family and place names in Fante areas of Ghana is one of the best known vestiges of the interaction between African and European cultures, but there has been little systematic study of it. The aim of this research was to investigate the European and Europeanized names commonly found in the Cape CoastElmina area. Using data obtained from interviews and a variety of written sources, the names were collected, classified, and their linguistic characteristics analyzed. The results of the study show that 1) there is a pervasiveness of such names still used by the citizens of the area under study, 2) the names are classifiable according to origin, and 3) there is a tendency toward hybridization.

1. Ancient Cities Marked by History

The interaction between Europe and modern day Ghana dates back to the fifteenth century. Francis K. Buah (1980) recounts that the Portuguese were the first European power to arrive on Ghana’s shores in January 1471, lured by the rich trade in gold. They operated from Elmina where, in 1492, they built the Sao Jorge da Mina castle and settled for about a century and a half being engaged in trade. Later, the Dutch came and conquered the Portuguese and, after staying there for about half a century, they also left, selling their holdings to the English. Buah further informs us that about a century and a half after the advent of the Portuguese, the English settled in Cape Coast and in 1664 built the Cape Coast Castle. From there they traded in merchandise and slaves and later ruled the colony until the capital was moved to Accra in 1876. Joseph Brookman-Amissah (1972) supports Buah’s account and provides further evidence of other Europeans frequenting the coastal towns of Cape Coast and Elmina. Notable among them were the French, the Danes, the Swedes and even the German Bradenbergers, the latter two staying for only a short time. Therefore, Mylène Rémy and Jean-Claude Klotchkoff’s (1992, 109) description of Elmina and Cape Coast as ancient cities marked by history is appropriate. Rémy and Klotchkoff elaborate this portrayal (1992, 109) with an assertion that the past seems more present than the present itself in both towns. However, in making this statement, Rémy and Klotchkoff’s thoughts seem to dwell more on historical monuments like the castles and forts and colonial architecture than on anything else, as evidenced by the following description of central Elmina as an aggregate of:

old creole-style houses, a totally unexpected Italian palace, and the equally startling statue of a doughty Queen Victoria in the middle of one of the town squares (Rémy and Klotchkoff 1992, 109).

But it is not only the antiquated European architecture that gives the two towns their nostalgic charm. They get their charm also from a unique characteristic –the prevalence of European and Europeanized family names. Buah (1980, 75) referred to this phenomenon as another lasting result of European activities in the country.

It is most intriguing that after 50 years of independence, the people of Cape Coast and Elmina still maintain the pre-colonial and colonial practice of giving European and Europeanised family names to their offspring. However, apart from brief and scattered comments such as the one by Buah quoted above, no systematic study has been made of those names, although they constitute some of the most obvious vestiges of the interaction between Europe and Ghana. This study attempted to establish that the names are an important record not only of that interaction but also of the different European powers who visited that part of the world. We asked the following research questions: 1) what kinds of European and Europeanized names are currently used in the area, 2) why are they used, and 3) what are the future trends? The cordial relationship between the Europeans and the Africans as evidenced by those names is a living testimony of the oneness of humanity, a fact that is often ignored in a world struggling to come to terms with ethnic conflicts and racial intolerance…

…6. Reasons for Adopting European and Europeanized Names

The informants who were interviewed gave five main reasons for adopting European or Europeanized names: European ancestry, conversion to Christianity, acquisition of formal education, to obtain colonial jobs, and miscellaneous reasons. We discuss these below.

6.1. European ancestry

Several of the European names, especially those of Portuguese and Dutch origin, were given directly by European fathers to their children with African women and these have been passed down to the present generation. A very good example of this is the name Bartels, which is common in Elmina. Originally German, it came to Elmina when Governor Bartels, whose family had migrated to Holland earlier, married a Fante woman.2 The Bartels family in Elmina today is descended from the children of this marriage, including Johann Carl Bartels who was a very rich merchant in his day. In addition to this, many families whose histories are not well documented claim direct descent from European forebears, e.g. the LeJeune and Guichard families of Elmina and Cape Coast, respectively. In both cases, as in many others, bi-racial characteristics support the claim…

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Half-Caste (An Excerpt)

Posted in Africa, Articles, Autobiography, Europe, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Women on 2010-12-11 02:15Z by Steven

Half-Caste (An Excerpt)

Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies
Volume 2, Number 1, (2008)
6 pages

Angela Ajayi

At about the age of nineteen, a year after I arrived for college in the United States, I stopped thinking of myself as “half-caste.” The word, so loaded in its literal meaning and with its colonial roots, was used with frequency and ease to refer to those of us who had European mothers and African fathers in Nigeria.

For a long time—from early childhood to late teens—I accepted the word, not giving it much thought since it wasn’t necessarily used in a negative way. In fact, if you were “half-caste,” you were different in a way that was usually considered interesting and more attractive. The “half-caste” women, for instance, were often sought after and desired by Nigerians for love affairs; the men deemed good-looking. Or so I observed, growing up in Plateau State, Nigeria, where more than a handful of mixed-race families lived.

In the first decades following Nigeria’s independence from the British in 1960, many Nigerian men received scholarships to study in Europe and the former Soviet Union. They left for their studies—and some of them returned, after many years, with foreign wives. My father was one of these men who came home with a European wife. While studying veterinary medicine in Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine, he met my mother and married her in a tumultuous time of discrimination and racial prejudice against black students in the Soviet Union…

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‘You Can Get Lost in Cape Town’: Transculturation and Dislocation in Zoë Wicomb’s Literary Works

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, South Africa, Women on 2010-12-10 16:32Z by Steven

‘You Can Get Lost in Cape Town’: Transculturation and Dislocation in Zoë Wicomb’s Literary Works

Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies
Volume 2, Number 3 (2008)
10 pages

María Jesús López Sánchez-Vizcaíno, Professor of English
University of Córdoba

In Zoë Wicomb’s novels and short stories, main characters tend to share Wicomb’s coloured condition—mixed-race identity as defined by South African apartheid legislation—and her diasporic experience as a South African living in Scotland. Transculturation, dislocation and inbetweenness emerge as central notions for the experience of many of Wicomb’s characters, who often occupy an ambivalent and fluid space in which different cultural worlds and identities come into conflict and negotiation.

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Blackness in Germany

Posted in Africa, Articles, Europe, History, Media Archive, Social Science on 2010-12-10 00:13Z by Steven

Blackness in Germany

Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies
Volume 1, Number 1 (2007)

Tomi Adeaga
Universität Siegen, Deutschland

This paper analyses the situation of the Black population in Germany. It revises its historical origins, well back in history, although it focuses more on the experience of the younger generation, particularly people of mixed parentage who are exposed to an endemic racism rooted in the stereotype of Africans as the most primitive race on earth. The survival of the myth of white superiority has been preserved in Germany and little effort has been made to integrate black Germans into mainstream society.

…Being black in Germany means that one is a foreigner, who has to struggle against stereotypical notions of the African continent as one at the bottom of the evolution ladder. The issue of Blackness is determined by the operational modes of the political climate in Germany, which depends largely on the political party in power. A look at the political situation at work in Germany before World War I shows that racial discrimination already existed in the societies because of the way the German colonies were operated before they were taken over by France and England. We only have to look at the Herero Uprising in Namibia whereby thousands of Hereros were killed. The Swakopmunder street is a proof of the German colonial history. What seems to have gone lost in history is the fact that the first official German concentration camp was built there in 1907 and all the Hereros who dared to be against the German hegemony were killed there. The Africans in Germany, including the Francophones in the French army stationed on the Rhine river, who had relationships with German women and gave birth to mixed children which were seen as exotic and unwanted, were victimised along with the Jews, the Roma and the Sinti and other non-Aryan foreigners by the German NS government.

In an attempt to shed some light on the dynamics of cultural co-existence in multi-ethnic societies as a way of bridging the gap between them, Homi Bhabha has developed the concept of “cultural hybridity” to discuss the dynamics of the impacts of colonisation. However, hybridity in my opinion is the co-existence of two cultures which do not mix together…

…Bhabha’s observation identifies the differences in cultures existing within the same country. Indeed multiculturalism is highly complex in its composition. However, it is secondary within German contexts because the dominant factor still remains the skin colour, the otherness. There is often the tendency for politicians and even Germans themselves to claim that Germany is a homogeneous country. However, this claim is an illusory one because of the existence of multiple cultures due to the mass migrations both from parts of Europe, and the rest of the world. Intermarriages have also always taken place. Moreover, since people of African origins have been in Germany as far back as the 10th century or even earlier, the possibility of mixed African presence has always been there. But their presence became a national problem as the political climate became hostile to people considered as threats to the German existence and supremacy…

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