Hermann von Hesse

My first book project, “Love of Stone Houses”: Enclosures and the Ambivalence of Security on Africa’s Gold Coast is currently under review with the University of Chicago Press. This book was inspired by the fact that I am descended from Euro-African merchants and partially grew up in eighteenth and nineteenth-century stone houses in Osu, a historic Gã town which hosted the Danish-Norwegian Christiansborg Castle. This castle also doubled as the headquarters of that country’s slaving establishment on the southeastern Gold Coast. 

Love of Stone Houses challenges conventional framings of West Africa’s forts and castles as simply outposts of early modern European imperialism sitting awkwardly in an unwelcome coastal landscape. This orthodox reading of Ghana’s coastal landscape is ahistorical because it does not consider the entangled cultural history of these stone edifices in historic Gold Coast and Asante societies during the seventeenth and especially eighteenth-century peak of the transatlantic slave trade.

My book examines how the new Atlantic age set in motion polysemic and its corresponding physical transformations in Gold Coast understandings of security which drew on and conflated pre-Atlantic notions of protective enclosures (Twi/Mfantse: aban; Gã: aklabatsa/mɔ̃ɔ) with the forts and castles. During the seventeenth and eighteenth-century peak of Atlantic commerce, Gã and Fante middlemen not only facilitated the slave, gold and ivory trades but were also caught up in the crosshairs of expansionist inland Akan states bent on controlling Atlantic commerce and the coast. Consequently, coastal merchants and rulers through negotiations with European slave traders drew on the slaveholding forts and castles as metaphorical and functional extensions of pre-Atlantic hegemonic enclosures or aban to preserve their livelihoods and communities. Gold Coast Africans could have simply referred to forts and castles as houses (Twi/Mfantse: adan; Gã: tsui), but they intended them as aban, which constituted ontological, material and metaphorical extensions of older Akan and Gã ideas of protective enclosures.

Like pre-Atlantic enclosures, castles embodied the hegemony, vulnerability and security anxieties of Gã and Fante political leaders, policing the boundaries between familiar and unfamiliar spaces. As a key infrastructure of Atlantic slaving, forts and castles, also served as aban, the ultimate physical manifestation of urban security on the Gold Coast.

Over the course of the transatlantic slave and legitimate trades through to the British colonial era and postcolonial rule, aban variously signified Fante, Akan, Gã as well as colonial and postcolonial state power and hegemony. Today, aban in Twi/Mfantse not only means “castle” but also “government,” “police” or the “state.” Likewise, in Gã, mɔ̃ɔ simultaneously means “castle,” “stone mansion,”   “dungeon,” “prison.” These varied but related meanings all hint at the ambivalence of not just the infrastructure of security and slaving but the elite African hegemonic process of determining who gets to be protected, assimilated or enslaved in early modern coastal towns. The architectural legacies of these historical processes resonate in postcolonial Ghana but in radically different ways for Ghanaians and Black diaspora visitors.

My next book project for which I have conducted extensive archival research is tentatively titled, “Dressed in the Gayest Raiment”: Atlantic Commerce, Fashion and the Cultural Politics of Adornment on the Gold Coast. This project examines the fashion histories of the Gold Coast from the late fifteenth to the twentieth-century. Rather than simply discussing the global textile trade in West Africa or “traditional” clothing, this book emphasizes the dynamism of Gã Fante and Akan dress. In this sense, Gold Coast dress was informed by the ever-changing nature of local economies, aesthetics, rituals, politics and identities in the context of trans-Saharan and Atlantic commerce. Thus, fashion is a prism to examine how Gold Coast peoples appropriated imported African, European, and Asian articles of adornment to express new modes of self-fashioning, self-aggrandizement, and respectability. These cultural trends influenced how elites and aspiring elites negotiated global debt economies, gender, social and racial identities during and in the aftermath of the slave trade and subsequent Christian missionization and British rule.