Healing the Past and Present Through Ritual: Memorialization of Enslavement Among the Bulsa of Ghana.

• In Event: Music, Performance, and Memorialization of Ritual

Description for Program

Although the Bulsa people comprise one of the few communities with the most recent compelling records and reminders of the experience of slavery and the slave trade in Ghana, little academic attention has been paid to their modes of remembrance of their ancestors' experiences. Even far less attention has been paid to how this history is etched in the Bulsa landscape via sacred landmarks, oral narratives, and rituals that continue to be re-enacted.
The Azagsuk earthshrine of Fiisa is one of the few living archives of the Bulsa peoples' cultural memory of their ancestors' experience during the slave trade. It is the habitat of a vigilant deity whose protective role dates back to their ancestor's victorious battles against slave raiders in 1897. This paper makes the case that in the study of slavery and the slave trade in Ghana, the Azagsuk earthshine provides an invaluable communal resource in both abstract and secular terms that simultaneously addresses the collective historical trauma of kidnapping and enslavement and the present-day Ghanaian stigma of being the descendant of ancestors taken captive.

Author

• Anbegwon Atuire, Colorado College