For the past year I have been working with Nii Kwaterlai Quartey (James Town Walking Tours) and Collins Seymah Smith (James Town Community Theatre Centre) on a project exploring modern slavery in James Town. The project grew from two things: a recognition that James Town has been overlooked by governments, academics and tourists for a long time, and, secondly, stories that we had heard of the involvement of local families in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. I have been travelling back and forth to Ghana since 2000, and nowhere in the museums or official memorials of slavery are these stories told. This opened up numerous areas of investigation for us: how are events that are forgotten at state level retained at the community level? What are the mechanisms of informal community memorialisation and, equally, of invisiblising inconvenient or unpalatable narratives and, finally, can an understanding of these things help to understand the phenomenon of modern slavery in James Town.
First, we began by investigating the nature and scale of modern slavery in the area. What we found was a picture of sophisticated and persistent exploitation of people. What we also found was that the mechanisms by which these practices are hidden bears a striking resemblance. Moreover, we found clear physical and conceptual links back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Our research found that modern slavery in James Town breaks down into three categories: young boys being taken from James Town to work in the fishing industry on the Volta, young girls being brought into James Town as sex workers and educated young women being recruited for domestic service in the Gulf states. Clearly, categorising these areas as modern slavery is controversial. Debate on the status of children working on the Volta has been the source of recent academic, media and political debate, and positioning domestic workers in the gulf states as modern slavery raises questions of state-level collaboration and consent, as young women require visas to travel.
Whilst we acknowledge these complexities, and the uncomfortable conversations they invite, we are clear in this project that we must first and foremost respect the experience and testimony of survivors of modern slavery. What that means is that where an individual has disclosed their experience and they identify that experience as slavery or analogous to slavery, we respect that position.
There are clear sensitivities here that we have to navigate but the main objective is to continue to understand the nature of modern slavery in James Town and engage the community in conversations that can inform at-risk young people and disseminate the issues more generally. One of the key findings of the research is that modern slavery is subject to the same mechanisms of invisiblising as historic slavery. This is more than simply ignoring the issue, it is rather an active, institutional lack of acknowledgment that the issue exists at all; that it happens somewhere, but not here.
As part of our research we undertook a number of interviews with various people ranging from survivors of modern slavery to traditional and political leaders. One of the interesting trends to emerge from the interviews was that those in positions of power did not recognise modern slavery as an issue in James Town. Indeed, we were told directly that ‘we do not have it here’. A statement that was directly contradicted by the evidence we collected. This is a key link back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and local involvement in it. Recent academic research (Perbi, 2004; Wellington, 2015) has evidenced extensive involvement in the slave trade by communities along the coast, particularly in the neighbouring community of Osu, but these narratives have been obfuscated by official memorialisations of the period.
The lack of official acknowledgement of the issue of modern slavery forms part of a structural violence experienced by survivors, where their story is minimised or trivialised as unfortunate or isolated, or not modern slavery at all. As a result, we argue that effective solutions will only be found and actioned at the community level. Consequently, as part of this project we developed a play based on the testimonies of survivors that we showed in the community and local schools. In all, the performance was shown to over 900 people and each performance was followed by a session where the audience could suggest solutions to the issues shown. This was the real revelation of the project. The solutions suggested ranged from prayer to community action, but what was most interesting was the willingness of the community to engage in a conversation about these issues.
As a result of this project, we have found multiple areas that require further research, namely: the development of community based strategies to combat modern slavery, analysis of the nature of the slave trade in James Town and the role of local residents, how and why these stories have been lost, and what can be learnt from the slave trade and reactions to it, to help develop effective solutions to modern slavery.
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