CEE #68

https://us19.campaign-archive.com/?u=43c1035893e0d8ecf635c14e6&id=3f388a0a57

Six more weeks of winter, and people have still not been able to dig out from last week’s snowstorm.  I could embrace winter as long as it does not bring six more weeks of children being used as pawns, six more weeks of ICE killings, six more weeks of inflammatory and inaccurate proclamations, six more weeks of normalizing sexual violence, and six more weeks of intimidating people who gather to ask for governmental accountability.

For the first two weeks of January, I was with students and colleagues (from both Penn and University of the Western Cape) in St. Helena (South Atlantic) and Cape Town.  Having spent the fall semester exploring different “Middle Passages and Returns” (the name of the class), we were in St. Helena to learn from the leaders of the St. Helena Heritage Trust – Helena Bennett and Shelley Magellan – about those Africans who were “liberated” in St. Helena after the slaveships they were on were intercepted by the British.  We visited the establishment that was built to house them in Rupert’s Valley, among other sites, and we stood at their new burial site (over three hundred were disinterred during construction for the access road for the airport that was finally opened in 2017). 

Having also traveled with members of the St. Thomas Kumina Collective from Jamaica, we were excited to perform a kumina.  Kumina is a Congolese-based ancestral ritual practice that would have been brought from St. Helena to Jamaica with the liberated Africans who then went on to become indentured laborers in the parish of St. Thomas.  We, too, were enacting a kind of return. 

In St. Helena, we were introduced to the incredibly thoughtful ways “Saints” (as residents of St. Helena are called) have commemorated these ancestors and their reburial.  For example, an exhibit was created from photographs taken of Saints in the same positions in which the Liberated Africans were found in their graves, enfleshing them and making them kin.  On the first anniversary of the reburial, stones were gathered from the bay – one to commemorate each African who had been exhumed – and children in the community each dipped their palms in paint to create a handprint on the stones, which were then placed in a spiral on top of the soil. 

We were overwhelmed by the care they showed these ancestors, and by the care they showed us, ethical modes of relation that join the living with the dead, Saints with Jamaicans and Americans and South Africans.  It is that kind of care we need for these six weeks and beyond.

Deborah A. Thomas

Director, CEE