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Uncovering the history of the Christiansborg colonial fort in Ghana – With Prof Fritz Biveridge - S2E4
249 Plays6 months ago
In this special episode of archaeological context, I want to highlight a bit of a different topic, as we will focus on a time period and especially geographical region, not often featured in archaeological discussions: A 17thcentury UNESCO world heritage site, located on the Westcoast of Africa. Specifically, we will explore Christiansborg Castle in Osu, a suburb of Accra, the capitol of Ghana. I aim to cover the interesting and dark history, as well as results of recent excavations and I had the pleasure to talk about this with Prof Fritz Biveridge from the University of Ghana.
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Transcript
Introduction and Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Uncovering the history of the Christiansburg colonial fort in Ghana.
00:00:18
Speaker
Welcome to a special episode of Archaeological Context with Dr. Noah, where I want to highlight a bit of a different topic, as we will focus on a time period and especially geographical region not often featured in archaeological discussions, a 17th century UNESCO World Heritage Site located on the west coast of Africa.
00:00:41
Speaker
Specifically, we will explore Christiansburg Castle in Osu, a suburb of Akra, the capital of Ghana. I aim to cover the interesting and dark history as well as results of recent excavations.
Interview with Professor Fritz Beaverich
00:00:57
Speaker
I am already sorry if my pronunciation of some places and names will be incorrect, but I think it is important to share this interesting research and I had the pleasure to talk about this with Professor Fritz Beaverich from the University of Ghana. Here's already an extract of our conversation. Do you know more about this underground tunnel where it leads to? Yes, it's still there.
00:01:26
Speaker
And it's closed now. I'm not assessed it, but it was used to transfer slaves from the dungeons to slave ships, which were bet ashore. You know, we didn't have a harbor, so they had to stay way back. And then canoes would take them to the ships. Oh, yeah. And it was easier to track through these tunnels.
History and Expansion of Christiansburg Castle
00:02:16
Speaker
The area of Osu and the Christiansborg Castle in particular have a very interesting history of which I can only give you a brief summary here. Unfortunately, very little is so far known about human occupation around Osu in the times before the area was seized by the Europeans.
00:02:35
Speaker
The first were the Portuguese in 1550, which occupied this strategically well-situated location at the intersection of important inland and transatlantic trade routes.
00:02:47
Speaker
However, their influence diminished, and in 1652 the local king in Accra allowed the Swedes to construct a small fortified trading lodge. Some eight years later the area was bought by the Danish, or better, Danish Norwegians, as both were under the rule of the king in Copenhagen, and the construction of the castle named after King Christian V began.
00:03:13
Speaker
Then, over almost 200 years and different phases of construction activities, the castle grew to contain a courtyard, cistern, chapel, storerooms, living quarters and it was armed with some 28 cannons. From the 1660s to 1850, the Christiansburg Castle was the headquarter of Danish-Norwegian activities on the west coast of Africa.
00:03:41
Speaker
They traded guns, liquor, cloth, iron tools or glass beads in exchange for gold and ivory. But especially during the 18th century, these activities were dominated by the horrendous transatlantic slave trade. And it is estimated that at least 100.000 people were forcibly taken from the areas administrated from Christiansborg and shipped across the Atlantic to the Danish West Indies in the Caribbean.
00:04:11
Speaker
Apparently, the castle played such a vital role in the Danish economy that from 1688 to 1747, Danish coinage even featured an image of the castle with the inscription Christianspork.
Azamani's Takeover and Danish Rule End
00:04:26
Speaker
However, the European colonial rule was not without opposition and I want to highlight one spectacular case which in my opinion could make for a really cool Hollywood movie. In 1693, a group of Aquamu men under their leader Azamani entered the castle disguised as merchants who wished to purchase ammunition. They managed to overpower the occupants of the castle and gained possession of Christiansburg.
00:04:56
Speaker
Azamani took down the Danish flag and gave himself the title of governor. One year later he sold the castle back to the Danes, but never returned the old keys to the castle, and to this day they apparently are in the possession of the Aquamu people.
00:05:14
Speaker
However, the horrific slave trade continued for another century until the abolishment of slavery in Denmark in 1792, or rather the actual enforcement of the abolishment in 1803. Afterwards, the castle lost much of its importance and in 1850 Christiansburg and all other Danish possessions on the west coast of Africa were sold to the British government.
00:05:42
Speaker
But the suffering of the local population was not over. When they protested new British taxes, the latter responded by shelling the Osu settlement close to the castle with cannon fire. Furthermore, as a security measure, the local population was prohibited from rebuilding their houses.
00:06:02
Speaker
And this ban has been upheld until recently, first because Christiansborg served as the headquarters of the British colonial state, and then until 2013 the castle was the seat of the Canadian government.
Tourism Development and Archaeological Impact
00:06:18
Speaker
As a result, the area encompassing Old Osu has remained largely undisturbed since the mid-1850s. However, after the Guinean president moved out of Christiansburg Castle, the ban on constructing buildings in the vicinity of the castle has recently been lifted.
00:06:37
Speaker
and the government approved a large touristic development project which includes hotels, shopping malls and casinos. These constructions will directly impact the hidden archaeological and historical heritage from both the pre-colonial and the Danish Norwegian periods at Oslo.
00:06:56
Speaker
I hope this short overview demonstrates that while much of the history of this castle appears clear through historical and ethnographic sources, less is known about the structures and material culture, especially of the role and relation with the adjacent osu! settlement of the local population next to the castle.
00:07:18
Speaker
However, recent archaeological and geophysical investigations increased the knowledge about historical osu, as in 2014 the Kralistiansburg Historical Heritage Project was given permission to begin surveys at the site. They have excavated parts of an extensive pre-colonial settlement consisting of house formations and fireplaces.
00:07:44
Speaker
In addition, they have found a large amount of local and imported objects, like Chinese and European ceramics, alongside local pottery, as well as African and European clay smoking pipes. But for me, highlights have to be a cannon they found, which must have fallen from the castle wall, and apparently they even discovered the entrance to an underground tunnel under the castle.
00:08:13
Speaker
As my guests of this episode informed me, this tunnel connected Christiansburg Castle to the Richter House. Built in 1809, this house is located a few meters north of the castle and served as an auction and slave holding facility.
00:08:31
Speaker
The house is named after a wealthy Danish merchant who lived in Osu and generated immense wealth selling African slaves to Danish Norwegian traders and chippers of the Guinea Company in the early phase of the transatlantic trade era.
00:08:48
Speaker
These are all very exciting discoveries and I am happy to talk about them and more aspects of archaeology in Ghana with my guest, Dr. Fritz Bevrich, Associate Professor at the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies of the University of Ghana.
00:09:15
Speaker
Ok, dear Professor Biberg, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. And maybe first, as I'm not familiar with it at all, I wanted to ask you how archaeology and maybe excavations in general are organized in Ghana. Well, in Ghana, much of the excavations that are undertaken
00:09:40
Speaker
organized by my units, which is the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies. And then the second one, another institution that does excavations is the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board.
Ghanaian Archaeological Initiatives and Collaborations
00:09:57
Speaker
They are the institutions set up by government to maintain heritage sites in Ghana, the monuments and other heritage sites in Ghana.
00:10:09
Speaker
These are the two main institutions, but by far we are the most active. We do most of the excavations in Ghana. We go to the field more than any other institution. Basically, we are the leading units in Ghana. When I say unit, you know a university is made up of many units.
00:10:32
Speaker
One is the department of archaeology and heritage studies. We are at the forefront of our excavations in Ghana. That's throughout all of Ghana or more centered on the coast? No, all of Ghana. Incidentally, we are the only university in Ghana that has some archaeology departments. So what happens is that everything comes back to us. We have to do all the excavations, yes.
00:11:01
Speaker
Occasionally, some of the mining companies, as part of their mandate, mining is destructive. It destroys the soil, the archaeological site. Occasionally, some of these mining companies engage us also to do excavations on their behalf. It's part of their cultural assessment policy.
00:11:28
Speaker
We don't just want to destroy sites, but we want to recover our data before the site is finally mined to recover goods or manganese or whatever. So occasionally, they also give us contracts to excavate on the happy path. They fund everything.
00:11:50
Speaker
I was wondering how the financing part works. If the state is paying, but you say also the companies have to pay. In Ghana, the state doesn't pay. Most of the funding comes from private institutions and then from the university itself. As part of our budget for the EDM, we have some funding allocated for excavations.
00:12:20
Speaker
So that is what we use. But the government hardly funds archaeological excavations in Ghana. But then in the past, we used to have some partners also, like no parts. The Norwegian group, in collaboration with them and vocationally, they also come here and we work together as a team on some of these sites.
00:12:41
Speaker
That's what I wanted to ask, because I have to mention, I studied parts of my master also in Trondheim, in Norway, and that's how I got to know the interesting research activities taking place in Ghana, also around the Christiansburg Castle. And I was wondering, in your view, how has this collaboration with Norwegian researchers and universities
00:13:02
Speaker
benefited archaeologists in Ghana, but more importantly, also vice versa, how have the European archaeologists benefited from your expertise and experiences? Well, the collaboration has been very beneficial for us. Number one, as part of the collaboration, they allow us to send about five graduate students
00:13:30
Speaker
to Norway, to John Dime every year. And they stay in John Dime for at the University of Science and Technology, something like that. Yeah. And they stay there for like the masters, the MBA students spend about a month and then the MPhil and the PET spend like four months or three months or something. And then they use the laboratory over there.
00:14:01
Speaker
and then to analyze some of their materials, especially with your carbon dating. So they do that there. And we are not very good when it comes to stone age materials. So Trondheim has much of that over there. So the collaboration is very beneficial for our students. In terms of faculty, some of them also come here and we work together as a team.
00:14:30
Speaker
And then the third very important benefits we get from this collaboration is that much of the time when they come and they're going, they give us the tubes with the broth, like a drum, and a few things that they brought. They leave it for us. So in a way, it enhances our work here. It gives us the technical know-how. It gives us the material, the tubes to do modern archaeology.
00:14:58
Speaker
So it's been very beneficial. Unfortunately, the collaboration has ended. It wasn't reviewed by the by the Norwegian government. Two years ago, we tried to revive it by doing a second fees, but the Norwegian government was not too keen on it said it had other areas that wanted to sponsor so it didn't it didn't come up.
00:15:26
Speaker
But we have a few other collaborations with other universities, and most of them are in the UK. So in terms of collaboration, it's been very beneficial for the Europeans. One thing that helps them is that they're not too familiar with the environment yet. They're not too familiar with the sites and the materials which are available. So we also share that knowledge with them.
00:15:56
Speaker
And then we are like iron smelting. We have all the information. So if an European scholar, for example, wants to do something iron smelting, we impart that knowledge to them. And the poetry here is very different from the poetry in Europe. We have all the classification schemes here, which we use. So we are familiar with different poetry from different sides.
00:16:24
Speaker
So we impart this kind of knowledge to them when it comes to ethno-medicine, for example. We've done so much here. So any European who is interested in ethno-medicine, data is already available. So that's a good thing about them. It's been beneficial to both sides. I would say that. I wish we could revive some of these, especially with the Norwegian. They were very good. Yes, they were very good.
00:16:53
Speaker
You mentioned before that also mining companies sometimes they pay for the excavations. Is that like by law that they have to pay, if they mine an area that there is cultural heritage and they will destroy, that they have to pay for excavations taking place? Yes, it's part of their contract. One company that is at the forefront of this is a company called Nemos. It's a big mining company.
00:17:23
Speaker
they have a very big concession in a shanty region. And the site has a lot of shrines, a lot of leats to knit sites. And some contemporary sites also, which have been vacated in the last 100 years or so. So what they do is that they work with faculty members who go and conduct observations to cover these materials. And regularly,
00:17:50
Speaker
extensive reports of their finds before the site is destroyed. They never destroyed the site before the scavengers are always done before. That's very good.
Mining Companies and Cultural Heritage
00:18:07
Speaker
There are other companies too, not necessarily in mind, but there are some companies too like Doosie involved with energy.
00:18:18
Speaker
These are mostly foreign companies that come to the country to build plants and other things. Some of them also engage faculty. I remember in the early 2000s that I was engaged in one of the, there was a company called the West Africa Gas Pipeline. And they wanted to build a plant at Tema. And I went to work on the site and recovered everything before the site was finally destroyed.
00:18:48
Speaker
So some of these companies are also, but they are foreign companies and it's part of their contracts. That is what is that and cultural assessments and steady has to be done for the. So they have a small percentage of money which is supposed to be used for this. Yes, it's very important.
00:19:12
Speaker
So they have to announce that they will mine in this area. And then one of your faculty goes and checks if it's something. Yes, sometimes the sites are that the area is very big. So it involves three, four faculty at the same time working at different locations. Oh, that's great. So then also the students have a lot of opportunities to work and excavate on different regions and periods. Yes, they do. They do.
00:19:41
Speaker
Currently, one of our students, one of our master's students, for example, that's supposed to be an expansion of the family airport. So some faculty went and did a cultural assessment study, were able to map areas which were important archaeological sites. And some of the materials were very covered. And then there's another company coming to set up a solar
00:20:11
Speaker
those solar panels across a very wide area. So currently one of our master's students is working in that area. He's also documenting the GPS locations of some of these sites before the company comes in to destroy the site. Yes, you know in the process of building they are going to destroy the site.
00:20:33
Speaker
I know, well, so there are never like any conflicts because I know from my, I'm also working on excavation right now. And we have a bit of conflict with the construction company because they want to construct and then we have to excavate. So they push that we excavate faster. So there are no like conflicts like this taking place sometimes with the mining companies. Yes, yes. It's very common here. They always want to work very quickly and archaeology is
00:21:03
Speaker
something that you can't just go and, you know, it has to be done in a certain way, scientifically. So it's the same here, just like you are experiencing, we also have the same problem here. They come and they say, I want this thing done in a month. But technically, it can't be done in a month. And they always want you to finish quickly so that they can come in and start mining for gold and other minerals. So it's a common thing here also. Yeah.
00:21:33
Speaker
for archaeologists worldwide, maybe. That's the thing. Yeah. Yeah. And the excavations are done by the faculty and students, or is there like a profession as field archaeologists? No, it is done by faculty. And it's done by faculty. And of course, we recruit the students to help us because we need to pass the technical knowledge to them.
00:22:03
Speaker
They need to know how excavations are done, the scientific way. So we always take them to the fields to be part of these excavations. And in the process they learn how to conduct proper excavations, scientific excavations. So yes, it's mostly faculty and students. In Ghana, we don't have many professional archaeologists who are
00:22:32
Speaker
into West Calvish snow. And the reason for that is that archaeology is a growing profession in Ghana. It's not as well established as it is in Norway or Denmark or America or any other place. It's a growing science. Yeah, so as we speak now, many of the professionals in archaeology are mostly faculty members. They are not
00:22:59
Speaker
professional archaeologists who can undertake excavations like it is in the US where they have companies. So that is mostly faculty and students. I read these excavations now around Christiansburg. They happen because they want to build, I think, a tourist resort or hotels or something. Yeah, but the area west of Christianburg Castle,
00:23:25
Speaker
It's also been planned to be used as a kind of tourist center that hotels and a lot of leisure activities. One faculty member went there to do salvage archaeology to recover some materials before the site would be totally destroyed. And then fortunately, we also had one lady, a PhD student who was also part of that team, and she used
00:23:53
Speaker
the site as a research area for a PhD. So we were able to recover a lot of materials, not as much as we would want to, because the site is huge. And we were only able to do a little part. And that was because of financial constraints. You know, archaeology is very expensive. It's one of the most expensive social sciences.
00:24:16
Speaker
We need a lot of money to be able to conduct very good excavation. So we're not able to do that. But we're able to move the area west of Istanbul Castle, or Skaurete. And we have many of the materials currently in our museum. They've been documented by the faculty member and one lady who did a piece. So we have some material, not as much as we would want, but we have some material.
00:24:44
Speaker
And maybe if I can ask you, I read that, for example, during the excavations now around Kristiansburg Castle, that they also discovered like an underground tunnel and cannons and one cannon, I think, that fell down from the castle wall. Do you know more about this underground tunnel, where it leads to? Yes, it's still there.
00:25:13
Speaker
And it's closed now. I'm not assessed it, but it was used to transfer slaves from the dungeons to slave ships, which were bet a show, you know, we didn't have a harbor. So they had to stay way back and then can use to take them to the ships. Oh, yeah. And
00:25:40
Speaker
It was easier to track through these tunnels. This is currently closed anyway. I'm here too. I think the main reason why they closed it is that it's not specifically strong enough. They don't want it to collapse or they don't want anybody to go in. That's the main reason why. But the canons are many. Some of them are still standing. Not just canons, but cannonballs also.
00:26:08
Speaker
which were fired from the cannons. They are also standing. I read that the British, when they took over the castle, they also shelled the... also settlements? Yes, they did. There was this conflict between the two groups. Much of it bothered on trade.
00:26:32
Speaker
And the British bombarded the police. In fact, the British were not the only people to bombard Kostas sites in Ghana. They did the same in Winnipeg. There was a fort in Winnipeg, and they blew it up. And then there was another one in a disco, where I've been working for the past five years or so. But in that day, they also bombarded the town.
00:26:56
Speaker
And then Alimina, let's not forget Alimina, Alimina was bombarded, but that was by the Dutch, not by the English. So it's not a new thing, bombardment is not an easy thing. And it's mostly a ruse because of conflicts between the local people and the European treaties.
00:27:18
Speaker
You conducted a lot of research not only on the Danish Norwegian castles but also British or Dutch colonial forts in Ghana, I read.
European Influence and International Visits
00:27:31
Speaker
And I was wondering what material culture evidence do we have for contacts between
00:27:38
Speaker
for contacts of maybe between the local population and these European occupants in these forts, or maybe even evidence of intermixing of these two peoples? Oh yeah, that's a lot of evidence. I would divide that into two, the tangibles and the intangibles. When it comes to the tangibles, we have a lot of European imports from the 16th century
00:28:08
Speaker
right up to the 19th century in the archaeological records. Some of them included kaolin, smoking pipes. These were imported from Poland. And then we had ceramics, different types of ceramics. Some are coming as far back as way back in Japan and China. And in the Dutch, we're kind of moving around and buying and coming to resell on the gimme cups.
00:28:37
Speaker
So we have different types of ceramics, porcelain, white wares, blue wares, and so many of them. And then we also have a lot of bohemian and Venetian glass beads. These were an integral part of imports from Europe. A polychrome and a monochrome, they are all several. We get them in hundreds at different sites. Then we also have
00:29:04
Speaker
and construction materials like nails, like screws, like door locks, window pegs, glass window pegs. And then another very important material we get in very large quantities is European alcoholic beverages. A lot of shared bottles, a lot of whiskey, beer, and mineral bottle wine.
00:29:32
Speaker
in thousands, because all of these sites, many of the excavations have gone at several sites. It's about 30% of what I get. It's quite significant. And then we also have a lot of imported metal products from Europe, like catalysis, axes, matops. These were integral to facilitation of the Costa tree.
00:29:57
Speaker
So we also get these in abundance. We have metal buttons for clues. You know, the records were made of metal, so they don't think they should be creating the archaeological record. We also have a lot of belt hooks. The metal leather is gone, but the belt hooks, because it's metal, a solid archaeological record. We have asbestos roofing sheets. All these were brought in yellow bricks, red bricks.
00:30:24
Speaker
yellow bricks from Holland, red bricks from Portugal. So many, so many materials. When it comes to the intangibles, there were a lot of intermarriages between occupants of the Christian Bocastle and the local people who lived around the fort. And one good example is the woof, that important trader.
00:30:50
Speaker
who married a gushu woman and her children. There are several mulatto families in Louisiana with their Danish and Norwegian names, like Ishlika and so many, so many names. The names are passed on from generation to generation.
00:31:12
Speaker
So, and then when it comes to architecture, many of the buildings in Ushuna, they have the Norwegian Danish architecture styles. And then when it comes to education, the Danes and the Norwegians who were active in the Christian bulk area, which they also had to build several school, one that is still standing, it's silent.
00:31:39
Speaker
It's a school called Salah. This is more than 300 years old. It's still standing. There's so much. There is so, so much. The evidence is abundantly clear.
00:31:55
Speaker
Maybe as a final question almost, it was interesting for me to read that another colonial fort related to this transatlantic slave trade, the Cape Coast Castle, I think some 150 kilometers west of Christiansburg, was visited by Obama in 2008 and also by Melania Trump in 2018.
00:32:21
Speaker
Could you maybe elaborate on how you and the other archaeologists or just the local population experienced these visits? It was a big event in Ghana, especially when the two events were very big in Ghana. But I would want to state that archaeologists were not part of anything that was done there. There was a purely government to government thing.
00:32:50
Speaker
So archaeologists had nothing to do with it. We were not involved in the planning. We're not involved in organizing anything. Yes, these two very important people visited those castles, but they were taken around by tour guides who are employees of the Ghana museums and monuments.
00:33:13
Speaker
And we just saw everything on TV, but we're not part of anything to do with it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So these were very interesting insights. Thank you so much, Professor Beaverich. And I hope that it will continue the collaboration with the Norwegians. I hope so. I hope so. It was very, very beneficial. And yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me.
00:33:40
Speaker
You're welcome. Anytime you need some information, you can always call me. Okay, I will. Thank you so much.
00:33:55
Speaker
All right, that's it for this episode. I wanted to cover this topic since many years and it was really interesting for me to read and hear more about archaeology in Ghana. Thanks again to Professor Fritz Bivrich for these interesting insights.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:34:12
Speaker
So, if you enjoyed it as well, please follow and subscribe to this podcast and you can even support it over on Patreon.
00:34:20
Speaker
I hope you will tune in in about two weeks for another edition of Archaeological Context with Dr. Noah.
00:34:47
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.