A FAILED SHOWCASE OF EMPIRE?: THE GOLD COAST POLICE BAND, COLONIAL RECORD KEEPING, AND A 1947 TOUR OF GREAT BRITAIN

Nate Plageman

doi:10.21504/amj.v10i2.2038

A FAILED SHOWCASE OF EMPIRE?: THE GOLD COAST POLICE BAND, COLONIAL RECORD KEEPING, AND A 1947 TOUR OF GREAT BRITAIN

African Music Journal of the International Library of African Music ◽

10.21504/amj.v10i2.2038 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 57-76

Author(s):

Nate Plageman

Keyword(s):

Great Britain ◽

Gold Coast ◽

Record Keeping

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Meeting Africa’s Challenge: The Story of the American Committee on Africa

Issue A Journal of Opinion ◽

10.1017/s0047160700503242 ◽

1976 ◽

Vol 6 (2-3) ◽

pp. 16-26

Author(s):

George M. Houser

Keyword(s):

Great Britain ◽

Public Library ◽

Gold Coast ◽

Reference Book ◽

Reading Public ◽

Secretary Of State ◽

American Interest ◽

The Us ◽

The Town ◽

Relevant Material

In the early 1950s when the American Committee on Africa was formed, American interest in and knowledge about Africa was something of a joke. There was a Tarzan mentality in the US about the continent. Few books about Africa were known even by the reading public. Gunther’s Inside Africa, when it came out in 1956, served as a reference book for years for those Americans who wanted to get a perspective on the continent. I remember listening to Chester Bowles, who served as under secretary of state briefly in the Kennedy administration, speak about his own attempt to find relevant material about Africa in a Connecticut town. He told about his visit to the town public library, where he culled through the card catalogue. To find books on the Congo he said he had to search under “B” for “Belgium.” In searching for material on Ghana (then the Gold Coast) or Nigeria, he had to look under “Great Britain.” He found books about Liberia and Ethiopia under “Miscellaneous.” Knowledge of Africa was minimal, and the continent was on the whole looked upon as an extension of Europe.

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Colonial media ecologies

Nordisk Tidsskrift for Informationsvidenskab og Kulturformidling ◽

10.7146/ntik.v7i2.118485 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

pp. 98-112

Author(s):

Lene Asp Frederiksen

Keyword(s):

Great Britain ◽

Digital Media ◽

West Indies ◽

Mixed Media ◽

Field Trip ◽

Gold Coast ◽

Parallel Movement ◽

Audio Recordings ◽

Danish West Indies ◽

The 1960S

In this mixed-media essay I document a field trip to Ghana where I, so to say, travel in the footsteps of the Danish colonizers to the Gold Coast in a bid to dialogically challenge the genre of the monologizing colonial traveloguei. My methodological retracing of the slave route is inspired by Danish author Thorkild Hansen’s book trilogy Coast of Slaves, Ships of Slaves and Islands of Slaves from the 1960s in which he visits the former Danish West Indies and the Gold Coast (in the, at the time of his visit, still very young Ghanaian nation, which had gained its independence from Great Britain in 1957). Hansen was one of the first Danish authors to voice a strong critique of the Danish colonial past and of a neglectful historiography through his docu-fiction. I was curious to explore in a parallel movement to Hansen’s the landscape as prism and archive today. Hence, the ‘reenactment’ of the travelogue in this essay functions as an attempt to recast and refracture colonial narratives of past and present. My own documentary audio recordings from the field trip are presented here along with methodological reflections on how to voice dialogical narratives about colonialism in new digital media.

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