Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Kim Foote
160 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
New Christmas
The cloudy sky over Elmina hints at rain, an anomaly in a
long-awaited dry season. It’s the first Thursday of January 2003, and
my mood is dampened by more than weather. For one, I have no clothes
that are black and white, now the preferred colors for celebrations or
funerals in southern Ghana.
Mr. Sikayεfi, my research assistant, navigates his car through
Elmina’s narrow, winding streets. He reaches over to rub my shoulder
and asks if I’m okay. I flash him a grimace. The first time I met him,
before the Christmas season began, he promised to have a family for
me to interview during the annual Edina Bronya festival—Elmina’s
new year celebration. Without a family’s permission, we’ll be unable
to witness the first half of the ceremony, where families gather at the
ancestral home to remember relatives who died the previous year.
After being away from Mr. Sikayεfi for Christmas with friends in
Accra, he claims to have found no one.
We stop to pick up Mr. Mensah, who Mr. Sikayεfi tells me is a local
historian. With his salt-and-pepper hair, squinty eyes, and spunky
attitude, Mr. Mensah reminds me of my grandfather.
Seeing my glum face, Mr. Mensah assures me that we’ll have no
trouble locating a family. When we reach a street full of people wearing
black-and-white, Mr. Sikayεfi parks alongside the gutter. Mr. Mensah
hops out to chat with a woman in a dress of black-and-white kente cloth.
Her hair is covered with a shiny black scarf. She suddenly claps her
hands and looks toward the car, nodding. Mr. Mensah beckons to us.
Mr. Sikayεfi smiles at me and rubs my shoulder. “You see, Yaa?”
But will we see slave artifacts is the question. Ever since I arrived
in Ghana a few months earlier, I’ve been anticipating Bronya. My goal
in the country has been to research slave history at Elmina, the Dutch
West India Company’s headquarters during the trans-Atlantic slave
trade. In Ghana, where it is taboo to refer to anyone’s slave ancestry,
I’ve been hoping to become familiar enough to some families for them
to do just that. More importantly, I’ve heard that Bronya might be