Mariah Young-Jones
Africa House Fellow 2015
Ghana and Senegal
“Are you obruni?” a young schoolgirl asks as I walk down a dirt path in Dixcove, Western Region, Ghana. I’m staying in the neighboring town of Busua, about a twenty minute walk away, but I’ve come here for the day to visit Fort Metal Cross. It’s an over three hundred year old British fort (also at one point controlled by the Dutch) that usually held around 100 slaves at a time—not many compared to the thousand or so that Elmina or Cape Coast Castle in the Central Region could hold. Today it is being leased from the Ghanaian government to a white British businessman named Bob Fidler. He plans to turn the fort into a luxe resort.
I’m used to being called obruni at this point, but it still makes me uneasy. The word, often uttered playfully to me by young children on the street, leaves what can only be described as a faint and uncomfortable tug deep within my chest. Obruni means an outsider, someone with no roots or ties with the locals. It means someone who is not to be trusted. It is essentially synonymous with “white person.”
Being in Ghana has made me confront my history as a member of the African diaspora in ways that I had not anticipated. People constantly question the tone of my skin. “Is your mother white?” they’ll ask. “What are you mixed with?” “Both of my parents are black,” I answer, and I know it’s not the answer that they’re looking for. But to truly explain to them the color of my skin would be to trace back hundreds of years of history, framed by the Atlantic slave trade.
I’ve visited over ten forts and castles at this point, which means that I’ve seen over ten sets of slave dungeons, over ten governor’s quarters, and over ten half-hearted and often problematic attempts at explaining how slave women were raped in those quarters. I am tired, and I am tired of explaining myself and what I am doing here.
At this point the fort’s stark white walls are in view, towering over the fishing bay beside it. I could keep moving, but I choose to stop because the young girl is still looking at me, and it finally dawns on me that she had asked a question and was still expecting my answer. I turn to face her.
“Are you obruni?” she asks again. She’s puzzled; she has not come to any conclusion. “No,” I say assertively, almost sighing in frustration. And after scanning me over, even with my skin and my hair and my clothes and my DSLR camera, she says “Oh!” and smiles.
And it’s a revelation for both of us.