This spring break, my class, AAS 481: The African American Atlantic: Modernity and the Black Experience, went on an expenses-paid seven-day tour of Ghana. The course focuses on one major question: How did blacks in the new world imagine themselves as modern subjects? To help answer that question, we have read a wide range of texts — ranging from Countee Cullen’s “What is Africa to Me?” to Richard Wright’s “Black Power” — and traveled to Ghana.
In the literary tradition of Africans in America, Ghana, once a major trading post for the export of slaves from West Africa, often serves as a point of origin and eventual place of return. So during our brief stay we visited museums, mausoleums, marketplaces and slave castles to evaluate the relationship between Ghanaians and the African diaspora community.
In Ghana we were tourists and, as such, we were afforded all of the privilege and distance of perspective that accompanies that status. This is not how traditional study abroad programs work. Last summer, I participated in the Princeton in Dar es Salaam program for Swahili immersion. The Dar program embodied the “cultural immersion” theory of study abroad, which is the theory we most often hear of at Princeton. The Office of International Programs “[encourages] all students to study abroad for at least a semester to get the full benefit of an international experience.” In Dar es Salaam, I lived in a home-stay, learned Swahili and learned to eat bizarre foods without showing pain or horror. It was the traditional study abroad experience, based on learning about a foreign culture from within it.
My class trip to Ghana, however, was the opposite. If my time in Tanzania was a cultural immersion experience, then my trip to Ghana was a cultural drive-by. Spending only a couple of days at any given location, we did not learn the language, struggle to understand traditions or teach our bodies to digest the local cuisine. Instead we lived and traveled as tourists, with one important caveat: We brought our academic skepticism with us.
I once regarded museum officials and tour guides as guardians of history and culture, but it was not until this trip that truly I questioned what version of history and whose culture they are protecting. In the museums the slave trade was portrayed as an external operation forced onto the inhabitants of Ghana, and the exhibits downplayed or even ignored the tribal wars of profit and conquest that fed the slave trade. Instead, the museums bemoaned the terrors of slavery while glorifying the tribal chiefs who perpetuated it.
With a small dose of academic distance, it became harder to identify the museum plaques, posters or exhibits calling for unity between Ghanaians and the African diaspora as anything more than marketing ploys. Even woodcarvers capitalized on this meme by selling carvings with a symbol that translates to “return to your roots.”
In my previous travels with the University, a major component has been building understanding and trust through education or community service. On this trip, however, we were passive recipients of histories with a decidedly Ghanaian perspective. Aware of this difference, we learned to constantly question, discount and fact-check the statements of museum operators and tour guides. The process helped give cohesion to the course’s mix of theoretical texts, novels and memoirs. As an African American, the trip was helpful in framing my own personal relationship to Africa.
Unfortunately, the humanities departments offer few courses that so clearly link learning to real life. But immersive study abroad programs are important parts of education and personal growth. They demand that their participants expand beyond traditional comfort zones and create a sense of cultural reflexivity that is difficult to gain inside of the Princeton Bubble.
There is, however, something to be gained from brief encounters like the one I enjoyed this spring break. Instead of spending months living as a student, I gained a perspective on how Ghanaians want foreigners to perceive them. We were shown monuments, castles and symbols that stressed the immutable unity of Ghana while there were no reminders of the series of violent military coups that plagued the nation for four decades.
Extravagant as it may seem to send students halfway around the world for a week, my brief foray into Ghana was time enough to implode misconceptions, destabilize stereotypes and give personal meaning to my academic work. Academic distance, in the context of our trip, became a living, critical battleground — rather than Princeton’s commonplace culture of the classroom — and that perspective is valuable in itself.
Michael Collins is a sophomore from Glastonbury, Conn. He can be reached at mjcollin@princeton.edu.
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