No bones or flags were buried in Ghana

by DAVID COMISSIONG I WAS RECENTLY SHOCKED to learn that many Barbadians have been fooled into believing that some six years ago – in November 2019 – a large Barbados delegation travelled to Ghana and buried a quantity of human bones exhumed from our Newton slave burial ground and a Barbados flag in a grave in Ghana. This is absolutely untrue, and I know it to be untrue because I was directly and personally involved in the matter.

I have also been informed that this false “urban legend” has been assiduously cultivated and promoted by well-known, inveterate partisan detractors of Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, and that it is routinely resurrected and highlighted on social media any time something negative happens in Barbados. I consider it to be both shameful and unhealthy that the sensibilities of our people should be assaulted in this manner, and I will therefore essay to clarify and put this matter to rest once and for all.

To begin with, when that large 39-member delegation spanning our public and private sectors and our civil society travelled to Ghana in November 2019, it did not take any human bones with it. No bones were dug up or taken from the Newton slave burial ground. Rather, what was dug up and taken to Ghana was simply a quantity of ordinary Newton “soil” or “earth”.

Proposal

There had initially been a proposal that Barbados should follow the example of other countries that had dug up the skeletal remains of long buried enslaved Africans and transported them to Ghana for re-burial or re-interment, but that idea or proposal was abandoned.

You see, when the proposal was given proper consideration, it was recognised that in the absence of any DNA testing of the skeletal remains buried at Newton, we were not in a position to scientifically determine the precise African ethnicity of any of the skeletons, and therefore, could not take the risk of burying a skeleton in territory that might be foreign to his or her African ethnic group.

And so, it was ultimately decided not to dig up or take any skeletal remains, but instead, to merely dig up and take a quantity of ordinary soil or earth from the burial ground.

I did not make the trip to Ghana, but after the delegation comprising multiple officials of the Barbados Government, private sector leaders of ICBL, Solar Dynamics, KPMG, and the Barbados Stock Exchange, and civil society leaders drawn from the Rastafari community and CTUSAB arrived in Ghana, I was contacted and requested to compose an appropriate inscription to be placed on the box that contained the “Newton soil”.

I did as requested, and the inscription I composed and sent to Ghana read as follows: “The burial of this sacred soil imbued with the essence of our common ancestors symbolises our homecoming and reconnection.”

Thereafter, on November 18, 2019, the Barbados delegation, accompanied by Ghana’s Tourism Minister Barbara Oteng-Gyasi, travelled to the coastal town of Assin Manso in the central region of Ghana, home of the Assin Manso Ancestral River Site – a location where enslaved Africans were made to take final baths before being placed on slave ships bound for slave plantation colonies like Barbados.

There, the delegation was received by the Chief of Assin Manso, Nana Ohemeng Awere V and other traditional leaders of Assin Manso, and handed over the box containing the “Newton sacred soil” to their Ghanaian hosts.

In a ceremony marked by the playing of drums and the singing of solemn songs, a traditional Ghanaian cloth was placed over the box, and the flag of Barbados was placed on top of the Ghanaian cloth – to symbolise the ancestral connection between Barbados and Ghana.

The box was then taken to a place by the riverside where a hole had been dug for its interment. The box was lowered into the hole; the Barbados flag was removed from the top of the box and lifted out of the hole; and the flag was handed over to Barbados’ Chief Protocol Officer, Hughland Allman. The box containing the “Newton sacred soil” was then interred in the soil or earth of Ghana.

Reconnection

In short, there was no burial of human bones or skeletal remains: rather, this was a symbolic act of return to and reconnection with the continent of Africa and with Ghana – the African nation from which the greatest percentage of our enslaved African ancestors were taken.

Admittedly, there were news outlets in Ghana that erroneously reported the event as if it had been the burial of skeletal remains. This probably stemmed from the fact that there had been several previous burials of skeletal remains brought from overseas at the Assin Manso Ancestral Slave River Site. Any such reporting was, however, incorrect.

There was also no interment or burial of the Barbados flag. Indeed, the flag had been taken to Ghana by our CPO Allman and was safely returned to Barbados by said CPO and deposited at our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade.

So, I trust that this matter has now been fully clarified.

However, the mere fact that there are still people in Barbados whose psyches led them to invent such a false “urban legend” and to imbue it with all sorts of dark and nefarious connotations should bring home to us that we Barbadians still have work to do to combat lingering vestiges of the orchestrated “mental enslavement” that was so much a feature of those long centuries of European-imposed slavery and colonisation.

David Comissiong is Barbados’ Ambassador to CARICOM. This article was submitted as a guest column.

Oteng-Gyasi (FP)