Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann

• Africa Institute

Slavery in Africa dates to antiquity. Slave trading networks in Africa transported people across the Sahara and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, with significant numbers of people sent to the Middle East, India, central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia. Africa, however, was not only a source of export of people; enslaved persons were also imported...

Timbuktu looms large in Western scholarship and popular imagination as the definitive counter argument to a portrait of African societies unable to generate their own history, their own narratives of change and civilizational achievement, prior to European imperial and colonial encounters. As such this city of scholars and their connections with re...

In the nineteenth century, Islamic talismans traversed extensive trans-Saharan African trade routes, as part of a global scale of networks, circulating widely in Asante, illustrating the movement of people, objects, texts, ideas, and imaginaries. This chapter examines nineteenth-century Islamic talismans in Asante in order to open up a set of quest...

Inspired by a conversation with Doran Ross (1947–2020), a leading African art scholar and curator who revolutionized the field of African art, this article discusses the adventures of fieldwork – in particular, its unpredictable nature. More specifically, it presents my experiences conducting an archaeological ethnography of nineteenth-century Isla...

This chapter explores the ways in which President Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings employed heritage tourism to advance socio-economic development in Ghana. In the 1990s, Rawlings attempted to reconcile the neoliberal economic demands of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and international governments, with his government’s socialist...

Anas Aremeyaw Anas has been called Africa’s “most notorious” journalist. ¹ He has produced documentaries extensively about human rights and corruption in Africa. As an undercover investigator, he is infamous for working in disguise. Operating under the mantra, “name, shame, and jail,” Anas describes himself as a “modern day crime fighter.” Anas has...

In the African postcolony, archaeological research and fieldwork engage with a variety of communities of connection. Therefore, a decolonizing archaeological heritage inquiry seeks a deeper engagement with an archaeological site’s living direct descendant constituencies. Privileging Danish-Ga direct descendant communities in a collaborative archaeo...

Condensed, concealed, inconspicuous material embodiments of mysticism, enchantment, and charisma, nineteenth-century Islamic talismans traveled the trans-Saharan caravan trade routes, circulating widely among the non-Muslim Asante, reflecting a tradition illustrative of the movement of people, objects, texts, ideas, and imaginations. Produced by mi...

This special issue examines the mobilization of heritage preservation concerns as part of different processes of construction of tradition in Muslim contexts. Through contributions from archaeological, ethnographic, historical, archival, visual, and discursive analysis in Afghanistan, Ghana, Mali, Bahrain, as well as in museum institutions elsewher...

The transatlantic slave trade and heritage lie at the center of Katrina Browne’s work as a filmmaker, writer and activist. Her film, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North (2008), which was received to critical acclaim, depicts the story of her family’s attempt to come to terms with their role in the history and legacies of the transatlan...

Professor James Kwesi Anquandah was Ghana’s first archaeologist. He was also the first Ghanaian to become head of the Archaeology Department at the University of Ghana, which was the first archaeology department in sub-Saharan Africa, established in 1951. Dedicating his life to Ghanaian archaeology, particularly during the difficult years in Ghana...

West African Islamic cultural heritage is recurrently overlooked or marginalized in scholarly, museological, and popular imaginaries, despite contemporary burgeoning Western attentiveness to Islam. Historically, Orientalists and/or Islamicists exclude West Africa, and anthropologists study West African Islam due to its alleged lack of written Arabi...

Material Explorations in African Archaeology, by Timothy Insoll , 2015. Oxford: Oxford University Press; ISBN 978-0-19-955006-7 hardback £90; viii + 480 pp., 76 b/w illus, 17 tables - Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann