West Indian influences in Ghana - An African who returned
The Member of Parliament (MP) for Essikado/Ketan, MR Joe Ghartey, will launch a book about a man whose great grandchildren may well have been his playmates in his teens – without knowing it at 4 p.m today.
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At Essikado, about 200 metres from Nana Nketsia’s palace, is a house belonging to the Christian family (no pun intended).
For one week after I was contacted to write this piece about the book - RETURNED EXILE, BIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE JAMES CHRISTIAN 1869-1940 - I made some checks and one revelation that came through was that this ‘Christian’ family traced its ancestry to a West Indian “who became a big man in the Gold Coast”.
A week ago, I made a call to a lady in Germany who had a child in the late 1960s by a man from Sekondi, with ‘Christian’ as his surname. I also spoke to that child, currently domiciled in the UK. Neither she nor her mother had ever been struck by the uniqueness of that name to question the ancestry of the man in their lives.
The link
I cannot wait to meet with Mrs Estelle M. Appiah, the granddaughter of a West Indian called ‘Christian’, the woman who co-authored this book. She may help to establish the link.
The search for this link with the Christians of Essikado, however, is not why I have cancelled all previous appointments so I can make it to the British Council launch at 4 p.m today. I am Pan Africanist at heart and one of my habits is reading about men and women whose bravery, determination and actions gifted us with freedom from colonialism.
From what I read about this man, I can afford to stretch my imagination to give him credit as one of the great grand- forefathers of the OAU (now African Union). As a Law student in the UK, he attended the first Pan African conference held in London in 1900, at which meeting ,the seeds of Pan Africanism were sown and of which Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta et al later became a part.
That is not the only reason why I cannot miss this afternoon’s launch. Professor John Collins, the only white man who teaches highlife at the University of Ghana, has a book in which he chronicles the history of highlife music. His research has established that the highlife which Ghanaians of today are proud to call our own, is a cross-fertilisation of the indigenous ‘adaha’ music of the people of the Gold Coast and musical influences from West Indies brought into the Gold Coast by their sailors.
Not only that. I am curious to know what there was about the Gold Coast that an African was prepared to leave his slave home-country (the West Indies) and choose to make here his home after studying Law in the UK. He was not the only one. Roman Catholics in Ghana know another - Bishop Joseph Oliver Bowers - who migrated to the Gold Coast shortly before Christian’s death in 1940. Bishop Bowers died in Ghana in 2012 at the age of 102. There is a school around Laterbiokorshie, Accra, named after him.
From the little I have garnered from reviews and blurbs which the book has attracted on the Internet, this man, George James Christian, must have been an extraordinary being with a personality so huge that more than 20 years after his migration to the Gold Coast, he got elected to serve on the Legislative Council for ten years, succeeding Casely-Hayford, in 1930.
The seed
This book is the result of 40 years of friendship between Mrs Estelle Appiah and Dr Margaret Rouse-Jones, a historian/librarian from Trinidad. The seed was first sown in their minds 30 years ago. It was watered with information obtained through trips to archives in Accra, Cape Coast, Sekondi, the National Archives in London and Colindale Library, as well as to Grays Inn and Dominica.
George James Christian must have been an amazing man indeed. Leaving his native Dominica at the age of 30, he studied Law at Gray’s Inn, London. After qualifying as a barrister in 1902, he set out to make a new life for himself in the Gold Coast.
My own conclusion is that this man knew that his life, from 1898-1940, was going to qualify to be part of history one day, so he kept records of all his documented actions, speeches and decisions. From these, a special collection of more than 5,000 of what have become known as the “George James Christian Papers” were donated by his granddaughter, Estelle, to the University of the West Indies in 2005.
Finally, with funding by Republic Bank – the Trinidadian bank that took over Ghana’s HFC Bank - the seed became a tree whose fruit, RETURNED EXILE, BIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE JAMES CHRISTIAN 1869-1940, was published by the University of the West Indies Press in December 2016.