A Little Piece of Brazil in Ghana
One of the many murals surrounding Brazil House
To enter Jamestown, the heart of old Accra, is to step slightly back into time. Gone are the skyscrapers and shiny new developments of downtown Accra. Instead, densely populated Jamestown is full of small shacks and shops with corrugated-iron roofs interspersed with pieces of colonial history and lively exclamations in Ga.
While Jamestown might be poor, it is rich in history. Two of the most striking landmarks are Fort James, a former British trading post turned prison, and the Jamestown lighthouse, built during the 1930s. While these two tourist attractions might garner the most attention during the popular Jamestown walking tours, it was a third building - Brazil House - that immediately caught my eye on a recent visit to the area. After learning tidbits about the house's history from my friend Mike, I was eager to learn more about its history.
The bright yellow Brazil House was built by the Tabom (also spelled Tabon) people – an Afro-Brazilian community of former slave returnees who arrived in West Africa on the S.S. Salisbury after the Malê Revolt of 1835 in Bahia. Approximately 10,000 former slaves returned to West Africa from 1835 onwards. From Lagos' "Brazilian Quarter" to Benin's "Ecole Bresil" and the plethora of families with Brazilian names like Souza, Silva, Cardoso, Da Costa, Gomez, and Costa, traces of this history can be found throughout the region.
While some Afro-Brazilians settled in communities in Togo and Nigeria, they received a particularly warm welcome in Ghana. The Gas, one of the most hospitable ethnic groups in Ghana, readily offered the new arrivals a tract of land in the area now known as Jamestown. The returnees were known as the Tabom people because when they arrived in coastal Ghana, they could speak only Portuguese, so they greeted each other with “Como esta?” (How are you?) and replied with “Ta bom." Over time, the seven original Tabom families integrated into Ghanaian society by marrying local people.
With their arrival, the Tabom brought many useful agricultural skills such as superior mango, cassava and beans techniques. Having been exposed to the European, African and Amerindian cultures in their native Brazil, they synthesized knowledge from each culture and also brought valuable skills such as irrigation, architectural design, and tailoring to Ghana. The Taboms founded the the First Scissors House in 1854, the first tailoring shop in the country, which once provided uniforms for the Ghanaian Army.
In 1999, recognizing the historical value of Brazil house, local and international groups began to renovate it. Following Brazilian President Lula’s visit to Ghana in 2005, the Brazilian Embassy leveraged financial support for further repairs from the Brazilian and Ghanaian private sector. Today, the house has been completely restored with a museum of Tabom history on the ground floor.
Since 2001, the Right to Abode Act has given members of the African diaspora - including Afro-Brazilians - the right to live and work in Ghana. While there may be some red tape, the restoration of Brazil House and the passage of the Right to Abode Act reflect the renewed interest in solidifying the relationship between Africa and its diaspora.
'To An English Friend in Africa': Okri and the Void
I first read Okri's The Famished Road in high school. At the time, I was enamored with magical realism, the poetic, fantastical writing style of Latin American heavyweights like Gabriel García Márquez and Isabelle Allende. The Famished Road explores a life in-between - the void in this case being life or death. The navigation of antipodes is a common theme that runs throughout my life and a theme that appears frequently in Okri's work.
"To An English Friend in Africa"
Be grateful for freedom
To see other dreams.
Bless your loneliness as much as you drank
Of your former companionships.
All that you are experiencing now
Will become moods of future joys
So bless it all.
Do not think your ways superior
To another’s
Do not venture to judge
But see things with fresh and open eyes
Do not condemn
But praise what you can
And when you can’t be silent.
Time is now a gift for you
A gift of freedom
To think and remember and understand
The ever perplexing past
And to re-create yourself anew
In order to transform time.
Live while you are alive.
Learn the ways of silence and wisdom
Learn to act, learn a new speech
Learn to be what you are in the seed of your spirit
Learn to free yourself from all things that have moulded you
And which limit your secret and undiscovered road.
Remember that all things which happen
To you are raw materials
Endlessly fertile
Endlessly yielding of thoughts that could change
Your life and go on doing for ever.
Never forget to pray and be thankful
For all the things good or bad on the rich road;
For everything is changeable
So long as you live while you are alive.
Fear not, but be full of light and love;
Fear not but be alert and receptive;
Fear not but act decisively when you should;
Fear not, but know when to stop;
Fear not for you are loved by me;
Fear not, for death is not the real terror,
But life -magically – is.
Be joyful in your silence
Be strong in your patience
Do not try to wrestle with the universe
But be sometimes like water or air
Sometimes like fire
Live slowly, think slowly, for time is a mystery.
Never forget that love
Requires that you be
The greatest person you are capable of being,
Self-generating and strong and gentle-
Your own hero and star.
Love demands the best in us
To always and in time overcome the worst
And lowest in our souls.
Love the world wisely.
It is love alone that is the greatest weapon
And the deepest and hardest secret.
So fear not, my friend.
The darkness is gentler than you think.
Be grateful for the manifold
Dreams of creation
And the many ways of unnumbered peoples.
Be grateful for life as you live it.
And may a wonderful light
Always guide you on the unfolding road.
Stateless in the Dominican Republic: Lessons from Côte d'Ivoire
Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers of Haitian descent are now stateless and risk imminent deportation if they failed to meet today's deadline to register their residency in the Dominican Republic.
Animosity between Dominicans and Haitians dates back to the early 19th century when Haiti invaded the Dominican Republic, liberated the slaves and encouraged free blacks from the United States to settle there. Dominican Independence Day does not celebrate independence from Spain, but independence from Haiti in 1844.
As Rachel Nolan notes in her excellent Harper's piece on the fraught relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, "Haitian immigrants in the D.R. do the menial jobs that most Dominican citizens try to avoid: construction, harvesting fruits and vegetables, cutting sugarcane, cleaning homes, and nannying children."
Since the early 2000s, Dominican authorities have changed national policies on nationality and applied those changes retroactively in a manner that discriminates against Dominicans of Haitian descent. On September 23, 2013, the highest court in the Dominican Republic ruled that people born after 1929 could only be granted citizenship if they had at least one Dominican parent. As part of its ruling, the court also ordered the Central Electoral Board to thoroughly examine country’s civil registry and birth records to remove from them all persons supposedly wrongly registered and recognized as Dominican citizens. After international outcry, the President presented a bill that stating that children born to foreign parents could be citizens, provided they have Dominican government identification documents and are in the civil registry.
But even with these changes, many Dominicans of Haitian descent continue to face obstacles to have their citizenship fully recognized. In the aforementioned Harper's piece Nolan notes:
The following year, the path to citizenship was made open, if less clear, for the afectados. Under a new law, passed in May 2014, afectados fell into two groups. Those who had been inscribed in the civil registry and issued birth certificates before the Sentence, like Deguis, could be “accredited” as Dominican citizens, which would give them the right to I.D. cards and passports. This group includes about 24,000 people. Those afectados, however, who were born in the Dominican Republic before 2007 but did not have a birth certificate were required to embark on a complicated, uncertain application for naturalization. First they had to prove their birthplace by providing one of four acceptable documents, such as a signed statement from a midwife or witnesses, then they had to apply through the regularization plan. The majority of afectados thus found themselves in a similar position to Haitians who crossed the border more than four years ago, never mind that they had once counted as citizens. The law requires that beginning this June, all immigrants and afectados who have not completed the application, or whose applications have been denied, will be deported.
An optimist might hope that what began as a Dominican court’s massive experiment in denationalization might end in the Dominican government’s massive experiment in naturalization. But difficulties immediately became clear. Even the lucky group of 24,000 afectados with birth certificates had to obtain their I.D. cards from the Junta Central Electoral, the same body that had been denying such papers for years. The protest group reconoci.do has documented at least 150 instances in which afectados in this group were illegally denied papers. The day that I met Deguis, she had been turned down and told she needed to apply at a different office. Deguis finally got her I.D. card on August 1 of last year. For the first time in six years, she could work legally. She received a passport a few weeks later, but it is still not clear whether she will be able to register her four children as citizens.
The Dominican government may have intended for this regularization path to serve as a window of opportunity, however, the onerous documentary requirements have proved difficult to navigate. For example, to complete the naturalization process, applicants must have an open, active bank account. In the bayetes, the isolated sugar company towns on the border of Haiti and the D.R., most of the applicants are poor, illiterate, and/or lack the necessary documentation to open a bank account in the first place. The government must develop other strategies to verify birth and long-term residence that poor, under-resourced communities can follow.
In a 2013 LA Times op-ed authors Mark Kurlansky, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz lay out the possibilities of what lies ahead for this population: "Will [Dominicans of Haitian descent] retreat into hiding, submit to the old conditions of near-slavery in Dominican agro-industry or desperately attempt escape on boats, as reports from Puerto Rico suggest they are already doing?"
If you do not have papers, you cannot have a business, travel, drive, or even get married.
While the Dominican Republic must tackle administrative obstacles to ensure that Dominicans of Haitian descent with the requisite documents can process their paperwork, the government also has an obligation to address the plight of the nearly 200,000 Haitians who are unable to meet the documentary criteria. With the Haitian government lacking critical capacity and facing political upheaval ahead of its elections later this year, Haiti is unlikely to prove of much help in issuing documents or aiding in repatriation. The prospects for the soon-to-be stateless appear bleak.
For this latter group of Haitians, how can the government make headway in registration and naturalization while not creating a large group of stateless people? For solutions to that, I turn to Côte d'Ivoire.
The recent rhetoric around these events in the D.R. recall the xenophobic rhetoric of Ivorité and how it created a population of over one million stateless people in Côte d'Ivoire. Over 12.3% of Côte d'Ivoire is made up of migrants. Law No. 72-853 of December 21, 1972 excluded those who were born abroad - or whose parents were born abroad - from acquiring nationality. For the thousands of people who migrated in the 1950s to till the land, proving such heritage was nearly impossible. This law created a vast stateless population and continues to affect their children and grandchildren. The stateless are like ghosts in the community, present but not recognized.
In October 2013, a new law came in allowing people to declare their nationality. For identified stateless persons, Côte d'Ivoire granted nationality on the basis of birth in the territory and long-term residence. Foreign-born residents living in Côte d'Ivoire pre-independence became citizens along with their descendants. Foreign nationals born in Côte d'Ivoire between 1961 and 1973 and their children also qualified. Moreover, to reduce the risk of statelessness, the Ivorian government also reinforced civil registration mechanisms to ensure children are immediately registered after birth and created late birth registration procedures. To guarantee the successful implementation of these changes, Côte d'Ivoire utilized the services of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. In this manner, the Ivorian government managed to address their stateless problem by regularizing long-term residents and tightening procedures for future generations.
Despite its fraught history and ongoing turmoil, the Dominican Republic might consider implementing similar steps in order to avoid further uproar and to promote a more equitable and amicable relationship between the D.R. and Haiti.
Yale Class Day
I was honored to serve as the 2015 Yale Class Day Co-Chair, where I had the opportunity to meet with Vice President Biden, along with my fellow Co-Chair Jeremy, prior to his remarks.
Death in the Mediterranean
you have to understand
no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land.
-warsan shire
Nearly 2,000 people have drowned this year trying to get to Europe from the Middle East and Africa. Last weekend, an estimated 800 migrants trying to reach Europe drowned after their boat capsized off the Libyan coast. These desperate people are part of the largest mass migration since World War II.
Worldwide, the number of people forcibly displaced by conflict or persecution reached 51.2 million in 2014. A large number of those escaping across the Mediterranean come from Syria and Somalia — which, along with Afghanistan, produce more than half of all refugees worldwide —as well as Eritrea.
Each day, would-be migrants depart from Libya, with most heading for the Italian island of Lampedusa, the EU territory closest to Libya. They are packed into cramped rubber rafts and fishing boats where they spend hours or days hoping to be rescued before they sink. On the boats, migrants are often deprived of food and water and risk being thrown overboard if they get seasick.
For this perilous journey, human traffickers charge desperate migrants up to £1,300 each.
In a recent emergency conference, European leaders pledged to address the migrant crisis, however, proposals fall short of a serious confrontation of the ethical and human rights considerations at hand. While committing to sharply expanding maritime patrols in the Mediterranean and cracking down on traffickers, European leaders must consider strategies beyond repression and detention.
For the Syrians, Libyans, Somalis and Eritreans who comprise the majority of this migrant flow to central Europe, we should do what the world did for the Indochinese in the 1970s. We should issue a comprehensive plan for action. As the communist governments of Indochina fell, global powers assembled to offer refugees the opportunity to resettle with the possibility of future repatriation. In the United States, approximately 130,000 refugees from South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were allowed to enter the country under the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act. Across Europe, several other nations implemented similar legislation. Why not consider a similar plan for these refugees due to the sheer magnitude of their exodus?
For those with mixed motivations for migration (e.g. migrants from other North and Western African nations), instead of bowing to the nationalist rhetoric of many European political parties, it may be time to acknowledge the need for the reform of the immigration system to accommodate migrants at all skill levels.
Globalization cannot only focus on the movement of goods and ideas. We must develop better strategies to regulate the movement of people too.
This model, supported by François Crépeau, UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, offers the hope of a better life for people who have lived in nothing but chaos for the past few years. By creating such an action plan, Europe can reduce the number of deaths and, in turn, reduce the smuggling business model.
Considering the role that Western foreign policy has played in the destabilization of countries such as Syria and Libya, we have a moral imperative to develop strategies to cope with the political issues themselves as well as their related effects on the quality of human life.
