Monday 3rd August 2009

Today was a great day. Professor Yaw Bredwa-Mensah, a University of Ghana lecturer, took us around the house of a former plantation owner. Firstly, it was a surprise to many of us to find out that they even used to HAVE plantations in Ghana. Although the slave trade was a tad non-sensical - transferring labour across the seas instead of trying to install plantations in Africa - that was the way things were done. So to find out that there had been efforts to create plantations here was news to some. (These efforts partly failed as the Europeans were prone to tropical diseases.)

Secondly, the former plantation's owner's house had been restored in a pains-taking and time-consuming fashion and Professor Bredwa-Mensah spoke proudly and at length about cutting down the trees that had grown up in the midst of the house, using materials that would have been available at the time the house was originally built and using replica furniture and models to recreate the house in a historically true fashion.

While before this trip I would not be too worried about the historically 'correct' way a famous house or area had been restructured, mixing with all these historians has really taught me that this is really important and isn't it a shame that not everyone thinks so!

D