Sunday 9th August 2009 - LAST POST Doh! Just realised that family and friends had left some comments re this blog! I've emailed you all - if you haven't left any thoughts but want to, feel free, I'll respond to each and every one. I'll answer a few questions here, publicly, express some final thoughts and then occupy your time no more. Q: Why no mention of the weather? A: This is a personal thing - I think the weather is such a boring thing to talk about and...

Saturday 8th August 2009 London Stepping off the plane, making it through customs without getting stopped (wow!), jumping on the smooth Gatwick Express to Victoria - I thought about how different things may have been in this comparatively very, very, very rich country if the slave trade had simply never been; if the Europeans and the Africans had continued to trade on mutually beneficial terms as they had before enslaved Africans became commodities; if the slav...

Friday 7th August 2009 Kokrobitey Institute Home time. That is how I think of today as this course has been so school-oriented. Today is all about 'make sure your desks are tidy, have you got all your bits and pieces? get home safely boys and girls!' The Americans - who teach all over that country and not just one city like the Liverpool teachers or the Accra teachers - are leaving earliest and so our goodbyes are said at the obscene time of 6am. A sign o...

Thursday 6th August 2009 Our lecture today on Anti-slavery and the Abolition of the slave trade was a particularly interesting one. The sudden (and in historical terms, it was definitely sudden) switch that Britain made from being the leading nation in sending ships to and fro filled with enslaved Africans to becoming a nation that policed the seas ensuring other nations did NOT continue the trade is astounding. The reasons are also complicated and varied. Af...

Wednesday 5th August 2009 Today's excursion - to visit the house of a Jew who came over to Ghana … er … a long time ago - was generally agreed to not be as interesting as some of our excursions. Cochran married a Ghanaian woman and as his fifth generation descendants told us, he was eventually buried in the house we visited (not wanting to be buried in a Christian cemetery.) The Caribbeans among us are familiar with such stories and the lighter-skinned pr...