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6. Open Secrets and Sequestered Stories: A Diary about Family, Slavery, and Self in Southeastern Ghana African family histories that openly and fully acknowledge the slave origins of specific individuals are notoriously difficult to obtain. Why this is the case throughout much of West Africa has been discussed perhaps most thoroughly by the anthropologist Bayo Holsey.1 In her study of memories of slavery in Ghana, she indicates that even at the turn of the twenty-first century, the historical reality of domestic slavery exists largely as a “public secret.” Everyone not only knows that it existed, but often can identify people in the community if not in their own families who are descendants of slaves. But despite this knowledge the topic is strictly sequestered from discourse.2 Holsey pays particular attention to the open secrets maintained today by the elderly descendants of slave owners because it is often only they who know the origins of individual members within the family.3 Making public a person’s slave origins, as Holsey indicates, would not only “violate ‘traditional’ legal and social codes of behavior, it would insult those individuals [identified].” Accordingly, such knowledge is consciously withheld so as to maintain family unity. But what was the situation in the late nineteenth century, when slavery had only recently been abolished? What did the children and grandchildren of the once enslaved know of their social origins? What did they do with that knowledge? How did it affect their life choices, their social positions within their families, their status as citizens in their home communities, their understandings of themselves, and their future possibilities? Tentative answers to these questions can be found in the diaries maintained by those of slave descent who used their Western education in missionary schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to record their thoughts and experiences. Scholarly studies of the diaries kept by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Africans—whether free or of slave descent—have emphasized the extent to Paul Sands’s diary 140 which the writers—who were introduced to this form by European missionaries —used the genre for their own purposes. Among European Pietists, for example , diary keeping was traditionally “a way to recognize and acknowledge Providence” [i.e., the hand of God] in their lives. By recording events they considered notable, they constructed an understanding of themselves and their experiences that conformed to their own notions about the self and the world in which they lived. It might be written most as a document for personal use or one to be shared with others; it often served to facilitate spiritual enquiry, but it could also be used as a forum for complaint or commentary.4 Most individuals in West Africa who adopted this form for themselves used the diary (like many in Europe ) to reinforce ideas about their own identities and place in society. But in colonial Africa, in particular, diarists—especially those from the middle and lower ranks of the educated elite: teachers, clerks, and artisans—often also revealed great “cultural insecurity” about the positions they held within their communities .5 Their limited educational backgrounds provided them with fewer opportunities than lawyers and doctors had to obtain the wealth they needed to secure a place among their more elite fellow Africans. At the same time, opportunities for success in business were few. Those of slave descent found even more challenging circumstances. In her biography of the Nigerian Akinpelu Obisesan, for example, Ruth Watson noted that Obisesan’s father obtained an Ibaden chieftancy in 1893. This, in turn, placed Obisesan in the position of being identified as his father’s potential successor. But Akinpelu’s mother was a slave.6 It was this additional social fact that pushed Obisesan to focus his energies and his selfidentity on becoming a “modern man of means” within the British colonial system in early twentieth-century Nigeria, rather than trying to succeed his father. He enrolled in and obtained an education from a school run by the Church Missionary Society. There he learned English and accounting, among other subjects, and thereafter worked as the family secretary, managing their land holdings and serving as his family’s principal liaison with the colonial government. In his own mind, however, Obisesan never achieved the success he had hoped for himself. He failed to make the kind of money that would have elevated him into the ranks of the most prestigious educated Africans. Even more interesting is that he blamed his lack...

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