This home page should orient the reader before the archive asks for patience: what the project studies, why it matters, and where the argument begins.
jamestownetojamestowne.com
Jamestown, Virginia, USA → James Fort, Accra, Ghana
Both places are named for the same man.
This project reverses a historical direction of travel and asks what becomes visible when the Atlantic is crossed knowingly, not abstractly.
1 published
| 01 | ACT I: VIRGINIA — Point Comfort, Virginia |
jamestownetojamestowne.com — Gabriel Mahia
■ ACT I: VIRGINIA • JAMESTOWNETOJAMESTOWNE.COM • jamestownetojamestowne.com
Jamestown, Virginia, USA → James Fort, Accra, Ghana
There is a place called Point Comfort at the mouth of the James River in Virginia. In August 1619, a ship arrived there carrying twenty and odd Africans who had been seized from a Portuguese slave vessel in the Atlantic. They were sold to English colonists in exchange for food and supplies. The transaction was recorded. The names of the Africans were not.
I am an African. I am a Kenyan who came to Virginia in 2011, nearly four centuries after those first arrivals. I did not come on a ship. I came on a flight, with a passport, with paperwork that the country had agreed to honor. The conditions were different in every material sense. The geography was the same.
The reverse crossing is this: to travel from Jamestown, Virginia — the place where the African presence in what became the United States begins — to James Fort in Accra, Ghana, which is one of the departure points from which enslaved Africans were shipped across the Atlantic. To make the journey in the direction they were taken from. To arrive at the place they left. To complete, voluntarily and in full consciousness, the circuit that was broken in the seventeenth century.
This project began with a question I could not answer easily: what does it mean to be an African who came to America willingly, who served in its military, who built a life in its suburbs, who used its food pantries and bought his first car from a Honda dealership in Manassas, and who now lives in Nairobi — what does it mean to stand at Point Comfort and look at the water from which that history came?
I do not have the answer. I have the journey. This series of twenty-four essays, written over six years, is the attempt to find out what the answer is by making the crossing and recording what it shows me. The first act is Virginia. I am starting at the arrival point because the arrival point is where I am.