The Vision Behind the Museum
Emmanuel John
Agangzesum Awine
Emmanuel J. A. Awine is a historian, public interest scholar, and advocate from the Upper East Region of Ghana. His work begins where most histories of slavery end — not at the coast, but inland, in the communities that were raided, silenced, and left out of the record.
A PhD candidate in History at Johns Hopkins University, his research examines the intertwined histories of slavery, the slave trade, and colonialism in West Africa, with a particular focus on northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso.
The Research
Awine's fieldwork along the Voltaic frontier has produced something rare: direct access to living memory. Through sustained oral interviews and community engagement in raided communities across northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso, he has documented a landscape of memory that is at once deeply present and deliberately concealed. Many of the individuals he has worked with are direct victims and descendants of slave raiding — people who carry this history in their bodies and their social relations, and who have chosen silence not out of forgetting, but as an act of protection. Silence, in these communities, is a shield: against stigma, against the reopening of old fractures, against the exposure of identities still freighted with historical violence.
But Awine's research does not stop at silence. It also uncovers what has been buried beneath it: an archive of resistance. Stories of collective defense. Tactical ingenuity. Communities that fought back against slave raiders and expansionist states — and won. These histories of agency and survival exist in living oral tradition, yet they have been systematically excluded from the scholarly record, which has long centered on victimry over resilience and the Atlantic coast over the interior. Awine's work is a direct intervention in that imbalance. He argues that the inland histories of the slave trade — the sites of capture, not just departure — are indispensable to any honest account of what the Atlantic slave trade and domestic slavery were, what they did, and what they left behind.
The Museum
It was not a theory that gave rise to the Museum of Healing and Reconciliation. It was a conversation — and then many conversations. Beginning in mid-2025, Awine returned to the communities where he had conducted his research, this time not only as a scholar but as a listener with a proposition. He shared the concept of a museum. He asked what acknowledgment would mean to people who had protected their histories through silence. He asked what recognition would feel like to communities whose victories had never been recorded. The response was clear: there was a need that existing institutions were not meeting, and a willingness to meet it together.
The Museum of Healing and Reconciliation is the result of those consultations. It is a community-centered institution designed to document the histories of inland slave raiding, preserve oral traditions, and create an ethically grounded platform for dialogue — between affected communities and the global African diaspora, between historical scholarship and living memory, between the past and its long, unfinished aftermath. The museum does not seek simply to exhibit history. It seeks to do something more demanding: to create the conditions for acknowledgment, reparative reflection, and the kind of recognition that communities have long deserved but rarely received.
The project is closely aligned with Awine's doctoral research, including his scholarly interest in the politics of naming, memory, and identity formation in the wake of slavery. Both the dissertation and the museum challenge the familiar binaries of victim and perpetrator, complicity and resistance, and insist instead on the layered, contested, deeply human experiences of communities still living in the long shadow of historical violence.
