The museum at the Willow Hill Heritage and Renaissance Center will soon host a new exhibit. The opening event will be held Saturday, March 11, from 1-4pm, at the Center, located at 4235 Willow Hill Road in Portal.
Exhibit: The Waters of Ghana Reach to America
Date: Saturday, March 11, 2023
Time: 1-4 p.m.
This exhibit features a traditional Ghana fishing boat that was built by Fulbright scholar Ralph G. Brown.
Ghana is located in the Western African region known as the Gold Coast. It has a history of maritime cultural exchange from the time of early African kingdoms, the Atlantic Slave Trade, to modern times.
In 2004-2005, Brown traveled to Ghana and helped construct an ocean-going dugout canoe, also known as an ahima. In 2019 he donated the dugout canoe and a freshwater canoe, also built in Ghana, to the online Museum of Underwater Archaeology (MUA).
The MUA lent the boats to a graduate class in maritime public outreach at Georgia Southern University. Students in that class, under Dr. Kurt Knoerl, created both a physical and a digital exhibit about the ocean-going dugout canoe. As part of that class, the students interviewed Mr. Brown and used his photographs of the building process as well as tools from the project in the exhibit.
In 2023 the MUA donated the boats, tools, photographs, and oral history recordings to the Willow Hill Heritage and Renaissance Center so that the boats would be exhibited to the public.
The opening event will feature various speakers from Georgia Southern with Dr. Alvin D. Jackson, Board President of the Willow Hill Heritage and Renaissance Center as moderator:
Dr. T. Kurt Knoerl Ph.D., RPA
Assistant Professor of History
Director of the Museum of Underwater Archaeology
Georgia Southern, Armstrong Campus
Dr. Kwaku Nti
Associate Professor of History
Georgia Southern, Armstrong Campus
Dr. Maxine Bryant
Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology
Director of Center for Africana Studies
Georgia Southern, Armstrong Campus
Dr. Amir Jamal Touré
Resident Scholar
People's Historian
Geechee Kunda and Founder of Day Clean
For more information, please contact the Willow Hill museum at (912) 800-1467 or [email protected].
