Princess Town

Princess Town, Ghana, 2005

Princess TownPrincess Town, Ghana, 2006

I honestly don´t remember why I took this picture, because I rarely take pictures of people that I don´t know. This is a snapshot of a man standing in direct midday sunlight. For a snapshot, the lighting situation and the circumstance, that I normally don´t like taking these sort of photos, it´s not a bad picture. The unfavorable light from above stands in contrast to the otherwise nice color combination of his traditional shirt, the wooden window frame and the plants in the background.

The picture was taken from inside Fort Fredericksburg (Groß Friedrichsburg), the only German colonial fort along the former Gold Coast in present-day Ghana. It was actually first a Brandenburg, then a Prussian settlement, a confusing little fact from those confusing times before the unification of dozens of German miniature states into one nation. It was a wonder the whole thing worked out, since Brandenburg didn´t have a sizeable fleet of its own. They leased two ships from a Dutch merchant (in 1680 the Dutch had the largest fleet of any seafaring nations  - around 16,000 ships, as opposed to the 28 ships that Brandenburg had) and it was this merchant who offered expertise and personnel for the undertaking. Eventually they landed at a spot along the Gold Coast that hadn´t already been occupied by Portuguese, British, Dutch, Swedish or Danish colonial forces. Ironically the biggest rivals for the Germans under Dutch organization were the - Dutch. There were even some skirmishes and one of the two ships was confiscated by the Dutch. But then a contract was signed between the Brandenburg officials and local Ahanta Chiefs, establishing trade conditions including slave trade, and the settlement was stable, successful and thrived. After only 34 years the German States withdrew from the Gold Coast, selling the settlement to the - Dutch.

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