Day: September 27, 2018

The city of New Orleans has unveiled a smartphone app tour of sites involved in the slave trade during the 18th and 19th centuries, including the pre-Civil War years during which the city was the nation’s largest slave market. 

The project, officially launched on Thursday, is affiliated with New Orleans’ tricentennial celebrations. It comes as cities around the country are shining an unblinking light on slavery and racial violence through such projects as a slavery museum outside New Orleans, an Alabama memorial to victims of lynchings, and the preservation of slave cemeteries. 

In announcing the app at a news conference, African-American Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the New Orleans Slave Trade Marker and App Project “will let us honor the lives and dignity of those ancestors who were undoubtedly bought and sold here.” 

The city’s Tricentennial Commission reached out to Erin Greenwald, then curator at the Historic New Orleans Commission, and historian Joshua Rothman of the University of Alabama, after they wrote an opinion piece in 2016 “calling out New Orleans for being behind other southern cities” in recognizing “difficult history,” Greenwald said.

The piece noted that Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama; Charleston, South Carolina; and Memphis, Tennessee, all had historical markers noting slavery, Reconstruction or Civil Rights troubles, but New Orleans had nothing to indicate that 135,000 people of color had been sold there as slaves. 

The app has been available for about two months. It includes more than two hours of recorded segments including historical descriptions and readings from interviews with and writings by former slaves.

It opens by naming 11 children — Bill, Isaac, John, Monroe, Lewis, Washington, Robert, Phyllis, Elizabeth, Mary and Lovie — sent from Norfolk, Virginia, to the New Orleans slave market on the ship Ajax in September 1835.

“Ripped from their families, their communities and their homes, they were among more than 1 million enslaved people forcibly relocated” from Maryland, Virginia, Washington and North Carolina to lower Southern states between 1808, when the United States banned the international slave trade, and the end of the Civil War, a narrator states.

In a later segment, an actor reads from a Federal Writers Project interview in 1937 with Virginia Bell, who was born enslaved near Opelousas.

“My mother’s name was Della. That was all, just Della,” she begins. She tells about her father, “sold away” from a wife and five children in Virginia. “I don’t know what became of his family back in Virginia, because when we was freed, he stayed with us,” she said.

The stops include five with markers created for this project — a sixth is underway — and two with markers created by another group. Unlike state historic markers, those made for the project are mounted directly on buildings and topped with the project’s logo: a black man, woman and child around an auction block behind which a white man has raised a gavel. 

If all the stops are taken in their listed order, the tour covers nearly 4 miles (6.4 kilometers), including more than a mile of backtracking. A map navigation button can be used to find nearby sites, with pop-up boxes to show each site’s name. That in turn will show an image, a list of audio tracks for the site, and directions to the next. 
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Earlier this year, two artists in Leesburg, Virginia, founded an art space where they could work and teach other art lovers as well. Part retail business, part studio, Clay and Metal Loft helps aspiring local artists gain the skills and confidence needed to start their own business. But, as Faiza Elmasry tells us, the founders have a bigger dream, they want their space to energize the community. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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The National Gallery of Indonesia is usually associated with such artists as Raden Saleh, Affandi and other icons of the nation’s artistic history. This month it plays host to the works of asylum seekers and refugees in an exhibition entitled Berdiam/Bertandang, which means Stay/Visit.

With about 13,800 people identified as “persons of concern” by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) residing in Indonesia, the exhibit aims to raise awareness of their plight while they wait in an uncertain and increasingly prolonged “transit.”

The exhibition is partly the culmination of a program called Art for Refuge, established by 16-year-old Indonesian high school student Katrina Wardhana, to teach art to children and young people at the Jakarta-based Roshan Learning Center for refugees. 

“I felt art was like a really powerful tool where refugees in Indonesia can share their stories,” she told VOA.

Many from Afghanistan

About half of the refugees in Indonesia are from Afghanistan. Mumtaz Khan Chopan, a professional artist who arrived in Indonesia in 2013 and whose paintings were part of Berdiam/Bertandang, said being an artist in Afghanistan holds extreme risks. There are few art institutions, he said, restricting opportunities to “go and practice and talk to likeminded people, artists.” 

“Most of the people in Afghanistan believe that art is not a valuable thing,” he added. “Not only valuable, it’s not even allowed … but this does not mean that Afghanistan doesn’t have art.”

Binam, a 17-year-old from Afghanistan whose name has been changed to protect his identity, came to Indonesia three years ago as an unaccompanied minor and lives in a shelter provided by the UNHCR. He learned photography as part of Art for Refuge and his work appeared in Berdiam/Bertandang. 

“It’s my first work, exhibition and it’s a big exhibition,” he said. “I feel proud.”

​Stuck in Indonesia

Indonesia has historically been a transit country for refugees seeking asylum in third countries, particularly Australia. While Indonesia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, it also does not deport asylum seekers and refugees back to potential danger. Jakarta’s historical approach to refugees has been described by anthropologist Antje Missbach as a form of “benign neglect.”

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo in January 2017 signed a presidential decree that for the first time acknowledged the presence of a refugee community in Indonesia as distinct from “illegal immigrants” and gave directives to various government institutions regarding their respective responsibilities in managing humanitarian aid. They continue to be denied the right to work, however, and opportunities for formal education are limited.

Moreover, resettlement in third countries such as Australia, the United States and Canada are increasingly unavailable to refugees residing in Indonesia. As of late 2017, the UNHCR reportedly began telling the refugee community there that resettlement elsewhere was highly unlikely for at least 10 to 15 years, if ever. 

“We have to live in shelter[s] because in here we can’t work,” Binam said. “And now there is no resettlement for the refugee from other countries.”

According to UNHCR data, 269 out of almost 4,000 refugee children in Indonesia are enrolled in accredited national schools. The work of the Roshan Learning Center and other community-led education initiatives are therefore vital. Mitra Salima Suryono, a spokesperson for UNHCR Jakarta, told VOA that “by doing such activities, it’s good because it keeps their hopes alive. What’s more important is that friendship between Indonesians and the refugees are getting tighter with initiatives like this.”

Building relationships

The main goal of Art for Refuge is boosting understanding about refugees in the broader community, said Wardhana, its founder.

“Having just found out about refugees only quite recently after my involvement at Roshan, I realized how unaware and un-talked-about the issue is here in Indonesia,” she said.

Chris Bunjuman, a photographer who taught teenagers through the program, encouraged his students to attend a public festival in Jakarta and take photos of 40 people with mustaches as an assignment. 

“Most of the time they always stay in the same community … they don’t really interact with people around them because of the language barrier,” he said. “Those assignments really pushed them, with their thinking … eventually they got out of their comfort zone.”

Alia Swastika, the curator of Berdiam/Bertandang, said that “the problem in Indonesia is that when we discuss about refugees they always think, ‘Oh, we have many other different problems that need to be solved and these are more related to Indonesian people themselves.’”

“People in Indonesia they are educated, of course they are very nice, but there is one thing they don’t know much about refugee[s] … what they are doing here,” said Chopan, the Afghan artist, who says he has found empowerment through the creative scene in Indonesia. “If I introduce myself to a person that I am a refugee, I get different reaction to if I say I am an artist.”
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After a months-long ban because of its lesbian love theme, the Kenyan film “Rafiki,” which means “friend” in Swahili, premiered for the first time in Nairobi following a Kenyan high court decision to allow the screening of the controversial film. VOA correspondent Mariama Diallo reports.
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The late reggae legend Bob Marley once sang: “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” For a young Kurdish immigrant living in San Diego, Marley’s observation rings true. Blind since birth, the young musician says music washes away his pain. VOA’s Lukman Ahmad visited the talented musician in San Diego, California, and filed this report, narrated by Bezhan Hamdard.
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