Black history month 2022

Day 3 of Black History Month

In Denmark, it was a rarity 300 years ago, to see black and brown people.

But as Denmark gained colonies around the world, including in Ghana and the West Indies, over the years a group of children with a skin color different from the one they were used to, arrived on Danish soil.

One of these children was Christian Protten

Christian Protten was born in 1715 in the area around Fort Christiansborg, one of Denmark’s colonies in Africa, what we know today as Ghana, which was then called the Gold Coast by Europeans. He was the son of a Danish soldier of modest means and a wealthy woman of the Ga people who inhabited the area around the Danish fort in West Africa.

In 1726, Christian was sent to Copenhagen with another child. The decision to leave the country of his birth was not his own, and with that journey from Africa to Europe began a very special personal journey.

Christian Protten was chosen at the age of 11 to travel to Copenhagen with another Danish-African boy. The absolute monarch, Frederik IV, took a great interest in the boys and even stood godfather to them when they were baptized shortly after their arrival.

With his arrival in Copenhagen, Christian Protten became one of the first “non-white” people to set foot in Denmark.

It is easy to imagine that for Christian Protten, the question of identity, race and cultural belonging was as present as it is for many today.

At least according to Gunvor Simonsen, a historian at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of a map of Protten’s life, in which she has tried to understand how he lived and understood his life in colonial society through his letters and diaries.

“There was no recipe for how a Euro-African should behave in the world that came in the wake of colonialism and slavery. And the ways Euro-Africans chose to relate to their cultural heritage were profoundly different.”

His connections at court enabled Christian Protten to study theology at the University of Copenhagen, where he enrolled in 1732.

A few years later, he was introduced to Pietist Christianity, which helped lead him around the Danish colonies and trading enclaves as an ardent missionary of the Christian message.

Christian Protten made it through his adult life both to the West Indies and back to his native West Africa, where he experienced first-hand how skin color was a crucial social factor.

– Christian Protten was a university graduate who had worked at the top of society in Denmark and spoke Danish, German, Dutch and a number of African languages. Yet he was confronted with the fact that Africans lived as slaves in the colonized world.

Among other things, he had to face the fact that the term ‘mulatto’ had given him opportunities in life, while for others the word meant a life of slavery. His diaries and letters show that this was a difficult experience for Christian Protten.

Christian Protten spent most of the last years of his life in the town of Osu at Fort Christiansborg on the Gold Coast. It was his hope that in his homeland he could create a society where there was room for him as a Euro-African Christian man.

Christian Protten had been in West Africa in the 1730s, and he had to admit then that he was not indispensable to the Danes. So, when he returned to Ghana in the 1750s, he turned to his African family. Here he found a place. With close ties to the local elites behind him, Christian Protten suddenly found that he once again had a voice among the Danes at Fort Christiansborg. The local connections gave him power, because he now acted as an intermediary between the Danes and the elite of the Ga people.

He had a vision of how to create the future. He believed there was a bright future for Euro-Africans with their mixed backgrounds.

He started writing dictionaries between Danish and the African languages Akan and Ga. He believed it was important for children of color to have access to all the learning and knowledge contained in Danish schoolbooks. The dictionaries would help with this, because the children’s mother tongue was now the medium of instruction.

In order to find his footing in life, he first had to decide how he wanted to live as a Euro-African in Africa.

Although some would argue that Christian Protten’s cultural and racial background did not stand in his way growing up, he still found that in the transatlantic world he was forced to deal with the issue of race. This is something some people in Denmark with mixed backgrounds would still recognize in 2022

https://www.dr.dk/historie/danmarkshistorien/saadan-var-livet-en-af-danmarks-foerste-brune-maend

Leave a Comment

en_USEnglish