Adjoa Armah on Black cartography and the spirit that returns

In an essay for Afterall, writer-in-residence Adjoa Armah explores alternative cartographies rooted in Black geographies and African cosmologies. She recounts traveling to Princes Town, Akwidaa, Dixcove, and Butre in Ghana, tracing routes between colonial forts—Fort Fredericksburg, Fort Dorothea, Fort Metal Cross, and Fort Batenstein—and reflecting on how maps are infused with time, power, and possibility. Armah draws on the work of Johannesburg-based artist Nolan Oswald Dennis, whose systems-based approach treats drawing as a way to equalize and equivocate, and Philadelphia-based Black Quantum Futurism (BQF), initiated by Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa, which uses quantum physics to open up elsewheres and elsewhens. She cites Ntone Edjabe's call for an Africa-centred cartography that requires hands, feet, hearts, and memory. The essay's title comes from a local saying: the Fante word for the sea means 'the spirit that returns,' reflecting the belief that whatever is given to the sea comes back. Armah's journey began at the point Latitude 0° Longitude 0° Altitude 0°, the nowhere that is the center of the world's surface, set to Greenwich Mean Time because the British were best at sea.