By Hafsa Obeng
Accra, May 8, GNA – Some students from the Washington and Lee University, in the City of Lexington in Virginia in the United States of America (USA), have paid a courtesy call on the Ga East Municipal Chief Executive, Mrs Elizabeth Kaakie Mann, in Accra.
The 18 students have been in the country on an educational tour led by Dr. Stephanie Sanberg, an Assistant Professor of the School.
In a brief remark, the team leader, Dr. Sanberg, informed the MCE that their visit was primarily to help the students acquaint themselves with the history of slavery in Ghana.
Dr Sanberg, who first came to Ghana in 2009, indicated that her former school, Calvin College in Grand Rapids Michigan, had a relationship with the Ga East Municipality through a Sister-City Relationship programme between the two, Ga East and Grand Rapids.
“Through the Sister-City Relationship programme with Grand Rapids, Calvin College adopted Adenkrebi and offered various volunteer services whenever students from the school came to Ghana, including stocking of their library with books and other learning and teaching materials, teaching, and painting of the school buildings, among others, while staying in the community.”
He appealed for a similar relationship with the City of Lexington.
Mrs Mann welcomed the students and emphasised the importance of Sister-City relationships and promised to ensure the formalisation of same with the City of Lexington.
She said the Assembly would focus on education, health, sanitation, tourism, and culture under the relationship
Mrs Mann led the team to visit the Frederiksgave Plantation and Common Heritage Site at Sesemi, about 3 kilometres from the Assembly Offices at Abokobi.
They were welcomed to the museum by Nii Akoto, Gyasetse of Sesemi, who conducted the team around the facility, highlighting the story behind the slave plantation established by the Danes in 1831, which was later discovered by an Archeologist at the University of Ghana, Dr. Yaw Bredwa-Mensah in 1997.
He said the National Museum of Denmark, in 2005, in collaboration with Dr. Bredwa-Mensah, Prof. Henrik Breuning Madsen, and Ecological Laboratories (ECOLAB) at the University of Ghana, launched the Common Heritage Project and later excavated the buildings of Frederiksgave, which was among eleven slave plantations established by the Danes in the Municipality during the slave trade in the Gold Coast era.
GNA