Remembering the forgotten prince of Gambier

GAMBIER — It’s the stories that get away that haunt me.

I’ve made it my thing to rescue stories from the edge, before they dissolve into the dust of time.

But the truth is, some stories have already slipped into oblivion. It bothers me that a story that potentially may have had a world of meanings to tell us, can sometimes already be so far submerged into the murk of time, that it’s essentially lost.

The story of Kwaku Lebiete is a case in point.

In the 1400s, Portuguese explorers sailing along the western coast of Africa stopped periodically to explore.

Along the coast of what is today the nation of Ghana, they discovered some powerful tribes, including the Akuapem, Akyem, Bono, Akwamu, and the Asante, and it didn’t take them long to figure out the source of the local tribes’ power: This coastal lowland area is an outwash deposit area from the central Ghana highlands.

One of the notable things which washed out of these highlands and could be found in the rivers and sandy soils of the coast was gold. And so an opportunistic name was coined: The Gold Coast.

The Portuguese set up a fort and started brisk trading operations with the local tribes, which included the various tribes of the Akan people. Gold was the main interest, at first.

It drew new trading posts established by the Dutch, Swedish, Prussian, Danish, and English, as well. It wasn’t long before the gold was largely depleted, but that hardly mattered to the Europeans, because they had discovered a new kind of wealth: human gold.

They found that if they proposed to one of the tribes to capture tribal enemies and sell them to the Europeans, the tribes would gladly dispose of enemies this way. And thus a new trade in human beings emerged. One tribe would raid another and seize prisoners.

The prisoners would be bought by the Europeans and then taken elsewhere as slaves. As often as not, by the next time the Europeans came around, they could buy slaves from the other tribe, who were now raiding the first tribe.

After a time, the Europeans did away with the pretext of buying prisoners from tribes and just started seizing slaves themselves.

This was the slave trade that was a key piece of the foundation of the US southern agrarian economy.

While all this was going on, there continued to be tribal and political struggles along the Gold Coast.

Slowly but surely, the British gained control over other European colonies, and over most of the coastal natives as well. But after some internal wars in the late 1600s, a strong tribe emerged, known as the Asante (the rough European approximation was “Ashanti” for many years).

This dominant tribe of the Akan people took their name from the Twi language word for “warlike.” While the English subdued most other tribes quickly, they were not able to officially conquer the Asante until 1901.

As the English empire crumbled during the 20th century, the region was finally able to declare independence in 1957 as Ghana. The Asante remain the largest population of the country today.

Why do I bring up all this? Well, because a young African prince from the Gold Coast was sent to Gambier, as part of a missionary program, in the mid-1860s.

We are told that his given name was Kwaku Lebiete, and that the folks at the mission hoped to integrate him into local society by rechristening him “Samuel DeWitte” while he was here.

The boy had already begun studies with the missionaries in Africa, and those English colonists had connections with the English benefactors of the Episcopalian school of higher learning that had been established in the 1820s on the American frontier: Kenyon College.

Letters were written, connections were made, and young Kwaku, probably about twelve years old at the time, got on a ship headed for the U.S.

Unlike many of his compatriots, he traveled as a privileged guest, not a chained slave.

While I have not been able to find examples of the name “Lebiete” among the Asante, “Kwaku” is so common, it looks like it might function as a surname.

The king of the Asante from 1834 to 1867 was Kwaku Dua. This king, indeed, had a history of sending his sons abroad from education, in the hopes that they would later be able to assist him in diplomacy.

He sent a son named Kwasi Boakye to the Netherlands to study in 1849. Kwasi did so well in his studies as a mining engineer, that he got a job as a college professor in Delft, and later worked for the Dutch East India company.

Was Kwaku Lebiete of this family? As a “prince,” was he in line to the throne? It’s not easy to determine either of these questions.

First of all, Asante society was matrilineal, meaning that although Kwasi was a son of the king, he wasn’t in line for the throne. The next king would be determined through one of Kwaku Dua’s wives.

Although more documentation of this royal family survives than any other tribe of the African period, there’s not much.

It’s an additional fact that as the Asante were still maintaining independence from the British, the Asante royal family may have had no interest in sending one of their sons to a mission at an Episcopalian college in America that was closely associated with the British.

Could Kwaku Lebiete have been from one of the tribes already subdued by the British?

One of the chief rivals of the Asante was the Fante Confederacy, a group of smaller tribes that united under leadership of a ruling council and warlord, rejecting a ruling king.

They consisted of many tribes, including the Fante, Acron, Asebu, Agona, Fetu, Assin, Akwamu, Wassa, Twifo, Denkyira, Nzima, Akyem, and more.

While they were all separate entities at one point or another, they all spoke related dialects of the Twi language, and were part of the Akan people.

“Kwaku” would likely still have been a common name in all these tribes, as the word originally means “Wednesday,” and would have first been given to a person born on that day of the week.

So, our young prince could have come from any of these tribes, especially since they had all been more-or-less absorbed into the British Empire by this point.

The Fante leaders started making a concerted effort in the 1840s to get the younger members of their royal families educated abroad.

This makes it very possible that the young man who came to Gambier around 1864, when the Gambier mission was established, was part of this general movement. Oh, the stories this young man could have told us, coming from the colonial wars on the western coast of Africa and landing in Knox County.

The young man would like have seen snow for the first time in his life while in Gambier, and must surely have been startled by the cold winters, so different from the tropical climate of his homeland.

What did he think of local society? Though he was certainly unusual as a black child in this area, there were other free blacks that he may have met, ones who would have been just as culturally remote to him as the whites.

What stories there must have been.

Alas, we have none of it. While there may have been some noble intentions behind the missionary work, and some practical notions of statecraft in whichever African tribe sent the boy to be educated in America, the one thing that people in those days didn’t have a good grasp on is the danger of introducing a person from a remote population into another population.

Populations that have not been integrated with outsiders tend to not have the immunity to illness and disease that more exposed populations had.

Ohio, as a crossroads of just about every ethnic group that passed through the American frontier, had developed herd immunity. Young Kwaku Lebiete had not.

On Feb. 17, 1865, aged only 14, Kwaku Lebiete died in Gambier. The main newspaper reference to him comes from May 18, 1957, when a ceremony was held in Gambier by the African Student League to honor Kwaku.

A local minister officiated, while Rashid Halloway, president of the Columbus Chapter of the league and vice-president of the national organization, and Lowell Ragatz of the Ohio State University participated.

The league’s executive secretary, Benedict Njoku, from Nigeria, was also present.

The only other information I could find is in the entry on Find-A-Grave.com which states that sometime after 1957, as racial tensions erupted in the U.S., Kwaku’s tombstone was vandalized.

According to the entry, his grave is now unmarked and its location is uncertain. Is that true?

I’ve not had a chance to make it there myself to inspect the site, though it seems likely its approximately position could be triangulated from the 1957 photographs taken of the ceremony by the Kenyon Collegian.

It looks to me like the spot may still survive in the northeast corner of the graveyard. I suppose the danger is that the gravesite may have been overrun by the creation of Storer Hall in the late 1980s.

Even if the grave is not currently marked, its existence has been well-documented by Kenyon College.

If not marked, it would be fitting that some sort of marker be created for as near as possible to that location to honor the memory of what was lost in the death of that boy in the harsh Ohio winter, so many seasons ago: a son of a family, a prince of a tribe, and an honored visitor to our country, but one whose stories were tragically lost.

Kwaku deserves at least that much.