The Department of History congratulates its alum, Dr. Nana Kesse (formerly Eric Kesse), on receiving a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship worth $60,000. This fellowship will support Dr. Kesse in completing his book manuscript, Living with Water: Aquaculture, Environment, and Slavery in a West African Stilt House Community, which explores the environmental and social history of Nzulezo, the only stilt-house community on water in Ghana and one of the few in Africa with a history dating to the mid-1700s. For over two centuries, the Nzulezo people have lived on the Amanzule River, sharing the water space with animals such as crocodiles, pythons, and fish, while enduring unfavorable phenomena like seasonal flooding and the Atlantic slave trade. Through archival research, oral history, and community-based ethnography, Kesse explains why the Nzulezo people chose to live on water instead of on land and how their story illustrates what it has historically meant for African communities to liveon andwith water over time.
Living with Water deepens our understanding of the intricate lives of water societies in Africa by revealing how prolonged human interactions with bodies of water often resulted in complex relationships between culture, humans, and the environment. It also reconsiders received orthodoxies in African historiography that generalizes that precolonial West Africans settled in hard-to-access spaces, especially in the middle of waterbodies, primarily as a defense against the Atlantic slave trade. In the case of the Nzulezo, however, environmental and spiritual factors—such as meeting the spiritual demands of the Nzulezo snail deity, as well as gaining access to edible and non-edible water resources—necessitated the creation of the Nzulezo community. These findings complicate Elisée Soumonni’s (2003) monocausal thesis, allowing us to see precolonial West African communities in greater complexity and to understand the lives of individuals beyond and outside the frame of the slave trade.
The NEH Fellowship is a prestigious and highly competitive award that recognizes individual scholars for their exceptional research, rigorous analysis, and outstanding contributions to the humanities. With this fellowship, Dr. Kesse joins a list of distinguished scholars in the field. Congratulations, Dr. Kesse, on this remarkable accomplishment!