In Memory of Rachel Horlings, a Daughter of Nigeria

The news of her death to an electrical accident with a computer printer cable in Ghana was hard to process. I had seen her parents only a few weeks before and had asked after her, as I always did. I admired her so much. She was a brilliant, vivacious young woman, who had earned her […]

The news of her death to an electrical accident with a computer printer cable in Ghana was hard to process. I had seen her parents only a few weeks before and had asked after her, as I always did. I admired her so much. She was a brilliant, vivacious young woman, who had earned her PhD in Anthropology in 2011 and was in Ghana on a grant to continue underwater excavation of a Dutch shipwreck off the coast of Elmina. She was a rising star in her field, one of only three scholars doing maritime archeology in West Africa, and she had built relationships both on the ground with the local museum and with archaeologists around the world whom she pulled into her project.
I have written a longer piece on the reaction to Rachel’s death, which I will eventually post on my blog. Here I want to share a few excerpts of an oral interview blogger William Haun recorded with her in 2007 during her PhD research in Ghana. I’ve transcribed and edited portions of the interview to give readers an idea of her contribution to studies of African history. It was her love for the country of her birth that made her want to spend her life learning more about the historical interactions between Europeans and those who lived along the coast of West Africa.
“I’m looking at historical trade in Ghana from the perspective of the sea,” she told Haun.” I work mostly with shipwrecks, and I’ve been here in Ghana working primarily on one shipwreck off of the coast of Elmina. Elmina was the first European fort built in West Africa. It was the longest occupied fort in this area, and there was a lot of heavy traffic here.”
Rachel said that she hoped her data analysis and samples of the sediments on the Dutch shipwreck would help “to build a predictive model looking at shipwrecks across Ghana.”  Her focus was on learning the history of ordinary people.
“A lot of people think of history as being very cut and dry, and most of that is because most of history is written by the victor, by the winner, and you don’t learn about the common people or the daily things that go on. And that is actually something that is really intriguing about maritime archaeology and being able to study the people who are on the vessel—sailors who are generally low class people. People think of underwater archaeology as looking for gold on a shipwreck, and we’re not. I hate gold. We’re looking to study the Europeans on the vessel and how they interacted with the people on the coast. West Africa was a phenomenally difficult place to trade, because this is such a rough coast. Vessels ended up anchoring a mile, mile and a half offshore, and they used local canoes to ferry goods back and forth. Elmina was famous all along the coast of West Africa for its canoe-men.  If you read historical accounts, captains will say, oh, we stopped in Elmina and traded such and such and then moved on. You never really learn about the interactions.”
It was her questions about those interactions that propelled her research:
“What it all comes down to is learning how to ask questions and learning how to learn about people from the past, when they’re not there to tell you. What are the things that this vessel is carrying, what does that mean in terms of what is being traded, and what does that mean in terms of what the people who were being traded with wanted, and what the Europeans were getting in return? Maritime archeology is very unique in that things are often preserved underwater that aren’t preserved anywhere else. So we have the potential here to learn incredible things about the people who were here. It’s just a time consuming and expensive process”
It was a process she hoped to devote her life to. “I hope to make this a lifetime career, working in West Africa,” she told Haun. Since few others had done marine archaeology in West Africa, “we’re sort of having to make it up as we go along for how we do things and what we’re looking at and how we interpret what we’re doing.” 
Having been raised by frugal missionary parents, she struggled with how much her research cost. “It’s all very dependent on grants. For a long time, and even now, people view underwater archeology as sort of the red-headed stepchild of archaeology. Why would you go underwater when you can do it on land and learn the same things? But you really can’t. The disadvantage is that underwater is exponentially more expensive than terrestrial archeology. That’s something that I struggle with as a Christian sometimes. How do I justify working in a field that is so phenomenally expensive? Our equipment costs more than many of these people will see in their whole lives. This is something in ethics in archaeology: what do you give back to the community?  I think it is a very good question for archeologists to ask. It’s something that hasn’t always been asked. How do I justify working out here, how do I justify getting the money to do it, and what do I do with it in return in terms of giving back to the people?”
One possible answer to this question, she said, was the employment and education the research provided. In time she wanted expand educational outreach possibilities and ”to work both in Ghana and Nigeria, and maybe in between in Togo and Benin as well. But that is really long, long term. Right now, we’ve just worked on one shipwreck. It’s really just the tip of the iceberg.”
Rachel’s death six years after this interview, as she was investigating other shipwrecks in the area—still the tip of the iceberg—is a huge loss to the fields of West African history and archaeology. I think of how her research could have aided authors like Ngozi Achebe in investigating the history of slavery along the coast of West Africa. Even more, it is a wrenching loss to those who loved her. She is survived by her husband, Dr. Alphonso Magri, her parents Andy and Linda Horlings, her siblings Calvin, Bryan, Sara, and Aaron, and many other grieving friends and loved ones. 
Many of those who left comments on the memorial website for Rachel wrote of being comforted by the interview she had done with Haun. I’ll end this tribute with Rachel’s own words about diving to excavate in “the incredibly high energy” waters of Elmina, which illustrate the fearlessness and faith with which she lived her life.
“For much of the year you literally can’t see your hand in front of your eyes on this site. I would just start laughing sometimes because I didn’t know whether my eyes were open or shut. It really is a testament to God’s protection and grace because you would go down and not have a clue where you were, not be able to see anything. It was the most amazing thing to me. God can see me down here. I don’t have a clue what I’m running into, what I’m grabbing, what’s about to grab me. Yet God does. So I think that, besides all the academic data taken from it, that is something that has been so, so real on this project, that God knows us everywhere, he can reach us everywhere, and what an amazing thing that is.”
I like to imagine that Rachel was thinking of God’s protection amidst murky waters as she stepped out into her next adventure, into the world beyond.