Biography
Prince is an interdisciplinary scholar and social justice advocate pursuing a Master of Sacred Theology in Religion and Black Experience at Union Theological Seminary. His research explores post-colonial religious ethics, African politics of grievability, and how colonial religious frameworks shape contemporary understandings of sacredness and humanity in West Africa. His work engages liberation theology praxis and examines the intersection of gender, sexuality, and the legitimacy of violence. Prince is a recipient of the Christopher Morse Scholar Award for Outstanding Student in the Study of Theology and the Frederick Buechner Prize for Creative and Outstanding Writing.
Paper Abstract
This paper examines the environmental crisis of galamsey—illegal small-scale gold mining—in Ghana, through the lens of place-based relationships and African Politics of Grievability. Rather than offering solutions, this work invites us to explore how grieving our relationship to Ghanaian lands might become a spiritual and political act of return.
What if place-based relationships in Ghana are not merely connections to geography, but genealogical bonds—spaces where soil holds ancestral struggles, indigenous knowledge systems, and histories of resistance? This paper considers what happens when we grieve what galamsey has taken from the land and from Ghanaian communities: Could such grieving refuse to render this ecological devastation invisible or acceptable?
This work asks: What does it mean to grieve the poisoned rivers and scarred earth of Ghana as we would grieve a person? How might this grieving practice become a form of ancestral witnessing rooted in specific Ghanaian places? And how could such witnessing ground us in a hope that emerges from the soil itself?
Drawing on African decolonial thought, this paper traces how communities are reclaiming place-based relationships—not as a return to an idealized past, but as an active, living conversation with the land and those who came before. It invites us to consider what a grounded, re-rooting politics of hope might look like amid ecological crisis.