Gyamerah Imports, owned and operated by Gyamerah, is located at 136 Dayton St., tucked inside Rose & Sal Mercantile. The shop\u2019s offerings include statues, busts, masks, textile art and clothing sourced from, or based on the diverse cultures of the continent of Africa. With personal ties to aspects of some of those cultures \u2014 Gyamerah\u2019s father was Akan, one of the major ethnicities of Ghana \u2014 the local business owner told the News in a recent interview that one of his aims in opening Gyamerah Imports is education.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe whole essence of my gallery is to introduce and reintroduce to all people, but specifically African Americans, the story of all these different cultures that we lost when we got here \u2014 because that story is almost gone today,\u201d Gyamerah said.<\/p>\n
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\nHe later added, via email: \u201cThe art I share in my gallery is an effort to bring parity to those images and instincts that we (diaspora Black people) have left behind, that are still useful into the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
Retired from military service and a career as a mental health professional in Columbus, Gyamerah moved to the Miami Valley nearly five years ago \u2014 though he said that wasn\u2019t originally his plan.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I retired, I came here on my way out west, and I met [fellow local resident] Laura Curliss \u2014 and I\u2019ve been here ever since,\u201d he said, laughing.<\/p>\n
Gyamerah is well-known by many around Yellow Springs as a drummer, having performed at Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Juneteenth celebrations and as part of the Afro-Cuban Afracanacosa group \u2014 which also includes local musicians Nathan Hardman, Teresa Misty Mon\u00e9e, David Diamond, Ed Knapp and Curliss \u2014 at PorchFest and elsewhere in southeast Ohio; he also leads drumming classes, teaching West African djembe and dundun and Cuban conga in the village. Before moving into the storefront, Gyamerah was also a frequent street vendor in town, selling the same types of items he now offers on Dayton Street \u2014 sometimes to high-profile buyers.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of my first street sales was to [musician] Questlove,\u201d Gyamerah said. \u201cHe bought a necklace that I made myself with a Benin figure and head on it \u2014 I gave him a good deal, too!\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cMy first celebrity brick-and-mortar sale was to none other than the most beautiful woman in the world, [model] Naomi Campbell. She bought a Senegalese birthing chair.\u201d<\/p>\n
Celebrity encounters aside, Gyamerah said what he values most about the pieces in his shop \u2014 which he sources from sellers in Ethiopia and Ghana and from longtime Columbus-based business, Black Art Plus \u2014 are the opportunities for them to be viewed by the wider public. He has curated installations of his pieces at both the Coretta Scott King Center at Antioch College and the Edward A. Dixon Gallery in Dayton.<\/p>\n
Beyond exposure, Gyamerah said he also aims to contextualize the pieces culturally and historically. By way of example, when telling this reporter about a pair of pieces he sold in the past depicting the figures of Ausar and Auset \u2014 more familiar to most westerners as Egyptian gods Osiris and Isis \u2014 he referred to Egypt by one of its ancient indigenous names, Kemet, placing the region within its African context.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had Ausar and Auset with their one left foot in front of the other, which you\u2019ll see in all the Kemetic art,\u201d Gyamerah said, adding that the style, called \u201ckouros,\u201d was originated by the Kemetics and borrowed by ancient Greeks. \u201cThey told the story of the Ausarian Drama \u2014 a virgin birth and resurrection story that is thousands of years older than the Judeo-Christian story. When I sold the art, I got to tell that story.\u201d<\/p>\n
A good number of his customers, he said, already know much of the history around the kinds of pieces he sells \u2014 indeed, that\u2019s why they come to his shop. But for those who don\u2019t \u2014 particularly those whose ancestries, like his, are tied to the African continent \u2014 he said he feels a sense of urgency around helping establish those cultural connections before they\u2019re lost.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s so much to recapture,\u201d Gyamerah said. \u201cOur culture, whether you\u2019re Yoruba, Twi, Hausa \u2014 all of that was taken when we got here.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cAnd [that culture] was replaced by Abrahamic religions.\u201d<\/p>\n
When the transatlantic slave trade stole people from the African continent and took them west to Europe or North America, it also often meant stripping those people of their long-held cultural traditions and practices. In the cases of those enslaved in the U.S., Gyamerah said, that meant being forced into the mores and practices of Christianity.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost African Americans are Christian now,\u201d he said. \u201cThe tragedy is that we don\u2019t teach the story that it wasn\u2019t a choice. African Americans didn\u2019t choose to be Christian; it was forced from day one. Postbellum, you wouldn\u2019t be respected unless you came out of the church. And that took almost the rest of Africa out of us. \u2026 I want to reintroduce some of what we lost.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meditating on the same theme, Gyamerah added that his Yellow Springs store is a subsidiary of his wider, online business, Gye Nyame Enterprises, LLC. The name is drawn, he said, from a term in the Twi language of the Akan that is translated as meaning \u201cexcept creation.\u201d Gyamerah added, however, that the term is often mistranslated.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt means, \u2018there is nothing except creation\u2019 \u2014 but Christianity has co-opted the term to mean \u2018except God,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
His perspective on the dominance of religion, particularly Christianity, in American cultural life is something he\u2019s been passionately vocal about in the public arena. Earlier this year, at a Greene County Board of Commissioners meeting, he spoke out against including public prayer as part of government proceedings; commissioners later voted at that same meeting to adopt a policy to begin each meeting with a prayer. His concerns about the ubiquity of religion were also part of a speech he gave at this year\u2019s Juneteenth celebration.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said, \u2018You\u2019re not going to hear this, most likely, in your synagogue, your church or your mosque, and you\u2019re definitely not going to hear it in your public or private schools.\u2019 Then I talked about the maafa \u2014 that\u2019s the Kiswahili term for the destruction of Black bodies,\u201d Gyamerah said. \u201cThe big tragedy \u2014 the big maafa \u2014 is that African Americans mostly don\u2019t know who we are, but the end chapter is that we don\u2019t want to know, either.\u201d<\/p>\n
To that end, Gyamerah said he and fellow local resident Michael Slaughter plan to lead an African studies book club at the library this year. Books on the club\u2019s reading list will include Carter G. Woodson\u2019s 1933 work \u201cThe Mis-Education of the Negro,\u201d \u201cYurugu\u201d and \u201cLet the Circle be Unbroken\u201d by anthropologist and African studies scholar Marimba Ani and \u201cStar Messenger\u201d by scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson; more information on the book club will be announced in a later issue of the News.<\/p>\n
The upcoming book club, as well as his work through Gyamerah Imports, he said, represent a dedication to connecting the threads of African and African American histories.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur history is a continuum \u2014 the narrative is the same, there\u2019s just water between us,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you don\u2019t have a past, you don\u2019t have a present. And if you don\u2019t have a present, how can you have a future?\u201d<\/p>\n
Gyamerah Imports is located at 136 Dayton St. For more information, visit www.shopgyenyame.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From a Dayton Street storefront, local resident Gyamfi Gyamerah hopes to do more than sell West African art \u2014 he wants to make cultural connections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12963,"featured_media":30765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,16],"tags":[7,30,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-30768","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture","8":"category-news","9":"tag-apie-project","10":"tag-culture","11":"tag-news"},"yoast_head":"\n