MELANIA IN AFRICA

MELANIA IN AFRICA Saturday, October 06, 2018 By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman First Lady Melania Trump’s recent solo visit to Africa, including Ghana’s infamous fort, slave barracoon , Cape Coast Castle—the “gate of no return”—may be in part due to her own Slovenian ancestry. Slovenia was part of Hungary, which in its 1848 Revolution, freed millions of “serfs,”—white slaves, as did Russia its “slavs” in 1861. That unstable region of Eastern Europe, Western Asia, “the Balkans” has been ruled by many diverse conquerors, Christian, Muslim, others, over centuries. Slovenia , Melania’s homeland, was in that geopolitical polyglot-mix with Serbia, Bosnia, and others. Possibly, she is herself a descendant of slaves and identifies. I had learned about the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, nee the French Revolution, nee the American Revolution, while reading in UNCLE TOM’S CABIN (1852, 1987) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, serendipitously, having no thought of Hungary at all. Intrigued by Stowe’s hopeful reference to it as an encouragement to black slaves, I googled it, and drew the above inference about Mrs. Melania Trump’s descent. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/03/melania-trump-africa-tour-ghana-cape-coast-castle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Coast_Castle https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/searching-for-melania-trumps-childhood-home