Who on Earth is Interested in the Bulsa? (Franz Kröger)

Franz Kröger

Who on Earth is Interested in the Bulsa?

This question cannot be answered quite easily. Certainly the Bulsa, those in Ghana and those in other countries, are highly interested in their own ethnic group, their own culture, history and all current events. But ethnologists, historians, linguists, tourists, development workers and missionaries who have already had contact with the Bulsa in Ghana or in the diaspora might also want to learn more about their new friends and their culture.
It is almost impossible to investigate the question of the above headline worldwide using only the conventional methods of social science. However, the new social media available on the Internet offer us new ways of understanding. Surely Google has the data detailing about the users who open websites after having searched for “Bulsa”, “Builsa”, “Buli” and “Buluk”. But for reasons of data protection, this information cannot be given out by the administrators.
Nevertheless, it is possible to learn about the daily number of visitors of our BULUK magazine by means of a built-in counter. About a year ago, I found a counter for the old BULUK website that also gives information about the nationality of the visitors. However, for reasons of data protection, this software does not provide more details.
When Ghanatta Ayaric (then in Hamburg, now in Brazil) and I published the first issue of BULUK in 1999, we believed that most of our readers came from Germany. At that time, for example, the Institute for Ethnology at the University of Münster under the direction of Prof. R. Schott had devoted itself to researching the Bulsa culture, and all members of the institute were more or less familiar with this group.
The following anecdote may fit well into this context: When Mrs. Margaret Lariba Arnheim from Gbedema took a taxi from the Münster main station, the taxi driver suddenly asked his surprised passenger, “Are you a Bulsa?” When Margaret Arnheim, full of surprise, asked him, “Why do you think so?” the driver replied, “The Bulsa are the only African tribe I know”. It turned out that his girlfriend was an ethnology student of Prof. Schott and had often told her boyfriend about the Bulsa.
Today, after lecturers have died or retired, the knowledge about the Bulsa at the Institute has diminished. Only the numerous publications in the library provide a picture about the importance the Bulsa had some decades ago.
Nevertheless, in 2017 I still assumed that most of the visitors to our magazine, which has also had an Internet presence since 2005, were Germans and Bulsa. How surprised I was when I found that the visitors in the first months of my registration were almost exclusively US-Americans and Russians. While the number of Russians declined sharply after six months, the Americans continued to make up the overwhelming majority of visitors every day.
The records collected over exactly one year (27 July, 2017 to 27 July, 2018), according to their frequency, produced the following results:

Visits between July 27, 2017 and July 27, 2018

Buluk.de
USA 318

Ghana 122
Germany* 109
Russia 71
Indonesia 70
Great Britain 21
France 15
Austria 8
Rep. China 6
Canada 6
Japan 3
Italy 3
Norway 2
Finland 2
South Corea 2
Philippines 1
Vietnam 1
Switzerland 1

Turkey 1

Denmark 1

Belgium 1

New Zealand 1

Not available 102

Total (Buluk.de): 867

Komaland.com
USA 326
Germany* 87
Ghana 16
Russia 16
Austria 6
Switzerland 6
Italy 5
Great Britain 4
Canada 2
Israel 2
France 1
Sweden 1
not available 30

Total (Komaland.com): 502

*In the beginning (July 27 – September 24, 2017) I did not count the visitors from Germany because I erroneously believed that my own frequent visits would be counted, too, which might have distorted the results. An extrapolation for one whole year would result in 109 (Buluk)., respectively 87 (Komaland) German visitors.

If these results are represented on a world map, you will notice that the interest in the Bulsa focuses on three continents: North America (324 visitors in 2 countries), Europe (234 visitors in 11 countries) and Asia (84 visitors in 76 countries). There are no visitors from South America and Australia, and in Africa only Ghana is represented.

More important than pure statistics is probably the question of how far Bulsa are included in the numbers registered for the various countries. Great Britain, with probably the largest proportion of Bulsa, has a rather low number of visitors. Most Bulsa visitors are probably included in the large group whose country of origin is “not available” because a lot of these visits seem to have originated with smartphones.
A look at two more websites gives us a little more clarity. These sites are: “Komaland.com” and “Ghana-Materialien.de”. The first-mentioned site is named after a very small ethnic group of about 2000 members living to the south-east of the Bulsa. The Komaland is not yet connected to the electric power grid, and a telephone and Internet connection is only possible at a few localities in the country (e.g. on a hill). In non-Ghanaian countries, there are probably very few Koma emigrants. (A few years ago, one young Koma studied in Belgium, and, according to him, there are no more Koma in Europe today).
Nevertheless, it is surprising that the Komaland website is visited more often by people of the USA than the Bulsa website (Komaland: 326, Buluk: 318). The reason for this phenomenon is quite clear: Non-Ghanaians are not interested in the Koma people but rather in the old terracottas that have been excavated in this area since 1985. Komaland figurines have been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, and their photos appear in numerous picture books, though often without sufficient information. In addition to the cultural interest, a commercial one is likely at play among European and American gallery owners and art-collectors.
Although the website “Ghana-Materialien.de” also provides data on the Bulsa, it is probably less attractive to English speaking visitors since the texts were mainly written in German. Nevertheless, more visitors from the USA (224) than from Germany (73) logged in.
Our investigation into the visitors of “Buluk.de” has yielded some unexpected results. The great interest of big countries, such as the USA and Russia with no particularly strong relationship to North Ghana, was previously underestimated. Above all, the analysis of the results has shown that interest in the Bulsa and their culture is a worldwide phenomenon.

Countries with contacts to the BULUK journal