Slave dungeons

Tuesday, February 14

John: I took a solo trip today, a tour with a group from the ship to visit two of the slave trading castles along the coast. What is now the nation of Ghana was one of the main portals through which Africans who had been kidnapped in the interior were shipped to the new world, and the coastline is dotted with the remains of the enormous fort/castles that European governments built in the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. It's awkward to do this kind of thing as a tourist. It's much the same kind of awkwardness, I suppose, as tragedy prompts with deliberation; you're putting yourself in the position of witnessing something awful happening to other people, and forced to reckon with whatever pleasure you're taking from the experience. And of course this tragedy--if the analogy holds-- was real, incomprehensibly enormous, and has had effects that continue to the present.  I live in Virginia, where African and African-American slaves were held for hundreds of years; I can walk to the site of the old slave auction block in Charlottesville, and live in sight of Monticello, home to the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson, whose Notes on the State of Virginia I'm co-editing.  My colleague Victor Luftig pointed out that we both work at a university that was built by slaves. It feels important, then, to go to these places since I'm here. I'm going today and Vic is leading a trip of her own to the same castles on Thursday; we both felt that this would be too difficult a trip for the children.

Many of us on the bus felt some moral discomfort on a smaller scale as we started our three-hour trip to the Cape Coast region, well west of Tema. As we pulled out of the port area, we were joined by a police escort in the form of a uniformed motorcycle driver, who cleared the traffic ahead of us. It might have been a five-hour drive if he hadn't done so, but the sight was kind of entertaining, scarifying, and appalling all at the same time--he pushed through traffic ahead of us, directing drivers into the shoulders (at times kicking cars) to create in effect a middle lane for the bus, then holding up traffic at roundabouts and intersections to speed us through. He seemed to get annoyed at our driver for not being aggressive enough in pushing through the narrow spaces he was creating, but to my eyes, we had some pretty close calls. The police escort is a service that you can pay for, apparently, and our tour operator does so since Accra traffic is so terrible, but still--the message about the relative importance of us and the ordinary Ghanaian drivers was pretty clear. And it was also pretty obvious that the police have a lot of authority here. Ghana is considered a success in that it has had democratically-elected governments and peaceful transfers of power for twenty years, which is something that most west African states can't say. But the military still has power here, clearly; you pass through the occasional military checkpoint on the road, and while our buses have always been waved right on through, we were reminded to bring copies of the information page of our passports with us at all times, just in case they decided to check that kind of thing. 

Our first stop was at what is called the Elmina Castle. It is the oldest European building in Africa, built originally in 1482 (pre-Columbus!) by the Portuguese as a warehouse for storing gold and the other stuff that they were after from Africa. More than 100 years later, the Castle started to be repurposed to hold a commodity that had by that time become very valuable because of the demand for labor in the New World plantations:  slaves. Some pictures:

Elmina Castle

The "Door of No Return"--the exit from the castle to the beach, where slaves would get on small boats to be taken to the slave ships

Interior of the female dungeon

It's a lot to process, and I'm still working on it. Our group had, though, a remarkable guide, a man named Atu  tk, who somehow struck what seemed to me to be a pitch-perfect note of candor and grace throughout his presentation. I can't recall his exact words, but it was very clear that his relationship to the site, to the history it represented, and to our presence there was anything but facile or willing to settle into cliche--it was really impressive. At the end, he said that he believed that there was no justification in visiting a place like this but to be reminded of the potential scale that people's inhumanity to other people can assume, so that we can be vigilant against its reoccurrence.

One of the most jarring things about this castle is that it is in an incredibly beautiful site, positioned out in the ocean with gorgeous beaches on all sides. The incongruity reached what are almost comical proportions at the lunch that followed. We were taken to a resort called the Coconut Grove--a pretty swanky place even by US standards, situated right on a spectacularly pristine beach, within view of the castle. They had a picture wall of famous people who had stayed there; I recognized Kofi Annan (who is Ghanaian), but it felt fairly profane to be enjoying lunch on a lovely beach.

Back on the bus, and down a few miles to the Cape Coast Castle. This was built by the Dutch in the early seventeenth century expressly for the slave trade,and it shows--the dungeons are now underground, and even more awful than those at Elmina. The British ended up in control of this by he middle of the seventeenth century, and held on to it for centuries; it was the center of the colonial government until the 1870s, when the capital was moved to Accra. 

Our time here was shorter, since we had lingered over lunch. Our guide was great, but not quite up to Atu's standard. What impressed me most was that this castle was on a considerably bigger scale than Elmina; the size of the operation had gotten much bigger by this time. I had gotten tired of taking pictures (and many of the places inside the building are too dark for good picture-taking), so I don't have any of this castle/dungeon.

A long and morally exhausting day.