My visit to one of Ghana’s notorious ‘slave castles’ was a haunting reminder of the not-so-distant past
Grappling with the legacy of slavery — and making peace with Africans' role in it — is one of the more challenging aspects of visiting Ghana, where Black Americans have been invited to “come home.”
CAPE COAST, Ghana — I’d been warned. Just about everyone who had visited one of the stone forts in Ghana where enslaved Africans were held before making the journey to the Americas told me to prepare myself for the wave of emotions that would wash over me.
I wasn’t ready. There was no way I could have been.
A guide led my husband and me into a dungeon specifically designed for male captives. It was dark and stifling. Sunlight shone through a lone, narrow window way overhead.
I tried to imagine how it must have been as our tour guide described hundreds of men crammed into areas like this so tightly that people could barely move, their bodies simply lying atop one another. There were no bathroom facilities for those prisoners back then, which meant they would have to spend weeks or longer in their own waste.
Reading about it was one thing. But walking around the grounds of the 17th-century fort and exploring the actual dungeons where untold numbers of enslaved Africans were once held made the atrocities more real to me than I’m probably able to describe.
For me, making peace with those feelings was part of my experience in Ghana, whose government has extended an open invitation to Black Americans to “come home” — urging them to visit and also immigrate to this deeply impoverished nation of nearly 35 million.
“The Africans were collaborators with the Europeans, but they didn’t start the slave trade,” said Molefi Kete Asante, the noted scholar of African American history at Temple University, when I reached out to him on Wednesday. “And they did not know what was happening to the African people who were captured. But there were Africans who were captured by other Africans, brought down to these fortresses, and they were getting goods and trinkets for this.”
“The buying and the selling of Africans was always in the hands of Europeans,” added Asante, author of The History of Africa: The Quest for Eternal Harmony. “It was not the Africans who had the ships. It was not the Africans who had the insurance for the sailors. It was not the Africans who had the guns, the cannons. This was all a European business. And the fact that they had African collaborators — today in American society we have Black people who are collaborating with [Donald] Trump, so you will have collaborators — but they were not the initiators of the slave trade.”
At the castle in Cape Coast — about 90 miles west of Ghana’s capital, Accra — I struggled through a 60-minute guided tour of the grounds. It wasn’t lost on me that a castle first made of wood by the Portuguese in 1653 was a stark reminder of slavery’s not-so-distant past.
At one point, my husband and I visited what used to be a chapel. I paused for a moment to reflect on the inhumanity of churchgoers to attend religious services steps away from where so much misery was taking place.
When we got to the female holding pens, I steeled myself once again to step back into the darkness, if only for a moment. I made it inside and was looking around when our guide, from African Roots Travel, handed me a beribboned funeral wreath. I had to choke back tears.
On the front was an inscription in memory of our family’s female ancestors who may have been held there. Like most who are descendants of enslaved Africans, I don’t know much about my ancestors — only that they were most likely born in West Africa and transported against their will to the United States and forced to work for free on plantations in the South.
Next, we headed for the so-called Door of No Return — a doorway that led the enslaved to awaiting ships for their journey to the Americas.
A short time earlier, we had journeyed to the Assin Manso Ancestral Slave River Site, where the enslaved were encouraged to bathe — not out of concern for their health and hygiene, I was told, but in the hope that they might fetch higher prices from their captors before being sold and making their journey to the Americas.
I crouched over the waters and thought about the millions who took their last bath on the continent there.
I thought about the words of Vice President Kamala Harris when she visited Ghana last year. “The horror of what happened here must always be remembered,” she said. “It cannot be denied. It must be taught. History must be learned.”
As it so happens, my journey here began in the days after her defeat in the presidential election. It’s unclear what will happen to the teaching about this chapter in American history once President-elect Trump takes office.
During an appearance on Fox News in October, the president-elect said he would close the U.S. Department of Education and cut funding to schools that taught the full history of slavery. I take him at his word.
Not acknowledging the impact of 400 years of chattel slavery, and even more of racial segregation, is a way to deny the country’s ugliest chapters and absolve the government of ever making amends, which it should have done long ago.
Meanwhile, Ghana has dedicated much of its tourism efforts to encouraging Black people from throughout the African diaspora to “return,” either to visit or to live.
It is a return I’m glad I made — and it’s one I’d encourage anyone of African descent to make.
We must always, as the vice president said, remember the horror that occurred here, both to honor the painful journeys made by our ancestors and to ensure that our descendants will prosper — no matter what shores they call home.
This column is the final installment of “Blaxit” — a series by The Inquirer’s Jenice Armstrong about Black American expatriates who have moved to the African continent. Travel for the series was funded, in part, by the National Association of Black Journalists.