KEL-DROPS : July 2013

Slavery- a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold and are forced to work against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work – you know what, let me just cut through right here and spare you the rest of the abstract nonsense this internet deduced definition has to offer. When you have stood in a tiny dorm-sized room that housed one thousand human beings and seen excreta marks that rose to about 3 feet on its wall where again human beings once laid, you can’t help but disregard this impersonal and aloof description some individual who sat behind a desk somewhere gave to this inhumanity just in time to get their monthly check.

I am a young man who has spent the better part of my twenty-two years in Ghana, a country where slavery is embroiled so deep into our fabrics it makes Coco Chanel seem like a Math teacher. From elementary school to senior high school, the slavery part of our past has been hammered into our consciousness and like everything else it has only become some robotic phenomenon that we just understood in the most abstract manner. Nothing, and good Lord I mean NOTHING prepared me for the harsh reality that hit me on my Cape Coast Castle tour yesterday for the first time in my life, a fact I’m ashamed to even admit as a mature native of this country, Ghana and as I walked through what seemed like boundless layers of darkness, the theoretical aspect of my slavery education was stripped bare and I felt naked with shame and fury on how any human being, forget black, could be put through such dehumanizing conditions all in a quest for some few coin and papers.

50% of the slaves captured were shipped to South America & the Caribbean’s (Majorly Brazil, Haiti, Peru, Jamaica etc and at a point in time, close to 50% of their population of Brazil was made up of black people), 40 % were shipped off to the Southeastern part of the United States (Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia etc) and the 10% left were shipped off to other European countries where the demand for them were not as high as the developing continent of America.

I had to go through the shame and pain of measuring human beings in statistical facts and likening them to shipping commodities because it is plays a very important role in explaining certain occurrences that happened to me on my visit and I write in hope that should the same incidence reoccur if you ever visit the Cape Coast castle, you would not be as taken aback as I was. Now as explained before, the majority of the slaves were taken to South American & Caribbean countries and one of the most ethnic visitors of the castle were people from Jamaica, a country were majority of the people were of black origin. Surprisingly, as I witnessed for myself, other major annual visitors to this monumental site were in fact white people and I found myself asking the question “what could possibly drive a criminal to return to the scene of a crime?”- I am no racist and I am definitely a firm believer in the idea that you cannot hold a person responsible for the actions of their fathers, however I am also a firm believer in the idea that when you drive someone out of your home, you don’t turn around to ask them where they are going to stay. It’s insulting and hypocritical to the person and it turns out I had a few other people who seemed to share my sentiments and boy did they have a way of showing it! The harassment and confusion that took place upon the encounter of the visiting blacks from United States (most especially Jamaica) and the whites was something that resulted in pulling people apart and dragging people to reception areas to calm them down. “What are you guys doing here?” “Haven’t you done enough?” “Did you come to survey the damage you caused” “why won’t you people leave us alone” … These are some of the cleanest and sanitary comments I can post here for anyone reading this but even my modest writing skill and play of words cannot even begin to describe the intense and emotional energy that vibrated around the walls of the castle amidst this prevalence. You would think we were captured slaves that had grown restless and violent because news of the arrival of the ship that was to convey us to the New World had reached us and the realization that this was it, we were going to be torn away from everything we knew and everyone we loved had finally hit home. People cried and people apologized but it was hundreds of years too late; you could not blame one side for feeling the need to fight for the little dignity and pride left of their dishonored ancestors as much as you could blame the other for feeling hopeless with regards to conducts of their own ancestors they had no control over. For the mutual faction of us pure Africans that did not in any profound sense belong to any these backgrounds, we just stood and watched what seemed like the same color-motivated struggle between two different races that had occurred on these very grounds hundreds of years ago.

After tempers had been cooled down and reason had been met, we were divided into different groups and a tour none of us were ever to forget any time soon begun. A tour that exposed thousand men been kept in an undersized room with nothing but a window as big as an iPad providing ventilation while one single man possessed a living room and a bedroom area with a sea view so magnificent Warren Buffet would currently be proud to call his own, a tour that exposed hundreds of African women been raped at night and been thrown into sea alive weeks later because they showed pregnancy signs that were not acceptable for people that were to work on plantation farms, a tour that exposed a few white administrators been treated to luxurious delicacies each night while porridge were poured down to thousands of black men and women through tiny windows they had to scramble for amidst human waste and excreta, a tour that uncovered human beings been arranged in tight fashion in ships and were required to settle in one rigid position for several months and stay healthy while doing so lest they’d be thrown overboard barely alive to trailing sharks that had grown accustomed to strange looking people with dark skin been fed to them every now and then in the epoch of centuries!

A tour that exposed African individuals consciously participating in this filth for nothing more than few shillings and good grace in the white books and a tour that made any black person (man or woman) aware of the sacrifices people have had to go through so we could be educated and think for ourselves today. A tour that reminded us as Africans of how trusting and relying heavily on other people for knowledge and way of doing things had affected us immensely in the past, a tour that prompted us to believe in ourselves and sharpen our own thinking abilities not even as Africans but as human beings that must learn to do things for ourselves and desist from depending solely on other people when the good Lord above did not bless us lesser than He did them.

But even most importantly, this was a tour that taught me as a son of the land that blame is easier to ascribe than acceptance of responsibilities. Because as much as we would like to plunk every guilt on the white man, an old African proverb says ‘Any insect that would bite you is already in your cloth’ and we can forgive them only if we can forgive ourselves for our conscious participation in this brutal dehumanization and abide by the words of the plaque at the exit which reads: