We took a taxi into town, and as the car wound through the streets it approached an ominous fortress, freshly painted white with beautiful light blue shutters covering the windows. We walked through the gate, admiring the massive size. It was quiet. Historians and archivists who worked there were quietly walking to their offices. We could hear the waves crashing on the sea wall. But the quiet was more than just the silence of the people who worked there. I could feel that we had walked onto holy ground, and the silence was out of respect.
The castle was built by the Swedes in 1653 for the Swedish Africa Company as a fortified weigh station for timber and gold. In 1663 it was taken over by the Dutch and then conquered by the British in 1664.
The British used the castle as a holding dungeon for the slave trade, trafficking human beings to be sold in the Americas. Since the subject of African history is so limited in the American school system, this was about all I knew about this massive castle.
I remember as a young boy going to visit my grandparents in Nebraska, and my grandfather took me to a cattle auction just over the state border in Missouri. Cattle were rounded up onto trucks which drove away. As a boy I stood watching, and wondered where they went and what happened to them. This time I wondered about people who had been treated worse than cattle, each with families, children, wives and husbands.
Alex and I walked through the entrance, past the tourist office, into the courtyard surrounded by three stories of colonial offices and living quarters. The sea wall was lined with cannons to defend the castle from attack by sea.
We waited as enough people arrived to form a large group. Our guide Mr. Essel Blankson, who had guided the Obama family during their visit to the castle, then gave us some background information and led us to the first stop on the tour. It was the Men's Dungeon.
The space was incredibly cramped as we walked down an uneven brick ramp through a tunnel, down several stories below the ground floor of the castle. It was dark and damp, and the walls were covered with green mold from the sea air. The ramp opened up into a room probably 100 feet wide by 200 feet long. The floor appeared to be a hardened mud floor. There were no windows, and only a small hole at the top of the wall on one end for ventilation. The air was stuffy and it was almost pitch black except for a light installed for the tours. Our guide told us that this was where 200 men were kept in chains and shackles on the walls, as they waited for the slave ships to arrive off shore. Conditions were horrific, and many men died from dysentery, typhoid and cholera during the wait. We were told that the floor was not mud, but rather petrified human feces over two feet deep.
At that moment, I felt the oppression and a great sorrow in that room. It was as if my heart weighed a thousand pounds. Alex told me later that he felt it as well. It was as if the souls of hundreds of thousands of men, all drowning in sadness, were crying out. Not cries of desperation, but of hopelessness. It was as if they realized that life was now over, and that their souls were now trapped to endure a lifeless hell.
Men who did not follow orders were sent to a cell to be beaten and tortured. Our guide took us in, and shut the lights off. It was so dark I could not see my hand in front of my face. The air was so thick that it was hard to breathe. Men were kept in here for months until they were broken into submission.
In the effort to break the spirit of the Fante people, the British even went as far as stealing the sacred fetish that had inhabited the spot where this dungeon occupied. Imagine someone coming into a most sacred place such as a church and stealing the crucifix or the alter. It wasn't until the 1970's that the British finally returned the fetish. A fetish priest now sits in wait to guard the holy site.
I stayed back while the group continued on into the tunnel leading to the Women's Dungeon. I stood by myself for a moment in the dark, wondering about the terror that these men must have felt. One day hunting in the great rain forests, knowing they had wives and children waiting for them at home in their villages; the next day shackled in chains and handcuffs to a wall, laying in the darkness in their own feces, terrified and having no idea what the future was about to bring them.
As the tour progressed, so did the heaviness I felt in my chest.
We were then led deeper into the castle, into the Women's Dungeon. This was where I witnessed the depths that humanity can stoop to. Hundreds of women were kept shackled to the walls. No windows, no ventilation and no sanitation.
In order to entertain themselves, the British soldiers stationed at the castle would come to the Women's Dungeon and select a woman to be led in chains to this small room. It wasn't more than 10 feet by 10 feet, and the ceiling was so low that it was impossible to stand upright. There, the woman was repeatedly raped until the soldier was finished. She was then put back into the Women's Dungeon to be available for the same treatment by other soldiers.
Many women were so badly beaten during these rapes that their injuries prevented them from being able to make the long journey to the Americas. This was the same for pregnant women, injured men, anyone severely ill and the elderly. The British took these people to this wall and threw them into the ocean to drown. Villagers outside the castle wall would collect the bodies as they washed to shore, and bury them in communal graves since they could not determine who these people were or where they came from. In African cultures, the rites of burial are sacred. This brutal and merciless killing with no burial was beyond blasphemous.
And the hypocrisy? The British and the slave holders in the New World would argue that these were not people, that they were beasts of burden. But even that is a lie. The soldiers who raped the women often impregnated them, and those children were taken at birth to be raised in a school inside the castle walls just above the women's dungeon. They were groomed to be good Christian subjects of Queen Victoria. They knew these were human beings.
There was a group of black American women who had come on a tour to Ghana. Alex and I had met them in town a few days prior, and we talked about my life in Cape Coast. They were also on this tour of the castle with us. At this point they broke down into tears, crying so hard that I thought they would not be able to continue. I would never be able to fully embrace their pain, but I did have some understanding. I thought of the terror I would have felt if Alex or Sammy had been captured and taken from me. What kind of horror would they have faced in this castle and then in America?
I have been to Dachau, one of the concentration camps in Germany which is now a memorial to the Holocaust. As I walked over the threshold of the gate at Dachau, I could feel the agony of the millions who died there. But in the selective telling of American history, absent is the holocaust inflicted on the continent of Africa which took more than 20 million lives. 20 million men, women and children. The continent of Africa was left behind while the world developed because the human resources required for development were stolen - taken away to other parts of the world to be beaten, raped and exploited for the benefit of white men.
The immensity of the evil that humanity is capable of hit my heart. And looking at the expression on Alex's face, it hit him as well. But Alex and I didn't weep. It was a sadness beyond what could be consoled through tears. The mind cannot fully grasp what horrible things mankind is capable of doing. I tried to find words to express this feeling. I could not. My heart begged for answers, but there were none.
Our guide then brought us to this doorway where the slaves were led through to board the slave ships docked outside the castle wall. It is called the Door of No Return. He said, "through this door you were stripped of your family, your community, your faith, your name, your language, your culture, your history, your past and your future. Through this door your humanity was taken away from you."
Alex and I looked at each other, but we were silent. We walked through the door, and I imagined what the fear must have been like for those in chains being loaded onto the ship. Did they realize they were never coming back?
There was an eerie irony to the beauty that was on the other side of that door. We walked outside the castle wall and there is a fishing village. The fishermen had just finished for the day, bringing their catch in. Life had somehow, in spite of man's cruelty, managed to carry on here.
Our group went back up to the main courtyard where we were brought to this plaque. It was written by the mother of a friend of mine. One of the black American women asked our guide why the castle was not torn down, to destroy the atrocities that had been committed here. Mr. Blankson explained that the castle was now a memorial and that Ghana promised to preserve this place so that we will never forget and we will never allow mankind to commit such horror again.
This experience brought history to life, a history that spans the Old World and New World. But more importantly for me, this experience was personal because it is part of the past of my sons. I wondered who in their family had been taken away. I wondered what great great grandmother of Sammy cried sitting in the doorway of her home when her husband did not return. I wondered if a cousin of Alex has ever walked by me here on the streets of Los Angeles. This is my sons' history and now it's my history. It would be easy to have a discussion about who was to blame for all of this, but I believe we are all to blame. Humanity is responsible for allowing the slave trade to happen. We cannot change the past, but we can recognize it. We can burn it into our memories and vow that it will never happen again.
The experience also makes me wonder about the issues of racism here in the United States. We have a history with slavery, and yet we have never dealt with it. We act as if the Emancipation Proclamation ended it all, but we have never really processed the fall-out from slavery. We have a black president, so we must have arrived, right? Today there are more black Americans in prison, on probation or on parole than those enslaved in 1850. Voting rights are still denied to black Americans and there is currently an effort to repeal the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in this country. Every year one million children of color drop out of school. Oppression still exists in the Unites States, but it has been disguised, concealed and integrated into our daily lives.
One of the greatest dilemmas that I face is whether or not I decide to bring Alex and Sammy here to visit this country; to see first-hand what happened to their ancestors. My fear is that it would destroy their belief that mankind is good and that the world is a just place for all. When Trayvon Martin was murdered, I had to discuss this at great length with Alex while he kept pleading with me in desperation, "He was shot and killed because of the color of his skin? This can't be!" Imagine teaching a black son the concept of institutionalized racism, and that his father lives in a country which sees Alex as a threat. This is what I face.
The ghosts of the slave ships and Cape Coast Castle lead us to the United States. What are we as a nation going to do to heal the wounds and foster unity?
