Kakum National Park and Cape Coast Castle in Ghana: A Personal Essay
There were a few people complaining about the smell of the room. “It is dark here why do we have to stay in here all together?” to which someone replied, “It is to appreciate what they went through.” And my head exploded: Appreciate? Really? Even if they locked us all in there for a day, we still wouldn’t know what it was like to be a slave. You’re tourists who paid for a vacation, what can you appreciate? And why use the word anyway?
The view of the ocean at Cape Coast Castle, with the cannons jutting out beneath.
Next were the male dungeons. There was little to no light in the dungeons with the only air coming in from really small open squares (I can’t even call them windows), high above in the walls. The guide explained to us the filthy conditions of the dungeons, how previously the human waste stood at 6 feet high. And people kept on taking pictures, a blinding flash here and there “to preserve the memories.” And I wondered what sort of memories they wanted to preserve. In my opinion more than half of the people that see/saw Cape Coast Castle and take pictures end up pushing the horror of slavery to the back of their minds. It is just an amusing tour–I mean, people do talk about it but they are not angry or baffled.
I remember a colleague from work went to Ghana and came to my office to tell us about his journey. He had taken the Cape Coast Castle tour yet all he told us was how the governor used to select the finest women and rape them. He mentioned that he thought it was ironic that the castle had a church while all these atrocities were happening, and he also told us how a woman, an African-American, told off a bunch of white tourists for taking pictures at the Cape Coast Castle. He thought she was over-reacting: “Why was she so angry, they were just taking pictures.”
We were shown the graves of some guy and an English couple (later on that day, my mum would tell me how she read somewhere that Zimbabwean officials stated that they were going to exhume all the bodies of colonialists and send them to their respective countries). In the female dungeons we were told how the English colonialists raped female slaves. Apparently if a female slave became pregnant she would be spared the journey across the Atlantic and given a house. She would also be made a mistress. “That is how today we have Ghanaians with surnames like Johnson, Williams and the like,” the tour guide explained. I had always assumed those names were ‘slave names’ who knew they had an European ancestor? One woman told me the better option was to keep a rapist’s baby, “It is better than being sent to work as a slave in a foreign land.” I preferred that the choice not be limited. There should not have been such de-humanisation in the first place.
The guide led us to “the Door of No Return.” Now it is a door, but back in the day it was a hole that the slaves had to crawl through. It was from this ‘door’ that slaves were loaded unto ships bound for the Americas. “See how our ancestors were forced to go there and here we are struggling to get American visa.”
Our guide showed us that there was also a Door of Return now that descendants of slaves have the ability to return to land their ancestors were taken away from. The tour continued through the church (which has since been transformed into a library), the governor’s room, and the room that used to house the auction where slaves were bought and sold. We had reached the end of our tour.
I walked into one souvenir shop in the castle and struck a conversation with the salespeople there. There was a man with an really nice smile with a penchant for Jamaican slang and the Muslim girl eating fufu and pepper-soup. While on the cruise earlier on my holiday, the Nigerians on the table I sat at had commented about how I looked Ghanaian, so I took to asking the Ghanaians what they thought. The guy with the nice smile said I didn’t look Ghanaian because my body was fresh! I think he was referring to my skin tone. I related this his colleague who shook her head and said, “You’ve really embarrassed us! How can you say Ghanaians don’t have fresh skin?” She told me I looked like her cousin.
Page 2 of 3 | Previous page | Next page