THE GHANA CHRONICLES: Imagining the Unimaginable: 6-17-23

From the lovely Canopy Walk to the horrific slave castles of Elmira and Cape Coast. The place where Ghanaians collaborated with Europeans to sell those captured in inter-tribal wars into bondage. These castles are where they were held until a ship was ready to take them across the Atlantic for some 400 years of bondage. So much beauty and love and connection and hope awaited us in the two weeks to follow, but first we needed to pay our dues by facing the history of what made our presence possible here and what precisely needs healing. 

 

And a heavy price it was. Compassion requires some level of imagination, an ability to step inside others shoes that you will never actually walk in, but can imagine what it might be— or might have been—like. As we entered the dungeons where the captives were held, we were asked to imagine the unimaginable. Truly, any and all aspects of the slave trade are so horrific that focusing on any single aspect—the conditions of the Middle Passage, the being sold as property on the auction block, the endless back-breaking hand-bleeding labor from sunrise to sundown, the tearing apart of families, the rape of the women, the beating of the men— it’s a long list. (Go to the Whitney Plantation outside New Orleans to get the real story of the life of an enslaved human being and feel it down to your bones). It’s easy to read about slavery in the history books and think that it was unfortunate or unfair, but to actually open your heart and try to imagine the sheer horror is something that few of us are prepared to do or certainly would choose to do. But here we were at Cape Coast Castle.

 

Our guide was pleasant and called us “Beautiful People!” while he talked of the conditions in the dungeon. Doing it every day, I imagine he has learned to distance himself from re-imagining the dread and disgust, but simply telling us the story was enough—for me, at least— to go yet deeper into one of the most vile stories of people’s capacity for inflicting suffering. And still sleep at night with some fantasy that God or gold justified it all, some extraordinary capacity to shut down their feeling so that they’re blind to their own brutality. 

 

The most striking part of this story was the fact that these men and women crammed in these dark, dank dungeons without light or much air, not for a day or two, but for months at a time, without exercise, without seeing the sun, with minimal food, is horrific enough. But here’s something no one would think about that the guide made clear. There were no toilets. They sat and slept where they shat and pissed. Take a moment to imagine that.

 

And then for those that survived, when they were finally taken through the Door of No Return and had a brief taste of fresh air and sunlight, they then were crammed into the hold of a ship for another few months passage in another torture chamber. And when they finally arrived in the New World, what awaited them? A lifetime of backbreaking labor, beatings, more brutality. We complain if we don’t get enough exercise for a day or it’s  foggy for two days straight and we don’t see the sun or if we go into a smelly public toilet. Can we picture what these fellow human beings endured? 

More importantly, do we understand the stories of white supremacy and a vengeful, narrow-minded God and a unquenchable lust for gold and riches that lay at the bottom of it all? That fed the worst parts of our flawed humanity and continue to do so today? Do we ever stop to consider that the unspeakable suffering of tens of millions of human beings mostly happened so we can drink coffee, put sugar in it and have a smoke afterwards?

 

The guide was clear that while the Europeans created these conditions, his Ghanaian ancestors were complicit. That from King Leopold to Genghis Khan to Idi Amin to Saddam Hussein and beyond, that this is a universal human problem. And each culture needs to face its shadow and shut down the stories that allow atrocity to continue. 

 

The tour ended with a story of creating the Door of Return as part of a healing movement welcoming displaced Africans and indeed, all people coming with an open heart, back to their homeland. A good reminder to us all.