Revisiting Elmina

I revisited Elmina in October 2008. I say revisited because the spirit of my ancestors had already survived the soul wrenching experience.

I took the bus from Accra to Elmina to the background of the incessant monotonous bleating of conductors repeating their destinations. Armed with "pure water" from a girl too young and beautiful to be resigned to a hawker's fate, I clambered aboard a slow-moving reject of a bus, reminding me, that ultimately Africa was still the dumping ground of the West. "Plantains miss?" "Yes please" I answered, even though I already had four packets in my bag, another purchase made to alleviate the guilt of being one of the lucky ones, as if by buying one packet of the tasty salty crisps, the mounds balanced tentatively on her small head would disappear more quickly, and the acid taste of a life selling the same thing around the same time to the same people would be tempered. With every stop of the bus, children clambered behind, conducting multiple transactions on foot, running (and catching up with) customers drifting away on heavy engines. Eggs with "pepp-erh", bread, combs, toilet rolls, cotton buds, CDs- nothing to cumbersome to trade for spanking new Ghana cedis.

The town of Elmina greeted me first by its smell, as if to remind me that the souls of cadavers of millions of African brothers and sisters had found final repose within its environs. It was the smell of festering sea-life, lives that had not sailed full-circle and had instead drowned on ocean floors a few miles away. The boats, by contrast were colourful in their regalia and sat on the sweltering seas, basking in stifling heat and humidity, dilapidated with a certain faded beauty, much like week-old artificial wreaths carefully poised on the mounds of graves in tropical cemeteries. This old Portuguese trading post, Sao Jorge de Mina, seized by the Dutch and then by Britain, was perhaps the last memory that my foreparents had of Africa, homeland.

I was taken on a tour of the castle, where slaves died below the floorboards of the rooms in which European men and women feasted. The recollections in Caribbean History II came alive as I walked the route of the dead. The holding cells were so tiny they were worse than claustrophobic, with no light save for a hole providing a muted view of a very distant horizon. I was frog marched into the slave prisons where those who rebelled were left to starve to death in a space that was undeserving of the name of a room. I was shown a connecting stair from the Master's quarters to the female slave rooms, where chosen female prisoners would be led to satisfy the cravings of needy conquerors.

History told me that I should be angry at the white mercenaries who treated our people so disposably. History told me that the white man's greed had no boundaries and that they went into our villages with guns and stole our grandmothers, grandfathers, parents, sisters, babies. History told me to be angry at the Popes and their papal bulls that condemned the black race to slavery. Maybe it was my eleven year old self, but I had always imagined the coastal towns to be almost void of life and form. I had imagined that the invaders slaughtered all in their way and that the coast was disfigured and barren – this was why they were able to take us away in such numbers and with such ease. I had heard stories of African slave traders but believed that these were only an errant few- all an exaggerated ploy by the West to humiliate our people and to absolve themselves: tales of the hunter always demeaned the hunted. Maybe I knew, but did not wish to accept that most of the Fante people, descendants of the Akan promoted the business of conquest and warfare. That among their ancestors were merchants and miners who traded gold. That it was easier and more profitable to replace gold with bulky human bodies. That chiefdoms were drawn along kinship lines and were the symbols of allegiance and not the colour of one's skin. So as I traced my way around the skeleton of Elmina, I felt no anger towards nameless faceless ship owners but intense disgust and disappointment that this was also our shame- the active facilitators of this dreadful trade in souls were us.

Far from being powerless, we were powerful. Far from being victims, we were aiders and abetters. Tribe over race, over country, over religion. 35 slave posts dotted around Ghana speak for themselves. Slave warehouses, trees with exposed routes for chaining prisoners and mass burial sites silently reveal what we do not wish to admit. I saw with my own eyes that directly adjacent to this castle where lives were tortured, men and women were able to swim peacefully in these seas of blood. I could imagine that while my forefathers were walking several kilometers in brutal conditions, shackled to each other, branded and stamped by fire, the coastal barterers and slave traders were able to eat yam and fish over open fires, to smile at babies being born, to fish and hunt and gather, to worship their gods in cool comfort. While tens of millions of African people forcibly left their shores in deplorable conditions, the barterers of the Gold Coast were being seduced by metal cookware, grains and seeds, livestock, rum, gunpowder and kola into selling people who looked exactly like them for less than the prices of horses. In fact in 1889, a German traveller called Blinger visited the Salaga market in the northern part of Ghana today, and made this startling revelation. "300 cowries are sold for a male slave, 400 for a female slave, 1000 cowries for a horse, 500 for an ox, and 150 on a sheep."

So as I stared into the distance from the Door of No Return I did not curse the white man. I cursed the Oyo Empire, I cursed the Kong Empire, the Kingdom of Benin, the Kingdom of Fouta Djallon, the Kingdom of Fouta Touru, the Kingdom of Khoya, the Kingdom of Khasso, the Kingdom of Kaabu, the Fante Confederacy, the Ashanti Confederacy and the Kingdom of Dahomey. And I prayed. That never again.