When History Becomes Real
History for me has been mostly a classroom subject. We’re taught to analyze what has happened in the past, and hopefully this will improve our understanding of the present and future. But, this practice has always had a large degree of abstraction. When the trans-Atlantic slave trade is taught, there is an inevitable difficulty in imagining the sheer quantity and cruelty of how human beings were mistreated. Studying the numbers and watching movies are only partially effective in evoking an understanding of this large-scale event. This is why one of the most memorable tours in this trip so far was going to the Cape Coast Castle.
This castle is one of around forty former slave castles in this part of the Gold Coast. When European slave traders came to West Africa, they took large amounts of the African population captive and would later ship these ‘human resources’ to be slaves to other parts of the world — Brazil, Haiti, the United States, the Netherlands. While they were captive in Africa and their sales were being prepared, the captive slaves were held in the most inhumane, unhealthy, and traumatizing facilities imaginable. The Cape Coast Castle is one of these facilities. As a group, we all were given a jaw-dropping tour of this castle. We were ushered into dungeons where the slaves were held in the near complete dark for around six months. They were given extremely minimal food and water. They were given no bathroom facilities, so they were forced to excrete where they lived. They were given no social interaction to family members and weren’t allowed out for any reason — other than to be shipped across the seas. The women were often raped, and the men were often tortured.
In the castle, we walked through all these dungeons and holding cells, while our guide was pointing out each cruel detail. One of the most striking points was seeing The Door of No Return. This door was the last point when the captives would be shipped off to their new lives of slavery in different parts of the world. Even after going through torturous living situations for many months, the worst had largely been yet to come for the captives. This had a really profound impact on me because I’ve never been able to imagine being forced to go or do something I didn’t want to do. But for at least hundreds of thousands, they were forced to live in the most inhumane conditions imaginable and then were shipped to an entirely new, and similarly cruel, life. This experience was hard to stomach for all of us on this trip, but was a necessary part of experiencing Ghana and understanding the history of the country we are travelling in and the country we live in permanently.
To be sure, this Dialogue has had many other great landmarks and museums. We’ve been able to tour one of the most beautiful national parks I’ve ever been to and were able to see the mausoleum of the legendary Kwame Nkumrah. However, the Cape Coast Castle had the strongest impact on my understanding of history, and it will be a place that serves to remind me of the cruelest aspects of human history.
