Saturday, July 18, 2009

doors of no return

accra, ghana

while the segments of roots that i was shown in my seventh grade social studies course were certainly poignant, they hardly compare with the sensation of standing in one of the relics lining the coast of west africa. six weeks ago, seemingly a lifetime, i stood in the dungeons of the slave castle at ile de goree and felt the presence of all those tortured souls from centuries ago. last week in benin, i saw from a distance the gate at ouidah from where so many of the ancestors of present-day haitians and other french caribbeans last saw their home continent. over the past two days, i've visited grander facilities along the coast of ghana that exported perhaps the greatest number of shackled passengers.

sobriety is found in the details. slaves from weaker tribes were captured from more powerful african kingdoms, who then traded their human bounty to european powers in exchange for further armaments, as the case generally was. the slaves were then separated between 'commercial' and 'domestic', with the former being kept in dank dungeons for periods of three months and the latter trained to serve the paltry rations of food and water (so the european soldiers didn't have to). the reason for the confinement was twofold: to separate the strong from the weak (around one-third died at cape coast, more than eight million at elmina) and to weaken any human spirit in these souls.

but you know all this. you may have forgotten a couple facts and figures, but it's been etched into your minds from the days of lunch boxes and yellow buses. but textbooks can't relate what its like to stand in a cellar with no light and picture the 250 people bunched together for months on end. textbooks don't show the path carved in stone by a river of feces, piss, and blood that flowed for centuries from holding cells to the gulf of guinea. and they don't show you the door.

the prominent feature of each of these castles was the same: the door of no return. it is the most affecting image from each castle: dark hallways leading to the bright blue sea. today there are humble fishing vessels on one side and camera toting tourists on the other. with a little imagination, it's not impossible to get an understanding of how this distribution came to pass and its relation to what once happened in each of these locations.

but a strength of the tours was that they showed that the blame for this gross phenomenon is shared and cast wide. those in the americas profited from indentured labor, but so did the more powerful african kingdoms. and let's not forget that some of those european capitals would be a whole lot less opulent if they didn't have their own irons in the shameful inferno.

there is at least a plaque in each of the three castles that provide logical points to end the tour and return to the present. they each bear messages deploring the slave trade and offering some variation on the vow of 'never again'. when you step out of each castle, the many people on their cellular phones and the passing cars might tell you that this era is over. in an ironic turn of events, my layover tomorrow will be in dubai, perhaps this generation's greatest destination for (for all intents-and-purposes) slave labor. guess there's still a little more to learn.

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