Saturday, 11 June 2011—Accra, Kakum, Elmina, Cape Coast (Part Two)

Saturday, 11 June 2011—Accra, Kakum, Elmina, Cape Coast (Part Two)

Leaving Kakum and heading south towards the coast, we take a cut off from the road we’d traveled to Kakum to head toward Elmina.  Along the way, the mystery of why the numerous potholes in the road have been filled in with the red soil from the roadside for a couple short stretches is solved—two young boys stand with shovels in their hands, hoping for tips from passers-by for smoothing the way.  We pass a prison, and adjoining it an entire small village made up of two-story barracks style housing for the prison staff. 

Elmina, from the Portugese for “the mine,” in reference to the gold obtained there, sits on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea.  Though a relatively small town oriented around the fishing industry (as well as tourism) today, during the most important periods of its history, Elmina played key parts in the West African gold and later slave trades.  The historic heart of the town is St. George’s Castle, the oldest surviving European colonial structure in Sub-Saharan Africa.  That alone makes this a truly historic place, without even considering what was done here.  The original structure, though much altered and expanded since, was constructed in 1482, so this building is older than the entire history of the continuous presence of Europeans in the Americas, which began ten years later with the first voyage of Christopher Columbus. 

Elmina remained under Portugese control until 1647 when it was captured by the Dutch during the fighting among European countries that also included Britain, Denmark, and Sweden, over who would control trade along this stretch of the West African coast.  The earliest trade between Europeans and Africans involved gold and ivory brought from the African interior and exchanged for European goods such as tobacco and gunpowder at one of the over fifty castles that were eventually built along the coast, of which seventeen remain.  The importance of the gold trade is clear from the name given by the Europeans to the region that would eventually become modern Ghana—the Gold Coast—the name by which it was known during the period of British colonial control up until Ghana gained its independence in 1957, the first former sub-Saharan African colony to do so.  In addition to gold and ivory, the trade included from the very early Portuguese period on the purchase by Europeans of enslaved Africans, an element that grew over time to comprise an increasing portion of the overall trade.  By the time that the castle passed from Dutch to British hands in 1872, however, slavery and the slave trade had been widely outlawed, and the British used Elmina to consolidate their hold on their colonial territories along the coast and during their campaigns to pacify the powerful Asante (Ashanti) kingdom to the north around the region of Kumasi in modern Ghana.

St. George’s Castle and the other fifty or so forts built along the coast provided places for trade, bastions against attacks by other European powers or by the African groups with whom they were allied, and later as holding areas for slaves brought from the interior before they could be loaded onto ships for the voyage to the Americas or other destinations and eventual sale.  Unlike Kakum, which is a place that you can truly say you enjoy visiting, I am not sure that that term can be applied here.  I think you can “be glad” that you visited, or find it interesting and historical, but it just doesn’t seem to be right to use the term “enjoy” when speaking about a place that was involved in the slave trade as the castle at Elmina was.  The castle sits on a spit of land that is separated from the rest of the coast by a lagoon and a river.  Roughly rectangular in shape, the landward side is protected by a moat and drawbridge, over which we entered.  The interior courtyard is surrounded by buildings up to four stories tall, the upper stories of which would have been occupied by the governor and other high ranking Europeans residing in the castle.  At one end of this courtyard sits a building that was originally a Roman Catholic church built by the Portuguese church, but which now houses a museum with informational displays about the castle, Elmina in general, and also the surrounding regions which were linked to this place by the economic and political ties forged through trade.  The Dutch, being Protestants, converted this structure to commercial uses after taking over, and built their own church in another part of the castle.

It is impressive the way the girls go right to taking notes from the various displays.  In my time here so far this stands out as a hallmark of the AGISS students, and from them I infer of Ghanaian students in general—they take lots of notes.  In fact, at times in the classroom I have had to work to keep them from writing things down when what I want them to do is be thinking or talking about what I have written. 

Our tour of St. George’s Castle begins in one of the male slave dungeons, located right off the central courtyard.  This barrel-vaulted chamber perhaps twenty feet wide and one hundred fifty feet long would have held 200 men, chained to the walls.  Up to 600 at a time would have been held in the castle as a whole, along with up to 400 women.  The only amenities of the chamber would have been several large containers in the corners for use instead of toilets.  Some of the captives, by the time they had reached the castle, after up to a two month forced march from the interior, would have been past the point of caring, and not have made the effort to reach these containers.  The heat, the smell, the noise of men crying out in pain and frustration, and the sounds of many different languages of the captives mixed together would have been terrible to witness, though this was apparently tolerated by their captors. 

Adjacent to this dungeon are two small (15 foot square) cells that were used as jail cells.  One, with ventilation and light that could come in from both the door and a high window, was used to detain European soldiers stationed at the port for various offenses such as slipping off into town without permission—the soldiers might be detained here for periods ranging from a few hours to a few days, depending on the nature of their offense.  Next to it was a similarly sized cell, but with minimal ventilation or access for light.  Into this cell were thrown any of the enslaved Africans who saw fit to fight back against their captors.  Those thrown into this cell, with its skull above the door, were generally left there without food or water until all that remained to remove were dead bodies.  Our entire class of fifty students crowds into this room and the guide closes the door for a minute to give us a brief taste of the darkness, heat and crowding that would have been suffered by those put there in the past.

Exiting the cell, we cross the courtyard and proceed down a low tunnel to enter the female dungeon, centered around another smaller courtyard open to the sky.  These rooms were originally warehouses, before the primary goods moving through the castle shifted to human beings from other types of items.  Three stories above, a balcony allowed the governor, whose rooms were on that level, to look down into the courtyard.  The women would have experienced similar conditions to the men, but with the additional trauma of being subject to sexual predation from the European soldiers.  Even today, Elmina has a distinct mulatto population as evidence of the sexual relations between the soldiers and the African women.  It is little consolation to know that the women at least were not subjected to branding with a hot iron as the male captives were in a small room off of one of the male dungeons.  Like the men, though, the women had no sanitation facilities other than containers in the corners of the dungeons.  They were fed and some ate, but after being marched to the coast from the north, and after up to three months spent in the dungeons of Elmina Castle waiting for a slaving ship to come, some simply preferred to die.  In the middle of the courtyard sits a cannonball that could be attached with chains as punishment for a female who misbehaved. 

Entering another one of the dungeons used to hold enslaved males, at the far end we come to a low short tunnel that requires me to bend over sharply as I pass through.  Standing up at the other end I find myself in a small room with a steep rough stone stair leading down from the women’s dungeon above  that we had visited earlier, and a small door in the outer wall through which I can glimpse the sea.  This is St. George’s Castle’s “Door of No Return,” the exit through which all those who had been captured, sold, and brought here were taken out of the castle, and away from Africa forever.  Today, due to shifts in the currents, the ocean has receded and a wide sand spit lies outside the wall, but in the days of the slave trade, steps would have lead right down to a jetty, whence boats would have carried the captives in small groups to the ocean-going ships anchored offshore in the harbor.  Those slaves taken from Elmina by the Portuguese, I am told later, were taken to Suriname, Brazil, and Guyana, while the Dutch transported their captives to Indonesia and the West Indies.  Some, though I am not sure from what time period, were also taken to Great Britain, and particularly to Bristol and Liverpool.  Ironically, the harbor-front street of Elmina from which one turns into the castle grounds is named Liverpool Street.  Two wreaths in the room have been left by past visitors, members of the African diaspora, descendants of those who had passed through this Door of No Return or some other like it.

It is important for the sake of historical accuracy to note here that while those working in the slave trade in the fort and aboard the ships were Europeans, Africans also played active roles in the slave trade as middlemen who bought slaves at markets in the hinterlands from still other Africans who had captured the victims in the first place.  One of the things I have learned here, and particularly from my preparations for the lesson on the slave trade, is the complexity of the history of slave trading networks in the region of Ghana.  Many Americans do not know that many African societies practiced slavery among themselves long before the coming of Europeans to the continent.  Captives from warfare were commonly enslaved as might be those who could not pay their debts.  Traditional kings or leaders in some African societies also had the power to enslave their subjects, a practice that may have been rare originally, but which seems to have increased in frequency after the integration of Europeans into the slavery and slave trading systems of the region.  Prior to the coming of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and other Europeans, while the precise status of slaves within African societies depended on the group involved, and while slaves in all societies were subject to the control of others, in some African societies slaves could rise to positions of substantial power and influence.  In certain regions, female slaves especially might actually be incorporated into existing lineages through marriage so that their children became not slaves but members of the society in question.

The issue of the role of Africans in the slave trade is a touchy one in the United States, with some accusing those who raise the issue of wishing to divert attention from the cruelty of the European dominated trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved human beings.  In Ghana, the fact of the African role in the slave trade, both before and after the coming of the Europeans is undeniable and is accepted without argument, being cited as it is in the national text for high school history classes.  One of the sources I have read suggests, however, that while this has always been common knowledge, public  acknowledgement and discussion are things of the relatively recent past for the most part.

The coming of the Europeans and their entry into the slave trade in Ghana and throughout Africa, transformed the trade and with it the African societies that were involved in the trade, whether as victims or as perpetrators.  The destructive effects on African societies of having large numbers of their young and most able-bodied individuals stolen away can easily be imagined, and many of the problems facing Ghana and neighboring countries today are arguably rooted in these effects.  However, while well known in Ghana, it is little known to the best of my knowledge in the United States that the slave trade also greatly benefited some African societies and groups.  In Ghana, one of the primary groups benefiting was the Asante (Ashanti), who through their control of the slave routes from the interior to the coast became wealthy and powerful, developing a highly centralized society.  Within Asante society, the wealthy and powerful gained the most from the slave trade, largely because they were in the best positions to invest in and profit from the trade in such a valuable commodity.  The Asante, however, were not the only African group within Ghana to benefit in this way—another was the Fante.  As the expansions of these groups brought them into contact, and conflict, with each other, they formed alliances with different European powers, the Asante with the Dutch and the Fante with the British.  The withdrawal of the Dutch from West Africa in the late 19^th century left their former allies the Asante in a precarious position, leading shortly thereafter to warfare between the weakened Asante and the British.  When the British won this war, they imprisoned the Asantehene, the traditional leader of the Asante, in St. George’s Castle for over twenty years. 

Leaving the castle, which in 1979 was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site (along with adjoining St. Jago (St. James) Castle that sits just across the Elmina lagoon, and Cape Coast Castle some fifteen miles east along the coast), we head for the more light-hearted atmosphere of the adjacent beach, where a recent storm out at sea has the water roiling as the waves break in on shore, sending barefoot AGISS students running laughing and shrieking out of the waves’ reach.  Looking down the length of the beach, the incoming waves, some easily ten feet tall as they begin to curl and break, have thrown enough spray into the air that the view is shrouded in mist.  As at a couple of prime locations within the castle, such as out on the top level with the various cannon still pointing out at sea, this photogenic spot brings out the shutterbugs, with lots of requests for photos of me with one or a group of the girls.  We are accompanied on this trip by a photographer who is apparently regularly hired by the school for such purposes.  He must have a very large capacity memory card because he takes scores of such pictures in which I am featured, in addition to a seemingly endless stream of photographs of the girls, who will later be able to purchase copies.  Partway through our tour, the memory card in my camera fills up, and then, after deleting some easily replaceable shots of the AGISS grounds to make room for more pictures of our excursion, my camera battery gives out.  I expect, however, that when I get around to appealing to the students for this purpose, I will be able to get some pictures of the shots that I have missed.

This is an excellent chance to get to talk individually or in small groups with students who approach me with questions.  One of the most common is “Are you on Facebook?,” to which I answer “Yes,” but with the warning that even after I return to the U.S. it may be late summer before I can respond to messages I receive.  When I mention that my girls at home have asked me to bring them some shells from the ocean, a handful of students heads off to comb the beach, coming up to me somewhat later with a handful of much nicer specimens of shells than the shards I had found on my own.  Near our group, on the rocks that mark the rise from the beach and on the adjacent land above outside the castle entrance, congregate a collection of food and drink vendors, souvenir sellers, and somewhat questionable young men who purport to be raising funds for their soccer club and asking for contributions.  The latter display perhaps overly worn subscription sheets showing the names and amounts given by past “donors.”  There are a number of takers among our students for the snacks and souvenirs, but the “soccer club” members know it is pointless to approach our students for money, and so as we head to reboard the bus, I see that they have refocused their attention instead on two young white women who have just arrived, and who have been engaged in conversation by a couple of these characters.  I know that these two have probably read in their travel guidebooks or received verbal warnings from friends about such touts in places like this, but knowing about them and being able to extricate oneself from their persistent appeals are two different things.

Elmina is a small town, so we are soon outside of it and proceeding along the coastal highway just a couple hundred meters or so from the beach, with its collection of palm trees and beached fishing boats.  The harbor at Elmina was filled with these colorful and brightly painted boats, and I regret that I was unable to take any pictures of the site from my vantage point atop the castle.  On the spit of land that has developed just outside the castle walls several boats were under construction, their hulls being constructed from large rough wood planks.  These vessels are long and narrow and upon first sight to unfamiliar eyes, their appearance would make it easy to incorrectly assume that they were created by hollowing out a single massive tree trunk.  The largest of the vessels seemed when viewed from above at the castle to be perhaps six or seven feet wide and fifty or sixty feet in length.  I could not see the motors on the few vessels that were moving on the choppy water near the fort earlier, but they must be fairly powerful to move such substantial vessels, with their crews and their loads of fishing nets and, hopefully, fish.  Just outside the castle along the harbor, everywhere in Elmina as we passed through, and now sporadically along the coast are huge piles of these nets, some being repaired or reattached to their lines by fishermen, some merely sitting—large piles of aqua-green mesh with styrofoam floats waiting to be put to use.  A number of the beached boats that we see along this stretch, however, will clearly never put out to sea again, their faded broken sides and exposed rotted hulls revealing them as derelicts, left to rest among the coconut palms and to provide shelter, perhaps, for the chickens, goats, and one solitary pig that I see foraging.

On the inland side of the highway, we pass the University of Cape Coast, Osman’s alma mater and one of the largest and best universities in Ghana.  More interesting to the girls is St. Byzantine’s College, a boys’ high school, which elicits a cheer as we pass the school grounds and the boys who are out playing football (remember that in Ghana this means soccer) on a field adjacent to the highway.  The seaward side of the road is punctuated by beach resorts of various calibers, their walls, fences and gates providing brief glimpses of accommodations that range from well-worn, thatch-roofed bungalows to modern three-story white-washed blocks of rooms bristling with air-conditioning units, satellite dishes, and uniformed valets standing at the entries.  There seems to be something for every taste, and every budget, although the latter half of this statement is clearly untrue as I think about it, since there are many Ghanaians for whom even the least expensive of these accommodations will be forever out of reach, concerned as they must be just with making enough money to meet their daily needs.

This need to make enough money just to be able to buy some food for the day, let alone to pay for housing, clothing, taxi or tro-tro rides, or to meet the costs of school fees or emergencies, underlies the seemingly ceaseless economic activity on the streets here.  Even young school-aged children can be found attempting to sell small items to passers-by.  I saw on the news a day or two ago a quick note that the government is trying to eliminate child labor, but it is hard for me to see how this will be possible given Ghana’s overall level of economic development at present.

As we arrive in Cape Coast and pull up at the castle, it is already past 4:30 and Osman announces that we will make a brief stop here, but not enter the castle.  Although from the outside, this appears to be a somewhat larger structure than that at Elmina, much of the information inside is similar, though oriented here towards the British role along the coast, since Cape Coast was a British fort, built to contest control of the region with the Portuguese and later Dutch stationed at Elmina to the west.  As we arrive, I am able to squeeze one more picture out of my dying camera battery, and am very happy to be able to do so because it is of workmen whitewashing the exterior walls of Cape Coast castle.  This practice has raised vocal criticisms in recent years from some diaspora Africans in the United States, who hold that “beautifying” the castle in this way, in their minds for the purpose of promoting tourism, represents in effect an attempt to whitewash not merely the walls, but the castle’s history and the terrible events that took place here as well. 

This is another particularly sensitive issue related to the history of slavery in West Africa.  While I recognize the deep feelings that many descendants of enslaved Africans may have on the topic, I think that these criticisms reflect at least in part a willingness to ignore certain aspects of the historical record and historical practices here that may not fit neatly into twenty-first century perceptions and representations of the slave trade.  The fact is that the castles of the coast would have been whitewashed during the time of their use.  This was a method to maintain the integrity of the forts’ exterior surfaces in a tropical environment where rain, moisture and the ensuing growth of fungi, molds, and plants on walls and other building surfaces requires ongoing maintenance of this kind in order to avoid their deterioration.  A shabbier appearing building with walls of mottled browns and grays may accord more closely with the feelings that people have about the slave trade than does a structure the neat white appearance of which belies the dark nature of the events that took place there, but it is nevertheless wrong to consciously bend the historical record in such a way to serve the purposes of the present, no matter how sincere and lofty these may be.

We take a brief walk around from the landward side of the castle to that facing the sea.  Cape Coast castle is built on a promontory atop rock bluffs that rise steeply above the water.  The surf coming ashore here is large and powerful, and as the waves crash against the base of bluffs below, they send towering plumes of spray onto the rocks above.  This must be a ceaseless phenomenon, for the rocks are coated with seaweed, and shellfish grow in small tidal pools that drain slowly down the face of the bluff between incoming waves that soak them anew.  At one point, as I am standing atop the bluffs posing for a picture with a small group of students with our backs to the sea, a wave sends its water surging all the way up the rocks to where we stand, perhaps ten meters above the ocean’s level, soaking the lower legs of my pants and sending the girls scurrying.  As we walk a little more, a group of Ghanaians who has also been exploring the seaward side of the castle walls is similarly posed on the highest point of the bluffs, at least fifteen meters above the sea, when a massive wave crashing into the base sends a towering spray of water rising up at least another three meters above their heads before crashing down, as we watch, to soak all in the group but the photographer who was poised to take the picture.  I certainly hope that he got the shot, because it would have been memorable.

Leaving Cape Coast, the older part of the city near the castle is characterized by large thick walled buildings of from two to four stories, while as we move away from the water, the architecture changes to the contemporary Ghanaian mix of buildings.  Sometimes the names on signs or shops along the way beg for further investigation, such as the “Holy Cities Academy Masquerade Society.”  Others of particular note include the “God’s Grace Spraying (spray-painting) Shop” and the “Don’t Mind Your Wife Chop” house (“chop” here is a term that refers to prepared meals).  It is difficult to tell if some of these signs are actually as old as they appear with many perhaps all that remains of now otherwise forgotten businesses and events, or if their advanced states of disrepair simply indicate the rapid weathering caused by the tropical climate and proximity to the ocean.  At the traffic circle where we rejoin the main Cape Coast-Accra highway, I see a large billboard displaying pictures of Ghanaian president Atta Mills and American President Barack Obama, with the slogan “Mills-Obama: Leadership We Can Trust.”  Shortly after another proclaims “Graphix Salutes Ghana at 50,” dating it to 2007.

We are in and out of rain on the entire trip back from Cape Coast.  During one such downburst, I see a girl sheltering herself under the large metal bowl she must usually use when carrying items on her head.  Rain here creates rust red puddles wherever there is a depression in the red, iron-rich African soil.  There is surprisingly little mud, though, since much of the soil is sandy and as I have noticed at the school, within just a short time after the rain has stopped, most of the water drains away.  Even in the rain, when we pull over just outside of Cape Coast to allow the girls to buy kenkey to eat after our late return to AGISS, the vendors come running to the bus, recognizing a large sale when they see it.

Re-entering Greater Accra, we drop several students off at various points along the way, beginning with some who live quite far from the school.  I am told that it might take two hours each, morning and evening, for the girls from these areas to make their way to and return home from AGISS.  More surprising to me than their willingness to travel these distances, however, is the fact that we are dropping them off as we are, along one of the main roads that makes up our route, then leaving it to them to make their own way home from this point.  This indicates a very different way of looking at who is responsible for students and their welfare in Ghana as compared with the U.S.  It is incomprehensible that what we are doing could be done in the U.S., where I, for example, am legally responsible to supervise my students throughout the full course of school activities like today’s excursion.

Our full round trip, when I inquire later of Isaac, covers a distance of 168 miles, including our inland loop to Kakum.  This makes the distance between Accra and Cape Coast about sixty miles.  Distances in Ghana, however, tend to be expressed in terms of time spent traveling rather than the miles between two places, and with good reason.  On this busy Saturday evening we were basically caught in a sixty mile long traffic jam, departing Cape Coast just after 5:00 PM, but not arriving back at AGISS until around 9:30.