Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024 | 2 a.m.
I’d been warned. Nearly everybody who had visited one of many stone forts in Ghana the place enslaved Africans had been held earlier than making the journey to the Americas advised me to organize myself for the wave of feelings that may wash over me.
I wasn’t prepared. There was no manner I may have been.
A information led my husband and me right into a dungeon particularly designed for male captives. It was darkish and stifling. Daylight shone by means of a lone, slim window manner overhead.
I attempted to think about the way it will need to have been as our tour information described a whole bunch of males crammed into areas like this so tightly that folks may barely transfer, their our bodies merely mendacity atop each other. There have been no lavatory services for these prisoners again then, which meant they must spend weeks or longer in their very own waste.
Studying about it was one factor. However strolling across the grounds of the Seventeenth-century fort and exploring the precise dungeons the place untold numbers of enslaved Africans had been as soon as held made the atrocities extra actual to me than I’m in all probability capable of describe.
For me, making peace with these emotions was a part of my expertise in Ghana, whose authorities has prolonged an open invitation to Black Individuals to “come dwelling” — urging them to go to and likewise immigrate to this deeply impoverished nation of practically 35 million.
“The Africans had been collaborators with the Europeans, however they didn’t begin the slave commerce,” stated Molefi Kete Asante, the famous scholar of African American historical past at Temple College, after I reached out to him final week.
“The shopping for and the promoting of Africans was at all times within the arms of Europeans,” added Asante, writer of “The Historical past of Africa: The Quest for Everlasting Concord.” “It was not the Africans who had the ships. It was not the Africans who had the insurance coverage for the sailors. It was not the Africans who had the weapons, the cannons. This was all a European enterprise.”
On the fort in Cape Coast — about 90 miles west of Ghana’s capital, Accra — I struggled by means of a 60-minute guided tour of the grounds. It wasn’t misplaced on me {that a} fort first product of wooden by the Portuguese in 1653 was a stark reminder of slavery’s not-so-distant previous.
At one level, my husband and I visited what was a chapel. I paused for a second to mirror on the inhumanity of churchgoers to attend spiritual providers steps away from the place a lot distress was happening.
After we bought to the feminine holding pens, I steeled myself as soon as once more to step again into the darkness, if just for a second. I made it inside and was trying round when our information, from African Roots Journey, handed me a beribboned funeral wreath. I needed to choke again tears.
On the entrance was an inscription in reminiscence of our household’s feminine ancestors who might have been held there. Like most who’re descendants of enslaved Africans, I don’t know a lot about my ancestors — solely that they had been almost certainly born in West Africa and transported in opposition to their will to the US and compelled to work without cost on plantations within the South.
Subsequent, we headed for the so-called Door of No Return — a doorway that led the enslaved to awaiting ships for his or her journey to the Americas.
A short while earlier, we had journeyed to the Assin Manso Ancestral Slave River Website, the place the enslaved had been inspired to wash — not out of concern for his or her well being and hygiene, I used to be advised, however within the hope that they may fetch larger costs from their captors earlier than being offered and making their journey to the Americas.
I crouched over the waters and thought in regards to the tens of millions who took their final bathtub on the continent there.
I assumed in regards to the phrases of Vice President Kamala Harris when she visited Ghana final 12 months. “The horror of what occurred right here should at all times be remembered,” she stated. “It can’t be denied. It have to be taught. Historical past have to be realized.”
Because it so occurs, my journey right here started within the days after her defeat within the presidential election. It’s unclear what’s going to occur to the educating about this chapter in American historical past as soon as President-elect Donald Trump takes workplace.
Throughout an look on Fox Information in October, Trump stated he would shut the U.S. Division of Schooling and reduce funding to colleges that taught the total historical past of slavery. I take him at his phrase.
Not acknowledging the influence of 400 years of chattel slavery, and much more of racial segregation, is a option to deny the nation’s ugliest chapters and absolve the federal government of ever making amends, which it ought to have executed way back.
In the meantime, Ghana has devoted a lot of its tourism efforts to encouraging Black folks from all through the African diaspora to “return,” both to go to or to dwell.
It’s a return I’m glad I made — and it’s one I’d encourage anybody of African descent to make.
We should at all times, because the vice chairman stated, bear in mind the horror that occurred right here, each to honor the painful journeys made by our ancestors and to make sure that our descendants will prosper — it doesn’t matter what shores they name dwelling.
Jenice Armstrong is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
