-
Feb 21, 2008 10:22 pm US/Pacific
-
Digg |
Facebook |
E-mail
|
Print
Assignment Africa: The Slave Castles of Ghana
Reporting
Dana King
Elmina, Ghana (CBS 5) ―
CBS 5 anchor Dana King recently completed a trip to Ghana in western Africa. This week she reports on the trouble of toxic e-waste, the struggle to find clean water in remote villages, the journey Americans often take to find a bit of their own heritage in the history of slavery, and the clash between an ancient belief in witches and the standards of modern justice. Below is Part 4: The Slave Castles of Ghana.
Elmina towers above Ghana's rocky shoreline known as the Gold Coast. It is a vision of white, as if the stain of its past could ever be concealed by paint.
Elmina is called a castle but its legacy is that of a dungeon. It is the oldest and largest of forty transatlantic slave warehouses in Africa.
"When they died here, they were not buried," guide Philip Amoa-Mensah tells us. "They were just removed and thrown into the sea for the fish to feed on."
Amoa-Mensah works to preserve the inhumane history that flourished here for hundreds of years.
The year 1441 was the first time ever the Portuguese started taking Africans to Portugal. Five hundred and thirty years later, in 1971, Bay Area educators Drs. Vera and Wade Nobles visited Elmina for the first time. And they have gone back every year since.
"I sat alone for some period. Just thinking and looking out at the ocean, just a deep,deep sadness," explains Dr. Vera Nobles.
"There's this whole gamut of emotions that go on," adds Dr. Wade Nobles. "When you go into the dungeons, they just jump out at you.
We squeeze through a tight passage that leads the way to the women's quarters.
"The women were held in here," Amoa-Mensah says. "One hundred fifty of them were sleeping on the floor. And when they arrived, they were very weak. And as women do have their menstruation, practically, they did everything on this floor. So this floor as it is dried today, in the past had menstrual blood, vomit, feces, and urine."
"The floor, think of the floor," says Dr. Vera Nobles. "How many women were placed in this small area! The smells. Smell the smells that were there. Go into the women's room and touch the walls. Close your eyes. Touch the walls and feel what the women were feeling."
In another room, slaves were brought for sale. Their buyers hid behind a wall and gazed at their human cargo through a peephole, never having to stand before them, touch them, or look them in the eye.
Another small cell was reserved for men who fought their captors, memorialized as "freedom fighters." They died brutally, their bodies pushed into the corners to make room for more prisoners until they were all dead. They had no food and no water.
Dr. Wade Nobles says, "There's the pain, the shame, of thinking about what men must have experienced, being bound and unable to protect their loved ones."
Death may have been easier for the women who were chosen as sexual slaves.
Guide Amoa-Mensah explains, "The governor, due to his position, any time that he wanted to do that, up on the balcony, there he stood."
The governor would pick a woman and she be would scrubbed clean by the soldiers. After the bath, she was given something small to eat and she was dressed and sent to the governor's residence, through a private access.
If she refused, she was dragged in the courtyard and chained to a weighted ball, and made to stand under the blazing hot sun with no food and no water, for days.
On Sundays, the captors took time to worship. While they sat with thoughts of heaven, something unholy was going on beneath their feet: their church lies just above the women's quarters, where it must have been impossible for the worshippers not to hear the women below, through the wood floors.
"This is the point were most of them cracked," says Amoa-Mensah, indicating a narrow, damp space. This was the portal to the new world for hundreds of thousands of slaves. It's called the Door of No Return. Here slaves passed ten or fifteen in a row, all in chains.
But only one person could go through at a time, down the dock to a waiting ship. Most of them would never see their family members again, creating a fragmented past that African Americans are still trying to piece together today.
"Now we look at ourselves and we're newscasters, we're professors at universities, we're astronauts," says Dr. Wade Nobles. "What kind of strength must be in these people? The dungeons is where the spirits say to us, 'Well done. We're glad you've come back.'"
For more information on aid to Africa, call World Vision at 510-525-5665 or email
amason@worldvision.org
.
(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)