An eternity for colonialism's ghosts

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Thousands of Africans were sent through Ghana to slavery in the Americas. ( )

Sitting on an outcropping of jagged rock, St. George Castle, better known as Elmina Castle, after the name of the town it towers over, is deceptively benign to look at from afar. Its white washed walls, set against a grayish ocean backdrop give it an appearance of some old crusader's citadel in a Hollywood epic. It's hard to imagine that it once was one of the most hellish places on earth, where for over a century, thousands of West Africans were brought here as the depot transmitting them into a life of slavery, that is, if they didn't die first in its dark, diseased catacombs.

The tour inside commences with a scramble through shadowed tunnel ways and four-foot-high archways. The first stop is a small courtyard the size of a squash court, dappled by an afternoon Ghanaian sun. It's explained to us as we look upwards to a small veranda some 30 metres above, that this is where the governor would gaze down to a crammed melee of black women and choose his nightly sleep partner. The others would then be pushed back into the dungeons that surrounded the square -- shared by 300 to 400 other women who had no place to lie or sit or any toilet facilities for relief.

That is when the embarrassment and shame began to creep inside. A realization that this was an imposed reality of violation, day after day, for close to a century, as Europeans and their tribal chieftain partners built a trade in humans that was the backbone of commerce for British, Dutch, Portuguese traders, and which ended up producing the slave cultures of the West Indies and the southern United States. "Can it be," I asked my self, "that I'm an inheritor of this travesty?"

The next stop was a lesson in hypocrisy. We were taken to a barren room on the second level where the traders and their families lived. The only adornment was a small ceramic reciting the creed of the Dutch Reformed Church, expressing the goodness and justice of God. The guide dryly observed that the floor right below where prayers were offered regularly to this just God, was the room where several hundreds of male slaves were encased, with the same living conditions as their women counterparts.

Which leads me to the point in the tour that brought emotions to the surface and a stunned, speechless non-response. It was the exit door that led to a long jetty where the slaves would be led to their respective ships. At the point of egress there was a small, set aside space, perhaps four by four feet. This was where there could be a split second reunion of husband and wife, parents and children, maybe grandparents or just close friends. They had a moment to catch a glimpse, hold a hand or cry out in grief, as they were sent off to their various destinations, unlikely to ever see each other again -- moments of heartbreak repeated hundreds of times a day.

Walking out I asked the guide if there had ever been talk or effort to seek reparations for the descendants of the victims who walked through the passageway of Elmina? Surely, in this day when we recognize how such a wrenching of the human spirit can destroy and corrode generations into the future, there has been some international meeting somewhere to raise the question?

Our guide, a knowledgable young man, could only reply that he thought that a few years ago the African Union had raised the issue, but there was to his understanding nothing afoot at present. It was, come to think of it, a pretentious question. As if there hadn't been many before me, who walked the dank and decaying corridors of the castle who didn't need some assuaging of the emotions released by the encounter. Faced with this man-made palladium of suffering and sorrow, knowing that as legatees of the wealth generated by the slave commerce of the 19th century, giving us a heads up in the global market place, we have prospered on this evil.

And I was also reminded, as I returned to my tasks of developing educational opportunities in the west region of Africa that all these efforts compounded by the multitude of similar ventures of aid, development, partnership and co-operation can never begin -- or a least not for generations -- to come be a proper and just reparation for the damage and destruction that has been caused

And I'm also made more aware and more finely tuned to the facts that such evil actions of men against their fellow kind, and in particular the violence and persecution, persist for the most vulnerable: the women and children. Far too often, women stand in a courtyard to be summoned for the nightly pleasure, and we too often stand removed on a floor above singing hymns of redemption while the sins under the floor below go unheeded.

Lloyd Axworthy is President of the University of Winnipeg and a former Liberal minister of foreign affairs.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 8, 2012 A10