I’ve spent nearly a decade trying to articulate my visit to the slave fort in Ghana with Semester at Sea. And I know that my long sought for words will still be inadequate to capture the fear, pain, shame, and devastating significance of that place. TW: sexual violence, captivity, slavery
Our small group was made up of college students, myself and a fellow priest, and a few other colleagues. We walked through room after room that had once held people stolen from their lives to be slave labor in ‘The New World.’ I will not comment on architecture. I am not providing a map or plan of a slave fort. I do not want to offer anything that makes this place ‘interesting’ or that glorifies this piece of our history. There was no glory and nothing interesting, only stomach churning horror as we walked through room after torturous room.
The captured men, women, and children became slaves here, held in waiting. This fort is where they learned the horrors that would fill the remainder of their days, and those of their children and grandchildren. Children were separated from their mothers here. Couples were broken apart. The despot in charge, Dutch in this case, lived in rooms on the upper floor, conveniently located above the dungeon for women. A particularly tomb like room was a holding cell for the African women selected as his rape victims each night, making the women’s subjugation complete and the humiliation of their men entire.
There was a ‘chapel’ in the fort, above another dungeon holding human beings, because these slave traders were faithful Protestants. I cannot image what prayers God would have received in such a chapel. They would most certainly have been drowned out by the pleas of the prisoners below and God’s own heart breaking. I might have stood still and cried endlessly in that room, at the corruption of my spiritual tradition, but this placed stunned emotion. Others cried, though, quietly, softly, slowly, as we paced through the fort, not only because we did not know each other well enough to let down our emotional guards, but also because walking through such evil is numbing. I wonder if any captives of the slave traders were stunned into silence while others wailed in agony.
At the end of the line of rooms, sloping down to the water line, was a tiny passage and and a tiny door, known as the “door of no return.” This is where every slave was pushed out of the fort and onto a slave ship headed for the Middle Passage. We each took a turn standing in the doorway, trying to imagine the unimaginable.
Later we stood on the ramparts of the fort, looking out to the sea, begging the ocean breeze to wash away the revulsion we felt and the evil of this place. We knew it wouldn’t. This kind of pain seeps into the pores of a place. The bricks hold cries of pain. The sand itself seems to bear witness. Every boat on the shore is an echo of a slave ship.
And, they aren’t. The small fishing boats hold no slaves, only free men and women building their own
lives. Perhaps more powerful than a cleansing breeze are the lives that are lived in the surrounding community. Our guides, who make a living in the footsteps of slaves, are not callous or indifferent. They are on a mission, gentle, and kind. They’ve seen what this place does to its visitors. They want us to experience it, to know its pain. It is pain that they carry willingly, perhaps to ensure that others of their countrymen never have to live it again.
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