Out of Africa

 Religion and slavery

If you are a descendant of African slaves, you shouldn’t visit Ghana without going to Cape Coast to see for yourself, some of the atrocities of the Atlantic slave trade.

This horrid place is 135km journey from Accra, the capital.

There you find Elmina Town on the Atlantic Ocean. That is where the shipment of captured and tortured slaves took place. 

Today it is a bustling fishing village to which traders come to from near and far to get supplies.

However, still visible and intimidating is a solid building on the hill overlooking the town. 

This was the army barracks which housed the well-armed soldiers who guarded the slave port, the fort and castle in which the human cargo were held.

In short, that is where the most heart-wrenching example of 'man's inhumanity to man' and the evils of Christianity, still stand fully exposed.

 It is also now an UNESCO heritage site.

This is Elmina Castle where the slaves were held, traded and tortured. The second floor had a chapel and religious quarters.

This castle was erected in 1482 by the Portuguese as a normal trading center until they realized how much more lucrative it was to trade in humans rather than products.

The Dutch seized the castle and fort from the Portuguese in 1637 and like their predecessors, used the promise of milk and honey through Christianity, to fool native chiefs and lull them into complacency while they continued the lucrative slave trade across the Atlantic.

In the mid 1600’s, the British who had become the most successful slave-trading nation, took over the castle and used it as their main slave trading post until 1807.

Between 1650 and 1860, it is estimated that approximately 10 and 15 million Africans were transported, often more dead than alive, to the colonies in the Caribbean, North and South America and to other countries.

Although the British claimed they had officially abolished slavery in 1837, their traders either outrightly or covertly, continued the trade or owned most of the ships that took millions more of captured Africans to their doom.

I often heard our Ghanaian guide's voice crack with emotion as he related some of the atrocities our ancestors experienced there.

What was especially disgusting for me was seeing the Biblical quotes all over the chapel and the space where the religious leaders slept. 

This is right above where slaves were tortured and kept chained in dark dungeons on cold bare floors.

On trading days, the slaves would be paraded naked below, as the buyers inspected them through the peep hole on the chapel floor and choose the ones they wanted.

Once the deal was done, the slave would then be branded with hot irons, with the names of their new owner.

Female slaves were also held naked and chained too. Sometimes they never received any food for 72 hours and all bathroom activities happened right there.

As the traders did not travel with their women, when they wanted sex, they would take one or a few females outside and wash them off. The water used to bathe them came from an underground drainage which they said they could never use themselves, as it was toxic.

Females who resisted were brutally punished. Those who got pregnant would be taken away to the town to deliver and brought back to the dungeon immediately.

Their children were never seen by them.

The dungeon to which rebellious slaves were taken had no ventilation, and the slaves were left there to starve to death. Their bodies were then dumped in the ocean.

The door of no return which led out to the ocean, was through which the slaves were taken out to the shore to board to small canoes which took them to the large slave ships anchored offshore.

Quite frankly, after seeing it all, I was shocked at how much Ghanaians are still into Christianity today despite these stark reminders in their midst of how evil it all is! (25% of Ghanaians are Muslim, the rest are Christian.)

 I have never seen more posters and billboards vying for people's souls anywhere else in the world than on this road from Accra to Cape Castle!

I estimated that at least 70% of all the roadside ads were about church activities, a small number advertised funerals and memorials, and the rest were commercial.

Jamaica has just as many actual churches as they do (proportionate to size and population of course) but they spend a lot more money by far on advertising religion than we do.

On a lighter note, whereas in Jamaica, there is usually a bar or two beside each church, I saw very few bars along the road to Cape Coast or anywhere else in general.

It seems Ghanaians concentrate on one spirit only.