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.
