Slumroach Millionaire

Wow, ladies and germs. Sorry for the prolonged silence. The network here in Ho (provided by VODAFONE, curse their name) has been a total mess for the last week and a half. We had some vital IT activities to take care of, so we made a quick trip into Accra in search (yet again) of a hotel with wireless. Unfortunately, I was so busy trying to register for my courses, I didn't get a chance to blog. Sigh.

Since the last note, we've been to Cape Coast for a short holiday. There are a lot of attractions to Cape Coast, but the biggest draw was its bookshop, Black Star Books, which from the looks of things thrives on the patronage of local university students. We picked up an excellent selection of classic literature for all ages to put in the library, including the complete works of William Shakespeare for around $30. (Gotta love that foreign currency market, provided you aren't actually an African.)

Aside from books, Cape Coast has many other positive points. For one thing, it's on the coast. This meant not only beautiful ocean views, but lovely cool ocean breezes. We spent three nights at a guesthouse that had no mosquito netting (we were absolutely eaten alive; ocean breezes also mean ocean-loving mosquitoes), but while we were awake, we spent most of our time at the local hotspot - Oasis Beach Resort. It's a restaurant and bar on the beach that recently expanded into a hotel, and is now the go-to spot for any foreigner in town, as well as any local who wants to meet them. After so long in the village, it was strange to spend so much time hanging out with expats, NGO workers, upper middle-class Ghanaians, university students, and the bevy of stoned rastafarian Burkinabe griots that wander around the tourist sites making friends and selling handicrafts.

The major site in the city itself is Cape Coast Castle, which for centuries was the seat of British power in the region. It is a striking whitewashed fort, extremely European but with a very tropical-coastal feel to the architecture - probably Portuguese influence (or it may have been built by the Portuguese and taken by the British, I'm not sure). It stands on an ocean escarpment, right above the water and right beside Cape Coast's most chaotic stretch of working beach, where the fishermen are continually untangling their nets and hauling in their catch out of their boats. But in order to get to the beach from the castle, you have to pass through a door - one with special significance. It's called the Door of No Return.

This is because, in addition to being a nice piece of architecture and a formidable military installment, Cape Coast Castle served for years as a giant depot for the trade in human beings. Our tour of the site took us into the most appalling, dark, squalid dungeons, where hundreds of Africans were regularly crammed into small rooms and made to live without daylight, sanitation, food, dignity, or hope. This was a life where women who were removed from the dungeons to be sexually abused by colonial governors were the lucky ones. Literally thousands of people passed through the Door of No Return to board ships to Brazil and the Caribbean. Most of them died on the way; many more died within a few years of arriving, crushed by the harsh conditions of slavery in the New World.

At one point, we stood in a place called the Room of the Condemned. There are three small chambers underneath the castle where insurrectionists would be locked and left to die of starvation and suffocation. The tour guide led us in, and then closed the door. We were wrapped in total darkness. Suddenly, I was seized by the terrible reality of it all. Every horror story from my history books leaped into life in front of me. People died in the room where I was standing. On a regular basis. And in this land where ancestor worship forms a major part of spiritual belief, I was forced to face the fact that my ancestors were the monsters responsible for this. And what's more, it isn't over. People are still standing in that room, all over the world.

Afterwards, I stood for a long time on a balcony overlooking the courtyard, weeping. I wasn't expecting it to be that moving, that troubling. But then, through my tears, I looked across at the Door of No Return, and saw a group of Ghanaian school children, laughing and chattering and running in their bright blue uniforms as their teacher led them on their class trip through the Castle. They were walking back in the door, from the beach, and so were fishermen with tangled nets, and masons who were repairing the outside walls, and small boys still wet from playing in the ocean. All of them walking back through the door. Returning.