“The past
Is but the cinders
Of the present;
The future
The smoke
That escaped
Into the cloud-bound sky.”
– Kwesi Brew

When French explorer and slave trader Jean Barbot visited Elmina Castle in 1682, he described the high stone walls as strong, beautiful and cannon-proof. He detailed the surrounding warehouses as being “stately and well furnished.” It was like nothing he’d ever seen.

And he wasn’t wrong. Originally built as the first trading post on the coast of Guinea, Elmina Castle is the oldest European building south of the Sahara. Construction began in 1482 and continued through 1486. By the seventeenth century, Elmina castle would become a pivotal stop along the route of the transatlantic slave trade, where upwards of 12 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic over a span of 400 years.

I arrived in Ghana on June 28, 2019, to intern as a reporter for a Ghanaian newspaper as part of a study abroad for my journalism degree at the University of Oregon. We drove three and a half hours from Accra to Elmina, formerly known as the Gold Coast, to visit the slave castle and to experience a part of Ghana my peers and I hadn’t known.

Indeed, from afar, the first thing I noticed was something akin to beauty: a large white fortress, proudly overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, as if it were the castle that came first, with the ocean being built around it. Outside of the fortress, the streets of Elmina were lined with merchants, beggars, young men and women, sitting and playing. I would come to find out, that regardless of their proximity to the historic Elmina Castle, many Ghanaians never fully learn about the atrocities that happened only a stones-throw away from where they live. To dwell on the past is a privilege in and of itself. For the Ghanaians struggling to survive, being present is a necessity.

By the time the bus parked, the castle looming large to my left like the grey clouds of a midday monsoon, the notion of beauty was slowly stripped of me. The sun reflecting off the white paint blinded my eyes. I bowed my head and squinted at the ground. A boy approached me and asked for my name. I had been advised to avoid giving my name to anyone, as the beggars would take it and make me a personalized gift, which I’d be expected to pay for. I remembered this as he spoke to me, and told him my name anyways. He said his name was Boston, and that he’d eventually make it to the U.S.

It’s hard to put into words the atrocities that happened at Elmina Castle. As a writer, my words and the words of others are sometimes all I have. But today, they feel cheap and trivial.

I can tell you about the smell of the dungeons, where hundreds of Africans were packed like sardines, forced to piss, shit and bleed on the stone floor, the metal chains dragging their bodies toward the cold ground.

I can tell you about the dead and decomposing bodies still chained to the living.

I can tell you about the steep wooden staircase where contemporary tourists sometimes slip and fall, and where slave women were ushered into the masters quarters, only to be raped and brought back down to the dungeons.

I can tell you about the metal bars, rusted with age and filth, that kept the slaves enslaved, that were cold to the touch, as if they’d soaked up the sorrow of those contained, only to dispel the remaining pain in cold, languid bursts.

I can tell you about the door of no return, where the enslaved boarded ships, with somehow worse conditions than the slave castle behind them. I can tell you about the kids playing in the ocean as I looked out the small, emaciated passageway that day.

I can also tell you about my selfishness. About my inability to comprehend the mass amounts of pain surrounding me. About the barrage of trivial thoughts concerning my girlfriend back home, about my internship and my cat. For me, the privilege existed in my inability to remain present. To imagine a sea of faces perishing at the hands of colonizers is easier than imagining just one. Because if there’s only one, there’s a chance I might recognize it.

Yes, I can tell you about all of this, the words tasting flat and diluted on my tongue. I can tell you how uncomfortable I am writing this now. How the idea of me using this experience as a tool for personal growth feels both empowering and utterly defeating at the same time. I can tell you about the moment I recognized the faces.

We were sitting in a small conference room at our beach side hotel later that evening. The rest of the students and I had met there at 6 p.m. to unpack our trip to Elmina Castle. Walking there from my air conditioned room, I still hadn’t grasped the gravity of where I’d found myself. I hadn’t attempted to see my surroundings through the eyes of others.

The discussion began slowly. It seemed as if nobody felt comfortable diving in, so we first dipped our toes, before wading in, waist deep. I was struck by the casual nature of the conversation, and I despised the awkward silence that followed each voice. I wished it would end.

When it seemed as if it finally would, a heard the beginnings of a shaky voice to my left. One of the two black students on our study abroad was preparing to speak. She sighed and said she couldn’t find the words to say how she felt.

She couldn’t find them. As if they were there, only hidden or lost. I had spoken only moments before. I had strung together a sentence of words I hadn’t searched for. It was the bare minimum. I sat in a puddle of my own complacency, when she finally spoke.

“That could have been my aunt, or my mother. If I was born at a different time, that could have been me.”

When I heard those words, I became speechless for the first time that day. I wasn’t able to hide behind my vocabulary the same way I had been this whole trip. I felt the air leave the room.

I could suddenly see the faces and personalities of those who perished. I could feel the pain, to the best of my ability, of those around me. I cried for them, and for the helpless nature of my predicament. I felt like I’d been allowed into a sacred space. One that I neither deserved nor added too.

The Elmina Castle seemed to have added a certain kind of closure for her. A long, painful, drawn out sense of closure. A closure that’s neither fair nor expected. Neither demanded nor needed.

Through tearful eyes, I lifted my head and glanced around the room. It scared me to look at the other students. It scared me to know they were looking at me. Suddenly, my fear turned to an overwhelming sense of love for those around me. Fear and love live side by side. You can’t have one without the other.

I’ll never forget my experiences at Elmina Castle, or the people I experienced it with.