SOJC Students Tour Historic Ghana Sites
by Professor Elizabeth Bohls, Department of English, University of Oregon
“There was a deep heaviness inside these places you could not shake.”
-Melina Mallari, Media Studies major
I sat on the terrace of Elmina Castle on the coast of Ghana, West Africa, looking out over the Gulf of Guinea. Spaced along the terrace edge were massive cannons aimed at the water. Having studied and taught the history of slavery and the slave trade for years, I finally had the opportunity to travel to Africa, source of the 12 million enslaved people taken to the New World over four centuries to labor, suffer, and build new lives far from home. Scanning the waves, I seemed to see ships at anchor, white sails moving with the breeze, massive hulls fitted with compartments and barricades to contain terrified captives. Tears came to my eyes.
Elmina Castle, built in 1482 by the Portuguese, served as a dungeon for captives herded to the coast, bought by the Portuguese and later the Dutch, held in squalid cells, then loaded onto ships for the notorious Middle Passage across the Atlantic. I had come to Elmina with a group of students from UO SOJC led by Professor Leslie Steeves, who has directed SOJC’s summer internship program in Ghana for over 20 years. During their orientation week and on weekends the interns visit places of interest in Accra, Ghana’s capital, and beyond, each year spending a weekend at the coast to tour Elmina and nearby Cape Coast Castle, where British enslavers operated. There is, of course, a great deal more to see and learn in 21st-century Ghana besides these sites of a dark history. It nonetheless feels important to take young Americans to these places where US and African histories intersect. Following a brief discussion of slave trade history, I’ll outline the origin of slave castle tourism in postcolonial Ghana before surveying SOJC students’ responses to this difficult experience.
Elmina Castle was built during the earliest phase of European contact with sub-Saharan Africa, before the 1492 “discovery” of the New World. In fact. Christopher Columbus visited Elmina as part of a Portuguese crew ten years before his famous voyage. The Portuguese explorers’ original aim was trade in gold, ivory, and spices, for which they bartered European goods such as guns, liquor, and rum. Though some captives were taken back to Portugal in the 1400s, it wasn’t until after 1518 that larger numbers began to be shipped across the Atlantic to labor in Spain’s new colonies. In the mid-1600s, when sugar plantations spread from Brazil to the Caribbean islands, the slave trade began to ramp up, reaching its apogee around 1770. The Dutch seized Elmina Castle in 1637 and continued to ship enslaved people from there. Britain established its own slave trade depot at nearby Cape Coast Castle. Though Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, other nations continued to pursue it well into the late 1800s.
A controversial part of this history is African involvement in capturing and selling people for the transatlantic slave trade. Europeans could not take captives at the massive scale that the trade attained, especially since relatively small numbers of whites manned the forts and barracoons (holding pens) along the coast. There were over 60 forts on Ghana’s coast, most much smaller than Elmina and Cape Coast. These were supplied with captives by African brokers, wo obtained them in various ways, the most common being wars among West Africa’s numerous ethnic groups. Defeated groups owed tribute to the victors, often paid in people, who in turn had to be captured by going to war with weaker groups. This vicious cycle, incentivized by European demand, enriched African elites while depopulating and destabilizing vast areas of the continent. To think of Africans selling other Africans is misleading in the sense that the term “African” is itself an artifact of the slave trade era, applied by Europeans to people who thought of themselves as Asante, Fante, Ewe, Ga, Igbo, Yoruba and so forth. Except for convicted criminals, those sold into slavery were “strangers,” without kin among the selling group.
Indigenous slavery also existed in West Africa, but it was a significantly different institution than the chattel slavery practiced by Europeans. It’s less misleading to think of it as indentured servitude. Unlike those caught up in the transatlantic slave trade, domestic slaves or servants had rights: they could marry, raise and keep children, and buy their freedom, and could not be killed with impunity. This institution was abolished in Ghana in stages from 1807 up to and beyond 1874, when Britain formally annexed the Gold Coast, as it was then called. This aspect of Ghanaian history helps explain local residents’ complicated relationship to the “dark tourism” taking place in Elmina and Cape Coast.
Slave trade history is somewhat of a taboo topic among Ghanaians. Families may include members with both free and enslaved ancestors; airing past status distinctions can cause problems, as research by Duke University anthropologist Bayo Holsey reveals. More broadly, Ghanaians may feel that the “Black betrayal model” of African history contributes to stereotypes of Africans as uncivilized or backward. Indeed—with profound irony—indigenous slavery became an excuse for European colonial intervention during European nations’ 19th-century “scramble for Africa.”
The development of Ghana’s slave dungeons as tourist destinations has its own history, part of the nation’s bumpy trajectory since gaining independence from Britain in 1957. The castles were used for various purposes before and after independence—Elmina was a military training site in WWII and a police training academy thereafter. By the late 1960s the new nation became interested in preserving historic sites, establishing the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB) in 1969. In 1979, UNESCO named Ghana’s forts and castles World Heritage Sites. Ghanaian policymakers, seeing tourism’s economic potential to benefit the developing nation, drew on international donors, primarily from the US, to preserve and manage Elmina and Cape Coast.
Planners focused on the African diaspora, in particular African Americans, as potential “pilgrims” in what came to be called “heritage tourism”—largely because Black Americans are seen as having the most disposable income among diaspora Blacks. In the early years of Ghanaian independence, a number of prominent African Americans sojourned or settled permanently in Ghana, including Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, and most famously, W. E. B. DuBois, whose Accra home and burial site is now a small museum (also visited by SOJC students). Today around 10,000 African Americans visit Ghana each year, with diaspora Blacks making up 60% of Ghana’s tourist trade. Given these demographics, it’s not surprising that the historical narrative performed by tour guides at the dungeons is geared toward the suffering of the enslaved people who passed through on their hard journey to the New World, whom members of the diaspora view as ancestors.
On our tours of the two sites we were privileged to be guided by Ato Ashun, an experienced museum educator who has studied history at the University of Cape Coast. Ato has coordinated tours for a number of US universities and has authored a short book, entitled Elmina, the Castles, and the Slave Trade (2017). His tours took us from bottom to top of each massive structure: from the dungeons where enslaved people were confined, to the Governor’s quarters on the upper floors. Ato is an eloquent speaker who brought alive for our group the cruelty and suffering that took place in these buildings in past centuries.
He pointed out, for example, that the floors of the dungeons on which we walked consisted of the compacted residue of thousands of captives: feces, blood, vomit, dead skin, and even bones. An indescribably disgusting smell suffuses these dark spaces, dimly lit by tiny openings near the ceiling. One can easily imagine the spirits of long-dead sufferers lingering here. Melina Mallari, a 2022 intern, writes in the blog, “Allowing Ato, our guide, to suck us into the pain and fear that these souls experienced through his gripping storytelling gave us a moment to imagine a mere sliver of the reality they [enslaved people] faced.”
Professor Steeves has structured the internship program to give journalism students plenty of opportunity to hone their writing skills. They are required to post regularly on the program blog about their experiences. Posts from cohorts dating back to 2011 are archived at ghana.uoregon.edu. Like good journalists, several students used sense details to convey their experience of touring the castles. One wrote in 2016, “Both castles had small, pitch-black rooms with hardly any ventilation where the slaves had been kept. Each small room had held 200 slaves. They were forced to lie in their own body fluids and were only fed enough to barely stay alive . . . Even today, the smell of urine, blood, puke, and death still lingered in the dungeons. In some areas it was so strong I thought I was going to throw up.”
Another student wrote in 2014, “The underground dungeons . . . had a stench of must and faint, ancient urine. Our tour guide showed us a chalk mark on a stone wall that measured the amount of feces and toxic waste that built up over the years . . . Feelings of sadness and guilt weighed heavily on my heart as I walked through such an important piece of history . . . Sometimes as privileged Americans, I feel like we all have this mentality of ‘that could never happen to me’ and we don’t think about what people endured in order for people like us to have the things we want.” Thoughtfully connecting Ghana’s dungeons to US history of slavery, this student made meaning of her tourist experience.
Privilege and guilt were repeated themes in student blog posts over the years. Individual students’ racial identification often had an impact on their experience. A 2016 post comments, “It’s a sobering and humbling experience for a white American whose privilege was built on the backs of these men and women.” Nathan Wilson, a 2022 intern who is white, published an account of our Elmina tour in the Accra newspaper The Finder, where he interned. “I am confident,” he wrote, “that I can speak for all of us . . . it was one of the most emotionally difficult—albeit necessary—experiences of our lives.” He goes on, “Some time in the past, somewhere along my lineage, it’s likely that my ancestors perpetuated slavery in some way which effectually makes me responsible for all the brutality and injustice.” Of course, the question of any individual’s responsibility for past generations’ crimes is open to debate; nonetheless, the castle tour clearly had a deep effect on Nate.
Peyton Brooks, a 2022 intern who is African American, writes, “I felt so privileged that I just happened to be born in fortunate circumstances at the right time. I felt it the most when I walked through the Door of No Return. Millions of Africans were sent to their deaths by walking through that damn door, and I could walk right through and come back.” Enslaved people exited through the Door to be loaded onto canoes and rowed out to ships for the Middle Passage. Peyton writes, “As an African American whose ancestors originated from Ghana, I feel I carry a certain responsibility to learn as much as possible about those who came before me and bring that knowledge to my family back in the States.” As an aspiring journalist, Peyton is especially concerned to tell the story well. “What would I tell my aunties at home? What would I tell my father? My mother? How would I tell the story . . . in a way that did it any justice?” Her blog post emphasizes her profound emotional reaction to this dark history, brought alive for her in the place where it happened. Entering one of the dungeons, she writes, “I was overwhelmed by the heaviness of it all. I dropped to my knees . . . my eyes flooding with tears that I let freely fall, and began to pray.”
Peyton was not the only student left in tears at the castle. By coincidence, however, our tour culminated with a vivid contrast. On our way into the castle we had noticed people setting up equipment in a neighboring field. Exiting the Governor’s quarters onto the castle ramparts, we heard and saw a large, noisy, colorful crowd gathering as a procession entered the area from the nearby town. Ato informed us that this was part of the Bakatue Festival, an annual occasion that celebrates the start of the fishing season—vital to the livelihood of what is still a fishing village.
Melina writes, “walking onto the balcony, we saw scores of people in garments of all colors walking through the streets. Chiefs in ornate palanquins were hoisted high above the crowd, waving to those who sang and danced their way to the . . . front of the castle. The music from drums and brass instruments rang through the air, and we all wiped our tears from the moments before to watch the spectacle. While I can’t assume how local Ghanaians feel about celebrating in this space, I’d love to believe that through the festival, they have reclaimed this space too. What rests within the castle is hundreds of years of torture, isolation, and fear. But outside of it is proof of the community’s permanence . . . although we still continued the tour with heavy hearts, mine felt a bit lighter knowing there was so much joy and color just outside these walls.” Nate Wilson calls the festival a “beautiful celebration of culture and heritage.” For me, it came as a serendipitous reminder that Ghana, past and present, is so much more than this one dark chapter of African and European history.