The Hindu Business Line : Point of no return

The Elmina Castle holds painful memories for Ghanaians as the staging point for a flourishing slave trade, which Britain finally abolished 200 years ago.

On March 25, the 200th anniversary of the passing of the UK Abolition of Slave Trade Act was observed at Elmina Castle in Ghana on the west coast of Africa, which was attended by, among others, J.A. Kufuor, President of the Republic of Ghana.

To Indians, the event is no doubt important as a crucial step in the evolution of the principle and practise of the concept of fraternity, equality and liberty in human society. But to Ghanaians, and indeed to the whole of West Africa, it is much more than that — the commemoration of an event which, on paper at least, was the first concerted step to put an end to a practice which led to the sale and extended incarceration of hundreds of thousands of their forefathers in distant lands, where, with a few honourable exceptions, they were treated no better than beasts of burden.

To Ghanaians, therefore, the event is an extremely sensitive one. What makes the Elmina commemoration even more painful is that, for a long period of time, it was from the Elmina Castle itself that members of their families, and those from the interior were put on the ships of the slave-traders, never to return again to their homeland — which, in a strictly biological sense, has been the cradle of the human species.

There is a squat doorway in the castle — leading to a dark, gloomy room from where the Africans were taken to the waiting ships — which the guide points out as the "point of no return" because no one who entered the room ever went back to his home and hearth from where the agents of the slave-traders had forcibly taken them away to be sold to whip-wielding masters in foreign lands. On a recent visit to the castle, we were the only Indians in the group that was being taken around, and one could hear the sobs of some members of the group who had come from abroad and quite clearly had a very personal stake in the visit — they were probably reliving the plight of their forefathers, in chains, as they waited for their captors to open the gate and push them on to the ships at anchor just outside the castle. (Since those times, the sea has receded with the result that quite some ground has to be traversed today from that infamous exit point in the castle to arrive at the water's edge.)

The age of slavery in modern times has always been one of the most sordid chapters of the story of human civilisation, its last traces being found in the US in the 1960s when black Americans began their final assault culminating in Martin Luther King's march to Washington. Few, however, are aware that it all began on the Gold Coast (as Ghana was known in colonial times) from places like Elmina which, incidentally, is just one of the transportation points of the slave trade which flourished in the 18th century. Elmina Castle is said to be the earliest European-built building outside of Europe (certainly in Africa), being first built by the Portuguese in 1482. The Dutch expelled the Portuguese in 1637 and used it for their own trading purposes (including the slave trade) till as late as 1872. That year, the English gained control of the fort as part of a transfer of property and assets between the Dutch and the English involving English possessions in northern Sumatra and Dutch property in the western hemisphere.

The infamous castle

Given this historical profile of the castle (which, by Indian standards, is nothing more than a small fort), it is hardly surprising that the architectural footprints of the Portuguese and the Dutch outnumber those of the English, including the small church within the fort precincts — which was first built by the Portuguese who were Roman Catholics and later used for other purposes by both the Dutch and the English — and the decorative railing of an upper balcony looking out on the church which portrays, among other things, a "W" which, some say, was the logo of the Dutch West Indies Trading Company.

A smaller courtyard, on a higher level, was the place where, it is said, the women captives were brought out for the viewing pleasure of the governor of the castle; he would select one of them. A small well in the corner is said to be the place where the woman selected was washed (a luxury which, as the guide said, was denied to the captives who were kept confined to the female dungeon from their first day of captivity in the castle till the time they were put on the ships — which could be as long as a couple of months) before being taken up to the governor's quarters through a steep ladder leading up to a trapdoor, which can still be seen. Those who managed to conceal a spark of the spirit of freedom within them despite the weeks of deliberate physical incarceration which rendered them too weak to rebel and protest were, as retribution, made to stand in the African sun in the same courtyard, their feet chained to cannon balls, one of which still remains.

One can write at length on the slave trade as it was conducted on the Gold Coast and on Elmina Castle, a focal point of that trade, which will be of interest to those who have a special interest in these subjects. But, clearly, the larger objective is to draw attention to the age of slavery in modern times through which the history of human civilisation has had to pass to reach its present "emancipated" stage and to underscore the inference that such things should never again be attempted by mankind, whether in the raw state of slavery (Elmina and all that) or in the modern-day form of dictatorships, where masters change from time to time depending on who can wield the gun better while the oppressed continue to be fed with the promise of a golden future which is ever unreachable.

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