Looking Homeward

We spent Saturday wandering the streets of Cape Coast, buying beads and other small gifts to take home. My old bones were hurting, and I began to long for a luxurious warm shower and a summer meal of chicken Caesar salad.

At the same time, I didn’t want this time to end. It seemed there was much more to learn. I thought about my friend Mitch who spent two years in East Africa in the Peace Corps about twenty years ago. Her view of the world, especially the enormous wastefulness in American society, has been profoundly changed by that experience. Now that I had had a tiny taste of third-world living, I hoped that I would not forget the life lessons that had come my way.

I had done some extensive reading about the famed slave-trade “castles” in Ghana, and many years ago I had visited Dachau, the concentration camp in Munich. But nothing could have prepared me for the guided tour of Elmina Castle that we took on Sunday afternoon. As we walked to the Female Slave Dungeon and ducked our heads in the passageway to the Door of No Return where untold numbers of Ghanaians boarded slave ships bound for Europe and America, the guide spoke of the barbarous behavior of the Portugese and, later, the Dutch naval officers who plundered the Gold Coast of its minerals and its populace. The stories of unspeakable atrocities, recounted so unemotionally, caused my stomach to wrench. When – in the same courtyard where women were chosen for rape by the governor – the guide pointed out “the first Catholic church in Africa” (now a museum), I turned away in revulsion.




Today, Elmina’s port teems with fishing boats, and the coastline’s beauty belies its terrible history of man's inhumanity to man.