-I-
CAPE COAST CASTLE.
We were early. Or, I should say we arrived before the procession got to the castle. We had paid attention to the schedule rather than to the reality of the people marching through the streets, walking to the castle with candles. So we arrived when the paper with the numbers on it said that things should start. Of course, none of our trio was surprised when nothing had started "on time." We took the opportunity to explore.
At the back edge of the castle, we stood in the semi darkness at the precipice facing the sea. Stood beside the cannon.
Where I stood, centuries before a European soldier stood, a slave trader stood, a ship's captain stood. And perhaps they and I wondered the same thing. How will this venture turn out for me? What, if anything, will Africa mean to me?
Isn't it pathetic that it is easier to identify with the mind set of the colonialists then to imagine all the misery and anguish of our raped innocence? What did our ancestors think? Under the conditions they faced, what was it possible to think? But of course none of our ancestors were allowed to stand here on the wall and look out across the water, listen to the waves and leisurely dream of lands far away.
I am stymied. I hear the sea. I feel the fort's immensity. I am covered in the dust of African travel. And I can not even imagine what to think. This is the trauma of birth. I am leaving the certainty of a Black womb and cast into something so shattering I can not even think. No wonder they characterized us as dumb and stupid. We were probably catatonic, unable to do little more than move.
The dungeons have stone floors. We were chained there. Pissed there. Shat there. Some of us probably were even born there. Lay there. Spit and cried. And bled. The whole life cycle of Africa seeped into and absorbed by those stones.
Peering into the unlit magazine (the small room where they kept the munitions), I try imaging that dark as it appeared centuries ago. Imagine being wrapped in that dark. You go down into the dark and everything is damp with body fluids, and the doors are closed and you are left alone, chained in your misery. Your sense of sight is useless. You can't see anything. You wish you couldn't smell anything. Every odor is pungent. And it seems that everything you touch moves, or slips, or slides, or is slimy, or something. Everything is moving except the dead body next to you, but everything else moves when you touch it. And of course, in the dark, you hear everything. Everything. And what you don't hear, you imagine you hear. You hear memories. You hear that seabird you heard cawing days ago when they first pushed you down the stairs into this sinking hole. You hear your heartbeat. You sharply hear a multitude of sounds. Noises. You can not imagine what causes all the sounds you hear. It is sensory overload.
What must it have been like to breath there. Every time you breath in you suck up the tears and terror of someone next to you. They characterized us as scared of our own shadows, as believing in ghosts.
Suppose you woke up naked, enchained, on a cold stone floor wet with your own piss that you tried to hold but couldn't, and your arms are wrapped around your brother who is dead. Over in another room, your sister is having the same experience but you do not know what she is experiencing.
Suppose you woke up after a night of shifting shades of darkness. Of different languages shouted, languages you've never heard before. Some praying, some cursing the name of a god you did not even know was a god.
Suppose you woke up and found yourself still alive but hugging a corpse for warmth. It had been cold in that hole, and you clung to each other for sanity. Clung desperately to this body which had been breathing when you fell asleep a few minutes ago, a few hours ago.
Suppose the live one was you, could you still be sane?
You have to go to Ghana to understand. You have to wade through the vibrancy of the people and confront the mute witness of white rock castle. You have to stand facing the sea. Walk the yard. Look into the darkness you are afraid to confront even with a torch or flashlight.
At the bottom of one stairwell where there was nothing except solid wall surrounding a small floor, even when we shone the light the roaches did not scurry away.
Imagine being there in the dark and insects are crawling all over you. Across your lips pressed tightly close you feel little legs running toward your nose and because you are chained one to another, you can not always get your hand up fast enough, so you exhale hard trying to blow the roach off your face or at least keep the thing out of your nose. This is when you learn to press close to the person beside you, press your face into the back of their hair and smell the sweat of their fear all night and wake up to discover that you have embraced a dead person. Could you handle it?
No matter what you know intellectually, you have to go to Ghana to even begin to grasp the magnitude of this deflowering of our innocence. I always thought the middle passage was where we suffered, but climbing back up the steps out of the dungeon, I now know. I know. Men separated from women. Each of us going through hell and having no words to tell each other about it. Only the look. Only the haunted look of surviving the castle experience.
You are a human being when you are marched into the fort, and if you survive howsoever long you are held captive there, if you survive you face the middle passage. And if you survive that, you face chattel slavery in the new world.
How can any human remain human after centuries of that? Look at how fanatical the Jews are after less than two decades of Hitler (1933 - 1945).
Tarzan has been among us for generations.
Our psychosis as a people started in the castles. At the top of the steps, pausing as I cross the doorway into the yard, I wonder what cure can there be for the illness that the castle wrought?
This is too much to think about. There are no words for this story. There is no language to talk about this. Tarzan's yells? The chants of traditional Africa? Standard American English? No, none of that is enough to communicate the transformation that the castle wrought.
I have never known this before. I may have thought about it a little, but never really imagined it. When I left New Orleans, flying north to New York and then southeast across the Atlantic into Africa, I had no way of knowing that everything I thought I knew about how we became Africans and what being an African (in the generic sense) meant had to be revised significantly in the face of the reality of the castle.
I had been to East Africa. I stood in the sand and touched the chains. I understood slavery. I had seen ancient auction block in Africa. In the Caribbean, even in the USA. I had read books and talked with wise women and men, but I never understood before now the profound reach of history.
If you want to know why we hate ourselves and each other. Why African dictators can be so brutal sometimes. Why we have these blood feuds which divide us even more than fighting Europe unifies us. Why we never ever seem to be able to get it all together. If you want to understand anything, everything. You must visit the castles of Ghana and realize that this experience was the birth of both the African and unavoidably also the nigger.
Both the African and the nigger were conceived in the mind of a White man, and born in the womb of the slave castle because only the African and the nigger survived that. When you left the castle either you were dead or you were irreversibly changed forever. Some of us became more of one than the other, but all became at least a little of each. We became really Black (and blue) there in the stone wombs of those castles.
We became something new. We became an African: an all encompassing identity that overrode whatever social identity we had, and, at the same time, we became that traumatized individual who can never fully trust his brother, never fully love his sister, never again fully be a member of the group, the tribe, the village, the land because most of us were captured by Black hands and sold into slavery.
I understand the mitigating circumstances.
I understand that the chiefs were often overwhelmed and forced to either capture others and sell them into slavery or watch their own people be marched off to never-never land.
I understand that more than a few fought, and that our weapons of warfare were far inferior.
I understand that many of the chiefs had no idea of what slavery meant in the new world and how it was so unlike being a slave in Africa.
I understand all of that now, but a few centuries back, enchained in that roach laden, dark, filthy, lightless hole, I am not sure what I understood, or even if there was anything I could have understood.
How does an adult understand that everything they have been they no longer are, and, while reflecting on that awesome thought, simultaneously understand that an identity they could never have conceived on their own, they are now in the process of becoming?
As is the case with all humans, while most of us are not stupid, the majority of us are not geniuses -- it would have taken an African genius to figure out slavery at that moment. What slavery meant, how it happened, and how not just to survive, but to overcome. Based simply on the weight of numbers, the luck of the draw, there were probably more than a few geniuses among the millions who passed through those holes.
I learned I wasn't one of those geniuses when my little white candle faded momentarily. Nia had handed the candle to me as I was the first to charge into the magazine. Earlier in the evening I had already gone part of the way in and had looked down through a portal at the processioners exploring the dungeon below where I stood. I had not felt any fear or any spirits for that matter, so I did not hesitate to take the candle and go further into the magazine.
Moving resolutely into the unknown, I probably appeared to fearlessly trod down the steps. There was nothing there, just a dead-end cavity. After we saw nothing but a wall and a low ceiling, some bats and insects, everyone turned to go exploring other parts of the castle. Because I had descended the steps first and held the candle, I felt like I was the only one who walked around on the floor.
Nia had been at the bottom too. This place does strange things to your sense of perception. Even though we were a group crowded into such a small space, I felt utterly alone. Utterly.
As I started back up, my candle faltered while I was still on the bottom step. I looked up and could hear voices above me and see pinpoints of light bouncing off the curved wall, but around me and behind me was darkness and all I could think about eleven o'clock that Friday night on the 9th of December, 1994 was getting out of there.
The candle flared back up quickly -- it was less than a second. But in that second, all I could think about was getting out. Getting out.
The castle changes you forever.
-J-
ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE.
You know that the world is never the same after "the man" shafts whatever he encounters.
In the process of being shaped into Africa, Africa was also raped and robbed. Africa suffers from the trauma of that rape and robbery. The lost of millions and millions of her strongest people. The lost of self esteem as her elders were rendered impotent, her traditions shattered, her culture trampled by the unmerciful wheels of commerce. The pain, the disease, the shame, the slavery. Centuries after centuries.
Under European chattel slavery, a century is three generations, at best. Imagine over nine generations of us ground to human meal betwixt the rock and the hard place of racism and capitalism. Auschwitz was one generation. Elmina was Auschwitz nine times over.
Before Tarzan built one church, Tarzan built the castle. A fort was his foothold and from there he swung through the countryside. But regardless of what Tarzan said in the bush, the fort reveals his real intentions.
According to one of our guides, the coast of Ghana contains twenty-eight of the thirty-some existent slave castles. Pre-Hitler, concentration camps of whitewashed stone with holding cells instead of ovens. The vast majority of these thick walled way stations were the beginning of a long journey into an unimaginable new identity. Instead of a train ride to a ghastly hell of tattoos and death, the ticket of slavery led to a long boat ride into a living hell of generations of chattel existence for those who were so unfortunate as to survive -- and while millions and millions of us died, we were so strong that millions also survived.
For every five of these wombs, these wounds on our humanity where we bled, and bled, and bled and dropped pitiful as poisoned cattle. For every five of these social cankers blighting the body of Africa's west coast, four festered on Ghana's shores.
These castles were the dining rooms of Europe's ascending bourgeoisie.
The traders picked over us, sucked the strong ones, the succulent ones, the ones who would build up mercantilism, industrialism, capitalism and all them isms. They ate us, belched and threw the bony ones of us aside, scraps for scavengers.
Europeans literally consumed us in these castles, greedily shoved us through the maws of the front gates and defecated us out of small holes in the rear of the castles, loading us onto the ships, where we were packed into the bottoms destined to become the fertilizer of the "New World's" phenomenal economic growth. Capitalism was the cook and we were the meal.
The scavengers of land, sea and air grew fat on the edge of Ghana. Huge, slow moving crabs feasting on fingers, toes, intestines and the soft parts of the face. Big bellied vultures plucking the delicacy of eyeballs. Huge-eyed hyenas laughing in the night dragging off thigh bones. The castles supplied nature's clean up crew with plenty, plenty dark meat.
For every five of these terrible, fetid dining halls, four were in Ghana. Our flesh was not all Ghana born, indeed a small number of us came from as far as the East African coast, but even if we were born two months-walk away, no matter, four out of five of us left Africa with Ghana dust in our nose, coughing and hacking up blood while the Hamattan winds covered us with dull red granules of Saharan sand. Ghana air was the last of Africa we breathed.
Thus, there is no surprise that Ghana is where the idea of Pan Africanism was really born. Here is where Africa's first bloody birth was consummated. Here is where Garvey and Padmore, C.L.R. and Walter Rodney got their intellectual ancestral start. Right in these slave castles: Cape Coast, Elmina, and twenty-six others. Locked up within these walls, our great philosophers first achieved the understanding that we were all Africans with the same immediate destiny: over the wall in death, on the ship if we lived.
Even those who avoided capture because of stealth, or because of resistance, or because of, well, because of just plain luck, no matter, because even those who avoided captivity were traumatized in the bush by the cruel beauty of Tarzan. Whether Tarzan was called plantation master, or governor sir, or savior Jesus Christ.
Don't you think the sudden shock of experiencing de-evolution at this level will produce at least one or two profound philosophers? In the castle we were stripped of everything except the essential spiritual kernel of our Africaness.
Pan African was the indestrutible seed we carried into the Americas as we were literally wrenched naked out of Africa. When this philosophical seed sprouted, it would flower most articulately from the mouths of those thousands of miles and several generations removed from African soil. DuBois returned to work and die in Ghana because Dubois the philosopher was spiritually born in the castles of Ghana.
The idea of unifying Africa and expelling Tarzan was born within the restrictions of the slave castles where hundreds of thousands of us died in captivity waiting sometimes as long as a year for a ship to transport us away.
Up until imprisonment in the castle, some of us were willing to coexist, to accommodate, to seek what would later, in the post cold war world of international relations, be called "détente". We already knew resistance. But, within the castle was born the philosophy that there can be no coexistence with this evil, Tarzan must be expelled.
The debate still rages today. Some of us can not live without Tarzan. Some of us can not live with him. All of us are having a hard time living.
—kalamu ya salaam