A Weekend in the Central Region

This past weekend the CIEE program took us to the Central Region of Ghana (it is the green area on the map) for our first trip together. I ended up going a day earlier than the rest of the students because one of my friends observes Shabbat and I wanted to make sure she had company on Friday. Mr. Gyasi, our program director, drove the two of us up on Friday morning and then in the afternoon we did a tour of Cape Coast Castle.

The tour of Cape Coast Castle was unreal. Having visited museums and other historical places before, I know that it takes me a longer time to imagine the past, to realize that this is where a past people lived or where a past event took place. We learn about history in the classroom and thus it sometimes becomes difficult to grasp the magnitude of the past outside of our readings. However, walking into the slave dungeons I understood that I was walking where Africans enslaved by the Europeans were kept, with no light, no place to go to the bathroom, very little air for many, many days. Last semester I took a class at Tulane on the African Diaspora and learned all about the Middle Passage and the Transatlantic Slave Trade but here I was, in a slave castle, where what I had read about existed and took place. It felt like I had been transported.

After the tour, Mr. Gyasi, Tali, and I went to the hotel and we discussed how we were feeling about the slave castle. One thing that was difficult for us to comprehend was the relationship between religion and slavery. There was a church built on top of the male slave dungeon and upon going in and out the whites could “check” on the slaves. How could a people, called by God, think that enslaving other human beings was acceptable? I understand the explanations that surround this question but actually seeing the proximity of church to slave dungeon brought my questioning back. From that moment I realized that I wanted to explore more in depth the relationship between the spread of Christianity here and slavery. Why did so many Ghanaians here adopt the religion of their oppressors? Or is that even the case? Did Christianity come from somewhere else for them? Driving around Ghana, there are references everywhere to God and Jesus. Just this morning I was sitting in a taxi that had a sticker of Jesus on the steering wheel.

The next day, Saturday, the rest of our group came and I went on the tour again with them. The second time on the tour I was able to pick up more from the later half, which was focused on where the Europeans lived. We were able to compare the European sleeping quarters with the African living quarters, if one can even call it that.

Then in the afternoon we did a Batik Tye and Dye workshop. An organization called Global Mamas (www.globalmamas.org) works with women in the Cape Coast area that do batik and then they export what they make to the U.S. Batik is a type of art that is done on cloth, in the simplest terms. These women take a piece of cloth, apply wax to it with different patterns and then use dye to color. We split into our CIEE teams, traveled to meet a couple of the Global Mamas who helped us, and each did a banner for our team.

On Sunday we headed out early and went to Kakum National Park for a short hike and canopy walk tour. Kakum is a nature park that was created to preserve one of the last rainforests in Ghana. It was fun to walk from tree to tree on the narrow pieces of wood without shaking it too much for the people behind.

The bus ride on the way back was quite bumpy but also a lot of fun. The bus that the group had taken to get to Cape Coast had broken down so Sunday morning we were split into two buses to get back. Not really a surprise that the first bus broke down but we were very lucky it happened at the hotel and not when we were already on the road. At one point we were driving through a heavily congested area and one of the girls on the bus jokingly asked if anyone wanted plantains. Of course we did! So Nikki leaned out her window and started buying everyone plantains and Fan Ice (which is ice cream in a small packaged bag that you squeeze out).

Overall the trip was a good journey outside of the Greater Accra region and a once in a lifetime opportunity to visit a place that we read about in books. Also, on Saturday night after dinner we shared how being at the Cape Coast Castle affected each of us, and what it meant. Out of this came a discussion about race that continued late into the night, that was prompted and facilitated by us, the students. This came about because a few of us noticed that within the second day of orientation we had segregated into blacks and whites. The dialogue that occurred that night may be a gateway to further conversations about race and racism. I was amazed that thirty of us were able to sit and start a discussion that is not easy to have; it’s something that affects us back home in the U.S. but as we could see was still apparent even abroad within our own group.

The plaque at Cape Coast Castle reads,

"In everlasting memory of the anguish of our ancestors,

May those who died rest in peace,

May those who return find their roots,

May humanity never again perpetrate such injustice again humanity,

We, the living, vow to uphold this"