Notes on Elmina Castle

If you're going to read any of my posts, it should be this one.

I had planned on blogging about my week experience in northern Ghana; however, this past weekend we went to Cape Coast where we visited two castles formerly used to hold Africans before they were transported to America as slaves via the Middle Passage. In light of this, there is nothing more I can write about than this experience. These are the notes out of my journal that I took after visiting Elmina Castle, the oldest slave fort in Ghana. This is not a continuous story; each paragraph is an individual observation.

Elmina Castle was built in 1482 by the Portuguese who retained control of it for about 150 years. The primary purpose of the fort, at this time, was for trade in commodities--natural resources, gold, etc. In the early 1600s, the Dutch took control. It was about this time that the "evil trade" started--trade in human beings.

When the Portuguese built Elmina Castle, they built a church for themselves. When the Dutch took over, this church remained within the walls of the fort, though it was soon converted into a room used for the auctioning of slaves.

For African Americans, this is returning to their roots, a part of their history. But it is just as much a part of my history as it is theirs. I feel as if I am often told that I, as a European, will never understand the suffering of those taken as salves to the New World. But to say that is to ignore half of the story, because there is not way for someone like me, someone who feels responsible for the actions of my ancestors, to go into a place like this and NOT feel a deep, intense sense of guilt. This is not something I can never understand. This is something that we share.

Places like this make me intensely aware of God's grace, because sometimes I wonder how He will ever forgive us.

We crouch through the doorway of the "room of no return". Our guide makes a joke, "Be careful! You aren't coming back!" I find it hard to laugh.

A black gate with iron bars is the last threshold in this place. Through this door, slaves were forced to turn their backs on their homes and board ships bringing them to a new life of suffering. The gate was once padlocked shut but, now broken off its hinges, merely rests against the doorway. Still the padlock hangs there, the word "VICTORY" impressed on its side.

When the Dutch took over the castle, they converted one of the rooms into a Dutch Reformed church. Above the doorway to this room is inscribed a verse from Psalms: "This is my resting place forever" (132:14). But God doesn't live here. The church overlooks a courtyard where female slaves would be displayed for the governor who would choose one to sleep with. It was required that the windows that faced the courtyard were locked during this...so God couldn't see.

From the roof of the castle, I look down on a place that looks like an advertisements for honeymooners. The white sand of the palm-lined beach meets the rhythmic crash of the ocean's deep blue waves on its shore. I look down from my window at the top of the castle. I am a part of this evil that obstructs paradise.

Beyond the outer wall of the castle, the busy fishing village is bustling. Fishermen untangle nets and scrub down the sides of their canoes, decorated with colorful paint and bright European flags--another reminder of the history of this place. The castle looms somberly in the background of the lives of these people who seem not to notice it anymore. Something that brings tourists. It's remarkable--this formidable presence of evil constantly in the background. The constant reminder of a history almost too difficult to understand. And the lives outside its walls carry on as if to say, "We must move forward. Life goes on. We will not be defeated."

So life in Jerusalem is a lot of fun still. In my Physical Settings of the Bible class, we've been going on lots of field trips, which are great. Two weeks ago we went to Samaria, and here are pictures from that.

http://calvin.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2039267&l=ee64c&id=15301972

Last week we went down south to Philistia, the Negev, and the Dead Sea area, and here are some pictures from that trip.

http://calvin.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2039893&l=79720&id=15301972


Thursday we leave for a four day trek up to Galilee, which should be pretty exciting.

Last Wednesday our group travelled to the village of Akropong, about a hour and a half north of the University, for the annual Odwira festival. We arrived in Akropong on Wednesday and did nothing except wander around the little town, which is situated on top of a mountain, making for a nice change of pace from bustling, dirty Accra, not to mention some much-needed fresh mountain air.

Thursday was our first encounter with the Odwira festival, a week-long event meant to honor the ancestors and pray for blessings for the upcoming year (the years go by harvest schedules, not the typical calendar year). We were not briefed about the activities we would be watching apart from the purpose of the festival overall, though we were told there might be some things we would find disturbing. Still not knowing what to expect, we split into groups of 3 (me, Brad, and Kristen) and were brought to various stations on a long road where we were to observe the rituals of a long procession that would be travelling from one end of the town to a palatial construction near the center of town.

After about an hour of waiting and making friends with a group of beautiful old ladies next to us, the procession started to pass the station where we were sitting. I don't know if it caught me off guard simply because I'd had no idea what to expect in the first place, but what we saw was very unusual. Young girls (maybe in their late teens or twenties, some even younger), dressed in white and covered in decorative white body paint, were being led down the road as they carried baskets of food on their heads, which they were bringing to the a feast for the ancestors. Along the way (at our station, for example) designated people were offering libations, pouring water onto the girls' feet or pouring gin and schnapps onto the ground before them. Drummers, dancers, and bell-ringers were also part of the procession, as were several men firing shot guns full of air-soft pellets into the air.

The hardest part about the whole experience, the part that most unnerved me, was the fact that these girls were allegedly being possessed by the spirit of the ancestors. Some Ghanaians have told us that they are just pretending to be possessed; others truly believe that the spirits are possessing the girls. While some of the girls truly seemed to be pretending, others truly did seem depossessed of themselves. Some were violent, some making really furious grimacing faces, some would nearly faint , and most had to be restrained at some point. It was really weird and I don't really know what to make of it all or how to respond to it, except to take it as a cultural experience and try to understand the motivation behind everything involved.

Ghanaians who participate in this festival view the ancestral spirits who possess the girls as benevolent; they believe it is because of these spirits that they prosper, so the idea of being possessed by them is not a bad thing to them. To an outsider, particularly a Christian, the idea of possession comes with certain connotations and, especially with the girls who were acting violent, those connotations are not always good. We've been talking in our group a lot since then about reconciling these cultural practices with Christianity, etc. and it's made for some very good conversations.

Overall, a very good trip. We're back in Accra now for only a week and then we're venturing up to northern Ghana for an 8 day excursion. I'm very excited for that, as northern Ghana is very different from Accra...very rural and predominantly Muslim. In addition, several thousand Ghanaians have been displaced by the flooding of Lake Volta, so we may be volunteering at a World Vision IDP.

More to come later. Hope you all are well.