Cape Coast Part I

"No one knows when the hour of Africa's redemption cometh. It is in the wind, it is coming. One day like a storm, it will be here. When that day comes, all Africa will stand together." - Marcus Garvey

At Shirley's place in NYC, Ghanaian culture is but one of the many cultures present, but here in Ghana, the Andoh household has its context. Being here answers so many unasked questions, some that I didn't even perceive that I had.

Friday morning a bunch of us got ready to take a trip to Cape Coast, two hours away, where Shirley and all of her sisters attended Holy Child, a Catholic boarding school, and Nana Yaw attended St. Augustine's. The driver came to the house with a Land Crusier and 8 of us piled in....Stephen, Shirley and Evelyn in the third row, myself, Carmen, Nana Yaw, and 3 year old Nina in the second and Eugene in the front seat with Atta.

The road wound through several villages and was punctuated with periodic rows of speed bumps which made it difficult to sleep.

Holy Child was on top of a green hill overlooking more hills and the ocean. Shirley showed us her dorms and her classrooms and we took a picture of Nina next to a statue that said when you educate a woman you educate a nation.

Then we drove to Cape Coast castle, a huge white affair, with ancient cannons ad rusted cannon balls facing the waterfront. We stopped to eat at a waterfront restaurant before going inside. I ordered banku and fish. Banku is a starch, fermented cornmeal, with a thick consistency. It is served in a ball with fried fish and pepper that looks like fresh salsa. I appreciate the variety of starches here, other than just rice; kenke a sliced fermented cornmeal in a circular patty, boiled yams, banku, fufu, a pounded flour that makes a slightly sticky cookie dough consistency meal to be eaten with soup, and also rice.

At the castle we visited the museums and then did the tour. It was very sobering to see the signs 'male slave dungeon' and 'female slave dungeon.' When we descended into the dark down the stone ramp, the smell was dank and the dark oppressive. You could hear people shouting in surprise and fumbling for pocket flashlights so as to avoid panic. The little light that came in was from three small windows at the top of the room. At the bottom the dungeon opened up to a room 20x15 with 3 inch shallow drainage ditches for liquid waste running throughout it. At the corners were deeper ditches for solid waste. We were told that between 50 to 150 men would be held in the dungeon at a time. We looked around at our small tour group of 20 that crowded the space and gasped. Captives were kept there chained together from 2 weeks to 3 months without being allowed to bathe. Imagine the stench!

Just on top of the male slave dungeon was a church for the slave traders... Our guide said that we would note these hypocrisy in the fact that Christianity and the brutality of slavery went hand in hand, but we would leave the judgement up to God.