Cape Coast and Elmina

Our trip this weekend took us to the slave castles at Cape Coast and Elmina. This was an experience that is difficult to summarize. The castles bring the history of slavery to life. Being a history major and having taken African history, the stories of the slave castles were not new to me, but the physical experience being there was still startling. The dungeons at Cape Coast where they kept the slaves are underground. The muggy feeling and musty smell of the stone walls (which have been there since the 16th Century-they are not just replicas) reminded me of the reality of the brutality against the African people who became slaves. The difference between the hot and stuffy dungeons (even when empty today, not packed with 300 people) with the cool, breezy upper rooms is startling. The British owners of the castle were living in luxury, while the sights and sounds of human suffering were with them everywhere they went. The views from the castle are gorgeous – billowing palm trees, white sandy beaches, clear ocean water with cresting waves. The day was perfect – warm, bright, and sunny. The dichotomy of physical beauty and the history of human suffering was startling. How much more so for those who were there while human beings were being so abused? How did they deal with this? These questions are unanswerable for me today, but it does make the history major inside of me want to do more research. I am glad that I’ve taken African history before – I had already learned most of the historical information at the forts from my classes at Calvin. I think the fact that I wasn’t dealing with all new information at the castles helped me to not feel completely overwhelmed by the experience and to appreciate for its historical value and well as search for applications that I could take out of history to my own life. One such application was the fact that when one person puts the value of his own life ahead of the value of all other lives, horrible atrocities can happen. The Africans were dehumanized by the Europeans in the slave trade, but that is not an excuse. Rather, it is an abomination because the value of other’s lives was so reduced that it became nothing. What ways do I live my life which puts higher value on me than on any other human being? Can this be legitimate? Not if I truly believe that every human being is made in God’s image.