Nine years ago, a most profound thing happened to me, I had a bit of an “awakening” if you will.
In the fall of 2014, the day Darren Wilson was acquitted of the shooting death of Michael Brown in St. Louis, i literally and figuratively felt like I was going to quit working my hardest in life because truly, in that moment, I felt like doing well wouldn’t matter because the degree of hate and indifference that I was seeing, feeling and experiencing coming at me and others like me was so deep that I was literally feeling like opting out of “the system”.
All I could do was pray to God and ask this one question, “Why do these people hate us so much and to the degree that our lives have less value than the pets in their homes?”
It was a profound moment for me because the thought of quitting had never ever entered my mind until that moment, but I embraced it and clung to it like a blanket that evening.
I ended up just going to bed, but that night, I had a dream that literally changed my life. I won’t go into that here, but suffice to say that was the beginning of a journey that I was being led on to answer the question I’d asked God the previous night.
Part of this journey was a historical study of the transatlantic slave trade. Not a historical study of what we’ve been taught about it in the United States, but rather from the history and books from various countries around the world, including those that were partakers and financial beneficiaries of this horrible act.
My journey somehow led me to the Iberian Peninsula, aka Portugal and Spain. This was when I discovered that there were 42 slave fortresses in Africa, with 36 of them located in Ghana, which caused the enslaving nations to change the name they called the area from the Gold Coast (Ghana) to the Slave Coast and finally to “Negroland”.
So one of the things I was hoping this trip would do is confirm my study, and that is what happened when we visited the Gold Coast slave castle the other day.
Our guide at the castle slowly unfurled the flag of this history of slavery, how and why it was started, the details of it - of which I just cannot write those words here. Those words are heavy, filled with sadness, anger and a whole lot of other feelings that are hard to unpack right now.
So we visited one of the many “Doors of No Return”, we, of course visited the one at the Gold Coast slave castle.
I won’t share all of the video, but will share as many photos as I am able to. I will say these videos and photos do it no justice.
I cannot speak for anyone else, but I felt pain, fear, despair, indifference, and just plain death while walking through the cells and chambers of that place. I mean, one could feel the weight of the place and one could feel that something truly heinous happened there.
I can say that everyone was a little upset about what they saw and heard at this site, what the captives went through.
I mean, it was fairly UNBELIEVABLE to see and stand in these cells and to see all of this. It was great to see and hear what we don’t see and hear in the United States about the several hundred years of this evil…
