Author of Ama Records Impressions of President Obama's Visit to Door of No Return

On the visit of President Barack Obama and his family to Cape Coast Castle, July 11, 2009.

The struggle for freedom, equality and dignity is an on-going one in which one must have the modesty to learn from the past and from each other, as well as the courage to meet the future.
Nelson Mandela, 1995.

The effects of enslavement have lasted this long because of the silence that surrounds its history . . . The power of the fetish of slavery is enhanced by keeping it hidden . . . To dissolve the fetish it is necessary to keep the story of slavery and the slave trade open-ended and to avoid closure; to clear the way to debate and to perpetually initiate rather than conclude the argument so that every new generation may visit it to quarry its lessons.
Kwadwo Opoku-Agyeman

These words of Nelson Mandela and Kwadwo Opoku-Agyeman were in my mind as I settled down on Saturday, July 11, 2009 to watch the television record of the Obama family’s short visit to Ghana.

In the run-up to its live broadcast of the day’s events, Ghana TV beamed a fascinating biography of Barack Obama, attributed to the Biography Channel. Sadly, the episode that made the most profound impression on me was one surely not intended by the film-maker.

Barack and Michelle Obama were married at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago in October 1992. The ceremony was conducted by their mentor and long-time friend, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. The Biography.com film shows the wedding but it has been cut, in a surprisingly crude and obvious manner, to excise all images of Rev. Wright. This deliberate falsification of history brought to my mind Joseph Stalin’s recall of the Soviet Encyclopedia so that every reference to Leon Trotsky might be excised and his image ink-brushed into obscurity.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has been demonized, in my view unjustly demonized, by the U.S. media. But, whatever your view of him, is it possible to turn him into some kind of non-person, the denizen of some virtual Guantanamo Bay or, to change the metaphor, to make him the object of some fairground magician’s disappearing trick?

Jeremiah Wright’s primary sin was to challenge the American people to confront the many harsh, uncomfortable, realities of their national history.

As I turned these matters over in my mind, the real show started. One of the skills which is most highly valued in Ghanaian tradition is that of oratory. President Obama did not disappoint us. He projected the warmth and charisma with which Americans are familiar and clearly succeeded in establishing an immediate rapport with the assembly of Members of Parliament, members of the Council of State and other dignitaries. His speech will no doubt be subjected to close scrutiny and analysis in the months and years to come.

The scene shifted to Cape Coast and as we waited for the Obama family to arrive, I saw in my imagination sailing ships from Rhode Island and other eastern seaboard ports anchored offshore, waiting to take on their loads. Then I recalled the more recent visit to Cape Coast by another Western leader.

On February 14th, 2007, John Prescott, then Deputy Prime Minister of the UK and chairman of that country’s national Advisory Group on Commemorating the (1807) Abolition of the Slave Trade, visited Elmina Castle, of which he said later, “(It) stands as an evocative monument to the inhumanity of slavery . . . a monument of man’s inhumanity to man. It should be a place of pilgrimage for us all.” Fine sentiments, without doubt; but please read on.

The British bought Elmina Castle from the Dutch in 1872, 65 years after the Act of 1807. They did not ship a single slave from Elmina Castle.

Mr. Prescott spent the next morning in Cape Coast, which is just 15 km from Elmina. Unlike the Obama family, he did not visit Cape Coast Castle.

The British were intimately connected with Cape Coast Castle through a period of nearly 300 years, from 1664, when they captured it from the Dutch, until Ghana’s independence in 1957. In the eighteenth century, and right up to 1807, it was the centre of the British slave trade in West Africa. Several hundred thousand enslaved Africans were at one time or another incarcerated in its underground dungeons, chattel cargo awaiting shipment. In the last twelve years of the legal slave trade, the British government paid over one million pounds to buy some 13,400 African men, who became the slave-soldiers of the West India Regiment. They went so far as to delay the implementation of the 1807 Act in order to make one last legal purchase.

Prescott’s failure to visit Cape Coast Castle was a symbolic refusal to confront some of the many harsh, uncomfortable, realities of British history.

The television camera kept its distance in the Castle, allowing the Presidential family a proper degree of privacy for what can be and no doubt was for them a deeply emotional experience; but we were allowed glimpses of what seems to be a very tight and affectionate family. I was moved to take some snapshots of the images on the screen.

In his short off-the-cuff address after the tour, Barack Obama reminded us of the capacity of human beings to commit great evil and, sometimes, to tolerate that evil “as we think that we’re doing good.” And he accepted an obligation to ”fight oppression and cruelty wherever it appears.”

“Cruelty wherever it appears.” His words took me back again.

In the early nineties, arriving at JFK on my first visit to the U.S., I misunderstood an official’s instruction to another arriving passenger, opened a door and found myself in a large room. There I saw two young Indian men and a young Chinese woman, shackled like slaves, their movements constrained by heavy iron chains. They might have been illegal immigrants, but they appeared quite harmless. “Cruelty wherever it appears.”

In the aftermath of 9/11 Mohammed El-Gharani, then just 14, was arrested at a mosque in Karachi, Pakistan and ended up at Guantanamo Bay. Recently, now 21, having been found not guilty of anything at all, he was flown to Chad, the country of origin of his parents and released there. Throughout the 20-hour flight he remained shackled. “Cruelty wherever it appears.”

“Fight oppression and cruelty wherever it appears.” The message that reverberates from Cape Coast Castle is a universal one, unlimited by time or geography and unlimited by the colour, gender, religion or national origin of the perpetrators of oppression and cruelty; or of their victims.

Manu Herbstein
Accra.