An apology to slaves - from the catchers

ACCRA, Ghana — Even in the dank and dim corners of Elmina Castle, behind whitewashed walls of stone blocks a foot thick, one can hear the angry sound of the ocean heaving waves to the shore.

For nearly 400 years, those tumultuous waves pounding the Guinea coast of West Africa carried off millions of her people — packed in rickety ships and bound for the Americas and a life of labor, humiliation and often cruelty.

As Ghana — the first African country to cast off its colonial rulers — marks the 50th anniversary of its independence next year, it will begin a tourism campaign aimed at Africans scattered around the globe by the slave trade.

“Project Joseph” is an invitation to blacks who trace their history to the slave trade to reconnect with the land of their ancestors — and it comes with an apology, not from countries associated with slave masters or slave traders, but from the black slave-catchers of Ghana.

“The reason why we wanted to do some formal thing is that we want — even if it’s just for the surface of it, for the cosmetic of it — to be seen to be saying ‘sorry’ to those who feel very strongly and who we believe have distorted history, because they get the impression that it was people here who just took them and sold them,” said Emmanuel Hagan, director of research and statistics at Ghana’s Ministry of Tourism and Diasporean Relations.

“It’s something we have to look straight in the face and try to address, because it exists. So we will want to say something went wrong. People made mistakes, but we are sorry for whatever happened.”

Sharing the blame

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that 17 million men, women and children were forcibly taken from the western shores of Africa in wooden ships bound for the Americas.

Millions more died alone — unknown, far from home and without proper burial — during the overland march to slave-trading forts such as Elmina, where slaves were kept in dungeons and shackles and then branded with hot irons before being packed “like pieces of ebony” into waiting ships.

Most books on the history of African slavery blame the trade on maritime trading countries such as Portugal and the Netherlands, and the countries where the human cargo was sold, such as the United States, Britain and Brazil.

The idea that some Africans sold their own people into slavery is mostly ignored. Ghana, however, has never shied away from it.

“Long before the coming of Europeans to the Guinea coast of Africa, our local people here already practiced slavery,” said Philip Amoa-Mensah, a volunteer guide at Elmina Castle.

“Who a slave was and how they were treated could not be compared,” he added. “To the Europeans, a slave [was] always a slave and the absolute property of his master. He had no protection against the wickedness of the master and was a tool to be used and discarded when useless.”

Guides such as Mr. Amoa-Mensah deliver Tourism Ministry-approved scripts describing the dense bush and jungle along the coastline, the virulent illnesses that wiped out early slavers and their wives, and the columns of hundreds of African men and women forced into the forts, subdued by chains and whips.

They say it’s unlikely that Europeans could have survived such experiences.

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