2018 Trip to Ghana - Cape Coast

- Coming Home, Accra - Mole National Park - Nkabom Grand Durbar - Chale Wote Festival - Cape Coast -

Visiting the El Mina dungeon (some call it "Castle," I call it what it was, a dreadful dungeon...), was an emotional, at times heart wrenching experience. I was so glad to have a brother like Sammy, going through the experience with me.

Sammy had visited as a school-aged kid. And like a school trip for any high-schooler, you bring the mindset of a teen. So it was very cool to share our respective journeys to consciousness about slavery, as two brothers, one who grow up knowing the light of his African roots, and me, someone who had to discover then.

Not every one of our ancestors literally passed through this "Gate of No Return," a trifle of a point many "journalists" hastened to make - some in snide cynicism, others pretending, in feigned modesty, it to be a mere point of historical detail - when President Obama visited. I'd read all the bullshyt; but also I'd read Walter Rodney and Chancellor Williams, more than once...

A trip to any of these fortresses of misery and human degredation will only be as important as the knowledge and historical awareness one brings with them.

It was as gratifying as it was haunting and discomforting at times, come back to this fateful place in history.

A verse from Psalms, torturously misconstrued to rationalize wholesale murder and rape. There are multiple chapels at El Mina.

Our guide for the tour, Robert Kugbey, was excellent.

- Coming Home, Accra - Mole National Park - Nkabom Grand Durbar - Chale Wote Festival - Cape Coast -