An Unsolicited Hug at Ghana’s Slave Castles
How a simple touch can move our world to more healing
As a student of African American history, it had been on my list for many years to visit Ghana and its slave castles.
Cape Coast and Elmina Castle were two of the main dungeons and platforms used to imprison and then ship millions of Africans to the Americas to be used as slaves. They and the 38 other slave “castles” in Africa are an important piece of African Americans’ history.
These sites were where many of their ancestors were raped, put in dungeons, beaten, in some cases murdered, and in other cases shipped off to places where their names, cultures, languages and religions would be lost forever. Places like Brazil, the United States, Trinidad and Tobago, Columbia.
I’ve always felt that it’s important to understand history to better understand today. We can’t possibly digest the depth of present issues, more less solve them, without fully grasping how we got here.
As American historian and author David McCullough reminds us:
“History is who we are and why we are the way we are.”
Sit with that.
As a Jewish American who lost family as young as four years old to the Nazis, I’ve been reluctant to visit…
