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Elmina and its Message.
Chris Okey Chinwuba
The bowels of St. George
Castle at Elmina in Cape Coast, Ghana, present a
stunning revelation of the magnitude of wickedness that
dwells in mankind. The unpleasant memories woven around
the history of Elmina confronts its visitors with the
horrors associated with slavery.
Elmina is a historic city in Ghana, on the Gulf of
Guinea, about 130km south east of Accra. The place is
the earliest permanent European settlement on the Gold
Coast. The Portuguese built St. George Castle on the
site in 1482. Elmina was initially a gold trading centre
but later made a mark in history when it metamorphosed
into a slave trading port, flourishing up to the 19th
Century.1 Little did the designers and builders realise
that they were composing a monument to inhumanity.
The Castle as an edifice connotes the proverbial painted
sepulchre. The architectural layout of the dungeons
located in the basement is part of a montage in the
shameful history of the exodus of black Africans to
America. The stifling air of the dungeons is reminiscent
of the unpalatable treatment that was the lot of the
inmates. There existed also two chapels where the
civilized lords’ and masters prayed to God – of course
fore prosperity in the slave business. Ironically,
however, the dungeons and the chapels portray a mockery
of the concept of God and humanity.
The Elmina experience silently enjoins us to pause in
our ideological strides and re-evaluate our thoughts and
decisions in relation to societal values and realities.
What remains of the grandeur of St. George Castle
persists as a form of conceptual art. It mirrors the
torture, humiliation and suffering which man meted to
his own kind. The tales told by Elmina pictures man as
beast that threatens its own essence. Ideologically, the
rationale behind the experience from Elmina strongly
questions the parameter by which humanity defines
civilization.
If we plough back into the last century, there is enough
evidence to show that the Elmina experience occurs
periodically in different dimensions in various part of
the globe. On April 13, 1919, for example, in Amritsar’s
Jallianwala Bagh, Punjab, India, the British military
commander, Brigadier Reginald E.H Dyer, ordered his
soldiers to fire point blank into an unarmed and
unsuspecting crowd of some 10,000 men, women and
children. Dyer returned to Britain a hero.2 Have we
forgotten too soon, the extermination camps of Auschwitz
and Sobibor of Nazi Germany? Then, in 1948, the
government of South Africa enacted the apartheid laws.
Racial discrimination was institutionalized. Race laws
touched every aspect of social life, including a
prohibition of marriage between whites and non-whites.3
Think of the 1966 pogrom in Nigeria when the Igbo ethnic
group was massacred in northern Nigeria.
How about the ethnic
cleansing incidents that occurred in 1994 in Rwanda,
where about 800,000 innocent men, women and children
were murdered.4 The mass murders that occurred in
Guyana, the former Yugoslavia, East Timor, Bosnia etc,
cannot easily fade from memory. The beast in man was
still on the prowl when on 11th September 2001, about
3000 men and women got trapped and were buried in the
rubble of what used to be the World Trade Centre, in New
York.
The overall picture thus presented, creates enough
nightmares to showcase man as a beast that preys on his
own kind. At this juncture, it could be concluded that
this beast, which is inherent in man is usually
unleashed when the idiosyncrasies of civilization is
translated without restraint.
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