Cape Coasters: Have Your Apologies Ready!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

In the wake of President Barack Hussein Obama’s first official visit to the African continent – actually, sub-Saharan Africa – since assuming his august and pioneering reins of governance of the United States of America, reams of mini-essays and articles have been written and published in anticipation of this momentous occasion. But that President Obama would decide to touch land in Ghana come July 10, 2009, has naturally generated a lot of hysteria. In all the flurry of excitement, though, what seems to have been conspicuously, and perhaps even conveniently, overlooked is the not-too-pleasant fact that Ghana, the erstwhile Gold Coast, was also a major commercial port in the infamous and harrowing trade in African humanity, at least in retrospect, otherwise called the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Where highlighted, the damning implications for Africans on the continent, vis-à-vis the latter, has almost invariably been accorded a glancing scrutiny.

According to Ghana’s Information minister, Ms. Zita Okaikoi, President Obama expressly indicated the wish of being shown and conducted around the Cape Coast Castle, obviously, in solidarity with the grim and apocalyptic African-American experience. For like many of us, his Kenyan paternity means that even as an “African-American,” Mr. Obama has no direct ancestral experience with the Transatlantic Slave Trade except, of course, by proximate and conjugal filiation through his wife, the former Ms. Michelle Robinson, and now-First Lady of the United States of America. Still, as kinsmen and women, the massive disruption of our cultures and the flagrant violation of our pre-colonial geopolitical cartography and the inexcusably inhuman deportations of our blood-relatives in the grim process of furthering European mercantile greed, logically implies that we, as continental Africans, are inextricably implicated in the African-American experience.

Personally, however, I would have selected the Elmina Castle for Mr. Obama, since Elmina happens to be the oldest and the seminal modern-European settlement on the Ghanaian littoral that effectively sparked the patently troglodytic trade in African humanity. The foregoing notwithstanding, it is Cape Coast, like the old slave castle at Osu-Accra (otherwise known as Christiansborg Castle), before the latter, that has the added significance of having also served as a colonial seat of governance.

I would also have recommended that the first Black President of the United States of America be conducted on an inspection tour of the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison, in order for Mr. Obama to fully grasp the grim and palpable fact that the collective reassertion by Africans of our sovereignty from European imperialist domination has not precipitated any remarkable, or revolutionary, change in man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man – and that a half-century into postcolonial self-governance, Africans continue to show ourselves to be as unenviably self-destructive as the erstwhile Euro-colonial regimes, and that it was time for us to demonstrate our innate capacity for collective self-worth and love.

It was also rather disorienting in the wake of the landmark announcement of President Obama’s Ghanaian tour to hear Ms. Okaikoi, Ghana’s Information minister, gaily tout the commercial significance of the Obama visit, not because the latter was quite obvious, but more because it detracted from the primarily moral and psychological significance of this presidential pilgrimage, which is precisely what this event is!

What seems to have been conveniently left out of the far-reaching narrative of the Transatlantic Slave Trade on state side, as it were, is the disturbingly evident lack of general remorse. This is largely because in a delicate bid not to blame the proverbial victim, the tendency has been for us, Ghanaians and Africans, to fully and squarely blame the European fort and castle builders and operators for a transaction that was ineluctably mutual, however politically and commercially lopsided this may seem. And it is precisely for this reason that I hope the chiefs and people of the Cape Coast municipality would also present a well-composed, albeit even symbolic, apology for the rest of us, Ghanaians and continental Africans in general.

In the past, some African-American friends, associates and colleagues have bitterly complained to me about the gaping lack of sensitivity and/or remorse by many a continental African tourist guide who conducted them around one of those slave forts and castles. I hope Ghanaians and the people of Cape Coast, in particular, would capitalize on President Obama’s visit to show such familial gesture of sensitivity to our African-American kinsmen and women,

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is also the author of “The New Scapegoats: Colored-on-Black Racism” (iUniverse.com, 2005) and a Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), a democratically-oriented think-tank. E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol. ###