Remains of the day: The Slave Staircase and the Slave Doorway
Today marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British dominions by Act of Parliament. It ended the trade in Africans from Africa itself, although it did not prohibit the trade among the Caribbean territories, which c
Tolon Mon is a house about two miles from Christiansborg Castle at Osu in Accra. Tolon is the name of a town in the Northern Region of Ghana, several hundred miles away from Accra. The word 'Mon' has more unsettling connotations for it means prison. Tolon Mon was the house where slaves from the north were kept on their way to the castle and subsequently into slavery. Christiansborg Castle has been the seat of government since 1877, when the British having ousted all other European competition, decided to use it as the seat of its administration in the Gold Coast Colony. The castle had been built by the Danes in 1659 and until the first part of the 19th century had been used as a trading outpost. Much of the Danish trade from at least the 17th century was in slaves. There used to be an underground tunnel leading from Tolon Mon to the castle and it is said that the tunnel was open until the mid-'80s when it was sealed by the then military government following increased security fears around the castle.
In the courtyard of Tolon Mon is a concrete staircase that stops practically in mid-air. The building to which it led no longer exists. It was torn down some time in the 1950s and has never been rebuilt. The staircase thus has a haunted look to it: it leads up to a place formerly associated with slavery that has now vanished! It is a suspended monument to tragedy. When I went to Tolon Mon last year and sought to take photographs of the staircase, several children rushed to stand on the decaying steps so they could come into the photos. They were utterly oblivious of the terrible history that was marked by the staircase.
On the abolition of slavery and its eventual discontinuation in the second half of the 19th century the slaves that had hitherto been held in Tolon Mon were freed and allowed to settle among the people of the neighbourhood. Unlike the things that have been written about other freed slave communities such as the Saros of Nigeria, very little has been done on the freed slaves of the then Gold Coast. Yet from all accounts they quickly integrated into the society, even inter-marrying among the free born. Roasted plantain, a very popular snack cooked over an open coal fire and seen across the city dates from this period. Its popularization is attributed to the freed slave women who begun selling it then. Even the history of this well-liked food which people generally take for granted in Ghana can be traced back to this pregnant past.
Elmina Castle lies 140 kilometres on the coast to the east of Accra. It was built in 1482 by the Portuguese. A guided tour of Elmina Castle will disclose various pieces of information about its history, the number of times it changed hands among the Europeans, the schools that were established for children of the officers there, and, most importantly, the slave trade which for over 300 years was conducted from its walls. But it is the Door of No Return that gives pause for contemplation. Through that door in the dungeons of the castle one can see the lashing violence of the Atlantic Ocean. One can imagine the slave ships that must have stood visibly on the near horizon, and which for the shackled men and women stepping through that door represented a rupture of their known worlds. The door and its surroundings are pregnant with images and to this day anyone that stands before it cannot help but imagine what it must have been like. Many African Americans and Caribbean people confronted by that testament to man's inhumanity to man break down and cry. For the transatlantic slavery is not something that can be grasped rationally, no matter how many books are churned out to explain the political economy of slavery and its place in the evolution of the world system during that period.
And yet revisiting the staircase and the door must not be an occasion solely for dismay, anger, and indeed bafflement. There are lessons to be learned from these symbols and testaments. The slavery in Black men and women represented the transportation of entire social systems across the oceans to the plantations of the Caribbean and the Americas. For each slave was not just a father or mother or child. They also fulfilled other roles in the societies from which they were taken: artisans, philosophers, bakers, carpenters, artists, nurturers of creativity and even princes and princesses. And despite the rupture that the transatlantic slavery represented they still managed to carry residues of these multiple roles and the social structures they represented along with them. Evidence of the values of being Black in different climes is amply to be found in the blues, jazz, and the signifyin' of African Americans, of the orisha religions of Brazil and the Caribbean, of the foods from all these places that often give Black people, wherever they may come from, a shock of recognition, and of the ways in which we declare ourselves singly and collectively wherever we are: "We Are Here." All these signals of Black values were carried in the souls of Black folk (to appropriate the title of WEB Du Bois's famous book) across the dark passage. The difficulty now is to unearth these values amidst the diasporic scatterings of Black peoples.
To retrieve the nature of Black values from this diasporic scattering, there are a number of things we have to bear in mind. First is to change the framework by which we think about our entangled history. For too long our history has been an appendage of other people's history. For too long we have laboured under the burden of the sense of racial injury. And for too long this burden of racial injury has been used to divide us, Black from Black and Black from the rest of humanity. It is time now to grapple with our history but not in such a way as to emphasize our victim status. This is not a call to forget what harm has been done to us but to place that harm within a wider and broader context. Africa existed before the slavers came.
The second important thing to bear in mind is that we must be prepared to link the lessons to be found within the communities of the freed all over the world. Thus it is imperative that we begin to ask questions and to link the lives of those bonded men and women who were left behind in various parts of Africa and those that were taken away across the waters. There is a lot of work to be done on this.
Finally, however, it is imperative to teach this history, painful as it might be, to our children and our children's children. The act of retrieval is important so we can have alternative mental maps for finding our way in the world. It is not enough to hope that Western globalization, whose roots lie in the exploitation of various peoples, will provide us the maps by which we can understand ourselves and find our way forward. As the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria put it, "until you know where the rain is beating you, you will not be able to avoid getting wet."