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Distances: The Ghana Conference

Much of attending a conference is usually a question of distance. It entails the physical moving of the participants from their usual places of abode to some other location to confer with other minds in order to shorten their own mental distances between the known and the unknown; between the felt and the imagined; and in order to help other participants reduce their own distances as well. Further, the temporary physical relocation helps in shortening the distances among the participants, most of  whom usually would be meeting for the first time.

In the physical realm of distance, even the home-based Ghanaian participants in the August 2007 international conference must have reached the International Conference Centre, Accra—where the conference was opened—from some distance, just as those who arrived from Cameroon, Central African Republic, Europe, Israel, Kenya, Lesotho, Nigeria, Senegal, the Gambia, the West Indies, Uganda and Zambia had done. We all arrived with distant memories of the wide, open sore on humanity’s forehead: the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

The opening ceremony at the Accra International Conference Centre was most colourful and almost solemn. Women and men of colours distant from one another’s met here and were wrapped in the unifying multicolours of the rich Ghanaian cultural displays that marked the opening ceremony, besides the intellectual discourses, including the keynote address, that whetted the appetite for the main menu at the Elmina Beach Hotel.

The opening ceremony over, we all headed for the distant Elmina Beach Hotel where much of the rest of the conference activities took place. And at the neighbouring Elmina Castle that evening, the performance of Musu, an eloquent Ghanaian drama ensemble, was an omnibus theatrical version of what the conference was all about. Musu both entertained and helped us to reduce the mental distance between the Slave Trade as it was, and today when most people only imagine what it was.

Thursday, August 9, 2007, and the academic pyrotechnics began with the intellectual gladiators trying to bring forward to us in words this distant past and its various colours and contours of sweat, blood, and tears. We all listened to this raw past, which gravity, notoriety, and inhumanity Time alone may mellow down. We listened as speaker after speaker dug into the unfathomable depths of the inhumanity; or tried to invent some room for the understanding of this past with some sympathy; or tried to show the inaccuracy in the very dating of when the Trade was abolished; or tried to show the shortness between this distant past and today in the affairs and well-being of the African.

The verbal calisthenics continued endlessly at the Elmina Beach Hotel. But some distance from here, the still-standing tall structures of the Elmina and Cape Coast castles stood for the truth, or for the nearest to the harsh realities of the distant past. These tell the tale, with some slight cosmetic accent of what being captured, chained, and sold meant for the Africans; of what the trade meant for the merchants. The insides of both castles, painted in innocent-looking white colours on the outside, were graves for the millions of Africans and their families, rich barns for the undertaker-African-middleman, and a piece of earth swollen with economically nutritious African flesh for the white slave dealers. Outside the castles are tall palm trees, widely spaced. But inside the castles were dark dungeons in which chained male and female Africans waited endlessly for the arrival of the next slave ship. Inside were the cells in which the slavery-resisting men and women were dumped to starve and thirst to death. Inside were the Palaver Halls in which, like at any bazaar, the Africans were auctioned. Inside these castles, too, were the mansions high in the sky, in which the slave dealers lived. And, paradoxically, inside one of the castles was the former Portuguese Church, where the slave traders worshipped the Christian God before whom all humans are believed to be equal.

Out on the open floor of the Cape Coast Castle, for instance, are bloodthirsty cannons and cannonballs facing the endless blue sky that is the Atlantic Ocean. Primed for havoc to any arriving rival ship in this distant phase of the man-mangling competition for profit, the cannons eloquently remind you that business is business. And beneath the floor of the castles on which the cannons rest is the dark, tomblike tunnel through which the chained bondmen walked away from freedom, their families, and communities into thralldom, severed permanently from their basic humanity; severed permanently from their names; severed permanently from being into nonbeing, through the wide “Gate of No Return.”

At the Cape Coast Castle the “Gate of No Return” has recently been reversed to “Gate of Return,” and our tourist guide explained that this is a symbolic welcome of all the descendants of African slaves back to their mother continent, and that every one of them is expected to endeavour to return, at least once in his/her lifetime, to Africa.

We toured the two castles with their raw history, looking with some distance in our eyes at these naked truths; and we looked distantly at one another, wordless, like passersby looking at defecation in an open street in daytime, which someone had left at night. At the castles, the distance between today and yesterday thins down. Here, the past weeps, still, and the chains and manacles continuously stutter their innocence.

And the conference continued amidst paper presentations, eating and drinking like a scene at the Castles’ Guest House in the days of evil, and scholars from different parts of Africa and from both sides of the immortal Atlantic initiated friendships or continued the fine-tuning of earlier presentations. And, of course, those dedicated men and women from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, which organized the conference, continued most dutifully their business of putting things in order and did so quite tirelessly, like the indifferent Atlantic charging against the banks and receding. In the end, we all had our distances between what we had known and not known shortened. We also reduced the distances that had been among us, as persons, before the conference through getting to know one another and becoming friends; and, then, we all returned in the end, to our distant physical places of usual abode, with our mental distances much reduced.