Cornishmaninafrica

Today we visited the Kakum game park, with its “canopy walk”. This is a series of seven long rope suspension bridges slung high up from tree to tree which permit you to view the rainforest from a height of about 150 feet. Lots of fun, though it was interesting to see how many of our group simply couldn’t handle it and had to turn back. Walking the bridges didn’t bother me in the slightest, but I would experience the same irrational fear if I had to crawl through a long narrow hole in the ground.

Today we travelled by coach to the Cape Coast, where we were given an excellent guided tour of one of the British-built slave forts. There are numerous forts along this coast, and they have become something of a pilgrimage site for black Americans returning to discover their roots. It is difficult to put into writing the effect it has, being the only Englishman amongst so many Africans standing in one of the slave dungeons. Slaves were marched hundreds of miles from the interior (well before the era of roads). Doubtless there were Kabiye amongst them. They were kept underground at the fort in appalling conditions. Chained to each other, in almost total darkness, with minimum sustenance and no common language. When archeologists first excavated the fort, they had to dig through a three feet of human excrement to discover the orginal floor. When their time came, the slaves marched through a long narrow underground tunnel to the ”door of no return” which faces the beach. As I walked through the door, I was struck by the fact that, for many of them, just seeing an ocean for the very first time and not knowing what it was would have been a terrifying experience in its own right, quite apart from the long sea voyage which awaited them. Many things impressed me about the guide’s explanation, but nothing more so than the fact that a mere hundred yards away from the dungeon was an Anglican church (West Africa’s oldest), where the British officers would attend evensong. If their diaries are anything to go by, many of them were evidently quite pious.

Attended a conference at Legon University, Ghana. The campus is an architectural jewel, set on a hill overlooking Accra. Spacious, newly whitewashed buildings, beautifully manicured gardens, tarmaced treelined avenues. One hall of residence even had a fountain playing in the quad, for goodness’ sake. There are on-site banks, shops, cyber-cafés and churches.