Dark Continents

Yesterday, I visited two of the castles that are infamous for the slave trade from West Africa to the Americas. They are the Elmina Castle and the Cape Coast Castle on the southern coast of Ghana.

Walking through the structures is a difficult task. Not because of the roughly hewn stone and brick flooring or the extremely low doorway entrances. Not because of the bats that hang around in one of the rooms in Elimina. Not because most of the place is dark, musty and dolorous -- except the Governor's living quarters which are expansive, airy and ventilated in both castles. The difficulty is posed by imagining the horrors that were perpetrated in this very place by man upon fellow man.

Elmira castle provided slaves for the Portuguese colonials for use in Brazil; Cape Coast did the same for the British colonials in North America. Learning about the grave injustices that were done to Africans by Europeans and Americans is a difficult task. As if being bought and sold weren't enough, the slaves were chained to each other and to cannonballs, handcuffed, raped, beaten, tortured, stuffed into impossibly small quarters, forced to live for days and weeks in their own excrement that often rose to knee-height, and killed by slow starvation and thirst if they dared to try and flee.

Learning about all this made me wonder to which continents the label "dark" more aptly applies. If the absence of the light of knowledge, empathy and the milk of human kindness are any part of what "darkness" implies; it is not Africa that was the Dark Continent. It is us, Americans and our brethren in Europe who should accept our history and meekly accede that it is our continents that were truly dark and unlit.