Southern Exposure: Or, a Long Weekend in the South of Ghana

Jungle Primeval

Cacun National Park is in the South of Ghana, within an hour from Cape Coast. It boasts some of the oldest, fully preserved rainforest in the world, and a canopy walk on which you can observe the forest from something of a unique angle – after all, how often do you get to see massive trees from above, rather than starting up at them? More importantly, Cancun is partially open to hiking, and one can, go for a walk in one of the few un-colonized (for lack of a better term) stretches of rainforest in West Africa.

It had been a nice coincidence that I had been reading Alan Weisman’s excellent thought experiment “The World Without Us” that week; and had just finished it on the bus ride south. Weisman considers the world both before our ancestors descended from the trees and evolved, and how biological systems will likely patch themselves back together post homo sapiens. To realize that much of the Africa, and perhaps even the world had at one point looked like the rainforest I trekked through in Cacun; and would likely look that way again given roughly one hundred years without the parasitic and often destructive impulses of people stripping the land of its resources, is oddly disquieting. It is not that I am opposed to people or the built environment – my field is urban planning after all – it is just, as one breathes the clean, moist tasting air of a dense rainforest; it is painfully clear that what is still going to be around 10 thousand years from now, and what may not be. The realization that everything in that rainforest is living; and in the case of some of the trees – which are as large as any of the Giant Redwoods you see in the Pacific Northwest of the North America – have been alive for thousands of years is a humbling feeling. That the air tastes different from city air, or even from air in more recently planted forests – that the incredible filtration system of all of those living things which have been at work for millennia remains, in every way, staggering.

Life, in this forest, reaches deep into the soil and expands outwards. It feels permanent – and in a way it is. Though the whole of the ecosystem can be rapidly and easily destroyed through even slight climate variations – in a way, it is the frailty of this plant life that gives its adaptability. If some plant species perish, some will always naturally select for traits that are best suited to those variations. From the upheaval will always come new life. One is forced to come face to face with this in a rainforest. It is us and our edifices that are impermanent and the forest that is the natural order of things. As Weisman argues in his book, the chimpanzees that human beings are descended from, who climbed from similar rainforest tens of millions of years ago in Tanzania were driven by slight climatic variations. Those forests will remain and will sprout anew, and perhaps, with luck, the chimps with them, long after we are dead and gone.

The Ghost of Slavery’s Ships

The town of Cape Coast was at one time the base for the British West African colonization and of the European sponsored and, tragically, African implemented West African slave trade. Cape Coast Castle, a white, almost pre-art deco castle was where those recently taken as slaves were held, in large, crowded holding cells for months at a time, among piles of their own excrement and filth, before being put on ships and sent to The New World, South America, the Caribbean, or elsewhere. It is estimated that some six or seven million people passed through Cape Coast Castle, before being loaded onto ships. They were taken from all over West Africa – some from as far away as Mali or Cameroon. Many died in the squalor of the holding cells of the castle, where they sat in near total darkness, even before they were loaded on ships. The dead were often left to rot with the still living. The Polish journalist of decolonization, Ryszard Kapuschisnksi, in the section of his book on the fall of the Soviet Union, 'Imperium', detailing the holocaust and before that, Stalin's purges in the Ukraine, likened slavery and colonization as being another holocaust visited upon Africa by Western Europe. He has a point.

Cape Coast as a town is quite a bit more laid back than much of the rest of Ghana, though it was once the centre of the Gold Coast Colony (as Ghana was known during the period of British control). Now it is simply a relatively poor coastal community, with most people making their livelihood through the extraction of ever declining Atlantic fish stocks. Heaps of (largely plastic) garbage litter what would otherwise be very pretty beaches, and the coastline is visibly polluted with all manner of waste that has been discharged into the ocean.

Those that have achieved affluence in Cape Coast have done so through the successful mining of white guilt over slavery cottage industry. It is interesting that a robust tourism economy can be built in dwelling, at length, in the depths of human willingness to exploit and abuse their co-mammals. Indeed, the viciousness of the slave trade, and later colonization of West Africa by exploitative European empires, was heinous – and guilt over this is something seized on by the locals of Cape Coast, dramatically inflating prices of everything from taxi fares to souvenirs for visiting white tourists. The ancestors of the slaves then, would seem to be having their revenge, increment by increment then. Except, it is not that simple. African complicity in the slave trade was what made the whole thing possible. While European demand for slaves drove the trade, it was Africans that went out, rounded up their brothers on the continent and brought them to the Europeans to be processed and shipped out. This is a point only briefly and hastily covered by those leading the tour of Cape Coast Castle, and the former Portuguese slave castle of Almina (a Africanized version Al Mina, or 'the mine'), stressing, to them the uniquely European nastiness of slavery, then strongly hinting that a generous tip would go some way to begin 'healing those wounds'.

Slavery though, was also a normal part of many of the African Empires that existed well prior to white colonization. A similar process of imperial conquest, with Assante, the Songhai, the Fanti, and other African empires perpetually at war with one another - and actively enslaving their enemies as parts of the spoils of war, had played itself out for thousands of years in Africa (and in the rest of the world!). Indeed, what elevates the European slave trade is three factors, (1) the scope on which it was practiced, and (2) its systematic implementation of the trade and the technology gap between the oppressed and the oppressors; and (3) the brutalism of exploitation of the colonization that followed.

The experience at Cape Coast is interesting because it is clear, one really does begin to feel bad about the horrible things that ones ancestors had been up to; however you do not always feel bad in the way people from Cape Coast would like you to feel bad. It has been European acknowledgement that the whole process of slavery and colonization were wrong after some bruising defeats to the old post-war European empires, and anti-imperial narratives from the likes of Forrester, Orwell, Paul Scott and countless others that has lead to the pervasive feeling of guilt for practices which were, throughout ancient history, common place. No such consideration seems to be given to the equally large, no less ugly, and far less often talked about Ottoman and North African slave trade run through Morocco, which often saw Europeans enslaved as well as Africans. Perhaps it was the unintended racial egalitarian nature of this slave trade that sees it forgotten, while the European slave trade, the ancestors of its victims alive, and in many places, often disadvantaged by centuries of institutional abuse, in the Americas and Caribbean that elevates the horror of one while almost erasing from memory, the other.

Colonization is an abusive system, it was one that had advantages in places some parts of India (where the English Colonial Service and British built railroads were the ticket to emancipation and social mobility for many low caste Hindus who would otherwise be forced into lives of extreme poverty and menial labor to their Brahman brethren) but it remained at base and abusive system. Slavery was one clear aspect of this abuse, and it is something that, in many parts of the world, we seem to have finally achieved consensus of its grotesqueness; however this does not necessarily exonerate Africans who were involved in giving the sinews of this abuse. Guilt can only be useful to a point, but it is memory and vigilance that such abuses not be allowed again that must be the lasting legacy. Similarly, it is also far too easy for many West Africans to blame all of the ills of their countries on colonialism, (and the artificiality of the borders of many post-Colonial African states and massive resource extraction by European colonialists makes this argument) without trying to improve conditions and often while exploiting their countrymen. The lesson should always be one of the prevention of future transgressions rather than in wallowing upon the spilled blood of the past.

Accra on Sunday

Accra is dead on Sundays. It is funny experience to walk in the streets of a city of three million and encounter no one except for the perpetual onslaught of dejected taxi drivers, desperate for a Sunday fair, who anxiously honk their horns at you as they pass. A coworker of mine, noted that, one of the things he loved about his country was that, as a result of the widespread religiosity of the place, Sunday had a very particular feel. Sunday is sacred in Ghana, people go to church and then spend the day at home with their families. In a way it is nice, it proves that even a days respite can be gained from that most resiliant of beasts: capitalism. Shops are closed in vibrant commercial districts, with only the odd restaurant or bar (often in areas that tend to boast large numbers of foreigners) open. Indeed, I walked the whole four-mile stretch of the central business district without seeing a single open shop. The next morning, the same area was so congested it became completely impassable. On Sunday though, one can begin to feel very alone. All of the signs of recent human activity are still present. Trash litters the streets and due to the open sewers, perennial stink of urine that permeates West African cities are, as always still there but, as the premise of the Weisman book offers, everyone has simply vanished. One can start to entertain ideas of how long it would take the jungle to reclaim Accra were this status quo to persist. Then you start to go a bit crazy.

The Northern district of the city is called Asylum Down. It is a relatively affluent district that felt something like a Ghost town on a hot Sunday morning. I think the name is wonderful. It reminded me of an episode of “The Old Grey Whistle Test” (a long since deceased BBC music program) with the Smiths on it. In said episode, Morrissey and Johnny Marr hijack a class of English school children as a mechanism for Morrissey to put forward a litany of slightly prissy remarks and weird jokes that don’t really come off. The high part comes during a scene in which one of the children has the gumption to ask Morrissey, “Where are we going?” to which Morrissey quite stiffly replied, “We’re all going mad!” Asylum Down on a Sunday makes you feel that way. It’s emptiness, the apparent sheer lack of human life on the streets (with the exception of the cabbies, who genuinely are mad in Accra and school like sharks on a feeding frenzy at the site of a fair) makes one feel that perhaps, you have completely lost it, and are in an asylum on ones own making. (Deadpans) Eerie that.