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 | Africans were kept in Dungeons/Pits before they were packed on the slave ships. Sometimes they spend many months in these torturous confinements chained up. Many of these slave dungeons/pits can still be found up and down the West African Coast today. |
By GLENN McKENZIE
GBEREFU ISLAND, Nigeria (AP) - The sand trail passed a well where slaves once paused to drink, and ended at a statue of two people linked by chains around their necks. Under a palm tree next to a wooden sign saying ``POINT OF NO RETURN,'' Loretta Butler broke down and cried.
Butler, a state health administrator from Roosevelt, N.Y., wondered aloud if her forebears had been among the hundreds of thousands of African men, women and children force-marched along this lonely stretch of Nigerian beach onto slave ships bound for the New World.
``I feel overwhelmed to see the place where some of my ancestors may have come from,'' she said, wiping her eyes.
Butler and 21 other black Americans - 12 of them mayors from small cities and towns, mostly in the South - are touring Nigeria this week to grapple hands-on with the legacy of slavery.
Their journey included a walk in the footsteps of African slaves on the half-mile sandy path across Gberefu Island to the beach.
From here, as many as 10,000 slaves annually between 1518 and 1880 were loaded onto boats and shipped to the Americas, according to Nigerian historians.
Each year, thousands of black Americans make pilgrimages to Ghana and Senegal, where crumbling slave dungeons have been turned into healthy tourist industries.
Butler's group, however, was among the first organized American tours in recent memory to Nigeria, where up to one-third of all slaves bound for the Americas may have gone through Gberefu Island and the nearby port of Badagary.
Butler's tears were partly out of frustration that most slaves' individual histories have been lost, she said. About all she knows is that her ancestors came from Africa.
The question of slavery's modern-day legacy was equally troubling for her: Why do so many blacks in the United States and Africa still live in poverty?
``Poverty is obviously a result of slavery. We are still fighting that,'' she said. ``We will return with this message.''
For many of the visitors, the voyage was a chance to make a personal connection with Africa.
Walking to the Point of No Return, ``I could feel my ancestors telling me it is OK,'' Butler said. ``I am home.''
Others in the group who have visited Africa before, like Michelle Kourouma, executive director of the National Conference of Black Mayors, said she hoped to spread understanding of how slavery dehumanized blacks and whites alike.
``When you're inhumane to another person you undermine your own humanity,'' said Kourouma, of Atlanta, who can trace her lineage back to her great-great-grandfather, a slave who escaped from Virginia to Canada.
The choice of turbulent Nigeria as a destination gave the Americans a glimpse of urban African life at its most difficult and raw.
In Lagos, Nigeria's main city, Mayor Christopher J. Campbell of Eastover, N.C., was shocked to see vast traffic jams, piles of burning garbage and people crowded into shantytowns stretching for miles.
``There are some places we have seen that are civilized and some others that are more primitive. It is quite disturbing to see,'' Campbell said.
``There are a lot of people going without electricity and sanitation. And there is too much garbage, it is hard to promote tourism with a dirty city.''
Some expressed surprise that cases of trafficking child slaves in Nigeria and neighboring countries continue to be reported. The United Nations estimates at least 200,000 children are traded yearly in West and Central Africa.
The mayors' visit, which ends Thursday, is part of Black Heritage Festival, an effort by Lagos authorities to promote black American tourism.
Opening the festival Sunday, state Gov. Bola Tinubu said he hoped the tourists would overlook the trash because ``we are trying to raise money to clean it up.''
Many people in Badagary, the fishing port and former colonial city not far from the old slave port, were hoping the American visitors would bring investment to the city.
Others wanted only to share stories of slavery.
``We all suffered from slavery. It tore our families apart, it made some of us traitors who sold others and made others of us into heroes,'' said Paul d'Almeida, a Benin-born teacher of French. His great-great-grandfather was a slave who escaped from Brazil and returned to Benin.
At sunset, the Americans and Nigerians did what their slave ancestors could not. Lighting candles, they wound their way back down the trail, away from the Point of No Return.
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The mayors visiting Nigeria are:
Irene H. Brodie, Robbins, Ill.; Samuel Brown, Lauderdale Lakes, Fla.; Larry S. Bryant of Forrest City, Ark.; Christopher J. Campbell, Eastover, S.C.; Jack C. Sims, District Heights, Md.; Felton Flagg of Country Club Hills, Mo.; Marcia W. Glenn of Lithonia, Ga.; George L. Grace, St. Gabriel, La.; Darrell Jupiter, Napoleonville, La.; Kenneth Fox Muhammad, East Spencer, N.C.; Otis T. Wallace, Florida City, Fla.; Donjuan Williams of Glenarden, Md.
John Griffin and Elsie Williams knew their vacation would move them, but they could not have fully understood the power of the places they were about to visit.
The two joined a Chicago tour group called Africa Travel Advisors that made a journey to Ghana, on the Atlantic coast of Africa, to see how the brutal life of captivity started for their ancestors and millions of other black Americans.
They visited two of the encampments still standing today, where Africans faced conditions so wretched that hundreds of thousands died before even setting out on the passage to America.
Growing numbers of African-Americans are making the journey to these sites to walk the ground where their forebears suffered. For Griffin, a retired police officer, it was a deeply personal mission. His grandfather, Robert Griffin, was born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862.
"He was a wonderful gentleman," he says of his grandfather. "And his father and mother were slaves. And that's not too far removed from me today."
Crying Surf
The first stop on the tour was Cape Coast Castle, which the British presided over during the peak of the slave trade in the 1700s.
Hundreds of Africans at a time were thrown into one of its dark, hot dungeons, where they would live for months in utterly inhumane conditions. They were forced to fight over the scarce food and water and were left to live in their own waste.
A guide named Harry Blankson explains to the tour how food and water was dropped through a small hole. "Water is thrown, they cup their hands and get a sip," he says. "They eat, they drink, they vomit, urinate, defecate, and sleep in it here."
Williams, a former postal worker, was stunned at how the Europeans lived comfortably in quarters above the sweltering prisons, which had only tiny openings for air. Like Griffin, she feels a profound connection to those who suffered there under the harsh European oppressors. "They did not connect with us as humans. We're no more than the dirt on the ground," she says.
Griffin says, "It just tears your soul up to know that possibly your ancestors came through this very same dungeon."
From the chamber there is a narrow passageway that leads to the ocean — now hauntingly dubbed "The Door of No Return." Captives were herded through the passage to ships which carried them away from everything they had ever known.
According to Blankson, many visitors today insist the screams of the captives can still be heard in the waves.
"It was almost as if there were people in there," says Williams. "I could actually hear voices. It was just like wailing, just wailing and crying."
