If I had ever learned of the Cape Coast Castle and Dungeon on what was then called the Gold Coast of Africa, I didn't remember it long after the exam. So when I arrived at the castle with 10 busloads of other Baptists, I was prepared only for a history lesson. I was not prepared to be profoundly moved by a place renowned for its past horrors but made sacred in a sense by the suffering of those who passed through.
Although it is impossible to say how many passed through this and a series of other fortifications on the African coast, estimates vary from 4 million to 60 million with recent scholars landing near 11 million.
The slaves were black Africans. The masters of the fort, the ships and the plantations were white. It is hard to miss the stark color differences and it was easy to assume that the causes of slavery were racial. Without doubt, race was a strong component. But race was a mere convenience. It made slaves and masters easily identifiable.
Jim White
To focus only on race is to miss the greater source of this tragic episode in human history. Being enslaved was not entirely unique to black people and owning slaves was not entirely unique to white people.
Moreover, many are surprised to discover that Africans themselves became willing, even eager participants in the slave trade because they became enriched by their human export.
A Ghanaian website records the following paragraph. “Recent research by Dr Akosua Perbi of the University of Ghana has shown a substantial African involvement in the trade. Typically, after an inter-tribal war, the prisoners taken by the winning side were sold to the castles. Then there were traders arriving at the Gold Coast from the north with slaves. Individuals also kidnapped people to sell them into slavery. Dr Perbi's research has revealed that some African traders supplied as many as 15,000 slaves per year to European merchants.” (http://www.ghana.co.uk/history/history/slave_trade_slave_castles.htm)
It is not my attempt to try to defend the sin of racism. Thinking of another race as being other than God's children, created in his image and equal to every race is sin. But the greater problem of the slave trade was not the color of their skins but the condition of their hearts.
Their lust for wealth, for power, for control are still powerful motives. A shameful and sobering reality is the slave trade continues even to this day.
Women and even children are being sold into slavery to the used by their captors as prostitutes and many of us are oblivious. Although it is impossible to determine a precise number, the U.S. government estimates that between 600,000 and 800,000 women are taken across international borders. It has no estimates for those enslaved within national borders.
A human rights website called Voices-Unabridged (voices-unabridged.org) provides the following figures.
• Four million girls and women are bought and sold each year for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Trafficking worldwide generates a profit of 5 to 7 billion dollars a year (United Nations).
• Countries of the former Yugoslavia have been identified as being at the crossroads of trafficking in Europe. It has been reported that young girls are sold at auction in Kosovo, Bosnia and in Albania for $1,000 to $2,500. Every year 50,000 young Russian women are trafficked to foreign countries1. (Le Monde diplomatique, November 2001).
• The price of one women on the market of Timisoara, Romania, is approximately $50 to $190. Her price in the destination country will be 10 times higher (UNICEF). Up to 80 percent of all trafficked persons from Albania are teenage girls under the age of 18 years old (UNICEF).
• Fifty thousand children and women from Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe are trafficked each year to the United States, but over the past two years, the U.S. government prosecuted cases involving only 250 victims (U.S. CIA)
• 30 to 35 percent of all sex workers in the Mekong sub region of Southeast Asia are between 12 and 17 years old (United Nations).
• Mexico social services report that there are more than 16,000 children engaged in prostitution (United Nations).
The Baptist World Alliance is attempting to do something about this terrible injustice by directing the attention of the world to the problem. Asha Sanchu of India, who works with female sex workers in Thailand, appealed to the Baptist World Alliance to not forget the women and girls who are being trafficked into sexual slavery. “I was told that I was too young, but if we were to accept such excuses, then none of us would do work for the Lord” she said.
After listening to Asha and visiting the slave castle, I wrote the following:
What tales would you tell, Oh walls of unyielding stone? So cold and hard, yet softer than the hearts of those who built you. How many of those in your grasp here lay down with empty eyes to follow their hopes through the door of death? How many shrieks of pain and anguished but defiant cries did you hear—or were there too many to count?
How many babies' brains were dashed against your sides as their own mothers contemplated evils so unimaginable that killing their offspring seemed the least fearsome?
How many rapes added to suffering already ineffable? What is beyond ineffable?
You stand still and cold. But not silent. The whispers and whimpers; the shouts and curses; the snaps of the lash and sizzle of flesh being branded; the clinks of chains and the groans of abuse sounded then and echo still declaring your complacency and pronouncing your guilt.
You are not innocent, Oh walls, for your embrace captured and enslaved rather than protected and nurtured. Your punishment? Dust? Decay? Deterioration? Rubble? Removal? Horror forgotten? No! Your sentence requires a justice commensurate with your crime. Stand forever in your naked shame and let the pain and prayers of those who passed through your hold reverberate within your cells that all generations will hear and curse your treachery.
You are old now and empty here except for those made reverent during their visit by the faint sounds of suffering and by ghostly visions appearing in their minds.
But, you are truly treacherous, Oh walls, for you have reappeared newly built and teeming with freshly fettered captives. Not to chop cotton or to labor in fields of cane, theirs is a labor that strangles their spirits with shame.
You have continued your satanic work of enslaving, Oh walls, with perverted promises of better lives or with broker-bartered solutions to family debt.
Those whose hearts are less breakable than your rocks; those who steal the lives of others and prosper from their misery, God will judge.
And, others. Those who do nothing because the pain is not theirs to bear, do they not understand that love of Christ demands love for others? The cries within your circle stir to oppose you those with ears to hear.