By Martin Accad
Earlier this month, during a conference I was attending in Ghana, I joined a group on a visit to one of the “Slave Castles” on the Southern coast. I expected it to be just another touristic experience. Ancient castles, fortresses and temples are no rare sight in my country, Lebanon. I am not known to be particularly emotional or to easily shed a tear. But even if my brain were to rationalize the information that was being delivered to us by our knowledgeable guide, nothing could have prepared my body for the violence of the experience.
On first sight, the castle interiors were not very different from any other ancient fortress. An internal courtyard surrounded by thick protective walls, flanked with a chapel at its center. Lovely stairways and narrow alleys led up to the top of the citadel with magnificent views of the small fishing port, beaches adorned with coconut trees and the Atlantic Ocean as far as the eye could see. But the engraved signs above the doors and memorial inscriptions revealed a different story. They told of dungeons and of segregated male and female slave cells. They told of amassed sweaty bodies of slaves, stacked together in the intolerable stench of the constant tropical heat and humidity. They told of intentional humiliation, starving and thirsting, designed to break the human spirit and deprive it of all dignity. They told of Portuguese, Dutch and British Governors and soldiers, away from their women over long months of military and commercial expeditions, servicing their lust by freely helping themselves to slave women forever separated from their men.
My mind wrestled and justified: “The slave trade was fed by fratricidal and inter-tribal African wars and slave traders…” “The men engaged in these disgusting activities were not true Christians…” “Muslims, too, were involved in the slave trade throughout Africa…” “This was the barbaric activity of degenerate men of a bygone era…” But none of these brain gymnastics were able to prevent the mounting throbbing pain in my head and the sinking gripping pain in my stomach. By the time our visit ended about two hours later, my physical state was a mess. The thought of riding back on a bus was intolerable.
It was not so much the fact that nations claiming to be “Christian” were engaged in such activity which was the most repulsive; for Christians, after all, still belonged to their particular time and culture. But the thought that a governor and his soldiers could engage in such acts of humiliating, breaking and raping, and then enter the courtyard chapel, engage in prayer, hear readings from the word of God, and remain untouched by the Spirit of God; that is what caused my body to feel so desperately sick. Physically, I felt that I had gone to hell and back, but my soul remained captive of the depth and darkness of human depravity. The words of our guide continued to ring in my head as the most profound statement of my journey to Ghana: “First the colonialists told us they had come to save our souls; and then the European slave traders began to convince us that we had no soul!” As my colleague, Jesse Wheeler, reflected in last week’s blog, “Bad Theology Kills.” My journey to the “Slave Castle” convinced me that we do not merely behave in line with our theology, but rather that we develop our theology to serve our lustful sinful selves.
Thankfully, our Ghanaian host, Pastor Nana, offered me a seat in his car as an alternative to the bus. I sat beside him, and as I began sharing with him some of my thoughts, my body began to convulse and I wept with tears of bitterness and despair for what must have been more than an hour. His deep and peaceful intonation comforted me as he turned on some worshipful tunes on his radio and received my sorrow like a prayer. My soul, initially captive of my impulse to judge history and others, suddenly began to peer at itself as in a mirror. If the evil I had seen could once entrap generations and nations across centuries and vast geographies, to what personal depravity was I blind today? Were the children of plantation owners in the 18th-century New World aware of the hellish reality that others had to suffer in order to serve their own opulent lifestyle? Were my people in Lebanon aware of the subhuman practices taking place in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Nepal, Ethiopia, or Beirut in order to service their need for cheap labor in their households? Was I aware of what children are going through in Vietnam, Cambodia, China, India, Côte d’Ivoire, or Nigeria in order to service my need for sports shoes, chocolate or a diamond ring for my engagement?
I wept and wept, and as Nana and I reached our destination, my bitter tears had washed away the excruciating pain in both my head and stomach, leaving behind a sorrowful awareness of my own sinful state. How we move through life unaware of the impact our so-called “private” life can have on a child, a woman, or a man across the world. How much more determined we need to be about living a life of awareness as we seek to bring healing and redemption to the world. Jesus lived a simple life, effectively a career of about 3 years. His sphere of direct geographical influence was probably no more than a few square kilometers. Yet he lived so much for the sake of others that the impact of his message and life reached eternal significance and affected the entirety of creation. None of us can retreat in the excuse that our life, what we do and say, has no significance. Many organizations today are making us aware that the choices we make every morning and every second of every day have an impact for the better or for the worse of someone else somewhere.
7 Comments
Thank you for sharing this very powerful experience. I imagine it took great courage to put it down in words for everyone to read.
It’s very easy to get wrapped up in our own bubble of daily worries and struggles that we become completely oblivious and even callous to all the greater and much more severe sufferings in the world.
God help us live selfless lives that truly reflect the image of his Son in everything we do.
Thank you, Martin, for such a vivid re-telling of something upon each of us Jesus-followers should reflect. O LORD, have mercy on us.
Reblogged this on Persona and commented:
Martin Accad shares his heart breaking experience in visiting a ‘slave castle’ in Ghana. I have had the same feeling while visiting Goree island in Senegal.
[…] ← My Inner Journey to Hell and Back […]
Yes, Martin, it was a heart wrenching experience and its effects are not going to leave me ever. Thank you for sharing. Lord, help us.
Arun, SAIACS
My dear brother Martin, it sounds like you had an emotional and physical “melt down” when confronted with the reality of this situation. I affirm you, I think your response was appropriate. I had a similar situation in rural southern Egypt, being much younger than I am now, after accompanying the local doctor on his visits to the poor and seeing such misery. That in contrast to my living in Austria and studying psychology at the University of Vienna.
Until today, I’m proud of the bold, risky, activism of my parents in confronting and opposing racial segregation in a small town in rural Texas, “Sugarland”, where the modern form of racial segregation reflected the slavery, plantation past.
Thank you for sharing this experience with us all. Painful, and very real, still in today’s worlde
[…] face of the LGBTQ struggle. I shared my agony over this first-hand experience of human deprivation when I visited a “slave castle” in Accra, Ghana, last year. One feels left wondering how on earth humanity could have one day been so […]