Castles and Real African Hospitality

View from Elmina Castle and Fred
September 23
Ghana Day 2

Today I was signed up to go on what’s called the Slave Dungeons and Castles. We left early in the morning (as usual) and drove 3 hours north (it probably would’ve been shorter if not for Ghanaian traffic which is just as bad if not worse than LA traffic). Outside the city like many other countries is not as nice as we saw along the drive out. However, I just wanted to point out that our definition of poverty is way different than their definition which is more basic. What we consider poor is average for them and nothing to be ashamed of. We drove further and saw some of the surrounding countryside which was nice. Our first stop was the Cape Coast slave castle which was situated on some low beachside cliffs. The castle was a dungeon primarily for slaves ready to be sent across the Atlantic, but also was a defensive stronghold against pirates and such. It was originally built by the Swedish in the mid 1600s and was captured by the English later and utilized by them.
Throughout the tour I was filming for my documentary class (I decided to get some footage of the castle. I really didn’t like filming because while you record you only focus on what’s in the camera and not what’s really around you. I wanted to look around and enjoy the tour but instead I had to get footage for my class. This caused me to fall behind a little and one of the tour guides started a conversation with me. It turns out he has an ancestor who was a slave there. It was a man who was part of a pair of twins: he was very strong and lived a long time as a slave and his twin brother died. I told him about my film project and he insisted that I film him. I ended up getting a really good, in-depth interview with one of the tour-guides (this was actually my original intention for this trip, except I thought I was too ambitious to actually get an interview). This was in fact the same castle that Obama visited and our tour guide was the tour guide of Obama. Around the castle was a fishing area and my tour-guide friend (named Enoch) told me that one of their past presidents was actually a fisherman like the kids (there were kids sorting fish nets) that were on the beach working.
After this, we continued on to lunch which was at Coconut Grove Beach Resort. As we drove there, we saw a massive amount of people (a couple thousand) congregating along a small water channel that lead to the ocean. It turned out to be a fish market. The fisherman brought their catch here and the women smoked the fish (the smell was strong) over grates. This was probably one of the most amazing things I’ve seen so far. The Elmina Castle (our stop after lunch) overlooked this human sea. Lunch consisted of sandwiches with seafood meats and hot dog slices and fries. We also got fresh coconut juice and a warm cocoa drink (cocoa being their main export) with lunch. The hotel was located along a beach that looked like it had been moved from the Caribbean. Palm trees in the sand, straw huts, smooth sand, humid weather and blue water really fooled me into thinking I wasn’t in Ghana, Africa anymore. Also, the hotel had an overgrown golf course with white-heron-type birds scattered about it.
After lunch we went to the Elmina Castle which was built by the Portuguese in 1482. According to Wikipedia, it is the oldest European building in existence below the Sahara. The fort was seized by the Dutch and was used for the Atlantic slave trade (it was later taken by the English and used for the same purpose). We got a similar tour as the one at the Cape Coast castle. We saw the dungeons, cells which were tiny but ‘housed’ hundreds at a time in one cell. The tour guides were very passionate and continued to make the point that the castles serve as reminders of the dark past of colonialism in Africa and they want the castles to prevent something like this ever happening again.
After the castle (I left out many details because I wanted to get to tonight), we drove about 4 hours back to the ship and I had a late dinner. I was planning on taking it easy that night because I’d had little sleep the previous night. A lot of people knew the local friend Fred, however I couldn’t find anyone who was going that night to have dinner with him, so I showered and got ready for an early sleep. However, I got a knock on the door and it was one of the girls who I went with the previous night around town with the students. She said she wanted to go to Fred’s house and need someone to go with. I was the only one willing and I told here I’d go with her. We left late actually, around 9:00 and met Fred at the gas station. Before this we decided to get some gifts (which consisted of cookies and (believe it or not) Obama Biscuits) for the family as was customary.
He led us back towards the bar from the first night and then a few minutes further to his home. Along the way we ducked into a bar to say hello to his sister (Ophelia) who was a waiter. At the bar there was a guitarist, keyboardist, and old man who looked like a blues singer hanging out. As we walked back down the street, Fred pointed out women along the street with short skirts who were (you guessed it) prostitutes. I was surprised by their commonality along the road (it was only this street that I’d seen them). What was interesting to me was I noticed to prostitutes stop one of the local girls and buy water from her. This was interesting because on one had you have the “risky” women of the night and on the other you have an innocent girl wearing traditional clothes. Both are trying to make a living but in completely different ways.
Fred lives in Estates, which are fairly nice homes (relatively speaking) but not upper scale. The household is extremely quaint and welcoming. Fred is the youngest sibling and lives with an elder sister and his brother/sister twins as well as his mom (who is a seamstress that makes bags to sell). The brother works for a roofing company, the twin sister of him works at a bar (we visited her on the way), and the sister does a lot of house chores. Besides me and the girl (Ashley from NY), there were 2 other girls who Fred had met earlier and taken around town and to the beaches, just like he did with my friends’ group the first day. We sat and talked with his family in his living room/dining room (it wasn’t a very big house at all) while his eldest sister made dinner for me and Ashley. She made us what is called ‘Banku’, which is a ball of mashed corn meal that becomes doughy, and a stew with beef and crab (a whole small crab) with tomato sauce and okra. The way you eat it is with your hands: you take some banku with your fingers and dip it into the broth and eat it that way. It was pretty spicy but not bad. I had a plastic bag filled with water (equivalent to one U.S. water bottle- apparently, you can get 30 of these decent sized bags of water for 1 dollar) along with my meal. I had dinner on the ship before hand because I had no idea I was going out and I didn’t want to offend them by not eating it all, so I ate as much as I could. To eat the grab you crush the abdomen with your fingers (it’s a small crab) and suck out the meats inside. The way Fred did it (and I tried the same way just for the sake of culture) was he ate the crab whole, exoskeleton and all. It was very crunchy.
It was late and the four of us (including the other SAS girls) missed the last shuttle so we had to get a cab. Fred felt skeptical of the cabs too so he hailed one and told him where to go, what price, etc. and also took a picture of his license plate, etc. After stopping for gas, the driver headed back for Tema along the coastal route. We stopped at a police checkpoint and the policeman on duty (instead of waving us through as they usually do) stopped us. He talked to the driver in a different language and they began to argue. I heard the word license and when I saw the driver not reach for his license, I knew this was not good. The police-guard told the guy to get out of the car, leaving us clueless in the car at the checkpoint. I wasn’t too worried because if something happened to our driver, we could easily grab another taxi. As it so happened, the brother of the guard was there (he’s a detective, but he was off duty visiting his brother) and he came over and talked to us as if the driver-issue was not even occurring. The guard continued waving people through while the driver paced. I asked if we would need to hail another cab and he said we might because they were going to arrest out driver. After arguing with the guard, our driver looked through his ashtray which had money in it which led me to believe he might bribe the cop. As it turned out, I was right. The driver grabbed some money from the tray, very covertly slipped it to the cop and we were on our merry way. The driver said that cops don’t like cab drivers, especially when they drive white people/tourists around because they think they’ll take advantage of them. The driver was nice and gave us a good price so this may support otherwise. This was a fantastic night when I truly got to experience Ghanaian hospitality. The kindness of these people is overwhelming and makes you wonder why they do it. The question, I found out on my own, is not why they do it, but why we (US) don’t do it. Ghana is an extremely hospitable country, but not the only one. The tour guide back at the Cape Coast castle invited me to come back to Ghana and stay with him (he was getting married next year apparently). The lesson here is everyone back home needs to open up a little and be more flexible… or invite Japanese tourists into their home and serve them food and confuse them. (As usual, something’s probably been left out. I’m writing this a day late like the last post. And too tired to spell/grammar check.)