Was I having another auditory hallucination? I thought I had heard voices earlier that afternoon in the dank cave beneath the sanctuary of the slave castle in town. Here they were again as I sat on the veranda of my hotel room, overlooking the rugged West African coast under the moonlight. United in stunned silence with two of my travel companions, the voices seemed to echo from the giant waves as they rose and crashed against the rocks. The voices grew faint as the tide rolled away only to rise and roll again. Perhaps this was a trauma response. Maybe it was that transgenerational trauma. Something beyond my marrow had been triggered.
My journalistic lenses dissolved as I stood in the slave dungeon for women at Elmina Castle The tour shook me more than I anticipated. Built in 1482 by the Portuguese, it was one of the first European slave-trading posts built in sub-Saharan Africa. The next day, we would head for Cape Coast Castle, the largest of the commercial forts built along the coast of West Africa during the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
From Community Member to Dehumanized Capital
It is estimated that more than 12 million Africans were kidnapped between the 15th and 16th centuries and transported on ships to the European colonies in the Caribbean and Americas. Often human spoils of tribal wars, men, women, and children were taken from villages from different regions and marched to the coast.
As a sidebar, it's well worth noting the practice of slavery and servitude within African communities bore little resemblance to the slavery into which Africans were traded with Europeans. Africans often adopted slaves into their community, where they could earn their freedom, elevate their status, and intermarry. If owning land as a capital asset carried a foreign ring, imagine how far-fetched dehumanizing people into property sounded. Slave cultures have varied throughout human history. Few, if any, have rivaled chattel slavery in its systemic avarice, brutality, and longevity.
Prior to Emancipation in 1865, enslaved people of African descent represented one of the largest capital assets in the United States. In other words, the 13th Amendment ostensibly returned ownership of black people's bodies to themselves. Their total value is estimated at as much as approximaely $4 billion, according to some economists. That's trillions in today's dollars. The federal government, and some insurance companies, compensated slaveholders for their loss. Slaves nor their descendants received compensation packages.
Give Me Ears to Hear
The dungeons on the slave coast offered a foretaste of the horrors that awaited captives once they boarded the slave ships through the Middle Passage, and ultimately a live of foreced labor on the plantations in the Americas and Caribbean. The system of chattel slavery lasted for 400 years. Listening to the African guide narrate the saga while standing in the cave where women were piled on top of one another like slabs of bacon chilled me to the bone. In an effort to steady myself, I placed my hand on the cave wall. As I traced the grooves of its surface with my fingertips, I heard the voices.
It was as if the rocks, like a black vinyl record, had recorded the sound of every whisper, groan, and prayer ever released inside the dungeon. The rocks absorbed the cries that fell on the deaf ears of the slave merchants, bureaucrats, and other government officials who ran the operation. Their ears were closed and hearts hardened even while practicing their religion in the sanctuary above the slave pit.
As I exited the dark cave into the sunlight, the expression on my face must have betrayed my effort to hold it together. Or perhaps my tear drenched shirt signaled the intensity of my experience. I'm not sure why. But a fellow American from another group approached me and introduced himself as a minister. He said, "You heard them, too, didn't you? The voices." I nodded. "I've heard them. Not everyone does, you know."
The Rocks Still Cry Out
It has been nearly two decades since those voices first haunted me. They have served to inspire and encourage me to always remember and never forget despite renewed efforts to ban, erase, and mute so-called black voices and stories.
They remind me that what may be ignored by man is always heard by God. When I drift, they guide me back to the shore, where the maker of heaven and earth hears the cries of the oppressed (Psalm 146).
The discipline of remembering the stories the past invites fresh opportunties to see the liberating power of faith in the present. It builds a bridge between our personal testimonies of overcoming to our ancestral stories of survival, faith, and hope against all odds.
Remembering has the power to pull us out of our individual stories and plunge us into God's story of hope, love, and redemption. As one African proverb tells us: The truth may make your eyes red, but it won't kill you. With God, the news is even better than that because the truth of God's spirit gives life (John 6:63).
As Jesus neared the end of his ministry, he cautioned the religious leaders of his day who were trying to silence the voices of those praising and crying out to God. Using figurative language, he warned, "If they remain silent, the stones will cry out." (Luke 19:40)
In a time marked by book bans, white religious nationalism, racist propaganda, and assaults on marginalized and immigrant communities, it is more crucial than ever to remember the past and learn from it to create a more just and equitible future. The stones bear witness to stories of human suffering and survival. They testify to the resilience of the human spirit and the restorative and liberating power of God's grace and redemption.
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