The first of our field trips to the various regions of Ghana took place on 3-4 September, when we traveled to Anomabu, Cape Coast, and Elmina on the Gulf of Guinea coast. Everyone was ready to depart at 7 as requested—except one student who overslept and delayed us an hour. He will be getting a 6 am call every time we have an early departure from now on. (Actually—from the perspective of another month of trips—the general pattern is that someone keeps 17 other people waiting for 30 to 60 minutes, but it’s a different person each time.)
Our first stop was at Anomabu, a small fishing village about 30 km west of the town of Cape Coast, reachable in less than two hours from Accra now that the road is finished. (It was in dreadful condition in 2004 and 2005—Chinese contractors were rebuilding the main highway and simply diverted the traffic onto rough dirt tracks along half its length.) The reason for the stop was to see an archeological project being directed by Kofi Agorsah, a Ghanaian teaching at Portland State University. True, neither of us had ever met the man. But he was warmly recommended by our mutual friend Marvin Kaiser, a dean at PSU, and we’d exchanged a number of emails and phone calls. “Stop in at Fort William on Saturday morning for half an hour and we will show you what the students are working on,” he said.
Fort William is one of the larger coastal forts in the Central Region, but when we last visited Anomabu it was boarded up. In its past, after the end of the slave trade, were periods of use as military base, storage depot, and prison, but it has stood empty for several decades after the prison was closed. We made a special stop at Anomabu in 2005 to photograph its amazing variety of posuban shrines, depots for the town’s military companies that have become giant public sculptures. There were plans afoot then to open the fort as a tourist site, and this happened in 2008. When we arrived, Kofi welcomed us warmly and turned us over to Philip, curator of the site, who gave us a fascinating and deeply disturbing hour-long tour. Although this is far smaller than the better-known forts at Cape Coast and Elmina (these two are often called “castles”), it was actually the busiest transit point for slaves. Those taken from nearby Kormantsin gained a reputation as the strongest and most robust of all the plantation slaves from the entire Guinea coast, and demand was always high.
Very little has been done to restore Fort William, in sharp contrast with the other two sites. We stood in a large room with two concrete counters. They were added when it was the prison kitchen, Philip explained, but originally it was a room where slaves underwent a physical and medical examination to assess their condition and market potential, while the officers looked on. He gave no sordid details, just left us to imagine the moral and spiritual state of a physician who would carry out such an outrageous affront to human dignity in order to arrive at an appropriate cash value for a man, woman, or child.
As at the other sites, we were taken into men’s and women’s dungeons, neither of them very large, and shown the “room of no return” from which a small exit door led to the loading dock for small rowboats that would carry slaves out to ships waiting at anchor. In one room was a surprising array of monochrome drawing and diagrams on the ceiling. Prisoners kept in this cell in the early 20th century had made these designs with the soot from candle flames, Philip told us, holding each other on their shoulders to reach the stone surface above. At the center was a graceful and serene woman’s face. This cell had reasonably good air and light through overhead openings.
Another cell, back in a dark corner of the fort, had only one small opening high overhead. This was where stubborn or rebellious male slaves were held, said Philip. Each day a small quantity of food, far less than a full ration, was tossed down on their heads from the high window, and the men had to claw at each other to get a share. There was no corresponding cell for women, but Philip described in sickening detail their exploitation as sexual partners by the fort’s governor and officers. The women selected for such abuse hoped desperately to become pregnant, he said, because it was a common practice to release female slaves who gave birth to mixed-race babies and set them up as officers’ concubines in the town.
This all took more than an hour, and it was all the more shocking because we were expecting nothing more than a quick briefing on the archeological dig. And that is indeed what followed. Kofi and an American colleague told us about the site where they have been digging for several years. It is in the oldest part of Kormantsie, where the British first settled along the coast in the early 18th century. They have found rich deposits of broken pottery, local and imported beads, clay pipes, and other artifacts, and one section that has no European objects is evidently the pre-contact Fante village.
All the artifacts they uncover are labeled and bagged and carried to Fort William, where a they are washed and brushed clean for further examination by a team of thirty students, mostly from Portland State, a few from other US institutions, and others from Cape Coast University and the University of Ghana. Real archeology, we were reminded, isn’t very much like what Indiana Jones does with a pickaxe and shovel: its most important tool is a toothbrush.
In Ghana for a month or six weeks, the American students are not taking formal classes but are learning a lot. The interaction between Americans and Ghanaians as they worked and chatted with our students was lively and interesting. We knew they were staying in the fort but couldn’t imagine where, til we walked up to the ramparts and saw a row of 15 bright orange and brown backpacking tents lined up there, behind the crenellated stone wall facing the sea. What a unique place to camp!
By now nearly two hours behind schedule, we skipped the castle tour at Cape Coast but stopped for lunch in adjacent restaurant overlooking the rocky coast, and then we continued to Elmina. There we had an excellent guide, Francis, who provided an informative but concise historical background on that incredible edifice, built by the Portuguese ten years before Columbus sailed off to the New World with stone they shipped from Europe, expanded many times since then. Recounting the terrible crimes committed by Portuguese, then Dutch, governors and slave merchants, Francis said repeatedly, “Our purpose is not to instill guilt but simply to remember, so that such crimes will not happen again.” He also talked candidly about the complicity of West African chiefs and their people in keeping the ships supplied with human cargo.
Because the Saturday of our trip would be the climax of the Oguase Fetu Afahye festival in Cape Coast, we were unable to find rooms at any of the hotels Calvin has used in the past. That turned out to be very fortunate: Samuel Abokyi found us accommodations at Brenu Beach Resort, about 20 km beyond Elmina, where we had taken the students for a swim and supper in 2005—but not overnight, since they had only some primitive huts that looked like heaven for mosquitoes and hell for people. Now there are several concrete block cabins with AC and hot water! The rates were high, but they let us put four students in each room. Unfortunately none of the rooms had four beds, as we had been led to believe. But we did scrounge up four mattresses that filled the floor of the guys’ room. The women cheerfully squeezed in next to each other in one big bed.
It had been a very hot and humid day—our short walk through Anomabu nearly knocked us out from heatstroke—and on arrival the students quickly donned swimsuits and headed for the beautiful, spotlessly clean, sandy beach. And into the ocean, which was raging furiously: large, powerful rollers came in one after another, six to eight feet from trough to crest, and pounded away at anything in their path, such as us. Some of the students went no farther than knee deep—and still got knocked down and pummeled by the water. The stronger swimmers (including a certified lifeguard) ventured farther and even tried riding the surf, which felt like diving into a washing machine on the spin cycle. I’ve never felt such powerful masses of water, turning me head over heels, spinning me around, shoving me every which way. While riding one wave I found my head inside a pocket of low air pressure, my cheeks puffing out as the wave pulled me forward and then threw me down. But some of the students soon discovered that if you swam through the breaking waves you could ride high on your back in the dense saltwater and just let the rolling swells lift you up and drop you down again. It was a strange sight to look out from the shore and see several students spread-eagled on a rising wall of water.
I had ordered dinner at Brenu Beach over a very noisy phone connection from Anomabu, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. It turned out to be a sumptuous feast, with two kinds of rice and fresh vegetables and “lobster” (small rock lobster tails) and calamari (a bit too heavily breaded) and a magnificent 10-kilo “cassava fish.” Twenty hungry college students and accompanying adults couldn’t consume more than half the delicious fish. “That was what the fisherman brought me today,” explained the proprietor. Cost of the feast: 15 cedis each, or $10.50, including beverages.
First stop Saturday morning was the famous canopy walk at Kakum National Park—an experience students talk about from year to year, so we can’t skip it. Susan and I were not very happy with the changes since 2005, especially in fees. Then it cost us about $40 for all the students, while the price has now shot up to nearly $200 for the same number of visitors. And we were hurried onto the path toward the forest walk by a guide, Doris, who combined our group with nearly 30 other visitors. When we asked whether she could divide the group she told us no, there were several hundred schoolchildren right behind us and our group of 50 was actually not very large. She didn’t tell us anything about the forest ecosystem, either, but gave only a brief introduction to the construction of the walkway. A huge contrast with 2004 and 2005 when we had a wonderfully well-informed naturalist as a guide—a man who had grown up in the forest nearby and recalled seeing elephants as he walked to school—and were the only group on the site for our first hour. This year the distance—and the magnetic lure of the beach after breakfast—made an early arrival impossible.
All the same, the walkway is a very interesting way to get a view of the many levels of the rainforest. There are five: the undergrowth of herbaceous plants, a thicker layer of shrubs, and three layers of canopy: spreading trees reaching up to about 50 feet, the closed canopy of taller trees at about 120 feet, and the isolated older emergent trees to which the walkways are anchored, some of them 200 feet tall. Visitors traverse seven suspended walkways, securely supported by cables with rope nets along the sides. It is very safe (no one has ever fallen) but rather terrifying, at least the first time. The others in our group graciously let the Calvin group proceed first, and the students mostly enjoyed it immensely, even the one who nearly opted out because of her fear of heights. Her smile looked a bit forced, but she made it to the end.
Kakum has an enormous wealth of wildlife, but we didn’t see any. The forest elephants live far in the northern part of the park, and the antelope and other game stay well hidden. We did hear dozens of different varieties of birds, but (unlike our 2004 and 2005 guide) Doris never mentioned any of them and wasn’t very responsive to questions. But she did give an interesting account of the medicinal uses of various trees (bark, wood, leaves, roots, fruits and seeds) on a forest walk that she conducted after we had finished our aerial adventures. It was amazing to walk past the gigantic trunks and root systems of tall trees whose tops we had just visited—but could not see because of the density of the lower layers. We had decided not to pay the stiff added fee for this, but Dorcas was more than ready to offer the add-on in exchange for a lower fee (we bargained back and forth a while and ended up at about half the ticket price) which went directly into her pocket.
This gave us a snapshot of what’s right and what’s wrong with Ghana’s tourism development efforts. The park is well managed, with few poaching problems and well-maintained paths, and there was not a bit of litter along the trail. Guides are mostly helpful and knowledgeable (we were unlucky this time). But fees keep going higher and higher (25 percent more this year than just last year) and yet there is nothing remotely approaching the experiences that draw crowds to the game parks of East and South Africa. You really can’t expect tourists to pay higher and higher fees to visit game parks in which there is no game to be seen.
But we didn’t complain about this to the students. They had a grand time.
From Kakum we went to a quaint lodge out in the countryside for lunch, Hans Cottage, where crocodiles swim in the pond and great crowds of weaverbirds chatter as they tend to their young in hanging nests in the trees. From experience we knew that service there can be extremely slow, so we had preordered an assortment of meals and were served promptly.
Then we returned to Cape Coast, hoping to find a good spot to park the bus and observe the festival procession—the most famous in Ghana. There are large numbers of chiefs and queen mothers carried overhead in palanquins and royal chairs, praise dancers and asafo companies waving their flags, drummers and brass bands, with masked figures and clowns and stiltwalkers all added to the mix. Unfortunately neither our graduate student guide nor our driver knew the procession route or asked anyone local where to drive and where to park. We spent an hour in stalled traffic and finally parked along a busy road, hoping to walk to the procession route.
But we found ourselves far at the back of the parade with an assortment of blaring sound trucks and crowds of dancers, few of them sober. We set out to make our way forward toward the chiefs, our graduate student leading the way. The crush of humanity around us was so intense that we were separated almost at once, and one student was challenged by a belligerent young men who had obviously had too much to drink. Susan took himm firmly by the hand and told him to stop bothering her boy.
I was at the back of our group, Samuel at the front, but I managed to communicate to all but the first few that we should wriggle our way out of the dancing human mass and move through back alleys for a kilometer or so. We emerged at a wider point in the street where we could watch the last few chiefs and warrior companies coming up a gradual rise—with some room to breathe. It was a fascinating spectacle, with far more people than at any other festival we have seen. The atmosphere was friendly and celebrative, though the muskets that were fired off at close range from time to time made us jump.
Eventually we followed the chiefs and their retinues toward the durbar ground, where each of the warrior companies would parade its colors and then take its place to listen to speeches by local chiefs, regional administrators, and the president of Ghana, John Atta Mills. But as we got closer the crowd became even more dense—and less friendly. Before long it was clear we could not hope to enter the parade grounds, so we crossed to a less crowded side street and headed back to the bus. Unfortunately, in that last few minutes of utter chaos, two students were the victims of pickpockets, one losing a camera and the other a mobile phone. A third student felt a hand reaching into his pocket and slapped it away, wondering who would want to steal its contents: a wad of toilet paper.
The 2009 Calvin group observed the Fetu Afahye festival and enjoyed it greatly, but they were given designated seats along the route by the proprietor of their hotel. We will not recommend returning in 2011, unless something can be worked out ahead of time to avoid trying to move with the crowd. It’s just too intense, and there are too many thieves in the mix. The students returned to their hostel to learn that several other foreign student groups had also been at the festival and none had returned without at least one person being robbed. For an understanding of festivals and why they remain such an important part of Ghanaian life, we get a great deal more insight from participating in the Odwira festival in Akropong.
We actually departed from Cape Coast nearly half an hour ahead of schedule—a first for this trip!—but lost all the time we gained in extremely heavy traffic coming into Accra. It had been a intense two days, and the students had lots to talk over on Monday when we spent a class period reviewing what we had seen and learned.
