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Post–Jesus Stress Disorder
The religious hypocrisy of Ghana’s slave dungeons.
I am writing this from Ghana as I learn on the ground about a part of the traumatic history of how millions of Africans were raped, beaten, kidnapped, shipped to the Americas, and sold into slavery in places like the U.S., Colombia, Brazil, and Trinidad.
One place I visited in Ghana was Cape Coast Castle, used as a trading post for the slave trade.
The castle is where Africans were marched by slave traders onto ships.
Visiting the place of this human trafficking was gut-wrenching, but for the Black Americans touring the dungeons, it was like visiting a concentration camp.
Their faces held the pain I had not seen before.
The castle itself had dungeons where Africans were kept in horrible conditions for sometimes months until they were sent to be shipped off and then chained on cramped boats.
The castle is also home to a church built first by the Portuguese and then by the Dutch.
I stood in the church inside the castle where I imagined Europeans praying to Jesus.
