On Friday, we visited the Cape Coast fort where enslaved Africans were held in dungeons for weeks or months before the miserable journey across the Atlantic. Built in the 1650s, as many as 1500 people were held in the dungeons at any given time. Our group was led through the fort by a guide who delivered a passionate and detailed history of the insidious business conducted at Cape Coast until 1807.
After the tour, the African diaspora members of our cohort participated in a ceremony to honor the souls that passed through Cape Coast. The rest of us found a space in the fort to reflect on a location using senses, voice, connectivity, and criticality. This post will try to share my meditation.
I chose the female dungeon cell, the last room before the Door of No Return.
I sat for a moment and then began to record what my senses were experiencing.
First was smell. A slightly musky odor was present. Then I imagined the odor of 150 women held for weeks or months with no bathing, forced to menstruate, urinate, and defecate in the 30 foot by 15 foot cell where a small trench was surely ineffective in draining the waste. The women were likely standing, or leaning against the wall, or perhaps lying on the floor among this awful mixture.
Second was sound. I heard the pounding surf and the locals talking animatedly beyond the Door of No Return. I imagined the sound of the women moaning, crying, and screaming in anguish, sadness, fear, and hopelessness. The surf was not a soothing sound but a soundtrack of terror.
Thirdly, I considered what I was seeing. An electric light illuminated the small cell. The uneven stone floor with the trench. The floor, we learned, was still caked in the packed human waste from the women imprisoned here. There are two small windows high up on the wall letting in faint day light. Wreaths and flowers are propped in the corners, left in tribute to the women who suffered here. I
imagined no light except from the two small windows. I tried to imagine hundreds of women packed in, some standing, some unable to stand, eyes flashing in fear and anger or registering dull disbelief and shock.
The last sense I experienced was touch. Rough stone walls, floors, and ceiling. The floor slippery under shod foot. I was sitting on the sill of an arched window opening on an internal hallway. I wondered about the purpose of the window and where there was a door or bars to keep the women inside. I tried to imagine the feel of the stone floor with bare feet or a naked body, the flow of waste underfoot.
My imagination of the experience of the women waiting in the dungeons is limited to what I have read or learned from our tour guide. Their trauma is unfathomable. The stories we heard were dreadful: rape, torture for resisting rape, torture for attempting suicide, murder for disobedience and rebellion to set an example. While I used my senses to imagine this insidious history, I was struck by the presence of the women as I sat in their torture chamber.
Why visit a dungeon like Cape Coast? Perhaps to be fortified in the drive to teach about the horrors and realities of chattel slavery practiced in the Americas. To tell the story to family, friends, and students of how chattel slavery was justified by systemic racism. That human beings were tortured and murdered while massive wealth was accumulated by Europeans in their colonies and then the United States. To remember that we all need to be determined teachers who continue to teach about chattel slavery, even as such teachings are outlawed.
By Julie Wyman, Teacher, Glenn Urquart School, Beverly, Massachusetts