Ideas - The complex legacy of the first European 'slave castle'

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

Elmina is a place in Ghana that poet Sarpong Osei Asamoah describes as a "two-sided wonder." A bustling, lively fishing town in contrast to the painful history of a 400 year old 'slave castle' — a UNESCO World Heritage site. Historically, it's considered 'ground zero' for global economic and racial injustice. This podcast takes you on a tour inside the dark and brutal past of the Elmina castle and through the vibrant town that's full of life.Guests in this episode:Philip Amoa-Mensah is an Elmina tour guide with more than 20 years of experience.Ato Quayson is chair of the department of African and African American studies and professor of English at Stanford University. He is the author of Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism.Bayo Holsey is a professor of African American studies at Emory University. She is the author of Roots of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana.Sarpong Osei Asamoah is a Ghanaian poet. His poetry includes At Elmina Castle, I Bleed.

What's the connection between being an astronaut and being a novelist? I hadn't really thought about it until I talked to the astronaut-turned-writer Chris Hadfield about his new thriller, Final Orbit. Every week on the podcast bookends, I sit down with today's best authors for candid conversations about their writing, inspirations, and lives. You'll get to see the world through the eyes of your favorite writers, and they might even take you to outer space, too. Bookends with Matea Roach is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyat. The street sounds of Elmina, a bustling fishing village on the Atlantic shores of Ghana.

This is the fish market of Elimina. Over here, they get... All kinds of fish like Grupa. So, resniper, squirt, octopus, shrimps, herrings, and all kinds of fish. They get it over here. In the harbor, countless long wooden fishing boats. How many boats? It's uncountable.

It looks like 500. 500 boats. All over there. Wow. The brightly painted boats are called canoes by locals. Each one decorated with foreign flags waving in the breeze. You could see there are flags on the canoons. Those flags have to identify that this is my canoe.

Some of the oneness of the canoe have with those countries before. Some have not, but a friend, a relative, who is staying, over there, helping it financially in doing it. And the last one, the football team that they support is the flight that they put on the air. So you can see Chelsea.

You see Barcelona? Yeah, yeah, that's it. Barcelona. It's Chelsea. Yeah. When you go further, you can see Spanish flag over there.

Yeah. You see British flag? Have you seen it? Yes. Yeah. So it's a very unique place to be. It's a Tuesday, the one day of the week where fishing is not permitted, out of tradition and respect for the goddess of the sea.

You know, in Ghana, on Tuesday, across the coastal area, we don't go for fishing on Tuesday. From the morning to 4 p.m., you are not allowed to go to fishing. Why? Because it is believed that the goddess of the sea, which is on Tuesday. No Ghanaian will go and mess around on the sea on a Tuesday. You just don't do it.

So that's where the resilience comes from, that despite the centuries of violence against the belief system, aspects of the belief system have still persisted. This is the three fifth day of Eliminia. Nana Benya Shrine. It's the one, the lagoon. You know, we have.

the capital G, that the supreme being, you have the small G. The persistence of honoring the god of the lagoon goes back centuries before European contact. Back to a time before millions of Africans were forced onto ships and into slavery. Turn away from the vibrancy of the harbor and now look up towards a mostly desolate embankment looming on the ocean's edge.

You know, as soon as you arrive in Elmina, you see the slave castle. It's this towering buildings much larger than anything else in the town. And so it's quite striking. It's this large white edifice that sort of stands out against the smaller buildings and against the sea. It appeared to me as quite an ominous site. I would say. Think of it in terms of a medieval castle. That is where the architecture was inspired from.

Think of it also as being larger than any building around the township. It is quite a contrast. Right outside the castle, you have this bustling community, you know, that stands apart from this violent history that the slave castle. For me, Elmina represents a colonial relic, a monument, an origin, a wound that is being nursed slowly but surely. As the site of the first so-called slave castle, built on Africa's gold coast by Europeans, Elmina can be considered ground zero for the transatlantic. slave trade, and the echoes of its legacy are still very much alive today. The history of the slave trade is just central for any understanding of our contemporary world.

It is that kind of starting point, that crucial historical node for thinking about the development of a global economy of global capitalism and very much tied within that of a notion of race and racism. And so we have to understand the slave trade in order to understand any of those things. Elmina is a paradox, the castle with its dark and brutal past, and the town. It's colorful and vibrant present. That clash can seem irreconcilable, leaving a simple but insistent question. What does Elmina itself represent?

It represents transcendence. So Elmina is home, it's kin. It's a world of peculiar two-sided wonder, if you like. Two-sided wonder, what do you mean? When I say two-sided wonder, I mean that Elmina as a coastal town was a welcoming destination

and it was also a gruesome departure. So that juxtaposition between the welcome and the departure makes it, you know, that double-sided paradigm to live in, to try and grapple with. As part of our series on significant ports around the world, Ideas producer Nikola Luxchich brings us into the two-sided wonder, that is El Mena. Good morning. Philip Almoa Mensa is a tour guide.

And do you know everybody here? Everyone seems to know you, or is everyone just being friendly? Yeah, yes, that's great. I've been doing the walk into it for a very long time, so they know me. I don't know me here. For the last 20 years, he's been taking tourists on walks

through the town, the harbor, and, of course, the infamous slave castle. Where we are standing now was the old Elmina village. Elmina is not the name of the town. It's a borrowed Portuguese word, al-Mina, meaning the mind. So our people at that time couldn't pronounce it properly, and it was corralled into today's word, El-Mina,

and that invariably became the name of the town. But we had a name before they came. This place was called Anormansan, and Anomansan simply means in-exhaustible water. Inexhaustible water. and the lagoon a natural harbor. Rewind the clock about 600 years. There are only 2 to 300 people living in the settlement here,

fishing, trading in spices. And there was gold, lots of it. That gold is what first attracted a Portuguese explorer who arrived on its shores in 1471. His name was Fennau Gomez. Now Fennau Gomez came into progress. prominence in the 1460s, specifically in 1469, he received a charter from King Alfonso the 5th. And King Alfonso the 5th granted him a charter to control all trade on the Gulf of Guinea.

The Gulf of Guinea is today's West Africa. So in the history books, they call it the Gulf of Guinea. Today it's West Africa. In 1471, Fernau Gomez lands in Elmina, and he discovers, much to his surprise, a booming gold trade. Now, the gold trade was especially significant because it was alluvial gold. Alluvial gold simply means that it was washed over the river banks. So it wasn't a mined gold, which we typically find now. But it was just, the gold would wash on the surface. And he was done to find that even little kids had gold on their footwear.

It was all over the place. So he thought he had chanced upon El Dorado. My name is Atu Kuisin, and I am Professor of English and Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. Professor Kwayson is originally from Ghana, and he's one of African-American Studies. Africa's most notable literary critics. He's interested in points of transition and the relationship between architecture and its social impact. Every year, he brings students to Elmina.

It was the first castle built on the old Gold Coast. So Elmina is a prototypical example that we can explore, examine, to understand the consequence of any of the castles that followed after it. At first, the Portuguese appeared to be relatively cooperative trading partners, sending gold and spices back to Portugal. But about a decade after first contact, the Portuguese decided to build a full-scale European castle on its shores.

It must have been really jarring. Think of it in contrasting terms. It did not resemble any of the existing. architecture. The existing architecture will have been small huts with grass-touched roofs. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that the fabric of the castle was all imported from Portugal. That is to say, the king, King Yao II, in 1482, when he was desirous of building it, he shipped every component of the castle from Lisbon. So these are stones, though?

These are heavy. The wood, the stones, everything, metal, the locks on the doors and everything. He shipped them out to El Nina on 10, they call them caravals. Caravals are cargo transporting ships of the period. And then two ships along, and this is really important, along with 100 Portuguese artisans plus 500 armed men. This is really important to note the number. So imagine two to 300 people in this settlement,

and then suddenly this building emerges on the shore. And not only that, it now brings in almost twice the number of people that lived there before, but this time armed. So white folk, men, all of them are men, armed. The consequence of this was a shock, a shock. And not only that there was resistance to the initial building of the castle, which led to mayhem.

You know, so they were running battles between the locals who were being displaced. Because when they were given their land close to the shore, there were people living around there, but they wanted to dispose of them so they could take more of the land. And they were running battles, some Portuguese soldiers. just died, and they just set fire. Basically, they adopted a scorched earth policy, and they scorched the place. So there was resistance from the inception.

All attempts at resistance failed. The locals were outnumbered and outgunned. The Portuguese went ahead and built the castle and added a moat and cannons. Some locals were hired as cooks and artisans, in effect, day laborers who'd enter the castle, work, then leave. But what they left with was stories of the new hierarchies, racial hierarchies, that were made evident to them inside the castle, in the sense of how they were given orders,

how they were treated as heathens. Because the other thing that the Portuguese wanted to instill was Christianity, so they were trying to get people to convert and so on. So the workers in the, who went to the castle, the Elmina, also came out with stories of humiliation, the disavowal of their habits and practices. In other ways, the castle was also the site of new views of their subjugation and oppression. So the castle was not just a physical injury onto the spatial environment, but it was also instituting a new epistemic order of social and racial relations. That new epistemic order basically meant the Portuguese superimposing their worldview onto the belief systems that the people in Elmina had for centuries defined themselves by.

They had their own pantheon of gods, you know, starting with Niami or Niankopong, as they call, the name is called. But the Onyanko-Pon-Onyami had subsidiary deities, which were all connected to nature. So forest, god, sea. The sea was really important, obviously. The sea god, the god of rocks and so on. Now, people would describe this as a form of animism, but I think it's a little bit more complicated than animism because the idea is that human life is closely connected to nature and they say volatile proximity between the natural world and the human world. So the human world requires a certain acknowledgement of recognition of nature, but also that the boundary can always be breached. And that's how their world system and their belief system was constructed.

Suddenly they see this monstrous edifice, which clearly is unnatural in every possible regard. They've also brought the worship of a new God that they tell us is meritocratic, because that's what Christianity tries to preach. You were all one before God. It's a meritocratic religion, and yet the practitioners of the religion also demonstrate signs of racial, hierarchy. So on the one hand, the religion is meritocratic. Everyone is equal before God. But on the other hand, the practitioners of it disavow other people's cultures and their humanity. So how do we marry that they are telling us that, the fact that they are telling us that Jesus Christi is the

son of God and he loves everyone and everyone is equal with the fact that they disdain us, They cohabit with our women without any regard for our cultural norms. It didn't take long, just a few decades, for the Portuguese to shift from trading in material goods to trading in humans. Men, women, and children were captured far from shore, bound and brought to the castle where they were imprisoned. We are at Elimina Dengenians, built by the Portuguese in 1482.

When the attention shifted from gold and others to a human trait, the same warehouses were converted into dungeons where the Africans were kept. And in total, the castle is talking of a minimum of 1,000 Africans at the time, 400 women, 600 men. The cactus had to walk as far as Cameroon, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Mali, Nijer, Bakina Faso, the northern part of Ghana, there's a place called Salagas Lake Market. And from there, they came to Sandima, Salavugu, to the southern part of Ghana.

And over here, they were imprisoned for two to three months before they were shed the way. In the Dengen's language barrier was a problem. And communicable diseases was at this high speak. What happens on the institution of slavery for the Elmenans, they now see other black people. And this itself must have been a shock to start with. Other people who look like them, they are no white, they are black, are shepherded in chains into the castle. There were many instances of resistance. against slavery in both at Elmina and Kipkos and other places.

So it was offensive. But what then happens is that for the workers inside the castle, the Elmina workers inside the castle, they will also have seen the enslaved in the various dungeons in the castle praying in different tongues to different gods. deities and gods, obviously, we're not hearing them, otherwise they will not be shackled and thrown on these ships. What does it mean to cry to a God who does not seem to answer? What does it mean in the scheme of our belief system that now men and women who look like us

are wailing and crying? visualize the scene. The people who were brought in chains, they were emaciated in many instances, there were sores on their bodies from their shackles, they were extremely hungry, and many of them had never set ice on the sea before. This monstrosity called the ocean. The ocean hitting the shore. They were shocked and scared. They were crying and wailing. So the Elmenans, would have borne witness to this. What does it mean that these white folk in the castle who have shown us very clearly

that they completely disregard our lifeways and even threaten us with violence for trading with another entity? What does it mean for them to absorb these black populations wailing into the belly of this whale, this castle. The largest female's dungeon 150 of the women were

sleeping on the floor. They had to walk barefooted from their various countries to this place and some very, very weak and many died. And when they died, they were not buried. They were removed and thrown into the ocean for the first of the feudal.

They gave them something more to eat just to keep them alive. Some act, some refuse to eat, they prefer. to die. And the stones we're walking on are very dark. Yeah, this is a bit of

stones. That's where they were sleeping on it. Yeah. They defecated, they vomited they did everything on the floor. It's I don't really have the words. It's harrowing even now to recall those dark, stained walls

we pass by and the ground we were walking on. with its dark buildup that was found by forensic tests to contain centuries of human matter, blood, skin, feces. In the dungeons, I could almost feel as though the walls through them, through their inscriptions,

their blood and sweat on these walls were speaking to be spoken for. My name is Sapan Osay Asamoa. I'm a Ghanaian poet and educator. I'm the author of Yanom, a poetry chapbook on post-colonial pandictory. Sarpong's visits to Elmina Castle have profoundly shaped his work as a poet. He was permitted to walk through the castle barefoot. I was given the privilege of doing that, which I'm told us rare.

In my culture of the Voto region and the action people, one of the greatest signs of respect is to take your shoes off, which means that you had become one with the earth, the soil. Homage, reverence, deference, to had lowered yourself before which I had lowered yourself before which I was. ever tightened you were in front of. So for me, to enter a place of so much power and presence, it wouldn't have felt respectful to the ghosts I had come to see to walk among them, insulating myself from the floor and the ground. on which they stepped. It was a sign of respect.

It was my own way of joining them in that act. My best lesson was in the castle. Because the silence spoke so much to me than any other words could have ever done. The silence it was a rumbling silence. It was a vibration silence. You could feel it and not hear it.

Considering that the Almena Castle is built upon rocks that are in between the lagoon and the Atlantic, I like to think it received language, vibration, right? which is where language begins from all of the creatures that populate this water body, including all their ancestors, their ghosts. So it was a vibrational one. It was not deafening. It was not absolute.

You could feel the silence. You just couldn't hear it. The dungeons of Elmina Castle would hold upwards of 1,000 people at a time. They'd be held for two to three months crammed in windowless cells together. Those who survived in these holding cells would then be crammed once more onto ships before heading across the Atlantic. This is ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed?

In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau. Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

After the Dutch took control of the Elmina Castle in 1637, the scale and pace of the slave trade escalated across West Africa. While records aren't complete, it's estimated that 13 million Africans were forced into slavery before the transatlantic slave trade was largely abolished, in the first half of the 19th century. The Elmina Castle in Ghana is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Museum. It is just one of the roughly 40 castles and forts built along the west coast of Africa

and used to hold enslaved Africans. In the courtyard of the Almena Castle grounds stands the church. The Dutch church says something out there from the Bible. And in the church, there's an inscription. Zion is the temple of the Lord. The Lord lives here forever. Zion is the temple of the Lord. The Lord lives here forever.

The walls of the dungeons of Omena Castle. I mean, symbolically, ironically built just beneath the beautiful walled cortices of dungeon police and the church. of the castle was defaced and you can take that as a metaphor for the treatment of the inmates, if you like, of the people, of the slaves that were brought there, the defacing of the walls. They're defacing not just the deface but to live legacy, to leave inscription, to live to live some kind of

recollection, reminder, a record for us who would come after them to know that even writing, even inscription, was defiance,

was art, and was away, a channel for us to understand them for us to feel them because in feeling the grooves in these walls

in their desperate attempts to leave some kind of record you can feel them because they left this there for reading they left this there so we can feel all of the blood

all of the suit you know, the space there, I've never been so claustrophobic. For me, all of that made Elmina, the Elmina Castle Dungeons, more a tomb than a holding cell. Okay, let me go straight to the most profound location in the entire castle. and that is the door of no return. We've seen the door of no return. And so this is where... The men will go through from this point,

the women join from the other side, to the door of no return. So we're going to see the door of no return. Each of the European castles along the coastline would have had a door of no return, through which each individual would be forced to pass before being packed into ships. The castle in Elmina is among the few that remains intact, still in its original form.

Oh gosh. You have a flashlight in your form? I do have a flashlight. It just makes me feel a bit queasy looking into this. This, it was dark, as I see it from that time to now. Okay. So in order to get through, you have to crouch your head into this narrow. They always make sure that they become weak,

for them to be controlled. Wow, even with a flashlight, you can barely see anything. Okay, and now another passage where you have to completely crouch, probably about the height of my waist, but crouch down. Okay, thank you. The door room deck, this is where they made the passage of ships. Before the sea was touching the castle, but it has receded. So when the ships came, it's malleable.

was brought here to convey them to the Bexias before they were taken away. Taking to Brazil, Ghana, Sri, Nam, Liverpool, the Caribbean and America. The most poignant thing about this door is that if you're an African-American, where the Asporic black person and you stand before that door, you know that one of your ancestors made it through and lived. And many people break down when they see it. actually of all races, both black and white, but African Americans having seen it, or Africans of the diaspora, Caribbean and so on, Jamaicans and Barbadians and so on, if you are a black descendant

and you stand before that door, you know that one of your ancestors passed through and lived. The story is told that of every 12 slaves that made it from from the hinterland, sometimes up north, way up in northern Ghana to the south, and then to the new world, at least nine died. Of every 12, nine died. So if you stand before that door and you are a black heritage person,

one of your ancestors, not only did they pass through that door, but they lived. That is such a poignant, and as I said, the poignant seal Elmina do of no return. I've seen people react like they throw up. They have a visceral. The reaction is so visceral.

They break down in tears. Even me. I've been there many times, but there's no time that I stand before that door. And I don't shudder in horror at what happened. It was very important to me personally to visit Elmina. It's very difficult. it's a very moving experience to be there. It's something that it takes a while to recover afterwards, frankly.

Yeah, it takes quite a while to process. My name is Bio Hulsey. I'm an associate professor of African American Studies and anthropology at Emory University. I think I've always been drawn to the history of the slave trade. I've had this desire to understand it. And I think in the process to understand my own family's history, to understand my own identity as an African American.

And so visiting these sites was a way to really make that history palpable. For me, I could, you know, attempt to imagine my ancestors in this space or in a similar space, imprisoned, tortured, hungry, separated from family, all of the horrors that are associated with that experience, to kind of imagine that, imagine this moment before the middle passage, before this forced migration to the Americas, the centuries of enslavement that followed. It's a very, very painful history to recall, but also as a descendant of enslaved people,

I also always think about this history in terms of the fact that my ancestors survived it. right, and that I am the product of their survival. And so for me, it's a history to always honor, to honor their suffering and their survival because it is the reason why I'm here today. Professor Bioholesi first came to Elmina in 2001 as part of her PhD research as an anthropologist.

She was struck by the juxtaposition of the castle and its unspeakable cruelties, and the vibrancy of life not far from its walls. It is quite a contrast because right outside the castle, you have this bustling community. You have fishermen who are constantly coming in and out of the lagoon, and they're brightly colored fishing boats, and they're mending nets and so forth.

You have market women who are selling goods. You have people walking through the thoroughfare. So there's a great deal of activity going on that stands apart from this violent history that the slave castle represents. And that's precisely what I was interested in exploring, in fact, is thinking about the contemporary community within Elmina and how they understand this history, given that They are living kind of in the shadow of this slave castle, but of course it's not determining every aspect of their lives. Is it something that's just ignored or tolerated? How would you describe that relationship? Well, when I first began my research in Almena and I was asking people about, about the history of the slave trade, asking what they knew about it, what they had learned about it.

So for many people, especially at this time, many people were not interested in publicly discussing the slave trade. They may have known various things about that history, but it wasn't considered appropriate to have public discourse about it. At the same time, I also discovered that for a lot of young people, kind of teenagers and young adults, they were increasingly interested in this history. They were kind of tied into more global black discourses about the slave trade that has used it as a means to critique the racialized global economy that we exist in today. So I discovered this sort of dichotomy between how older generations were approaching the history and how the younger generation was thinking about it. So they were thinking about this history, which is really at the root of the emergence of capitalism and points to the integral nature of race to global capitalism.

that was allowing them to connect that to their current day situation and speak about contemporary forms of global racism. Well, it is in some ways really ground zero for global economic and racial injustice. Absolutely, yeah. I think the slave trade is right at the core. It's the sort of starting point of those kinds of inequalities that we live with today. On the streets of Elmina today, there are other visible reminders of the colonial imprint. This whole street is called Liverpool Street.

Liverpool Street? Yeah. Why Liverpool? The British had an influence here? Yeah. So when you go to Cape Cui, you have the London Bridge. Okay. The bridge is where in Cape Coast and slave in Africa and to Africa and to live in Africa and to

So that's small brick. They call the London Bridge. And then we have the Liverpool Street. So this is the Liverpool Street. And not far off Liverpool Street are the crumbling brick remnants of European homes dating back centuries. When the Europeans came, after being over here for a while, they never brought here a woman. So they were sexually abused with the women in the dungeon. and some of them, you might call it decent ones,

they went to town to the older than a village. God married to the woman. They both houses, known as stone houses. They stay with their wives. They had children and they gave their name to their children. So as we work within town, I will show you one of the typical European building. You know, the Dutch protein, yellowish-bend bricks,

and the British protein, reddish-bend bricks. So I'll show you a typical house. That is not in the gushab at the moment, but it's pure European border in town. So they would be 400 years old? More than that. 500? Yeah, yeah.

Liverpool Street is still called Liverpool Street. The old abandoned. Dutch houses are still standing, even in their crumbled form. The fishing boats lining the harbor are decorated with flags of European countries and football or soccer teams. Looking at the mashup of past and present, it's hard to fully grasp the complexity that is Almena. It is important to understand Elmina as a site today that is a marginalized town within a

marginalized nation within the global economy. And so there are these levels of exclusion that people who live there are grappling with, people who, many of whom do not have a lot of economic resources, do not have a lot of opportunities, people for whom travel to other countries is extremely difficult. I'm often out of reach. And so there's this sense of sort of stuckness of exclusion that people are living with. And in that context, recalling a past in which their town was this central site of global trade, where the Dutch decided to set up their headquarters,

is a source of a kind of pride, right? It's a way of remembering a time in which their town was central to the global economy. And I think also recalling that history is in fact a way to make a claim on a future of greater inclusion in the global economy. And that's what I think is really important to understand that I feel like that that's the claim that people were making. And it wasn't a claim about the slave trade not being important or anything of that nature. But it was a different sort of understanding of this history. But it so happened that often what occurred in the process was the silencing of the history of the slave trade. because of course that was what the Dutch were engaged in while they were headquartered in Almena.

So there's this very strange relationship to that history that emerged in Almena. Yeah, that's interesting. And I'm quoting from your work where you say that silence is a strategy that groups can employ in order to negotiate oppressive, conditions. Can you elaborate on silence as a strategy and how you see it manifest there? Yes, I think silence is a strategy to negotiate their position in the global economy. So thinking again about, for instance, the kinds of stigmatizing narratives that European colonial history, historians constructed discussing African participation in the slave trade by silencing those histories, by kind of sequestering them from discourse. People are trying to negotiate that

stigmatization, fight back against that stigmatization. And so in that regard, that silencing is, in fact a political act where they are trying to kind of repair their communities in a global context in which they face a great deal of exclusion. And here's another question that I'm drawing from your book because you meditate a little bit on the idea of remembering and you add the hyphen between the re and the member. So what does it mean to remember? I did want to play with that idea of both recalling the past and reconstituting it and reconstituting communities in the process. And I was drawing on Jennifer Cole and another anthropologist who uses the term remember in in that dual fashion as well.

Also, it's a bit of a playoff of Tony Morrison and her notion of rememory, which is thinking about the influence of the past on the present. So to remember then is much more than just sort of thinking about the past, but it has this deep influence on the present, and it has a deep influence on our community. and on the integrity of those communities, how we think about them, protect them, reassert their importance in the present. Memory plays a central role in all of that. I climbed like seasault up bedrock, bigger than the moon, I swear.

My feet clump upon the good, great teeth of the... old gods. I want them to hear me coming, my dead. I touch the walls to feel their skin. It is not a caress, but it is close to its secret. I put my fingertip against the markings on every wall here and beg for translation. I press till I lose feeling in my heart. I press till I lose feeling in my forefinger, blood, my only remittance. Then I hear them. They called to me. Plead with us.

On the shore, I hold out my forefinger and let my blood fall onto God's tongue. And you know, normally, because this is a fishing community, They don't go to fishing on Tuesday. That is when somebody dies, they use it to fix the date for the final final ratch. This is what they are doing now. Elmina has gone through so much tragedy. It has, I will say, overcome so much story.

and when you go to Elmina today and you didn't know anything about Elmina you would think the Elmenans built a huge castle and after that made towns around it Elmina is bustling Elmina is fishing Elmina is creating life

but it has not always been so So I say Elmina has gone beyond tragedy and death to propagate life and prosperity and joy. Is that how you come to the idea of transcendence? Yes. That's exactly what it is for me. Being able as a town to go beyond, to move. beyond, to be much more than the town that had the Elmina Castle that saw so much gruesome happenings, to go beyond that, to choose, to remember life, chooses to, you know, be resilient.

I counted as a wound that will heal is healing. You find that the people of Almena are buoyant and it is this buoyancy. It is this joy in their hearts. This defiant joy not to succumb to their recent. history. I mean, O'Meda is such a capacious place. It's such an interesting

creation, if you will, of history and of the present. So, for me, my heart is joy. It's gladness that I feel that this group of people have been able to, you know, transcend and live an amazing

existence. Ghanaian poet Sarpong Ose Asamoa. We have a link to his poetry from our website, cbc.ca.ca.com slash ideas. Thank you to all the guests who contributed to this episode. My name is Philippa and one major at Turoga at the Limina Castle. My name is Atu Kuisin and I am Professor of English and the Chair of the Department of African and African.

African-American Studies at Stanford University. My name is Bio Holsey. I'm an associate professor of African-American studies and anthropology at Emory University. My name is Sapung Osei Asamoa. I'm a Ghanaian poet and educator. This episode was produced by Nicola Luchic. Technical producers, Sam McNulty, Emily Carvezio, Gary Francis and Gabriella Gonzalez.

Web producer Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.