Lessons Learned at Elmina Castle in Ghana!

Elmina is a small, picturesque, fishing town on the coast of Ghana. It is the home to a couple of European-build castles, the most famous being the Elmina Castle. This beautiful structure was build in 1482 by the Portuguese for the purpose of facilitating trade! Trade included mainly gold but eventually it was human-beings that would be the prominent commodity to be sold and sent to the New World as slaves!

My first visit to Elmina Castle was in 1998, our group was made up of mainly Americans of all shades, and most seemed emotional by what they saw and heard. Our tour guide described the conditions of the slaves who were kept in the castle, waiting their turn to journey to the unknown.  Emotions were high, when we got to the ‘Door of no Return” where slaves would be taken to their ships and never returned! Elmina is a historical testimony to the worst of humanity such as greed, hate, prejudice, and racism. Many within our group that day, wondered how could a people that believed in God, and build a church within the castle, commit such horrible acts against God’s creation, which in this case were their own fellow human-beings. Did Jesus teach his followers to enslave people? Take people away from their families and communities and barter them for cheap goods like rum? Take children from their mothers and throw the sick into the sea? We all agreed they were not true Christians!!! Because someone who believed in Jesus would show love and compassion not hate and cruelty. We also wondered why the Christians of the time did not stop such horrific crimes being committed in and justified by their fellow Christians. Was the Christianity that allowed for slavery and exploitation of millions of human beings, the real Christianity? Or was there another Christianity that rejected these evil actions?!

In 2015, we are asking the same questions of another religious community, this time its Islam and the Muslims who have to answer the tough questions about the horrible terrorist attacks committed in the name of their religion. Unfortunately, (in this case), unlike the seventeenth century, the world is connected through technology and Muslims unlike their Christian counterparts of three centuries ago have to deal with “guilt through association”!

Today’s terrorism like yesterday’s slavery is justified in the name of religion, the perpetrators of these actions are a minority, using their religion to destroy anything they don’t agree with. The same way the slavery of the past used religion to justify why it was OK to take people and enslave them, and in fact in most cases the owners thought they were saving the souls of their slaves!

History can be a great teacher, if we allow it to be. The most important lesson that action in Elmina Castle and Slavery, and action in Paris and Terrorism can teach us is that one cannot and should not judge a large group by the actions of a few!