Face to Face With Pain, Pride of the Past

Surrounded by scores of women, five teenage girls from South Los Angeles hoist lighted candles as they file into the dungeon of a one-time slaving fort in this former British colony.

They are silent and apprehensive as they move into the windowless stone room, which for centuries served as a warehouse for African women destined for slavery in the Americas.

Only hours before, the girls and nine other students from Crenshaw High School set foot on African soil for the first time. They have traveled here after nine months of studying African American history in a Rites of Passage school program.

Some of the students do not know what to expect over the next seven days. Some think they know--but will find out that their preconceptions were wrong. Others dream of meeting people here who will be a link to lost ancestors.

In the dungeon, the girls and women--most of them African American--come face to face with the pain of the past. Tears begin to flow even before the start of a ceremony designed to help them relive the shame and terror of captivity. They cry, many will say later, because suddenly they realize how their ancestors must have felt.

Beverly Silverstein, the instructor who created the program, stays close by her students as the suffocatingly hot enclosure fills with bodies.

Across the courtyard in another dungeon, the Crenshaw boys are going through a similar ritual with a group of African American men. Visitors to the fort had been separated by gender, as were the captured Africans awaiting passage across the Atlantic.

“I felt kind of sick,” 16-year-old Aisha Kennedy would say later, recalling the emotions that engulfed her in that bleak cell. “It hurt very, very deeply.”

Monday, July 1

It is 10:45 p.m. and the students are gathered at their gate at Los Angeles International Airport.

For weeks, parents and teachers have been telling them that this trip could be the experience of their lives.

Something that prodigious, however, seems to be the farthest thing from their minds. As they wait for their plane, they seem more interested in chatting about end-of-school parties or listening to CD music on their headphones.

They weren’t always so blase.

For months, they had been holding carwashes and readathons and soliciting donations from corporations and community groups to raise much of the $50,000 cost of the trip, which was prompted by an invitation to present papers at a conference in Accra, Ghana’s capital.

Now, they wait to board the Boeing 757 that will take them to New York City. From there they will take an Air Afrique Airbus across the Atlantic.

Most of the students will be seniors in the fall. Among them are:

* Carroll Houston, a shy, bookish 16-year-old who will come roaring out of her shell by the trip’s end.

* Taaji Madyun, an intense and curious 17-year-old who will emerge as a leader of the group.

* Antinisia Young, 17, Taaji’s best friend and, like her, one of the more serious students.

* Danyell Sparks and her twin, Daniel. They will have their 17th birthday in Ghana.

* Ade Akinloye, 17, a natural prankster who was born in what probably is the only African-style village in the United States--Oyotunji, outside Beaufort, S.C.

* Akbar Gbaja-Biamila, 17, an outspoken starter for the Crenshaw football team and the son of Nigerian immigrants.

Also on the trip are three chaperons, and Silverstein, her son, Joshua, 14, and their neighbor, Frederic White, 16. The boys attend Franklin High School in Los Angeles but completed the Rites of Passage program.

When the group’s boarding call comes, chaperon Vorris Nunley orders headphones and baseball caps off and the banter to cease. He asks everyone to pray.

“Ancestor homage is very important to our people, so what we’re going to do is give homage to the ancestors and ask them to travel with us on this journey “ he offers as a prelude.

As passersby stop and stare, Akbar’s father, Mustapha Gbaja-Biamila, leads the prayer.

Then the last goodbyes ring out.

“Don’t forget why you’re going,” one parent calls as the young travelers file through the gate.

A fellow passenger on the flight nudges Ade (pronounced Ah-day) and asks where the group is headed.

“To Africa,” Ade says proudly.

“That’s great,” the woman offers.

“I know,” he replies with a grin.

Hours later, when the plane touches down to refuel in Senegal, the students cheer and applaud.

“We’re in the Motherland,” exults Akbar. “We made it.”

Wednesday, July 3

After 16 hours in the air through eight time zones, the bone-weary students walk out of Kotoka International Airport on the outskirts of Accra.

A light, warm rain is falling. A woman swathed in vibrant blue methodically sweeps debris from the side of a road. Beyond, the red dirt of the countryside is covered with lush green brush and trees.

The students follow the thunderous beat of drums, turn a corner and encounter a small troupe of performers.

The drums and dancing have been organized by the Assn. for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, sponsors of the conference the students will attend.

The international association--whose president is Nzinga Heru, a retired engineer in Los Angeles--tries to promote accurate portrayals of African history and to encourage the study of it by people of African descent everywhere.

A dancer motions for Antinisia to join him. She resists, at first, but gives in at the urging of the other students and her father, Anthony, one of two parents on the trip.

After a few minutes of matching her partner’s steps to near perfection, she dashes back into the crowd, embarrassed.

Then the students are bundled onto a tour bus, part of a caravan that takes conferees to their hotels.

The bus races to the nearby Holiday Hotel, in a middle-class enclave of walled stone homes. The students barely have time to wash their faces before they are back on the bus, bound for the slaving forts of Cape Coast and Elmina.

In an interview before the trip, Heru said she deliberately started the tour this way, knowing it could mean a somber beginning.

“I want everybody, students and adults, to start on the same page,” she said.

Accra’s streets teem with vendors and hawkers selling everything from plastic bags of cold water to coffins. A couple stand in the middle of one roadway, holding aloft a puppy in each hand for sale to motorists. Women with babies strapped to their backs balance baskets of delicately stacked eggs on their heads.

Despite the spectacle unfolding outside the bus windows, several students succumb to weariness and fall asleep.

Those who remain awake pepper their guide, Johnnie Attu, with questions.

The queries make Silverstein wince.

“So, where are the animals?” one boy asks.

“What animals?” asks Attu cautiously.

“You know. The lions and giraffes and elephants,” the boy says, undaunted.

“Well, you can probably find something like that in the zoo in Accra,” Attu answers curtly in his rich accent. “But nobody here has time to go to the zoo.”

Later, the bus passes villages of mud homes with tin- or straw-covered roofs. Residents wave to the passing caravan.

“I just want to know if they would consider this a slum, because in America we would consider this a slum,” the boy says, his tone more accusatory than inquiring.

As the guide tries to explain that students in Ghana pay a fee to go to school, another boy interrupts to ask incredulously: “You mean kids who can’t pay to go to school can’t go?”

When the bus passes a village where a man appears to be barbecuing something on a homemade grill, one of the boys shouts, “That’s their McDonald’s.”

Silverstein, 47, grows visibly angrier by the minute as she listens to the questions. Months of discussion about cultural sensitivity seemingly are forgotten.

At a rest stop, she lectures the students on civility, telling them that referring to the Ghanaians as “they” and belittling their environment is unacceptable.

“If I sound aggravated, I am,” she tells the contrite group. “I expected more from you.”

*

With dusk approaching, the caravan pulls into Cape Coast’s main square. Some students are exhausted and cranky after a hurried tour of Elmina Castle, the oldest of 60 slaving forts that once dotted the coast.

Many of the forts have been lost to the sea over the years. Others are in ruins. The forts at Cape Coast and Elmina, however, survived relatively intact and have been undergoing renovation since they were designated World Heritage Sites by the United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1991. Since then, the government of Ghana has received $4.1 million from the Smithsonian Institution, the United Nations and the U.S. Agency for International Development to pay for the renovation.

At Elmina, the students skirted scaffolding to get into the fort’s dungeons. They gazed through the “Door of No Return,” through which chained humans passed on their way to canoes that took them to waiting slave ships.

They briefly were shut into a cell where defiant male slaves were left to starve to death.

“That was something real evil,” said Daniel, emerging from the pitch-black enclosure. “We were only in there a few minutes, and look how hot it was.”

At the Cape Coast fort, a few of the students complain that they are exhausted and grouse about what they think will be a repeat of the Elmina tour. “We’ve already seen one dungeon,” one mutters.

Those who disembark appear uninterested, and when they enter the fort’s courtyard, what they see does not seem promising--more adults giving speeches.

For Silverstein, it is a constant struggle to keep the group together and focused.

When several of the townspeople gather to reenact a slave raid, some of the students are nowhere to be seen.

But by the time the Ghanaians, still in character, begin leading the men and women into separate dungeons, all but two or three of the students are there to take part.

Inside the women’s dungeon, the heat from compressed bodies and the candles make the temperature nearly unbearable.

Nzingah Okofu, a middle-aged African American who moved to Ghana six years ago, begins the “ceremony of return.”

“This is only the second time since the end of slavery that there have been this many Africans in this place,” says Okofu. “This is sacred ground.”

Carroll shudders as tears trickle down her face.

The other girls wipe tears away as Okofu recounts the horrors of the slave trade, grieving for those it destroyed and praising the courage of those who survived.

“What joy the ancestors must be experiencing to know that generations later, their children have returned to honor them,” says Okofu, who runs a sponsorship program that matches Ghanaian children who cannot afford school with African Americans who will pay their educational expenses.

After two of the oldest visitors speak, Okofu asks that the candles be snuffed out. She urges the women to call out the names of deceased relatives or historical figures.

They then join the men outside the dungeon. This time, they walk through the arched, wooden “Door of No Return.”

Crumbling steps lead to a narrow beach where the canoes once waited for captive Africans.

Some in the group, ignoring a steady rain, descend and walk knee-deep into the sea to stand in silence. Others stay just outside the door, singing songs from the civil rights era.

“I don’t understand how people could be so cruel to each other,” says Carroll, shielding her head from the rain with her denim jacket.

With the notes of the songs hanging in the damp air, the group walks back through the door.

Thursday, July 4

When the bus arrives to take them to the Ghana International Conference Center, the students no longer are the weary, emotionally drained group from the night before.

Most now wear traditional brightly hued African garb they brought with them. The others are in white and black outfits enlivened by sashes of kente--Ghanaian cloth once reserved for royalty.

After a morning of conference activities, the students huddle with Silverstein and Nunley to practice the presentations that six of them will make today. They will talk about such topics as the importance of ancestors among black people, the slave trade and African American families.

The students--who were invited here at a November reception in Beverly Hills for the president of Ghana--aren’t nervous.

They are keyed up.

As the youngest presenters, they turn out to be a hit with the gathering of academics and lay historians. The “Crenshaw kids” are introduced from the podium at every major event. They are interviewed by a local TV station and mentioned in an Accra newspaper.

After their presentations, the normally deferential Carroll stuns her classmates during a question-and-answer period with the audience. She is asked about her visit to the forts.

“I vowed that day that I would never let anything like that happen to us or our people,” she says fiercely.

The crowd gives the students a standing ovation.

Sunday, July 7

The conference is over. Silverstein and her students want to do one other thing as a group before they leave the country: to see the manufacture of kente, the colorful ceremonial cloth that has become a badge of cultural liberation for many African Americans.

Though their formal studies in the Crenshaw program have ended, they will continue working together on a senior-year project, helping to prepare and mount an exhibit on kente that will open at UCLA’s Fowler Museum in January 1998.

The cloth is made primarily in Bonwire, one of several villages in south Ghana’s rural Kumasi region that are known for specializing in a single craft. Ehwiaa, another village, is known for its woodcarvers who make artful masks and statues. In Ntonso, weavers create adinkra, which often has a two-tone pattern that features symbols such as the Sankofa bird, an imaginary creature that looks backward so it can move forward.

Before they reach Bonwire, the tour group stops in the city of Kumasi. It is the bustling capital of the region dominated by the once-feared Asante people, among the fiercest resisters to British rule. In Kumasi, the group pays a formal visit to the Asante king’s cabinet of chiefs.

The students break away early to get to Bonwire.

As the bus pulls into the village, a shout goes up along the one dusty road. Residents come running, holding up swaths of kente that they offer for sale.

Ade, who already has proved himself the most astute haggler among the students, is ready to bargain.

Kente is the lifeblood of the village, where almost every household has a weaver. Two square yards can sell for as much as $50 in a country where an average worker earns as little as $150 a year.

Taaji finds a weaver working his loom in back of his small shop. She watches as he expertly manipulates the machine, his feet and hands moving in concert. When she asks, he lets her give it a try.

She giggles, awkwardly trying to synchronize her hand and foot movements. “This is not as easy as it looks,” she says.

Conveying the artisanship of the kente weavers will be part of the students’ mission back home. They will assist Fowler curators in assembling an exhibit catalog, and interviewing African Americans and others in Los Angeles who wear kente to symbolize a link with Africa.

Monday, July 8

This day is set aside for sightseeing in Accra.

The most meaningful event of the day to the Crenshaw students is a visit to the W.E.B. Du Bois Centre for Pan African Culture, named for the African American scholar who helped found the NAACP and who spent the last two years of his long, productive life in Ghana.

Du Bois, who was 95 when he died 33 years ago, was among the first wave of African Americans to answer a call from Kwame Nkrumah, independent Ghana’s first president, for African Americans to “come home.” He arrived in 1961 and later was followed by other prominent African Americans, including Maya Angelou, Stevie Wonder, Isaac Hayes and Dionne Warwick, all of whom have lived or owned property in Ghana. Louis Armstrong traced his roots to a village near Cape Coast and had property there.

The Du Bois center comprises the house where the author lived and died and a building that holds his tomb.

The students enter the tomb building with hushed reverence. They seat themselves in the single room, which is decorated with wreaths left by previous visitors, including one whose name the students recognize: Jamaican rapper Shabba Ranks.

A guide describes Du Bois’ life in Ghana, including his ambitious project to create an encyclopedia of African history and culture.

Later, inside the room that served as Du Bois’ library, the students are startled when the guide opens a bookcase and hands one of the volumes to student David Humes. It is Du Bois’ personal copy of his “The Souls of Black Folk,” the seminal collection of essays that was required reading in their program at Crenshaw.

One by one they leaf through the book, passing it among themselves as if it were a sacred object.

“I can’t believe I held a book that W.E.B. Du Bois had in his hands,” David marvels.

Afterward, they make one last visit to Papaye’s, a fast-food restaurant on a busy commercial street the students have dubbed Crenshaw Boulevard East. One of the tour guides recommended it after they began hungering for a good old American hamburger after days of eating chicken or fish, and rice with almost every meal.

Tuesday, July 9

A tropical rainstorm drenches Accra on their last evening in Ghana. The students, some of them in pajamas, gather in one of the hotel suites.

Danyell and Antinisia have said their last goodbyes to Ghanaian pen pals whom they had found through the Internet. Akbar has said farewell to an uncle from Lagos, Nigeria, who drove 24 hours to Accra to meet his sister’s son for the first time.

Now, they play out a silly exercise, voting on who wore the most insect repellent and who slept the most on the bus.

Then the conversation turns serious. Each student stands in turn to say what the trip has meant to him or her. Danyell speaks of how the seven days shattered stereotypes she had held of Africa.

“I thought everyone was living in huts, because that’s what I saw on TV and in the movies,” she says.

Akbar has a new appreciation for the life that he has in the United States, noting how eager some children were to get an item as commonplace in America as an ink pen. “There’s a lot of stuff we take for granted. These people cherish everything they can get,” he says.

Although some of the students say they will be happy to get back home, a few express regret that the trip is coming to an end.

Taaji, whose parents know many African immigrants in the United States, says the visit deepens the sense of kinship she already felt with Ghanaians.

“I just want to tell my parents to move out here,” Taaji declares, before saying good night to the group. “I just want to stay here forever.”

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A Brief History

The people who populate what is now Ghana are thought to have been just ending their migration into the region in the 15th century when the Portugese arrived and set up trade with coastal rulers.

From the beginning, that trade involved some slavery. But after Christopher Columbus’ 1492 landing in the Caribbean, slavery grew to become the dominant industry as the demand for labor in the Americas became insatiable.

The first slaving fort was built at what is now Elmina, with cannons facing the sea to protect Portugese trading interests. Other forts followed, with as many as 60 operating along the coast throughout the four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. The forts served as human warehouses for Africans captured from the West African Coast and inland, who were locked away until they could be transported to ships for the brutal journey across the Atlantic known as the Middle Passage.

When the slave trade ended in the 19th Century, the British moved to consolidate power in the area known as West Africa’s Gold Coast, eventually instituting direct colonial rule.

The state of modern Ghana came into existence in 1957 when African intellectuals, most of whom had been educated abroad, won independence after years of ceaseless political agitation.

The name Ghana was taken from the powerful kingdom that flourished in the region of the Niger River between the 4th and 13th centuries.

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Pilgrimage to Ghana

Ghana is among the most popular destinations for the growing number of African Americans traveling to Africa in search of their ancestral past. Tourism to Ghana has tripled since 1990, with 286,000 people visiting last year alone, according to the Embassy of Ghana in Washington. Many tourists make the trek to the notorious former slaving forts such as those at Elmina and Cape Coast.

Republic of Ghana

* Location: West Africa

* Capital: Accra

* Population: 17 million (1994)

* Size: 92,100 square miles (about) the size of Indiana and Illinois combined)

* History: Established as a British colony called Gold Coast in 1874. Achieved independence in 1957, the first colonized African country to do so.

* Official language: English

* People: About 100 ethnic and language groups and numerous subgroups

* Government: 1992 constitution prescribes multiparty democracy. Next elections scheduled for this fall.

* Head of state: President Jerry J. Rawlings

Source: Library of Congress