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As usual they are vague with the truth ! From Sunday Dailynews sports section

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bongoid:
  >:(There is very little mention of how it was blacks & the "Ismaelites" who were the main slave traders in Africa.Where were those "Noble Kings & Queens" when their own black people were being enslaved by Ol' "YT" ? Well of course,they were preying on their own kind in the inner continent of africa where the white's did not dare tread .As for the black people, I would ask this:If "Dem noble kings & queens" that were supposedly your ancestors were so noble ,why did they sell your ancestors to the white man.By your logic the noble african king Shake-a -Zulu would have raised an army to liberate your ancestors from these terrible slave dungeons at these points of no return.but the sad fact is that he was too busy enslaving & killing his own kind for sport.

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
The door of no return
BY T.J. QUINN
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Sunday, February 11th, 2007

During the Major League Baseball goodwill trip to Ghana last week, the delegation took a break from its schedule of diplomatic appearances and traveled three hours along the Gulf of Guinea coast to the towns of Cape Coast and Elmina, to tour the castles where African slaves were collected before being shipped to the New World. As guests of U.S. Ambassador Pamela Bridgewater, Mets GM Omar Minaya, Hall of Famer Dave Winfield, two-time All-Star outfielder and three-time Manager of the Year Dusty Baker, seven-time All-Star Reggie Smith, original Met and longtime pitching coach Al Jackson and a handful of others toured the castles and shared their thoughts as African-Americans returning, as Smith said, "to the motherland."
ELMINA, Ghana - When they came to excavate the men's slave dungeon at Cape Coast castle decades ago, there was at least a foot of baked human excrement to dig through before they hit stone.

This was in a room the size of a country church, stone walls, arched stone ceiling, with one window where a shaft of light broke the darkness. That window, less than a square foot, once held iron bars in case anyone held dreams of slipping through that impassable space.

During the day the window provides a spot of light that climbs from the bottom of the far wall, turns red, diffuses, then fades to complete blackness, as it has since 1792 when the room became storage for human cargo. During the years of the slave trade, there were usually 250 men packed into the room, the ones who were still somehow resistant after being marched as far as 500 miles through the sub-Saharan jungle from the places where they were captured.

"Everything was for a purpose," the guide, Stephen Korsah, says. "This was a business."

When Korsah leads a group of American visitors down a slick ramp into the dungeon entrance, there is nervous laughter about how embarrassing it would be to fly to Africa and end up in a hospital because you slipped on stone before you even saw what was inside. Korsah doesn't smile.

As the group turns the corner, the sunlight fades and their eyes adjust to the light of a single, suspended lightbulb at the dungeon's subterranean entrance. The laughter stops.

"Nothing can prepare you for this," Reggie Smith will say later. "Nothing in the world. There's nothing you can read."

Dusty Baker spent the flight from New York to Ghana reading Elie Wiesel's "Night," the definitive first-person account of the Holocaust. Wiesel's book, only 128 pages, talks of being thrown into cattle cars where prisoners had to sleep standing up, had to urinate and defecate on themselves as they headed to Auschwitz.

"That had to be what it was like," Baker says.

He puts his hand on the wall of the dungeon to feel the stone. On the back wall there are holes where chains were anchored, there to hold the most incorrigible slaves. In "Night," Baker recalls, Wiesel wrote of a woman on his train who began screaming about visions of flames, long before the train arrived at the death camp and saw pits of fires where bodies were thrown.

"There must have been someone (on the slave route) who had the same vision of what was going to happen," Baker says. "As spiritual as Africa is."

Korsah, a Ghanaian, is the physical center of any room he stands in. He is sweating more than the American baseball delegates. His beige long-sleeve shirt is matted to his shoulders and back. Korsah has taken thousands of people, most of them African-Americans, through this castle, starting in a small museum in a heat-choked room and then into the dungeons.

He speaks with the dramatic presence of James Earl Jones, freshly and passionately.

"This dungeon is a sacred ground," he says. "Believe it or not, the ancestors are here. Believe it. They are here with us. Look and you can see them. If you cannot see them, be still and feel them.

"We have not relocated their souls from here because they are not buried in land. They sent the bodies to the Gulf of Guinea."

Wendy Lewis, a vice president with Major League Baseball and a mother and grandmother steeped in her African-American heritage, stands by the wall, sobbing. Smith has to leave. Usually captives spent at least two weeks here, and if they survived, they were loaded onto the ships.

On into the women's dungeons.

Baker has a question.

"What happens if the woman is pregnant?" he asks.

Korsah sniffs. "The conditions," he says slowly, "would not support the fetus."

But if she had the baby?

"If the baby became a nuisance . . ." Korsah begins . . .

"Baby gone," Baker finishes.

Korsah nods. "Yes."

* * *

Just a few miles down the coast at Elmina is the castle the Portuguese built in 1482, 10 years before Columbus left for India and found the Caribbean. They built warehouses into the rock to hold the gold, spices and cloth that were to be sent back to ports in Europe. The market changed. By 1503 they needed labor for the sugar fields in the New World. Humans from inland tribes became more valuable than African gold, and the Europeans began paying local chiefs to help them capture rival and enemy tribesmen. The captives were chained, branded, then marched to the coast. The vast rooms at Elmina that were built for dried goods became holding places for slaves.
There are two moats to cross before entering the castle, then a passage to an open courtyard. From there one path across sun-baked blond rock leads to the men's dungeon, another to the women's. Just past the main entrance is the "death room," a stone room with no window, no vents and one iron door.

Winfield has to duck his head to see into the darkness of that room. He shakes his head, can't speak.

"This is where a slave was thrown to die," says the Elmina tour guide, Kofi. "He would starve to death or die from the heat."

The women were kept behind iron crossbars in cells that surrounded an open courtyard. The space is open now, but some of the bars are stacked unceremoniously in a corner, like leftover debris at a construction site. They have been caked with centuries of rust since the first imprisoned hands gripped them.

The women were at times brought from the cells into the courtyard, where officers stood above them on a balcony.

"The officers would point to the one they wanted, and the woman would be brought up those stairs and she would be raped," Kofi says.

Winfield's wife, Tonya, stares at the balcony. She shakes her head, says, "No," in a low voice.

If a woman needed to be punished, she was taken into the courtyard and chained between the cell door and an iron cannonball embedded in the ground, splayed under the sun until she was broken.

Both dungeons lead to smaller rooms, and then to a final room the size of an average garage, where the only remaining exit is a door about five feet high, maybe a foot wide. This is "the door of no return." On the other side was a boat, a trip to a large ship, then a month's journey to the Americas.

The door was small enough to prevent more than one captive from going through at a time, reducing any risk of rebellion or escape.

Minaya, Dominican-born from African and Spanish ancestors, stands in front of the door.

"Did these ships leave for the Caribbean?" Minaya asks.

"Yes, many left for the Caribbean," Kofi says.

Minaya looks through the door again. A few of the visitors take pictures, ask others to take their pictures in front of it. When the group leaves, Minaya goes back by himself and says a small prayer.

* * *

A short ride from the Elmina castle, the group stops at a guarded golf resort, eating a catered lunch a hundred yards off the beach. Laughter returns and everyone begins talking about what they shared. Those who stood in the dungeons, white or black, wonder if they could have survived. Who would have died on the journey there? Who would have just given up once in the dungeons and let life ebb away? Who would have fought?
Sitting at the resort, Jackson, 71, talks of growing up in Waco, Tex., the youngest of 13 children born to his sharecropping parents. Whatever troubles he had in his life were nothing to what his parents endured. What they went through was nothing compared to what Jackson has just seen.

"I'm never going to gripe about anything again," he says.

His wife, Nadine, nods. "You don't know what you can survive," she says.

From the group, only Winfield, who has traveled to Africa before, has had success tracing his family's African lineage. He isn't sure where they came from, but they probably boarded a ship in nearby Guinea.

"Someone with my DNA was in this room," Smith says. "I was hit with emotions in a way I never had been before. Physically. I never felt anything like that. I had to get out."

They all keep going back to that dungeon in the Cape Coast castle, the one with the single unreachable, impassable window. Baker decompresses by walking away from the lunch tables for a bit, taking off his sandals and rolling up his pants to wade into the soft surf.

"I didn't feel the anger that people say they've felt," he says. "I felt more the spiritual sorrow than I felt anger. It was similar to like a wailing wall, where you could feel the moans and the pain and the humiliation of not being able to sleep or use the bathroom. Think about the smell. These were proud people. They probably had never been in a claustrophobic situation like that. Africa's an open place."

They think again about the "door of no return" at Cape Coast, the first castle. It once had a tiny concrete slot of a door designed to control the flow of human cargo, but now it has a large gateway. At the end of the tour, past the battlements and the rusted cannons pointing to the gulf, Korsah pointed to the sign that said, "Door of No Return," opened it, and the scene on the other side was so vibrant, so unexpected, it made some flinch.

Past a flight of ancient stone steps where their forebearers were dragged in chains to the boats, Ghanaian children played soccer on the beach and dove in the surf. Men sat on wooden fishing boats and tended their nets. A woman just outside the door was breast-feeding her child.

"You see those kids playing as free as I've ever seen kids playing in the ocean without adult supervision. No lifeguards or nothing, just playing," Baker says. "See them and imagining that their ancestors could have been our ancestors."

A 19-year-old student named Kobby says he has seen countless grim faces come through that door.

"They all feel sad. They know with this situation their grandmother, their cousin, their sister was taken away here," he says. "We welcome our brothers and sisters."

Smith walks back through the door, thinking about someone from his history who never came back.

Raised in Compton, Smith is as tough a major leaguer as Baker says he ever saw, but says he doesn't know whether he could have survived enslavement.

All he knows, he says, is that in the lost, muddled history of his family, "someone did."

For a brief video tour of one of Ghana's slave castles, plus more coverage of major league baseball's trip to Africa, log on to T.J. Quinn's blog at blogs.nydailynews.com/iteam

 

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