Jonathan Clayton in Cape Coast, Ghana
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AMERICA’S first lady, Michelle Obama, fought back tears yesterday as she toured a former Dutch slaving fort similar to the one in which it is believed her ancestors were held before being shipped to work on plantations in the deep south of the United States.
On the second day of President Barack Obama’s historic trip to sub-Saharan Africa, the first family flew from the capital, Accra, for a tour of the restored 17th-century Cape Castle, previously one of the biggest slave outposts on the West African coast.
“As painful as it is, I think that it helps to teach all of us that we have to do what we can to fight against the kinds of evils that sadly still exist in our world, not just on this continent but in every corner of the globe,” said the president.
Before the visit, Michelle Obama, whose great-great-grandfather, Jim Robinson, her oldest known relative, was born into slavery on a rice plantation in South Carolina, was made “Queen of the Cape Coast” by traditional chiefs of the region.
The couple and their children, Sasha, 8, and Malia, 11, then descended the narrow staircase into the dark dungeons of the ocean-side fort where thousands of slaves were kept for up to 12 weeks waiting for a ship to dock.
Thousands of shackled African slaves huddled in squalor before being herded onto ships bound for America through the “gate of no return”.
Ghanaians are jubilant that the first black American president has honoured their country with his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa. They have greeted the trip more as a homecoming than an official visit. “Akwaaba welcome home” proclaim banners strung across Ghana’s main highways.
In a keynote speech to parliament, Obama acknowledged his African roots, saying he had “the blood of Africa within me”.
It is Michelle’s roots that have most captured the imagination of the people. “She is our sister; she is one of us,” said Victoria, a young woman who waited for hours outside Cape Castle, some 100 miles east of Accra, to catch a glimpse of the president and his wife.
In his speech Obama scolded the continent of his ancestors and said forces of tyranny and corruption must be defeated if it were to realise its potential.
“Development depends upon good governance. That is the ingredient which has been missing in far too many places, for far too long,” he said.
He told how his grandfather, a cook for the British in Kenya, had been called “boy” by his employers for much of his life despite his being a respected village elder.
Despite the wounds of colonialism, he emphasised that Africa’s failures were Africa’s problem. “No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves, or if police can be bought off by drug traffickers.
“No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20% off the top. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery.
“That is not democracy; that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there, and now is the time for that style of governance to end.” It was not the West to blame for “the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants”, nor for the corruption that is a daily fact of life.
“Africa is not the crude caricature of a continent at perpetual war,” he argued. Yet for “far too many Africans, conflict is a part of life, as constant as the sun. There are wars over land and wars over resources. And it is still far too easy for those without conscience to manipulate whole communities into fighting among faiths and tribes.
“These conflicts are a millstone around Africa’s neck.”
The president chose to visit Ghana, rather than his ancestral home of Kenya, to reward the West African country for a recent close election that ended with the incumbent losing and peacefully transferring power to his rival; a rarity in Africa.
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