Vice President Kamala Harris emerged from the female slave dungeon at Cape Coast Castle visibly shaken. Inside the famous slave trading outpost’s dungeon, Harris set a bouquet of flowers down and placed her hand on the centuries-old wall, connecting herself physically to the sorrow of the Africans it once imprisoned.
It was a rare show of emotion for the typically stoic barrier-breaking leader, often reticent to talk about her own plight as a Black woman in America. But at a makeshift podium in front of the cannons that stretch along the ocean, Harris’ voice broke as she talked, delivering at times off-the-cuff remarks to describe what she saw.
“Being here was immensely powerful,” Harris said at the castle, a relic of transatlantic cruelty. “The crimes that were done here. The blood that was shed here.”
“The horror of what happened here must always be remembered. It cannot be denied. It must be taught; history must be learned.”
Cape Coast Castle has become a feature of Western leaders’ visits to West Africa, a way to pay penance for the past sins of the nations that shipped and sold African bodies and chart an optimistic future for their descendants both still on the continent and across the globe.
Harris’ visit had echoes of those by former President Barack Obama, who visited the landmark with his family in 2009. And his mark on Cape Coast Castle, as the first president have a direct bloodline to the continent, was evident when Harris stared upon a plaque unveiled by Obama on the wall to the left of the male dungeon door.
But absent from her remarks was her personal connection as a Black American and woman in power. A daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, Harris has often described her decision to become a prosecutor, her career before entering politics, to right injustices she witnessed growing up in a predominately…
Read the full article here