SLAVERY IN PAINS, NOT CHAINS

By Ifedayo Adebayo

Soaked in her thought, Fatou Sowe’s look at the Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle reflects chains of thought. Pains of slavery for her goes beyond chains on the legs and the gates of no returns were like marriages of some of her people.

Whether they like it or not, the voice of tradition is the wish of the elders. Fula girls are perfectly preferred to marry their cousins and that is the joy of the parent who will in turn happily sacrificed many cows out of their herds.

Luckier than other Fula girls, her father brought her up with seeming opportunity to make choices on issues related to herself, but she can’t still stop asking him, “can’t they stop this practices? Can’t they be allowed to marry on their own?”

From one door to another during a visit of the International Institute of Journalism Media Ethics course participant held in Accra Ghana at the over 400 years old slave Castle, my Fula friend was happily joining group photographs and sometimes taking notes, but a step into the women dungeons changed her mood. “This is the story of my people, she told me. Not in chains, but in conscience.”

She told how a woman over the night stabbed a man she was ordered to marry to death. Painful story, but she choose not to live with a man she never loves. Against many wishes, the practices have flourished and many marriages are in crumbles, yet the parents believe that such tradition must be upheld.

Over 400 years ago, over 1.2 million West Africans were traded in slavery, sometimes thousands of kilometers far away from the burial places of their umbilical-cord. They lost their culture, traditions and citizenship birthrights. Today, they all want to return. They want a life where they belong and once again be very proud who they originally believe they were.

Sometimes visiting the slave castles with gifts of flowers in commemoration of the end to slavery; a feat they wish never happened, though too late to reverse the trend. The background was truly very dirty, mostly sold into slavery by their people, yet they still believe in those people. They want to come back and be celebrated again; many flowers brought for the commemoration still lie down there in the dungeons, all soaked in tears of remembrance.

Though the chains were no more there, but the slave masters still exists, Fatou as a Gambian however believes as preached. The slave masters generation must be made to believe that what they did was wrong, but will not stop asking me, “Why can’t we start amongst ourselves. I mean my sisters must not be forced into marriages again. That is still slavery in existence.

Beginning as early as the 17th and 18th centuries, but mainly in the 19th century, Fulas and others took control of various states in West Africa, taking lands and slaves for themselves, she however fumed her hope that her people will someday learn that the worst slavery exists amongst them; even in the name of tradition.