Ghana 2019 - Assin Manso

Let me, if I may, tell you a story.

We left from Kumasi to drive toward the coastal area of Cape Coast and Elmina. Along the north/south highway that connects the two regions, we stopped at the historical site of Assin Manso. Colloquially, Assin Manso is known as “Slave River” or “The Place of the Last Bath”. At the height of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Assin Manso was the busiest slave trading block in the world, its confluence of rivers serving as a place where kidnapped wives, husbands, children and parents were bathed before being sold to the highest bidder and marched further down to the castles built to imprison them until they were loaded onto the slave ships.

Visiting Assin Manso was such a powerful experience. Our group of 26 students is quite diverse, and we all acknowledged that the experience would be different for each of us.

Our guide encouraged us to remove our shoes and connect with the earth as we walked down to the river. He described in detail the brutalities that the stolen bodies and lives endured on that very ground.

Then came the rain. Just as our guide, Kofi, invited us to move down the bank to the water’s edge, the heavens opened and the sky roared with rain. In a torrent. Like a blessing. And then the tears came, too, the raw emotion of this homecoming for so many of our group’s members. The emotion of returning in body and in spirit to this ground that was trodden by thousands and thousands of fearful, persevering souls. Words fail anything beyond that, but our students surrendered to the rain, letting it drench them, then poured libations in a ceremony over the water while the rain poured and poured and washed everything away.

You can’t create these experiences, you can only hope all the pieces come together in the right place at the right time to make them so. We’re grateful, and looking ahead to a few more days of learning.