Black Gold of the Sun (12 page)

Alone in the cell I felt the air press upon me like a physical weight. I pictured what it was like for a slave to be herded into the courtyard after spending months in the dungeon.

A Dutch ship is weighing anchor. You are brought into the light and made to strip naked. For the first time in a long while you are aware of your body's scent in all its sourness. A soldier shaves your head with a straight razor. He has a young face and ruined teeth. He nicks your scalp with the razor. The Dutch captain enters the courtyard.
He is balding and impatient. He sticks his fingers in your mouth to check for loose teeth. You taste his sweat on your tongue. The captain rejects the sick among you as damaged goods. The rest of you are lined up before a brazier. You are branded on the shoulder. The smell of burnt skin is almost as hard to bear as the pain itself.

They clamp a ring round your neck, thread a chain through it and tug you all in line to a narrow exit at the far end of the courtyard. It is called the ‘Door of No Return'. One by one you step through. The ocean lies in front of you. Struggling against the chains you and the other men are walked to the waiting boat, then rowed out to the ship. You are unshackled in order to climb aboard. Some men throw themselves in the water and try to swim for land. The ones who don't drown are captured on their return. The rest of you are counted and taken down into the hold. The ship raises anchor. It turns away from Africa and ploughs across the sea. Turns away from the known world, as it seems in the blindness of the hold.

I left the dungeon, the light stinging my eyes as I returned to the courtyard. Beyond the castle walls fishermen banged buckets to announce the arrival of the day's catch. A goat maintained a solitary bleating. I smelled the salt of the ocean. For a few minutes it was all I could do to stand bent over, gulping air, until the weight of the dungeon had left my shoulders. When I raised my eyes I saw it across the courtyard: the Door of No Return. It was cut into the wall at the far side of the castle. Except
for the sign it could have passed for an ordinary archway.

I stood beside it and ran my hands along the stonework. I stepped through it as the slaves had done, to the shoreline and the waves. As I did, it came to me that, in the wake of slavery, all of us black people born in the west are exiles. Periodically, Elmina stages a ‘homecoming' ceremony where African-Americans, Caribbeans and black Europeans are invited back through the Door of No Return to the land of their origins.

Is it possible to reclaim the past? Or do we remain wanderers even after our return? This is what Jacobus Capitein, vicar of Elmina castle, must have asked himself time and again when he gazed out from the castle walls. I'd read about Capitein the previous evening, and the course of his troubled life came back to me as I stood with my back to the door.

Capitein was a Ghanaian boy of eight years old when he was kidnapped by slavers trawling the coast in 1725. They sold him to the captain of a Dutch frigate who, in turn, gave him as a present to Jacobus Van Goch, the West India Company representative at the Dutch fort of St Sebastian. It was Van Goch who named the boy Capitein (Captain), after the frigate commander, and who discovered him to be hard-working, eager to please and good-natured. After three years in the Gold Coast, Van Goch returned to The Hague, Capitein beside him as an adopted son.

In the notes that survive him to this day, Capitein claimed he was unable to remember his real name or the village where he was born. Whether this is true or an act
of willed forgetting is impossible to say. What it makes clear is that he regarded the moment of his enslavement as the start of a new life. In that respect he may have considered himself European even before he and Van Goch landed in The Hague. If so, the reaction to him in Holland must have been a disappointment. In his notes, Capitein writes that mothers hurried their children across the street as he approached. Strangers pointed. Young men deliberately jostled him as they passed.

In the quiet of the Haagsche Bosch park, he'd find a bench where he could sit alone and escape the taunts of ‘blackamoor' that followed him through the city. Slavery was illegal within the borders of eighteenth-century Holland and, as a free citizen, Capitein became the first African baptized in the Netherlands. At the Dutch Reform church in Kloosterkerk he took the name Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein, after his adoptive father's family.

On completing school, Capitein left The Hague to study theology at the University of Leiden. He made friends among the students and gained a reputation for diligence and generosity. A portrait from that time shows him dressed in a university gown, clutching a Bible. The softness of his expression and fullness of his belly give the impression of a man at ease with himself.

Yet the painting captures Capitein at a pivotal period of life. Shortly after he began university, Van Goch had died. With a small stipend from his will, Capitein was free to determine his own future. Even if he regarded himself as completely European he need no longer have rejected his
African past. Instead Capitein continued to insist he had no memory of his early childhood. Moreover, for his graduation thesis he decided to write a paper in defence of slavery.

When
A Political-Theological Dissertation On Slavery As Not Being Contrary to Christian Freedom
was published in March 1742, it created a sensation. Africa was a land of heathens, wrote Capitein. In transporting its people to the New World, Europeans were bringing souls from darkness into the light of civilization. They were performing God's will. Morally speaking, slavery was an act of liberation.

In a country that had grown rich off slavery while agonizing over the trade's ethics, Capitein's argument found fervent support. A first print run of the dissertation sold out in weeks. Three more followed the same year. Framed portraits of him went on sale in bookshop windows and found their way on to display above mantelpieces across Holland. Capitein undertook a nationwide tour of Dutch Reform churches. Parishioners clamoured for a glimpse of the ‘Africaansche Moor'.

At the peak of his celebrity, however, he decided to return to the Gold Coast. He was going back out of a sense of duty, said Capitein. Van Goch had lifted him out of ignorance and it was his responsibility to do the same for other less fortunate souls on the Dark Continent.

In light of his dissertation's success, the West India Company and the Council of the Dutch Reform Church in Amsterdam appointed him vicar of Elmina castle. In
July 1742 he sailed from the north-western island of Texel, on the slave ship
Catherine Galey
, accompanied only by the indifferent verse of his university friends: ‘Your departure is bitter for me, O black Moor, internally much whiter than alabaster.'

As Holland slid out of sight, did Capitein imagine himself leaving home or returning to it? What did Africa hold for him? And what, once he reached his destination, would he discover about himself?

Thinking about Capitein led me to remember the day my family moved out of Kingsbury. I'd already left home for university by then. With Esi and Kodwo gone before me, my parents decided to clear the debts they'd built up after the coup by moving to Northampton.

I went back that Christmas in 1987 to box up the records and comics still piled in the bedroom Kodwo and I had shared. When we'd finished and the removal van had rumbled off towards the M1, we squeezed into the back of the second-hand Beetle my father had bought as a replacement for the Volvo.

‘Better take a last look,' he said. ‘Because we won't be coming back.' Then he pulled into the traffic and away from the house for good.

At the time I thought him cruel, but his brusqueness makes sense now as a desire to leave the memory of the
coup years behind. He was right, too. We didn't return. Not, at least, until years later when I took myself on a sentimental journey back to Kingsbury. Somehow I expected to spot old school friends hanging outside the kebab shop or sneaking fags under the bus shelter as they'd been doing the last time I saw them. But there was no one I recognized and, gazing up at the net-curtained windows of the old house, I felt nothing beyond the shallow wash of nostalgia.

It seems to me now that the act of departure affects the nature of the place you leave behind. Between leaving and coming back, you change. And because you don't stay the same, neither does the place to which you return.

When Capitein was baptized in Holland, he renounced Africa. What drew him back? Did he accept he'd always be a stranger in Holland, or was he searching for his lost childhood? Perhaps both were true, even if Capitein himself viewed matters differently.

His actions in the first weeks suggest a man little given to introspection. In the space of a fortnight he set up a school for African children at the castle, recruited his first twenty pupils and began translating the Lord's Prayer into Fante. His mission, as he saw it, was not to get closer to the Africans, but to bring them nearer to Europe. To further prove that he ‘did not despise them', Capitein also decided to marry a young woman from Elmina.

As he would have discovered on his arrival, West India Company rules forbidding relationships with African women were commonly flouted at the castle. Most of the
Dutch officers kept an African mistress at the fort. Their light-skinned children were a common sight in the streets of Elmina. All the same, his request was turned down by Jacob de Petersen, Director-General of the castle. In protest Capitein appealed to the company in Holland, arguing that a wife would help secure him against ‘the seductions of Satan'.

It took two years for him to receive a reply. In 1745 a young red-haired woman named Antonia Ginderos arrived on a ship from The Hague. She announced herself as Capitein's fiancée. Without his knowledge, the West India Company had arranged a bride for the vicar.

Although they'd never previously met the couple were married at the castle by de Petersen shortly after her arrival. In a letter of gratitude to the Council of the Dutch Reform Church, Capitein described her as his ‘gift from God'. After two years in Elmina, though, there was little else for him to celebrate.

Prim and sanctimonious, Capitein was unpopular with the rest of the castle staff. His fellow officers were coarse, illiterate, heavy drinkers, less used to regarding Africans as equals than as slaves and whores. At an official dinner, de Petersen's aide-de-camp called the vicar a ‘filthy nigger'. Capitein tried to ignore him, but the invective continued. None of the officers intervened. From their smiles, they appeared to be enjoying the scene. Capitein left the table. Afterwards he was ostracized by the staff, who claimed he couldn't take a joke. On Sundays he preached to empty pews. Attendance at his school foundered. The children would be better off working, their parents insisted. Able
to speak only halting Fante, Capitein could not convince them otherwise.

With disinterest from the town and hostility at the castle, Capitein wrote despairingly to the West India Company: ‘I believe that things are going to go with me the same way they must have gone with most of, if not all, my predecessors: namely that they had to toil and expend their energies fruitlessly, and to suffer the hatred, contempt, ridicule and persecution of the depraved Christians here.'

In July 1745 he followed the letter with another one offering his resignation. With no response from the company, Capitein succumbed to despair. He began to spend freely on imported wines and cloths, hoping to trade them locally for a profit. As a way to supplement their incomes many of the officers did the same, borrowing money from middlemen to purchase their initial stock. Capitein followed them, only to find himself sinking into debt. To escape his losses, he turned to the one truly profitable source of commerce on the Gold Coast. He began to buy and sell slaves.

Yet still his losses seemed to grow. On 27 December 1746 he was summoned to court in Elmina with debts of 8,447 guilders. Three days later he faced a further claim of 1,200 guilders from a local innkeeper and 79 guilders from a wine trader in Amsterdam. His reply forms his last recorded words.

‘I do not have it!' he told the court. ‘Sell my bed; it's no shame to me. Let those who wish to claim money be anxious, and not those in debt.'

Two months later, on 1 February 1747, Capitein was found dead, aged thirty.

In the West India Company minutes of October 1747, his demise was noted under ‘Other Business'. No cause of death was given. At the castle there was no tombstone laid to mark his grave. Such indifference suggests that Capitein probably committed suicide, an act regarded at the time as a mortal sin.

Having argued the case for slavery in Leiden, Capitein returned to Africa where he saw the reality of the trade for the first time. Each year 5,000 slaves were bought and sold at the castle. From his rooms, he'd have watched as they were made to strip naked in the courtyard and marched through the Door of No Return. At what point did he start to question his former certainties?

Capitein claimed to have forgotten the African family to which he was born. Each day he faced a reminder of his past. As he gazed down into the courtyard, perhaps the former slave asked himself if he'd ever truly been free.

Leaning beside the Door of No Return, the memory of Capitein prompted me to ask why
I'd
returned to Ghana. If I was looking for somewhere I belonged, why come to a country where I'd lived for only a few years as a kid? Perhaps because the truth of a place doesn't lie in the minutiae of childhood so much as in understanding the hold that the past maintains over the present.

Going
home is easy. The hard part is what happens after you arrive.