The Year of Return – African Americans and Africa – Andy’s Back in the Jungle

My first foray out into the Ghanaian world beyond Accra was a trip down to Cape Coast which is a bog standard place for tourists to visit when they come to Ghana. I was certainly limited in my opportunities to find some great unique adventure like Odysseus, but I made certain not to leave without trying my best to dig as deep as I could in the small sandboxes my trip afforded me. Cape Coast houses some rather unique places, so unique as to receive the distinction of UNESCO World Heritage Site status. While many World Heritage Sites are resplendent with architectural, archaeological or natural beauty, the three sites down in Cape Coast were accorded the honor from the UN for very different reasons. The first place I visited was the castle built on the coast of Ghana by the British in the 1600s. Its walls stood not so high but its dungeons ran deep under the earth. It was here that monies were exchanged between Europeans and Africans, a ship was loaded with captured men and women and the first Africans were floated across the Atlantic to the new world – and the transatlantic slave trade began.

As America gradually began to move away from her founding principles of limited government during the second half of the 1800s and into the 20th century, the scars she left upon the world grew in both number and severity. As such, there are certain parts of the world that I think we can all agree we should make an effort to visit if we find ourself given the necessary proximity. Our participation in the transatlantic slave trade, even though my own forefathers came to the country some 40 years after the end of the American Civil War, made me feel it was something I should definitely visit. Within the white-washed, sun-bleached, and salt-sprayed walls and corridors of the castle, which as so many castles are, consisting of several physical incarnations of the same purpose and necessity molded and buckled together decade after decade, I encountered large groups of black Americans and Englishmen. I then remembered something my host Kwadwo had told me earlier that week, that 2019 was designated as the “Year of Return” a massive global awareness campaign in which Ghanaian culture and tourism ministries focused on inviting Africans around the world living in what they described as a diaspora, to return to the country of their ancestors to pay homage and invest in the local economy. From what I heard on the radio during various car rides throughout the journey, it was a measured success, with celebrities like Jay Z and Beyonce visiting and performing shows in the country. So I thought it was a really special time to see the slave castle, alongside my countrymen experiencing such an important moment of reflection. The only drawback was that the tour guide needed at least a solid month off, for he possessed all the diction and verve of language as a common garden snail. After I heard him say the phrase “Sleeping in their feces and dying in their numbers,” the fourth time, the luster had very much been lost.

After the tour, I charged my driver with taking me to Kakum National Park, the primary purpose for my visit to Cape Coast because Kakum is a jungle and I love the jungle. I realized while I was preparing for the trip that the jungle, to say tropical rainforest, is the only ecosystem the United States is not blessed with. I suppose I’m wrong in that there is jungle in Hawaii, but let’s be honest, is that really the United States? There is rainforest in the Pacific Northwest, but it isn’t tropical, and you wouldn’t want to be caught in it during the winter. A proper hot steamy jungle is a place like no other and one which I love beyond all conjurable words. On our way, the driver, a young man who like me also didn’t have ancestors involved in the slave trade – an irony not lost on either of us, talked to me about the only thing drivers in Africa talk to you about – the corruption in their government. This discussion was punctuated finely by a routine police stop in which the glorified revenue collectors harassed the driver about the state of his on board fire extinguisher, a motoring requirement in Ghana, until I gave the pig a 20 and we were off again. I’ve never bribed a police officer in all my travels, but it was something which I knew I’d have to do eventually.

Kakum is famous for having a series of rope and plank bridges suspended above the jungle canopy. In some places they dangle over 100 feet from the ground, and walking across them was just a matter of walking so slowly as to just keep pace with your tour group just enough until the next tour group came from behind, and then slowing down and merging with it – wash, rinse, repeat until you’ve taken in enough of the view. It was a great experience but the numbers of people detracted a fair amount from the scenery and ambience. Following my descent, I waited around for one of the rangers to take me to my campsite for my traditional nighttime camping in the jungle, something I always try to do when I have the chance. While waiting around, the park closed for the day, and as the day trippers filtered away in their tour buses and vans, I became acquainted with the folks I was going to share in the second half of my jungle adventure with. The first group was a genuine surprise to me, as I don’t equate adventuring at night in the jungle as an activity that Russians have a lot of interest in. The other two, a British couple, helped me get over a small bout of loneliness I was managing. They first noticed me due to my use of English phrases, but with an accent they thought belonged to an ESL speaker. A teacher and an entomologist, Lizzie and Chris were diamonds – truly lovely and a credit to their island. Not only had I suddenly acquired some friends, but friends who were entirely fascinated, like me, with the natural world. Chris and Lizzie would grab insects and show them to me, we’d look at birds and butterflies through their binoculars, and at night we stood on the balcony of the tree house well all lodged in and take wild guesses as to what kind of animal was cooing, crowing, or yowling out in the gloom. Indeed I gave up the idea of camping to join my World War 2 allies in the treehouse. I was supposed to partake of a night walk through the jungle, but was stricken with such exhaustion that I accidently fell asleep, despite the fact that I was caked in so many layers of sweat that it cleared my skin of all blemishes and dryness for 6 days.

The next morning we left for the morning hike, saw some monkeys wake up, but the notable moment was the chance to do the rope bridge canopy walk a second time, only now at our leisure and silence. I always say about the jungle that it’s like walking through the arteries of a large animal. Having spent the previous 3 weeks in deserts wherein it’s not so clear to the naked eye how the lifeforms in the ecosystem fit together and work off each other, the contrast at that moment in the rainforest was even more stark than it might have been if I had spent the last 3 weeks in the woods or mountains or some other terrain. All the noises, the plants curling about each other, the ants and other insects that patrol every vine and every fallen log press in and fold around the trail and serves to really give you the feeling you are inside a living thing and not a collection of static objects. Meanwhile the sounds on the jungle floor are dull, often loud, broken up, consisting mostly of insects and at distances the ear struggles to estimate. The sound is more like an industrial concert, whereas from the bridges over the canopy, each of the separate pockets of life from the forest floor to the bromeliads and branches to the treetops layer themselves like an orchestra which by the time it exists into the steamy blue sky is perfectly blended together into a soothing wondrous symphony that when paired with the rising sun, made for one of the more special mornings of my life.