An Illinois State University professor hopes to raise racial sensitivity by raising awareness of the “missing link in the history of slavery” that began before imprisoned Africans even arrived on American shores and has affected African-Americans many generations later.
Ghana's Elmina Castle, where Africans languished while awaiting shipment to the Americas.
The slave dungeon.
According to Ama Oforiwaa Aduonum, the upcoming local presentation Why Do Black Lives Matter? Listening to Our Ancestors explores “the journey that people of African descent took to get here,” focusing on the African “slave dungeons” where men and women were held following their capture and sale to American “owners.” Aduonum extensively researched the experiences of African women who were enslaved at Elmina Castle on the coast of Ghana, and her program reportedly will attempt “to connect the dots from pre-slavery to Black Lives Matter Movement.”
The evening program will include a historical powerpoint, a musical dance drama featuring Bloomington-Normal community members, and a community “talk back and civic dialogue.” Aduonum will present the program from 7 to 8:45 p.m. June 29 and 30 in the Normal Public Library Community Room and July 5 and 12 in the Bloomington Public Library Community Room, from 7 to 9 p.m.
Often, individuals were kept in cages for months until slave ships could be filled for passage from Ghana across the Atlantic, and African women faced the same kind of sexual victimization they would experience with U.S. slave owners, Aduonum said.
She believes many of those who fail to understand or appreciate the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement fail to grasp the true depth of “the historical violation of black bodies.” As horrifying as some film treatments of slavery have been, Hollywood has effectively “whitewashed” its tragic, deep-rooted human dimensions, the ethnomusicologist and doctor of philosophy argues.
“What we hear about or see on TV is slaves working on the plantation,” Aduonum related. “We never talk about how they got here. My argument is that once they were captured and sold, it was in these places where they became slaves. It was there where they were controlled and starved or left to die in isolation cells. This was where their psyche was shaped – where they lost their community, their collective identity. Once you are branded, you are a commodity – your identity, your name, everything was stripped away.
“What this also shows us is that the violation of black bodies didn’t just start with the Black Lives Matter movement – it started a long time ago. I’m trying to make a connection between what is going on now and what was going on before. This racism actually started in these dungeons, because it was here where the idea of white superiority and black inferiority started – the objectification of black bodies started here.”
She characterizes the trauma and “anguish” slavery has inflicted on many modern African-Americans as “post-slavery traumatic syndrome,” comparable to general post-traumatic stress disorder but on a genetically ingrained “cell memory” level. Except, however, that “people who have gone through a traumatic situation often get counseling” – an option unavailable to those abruptly freed in the 1860s, some after nearly a lifetime of slavery.
Aduonum began researching the slave dungeons in 2009, during a university sabbatical, developing the script for the play Walking With My Ancestors in 2014 based on her interviews and journey to slave “spaces.” “I stood in this cell and tried to imagine what life must have been for these people who had no voice,” she recalled. “In my script, the spaces are also talking.”
Following its debut in November 2014, the program traveled to Washington last June and was presented last fall as part of ISU Homecoming. Aduonum cited “really intense dialogue” particularly in D.C., and noted ISU students were “outraged” by the lack of public attention given the slave dungeons – a historical aspect they felt was necessary for individuals to truly shape “informed decisions about racism.”
“We always assume that black people are complaining about nothing,” she suggested. “We just don’t know.”