During their recent trip to Ghana, President Barack Obama and his family walked in the footsteps of Africans who boarded ships that would carry them to slavery in the New World. Obama, born to a Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, called the tour of Cape Coast Castle bittersweet, recognizing the sadness of its history while acknowledging the former slave fortress as the place "where the journey of much of the African-American experience began." Cape Coast Castle, about 100 miles from Accra, was the center of the British trans-Atlantic slave trade from 1664 to 1807. Millions of captive Africans, swept from their villages and herded like cattle for hundreds of miles, were brought to this coastal fortress to await their voyage to the Americas. Like First Lady Michelle Obama and most other African-Americans, I am a descendant of slaves who were shipped from ports such as this. Two years ago, my family and I also stood in the dark dungeons at Cape Coast Castle and tried to imagine the unimaginable. In our minds, we pictured our ancestors held captive for months in this inhumane place -- a thousand men crammed inside, forced to stand shackled at the ankles and bound to each other with wooden planks, until they collapsed in the sweltering heat. The only daylight came through a single opening in the ceiling from which the captives undoubtedly prayed for a cool breeze from the ocean just outside the fortress gate. I tried to breathe in the smell of disease and death. But after hundreds of years and two excavations to remove loads of human bones and decay, the odor had disappeared. I slid my feet across the smooth ground -- rock or concrete, I thought. I learned that we were standing on mounds of hardened excrement, human waste that covered the dungeon floor and walls. There had been no toilets for the slaves, only a channel in the middle that overflowed with urine and feces. We walked across the courtyard, to an even worse place. The "condemned cell" had a skull and crossbones carved above the entrance. There were no windows in this small dungeon, only a door that, once shut, would not reopen until everyone inside -- deprived of food, water and ventilation -- had died. The walls are covered with marks from where they futilely tried to claw themselves free. This was the punishment for those who had fought back, who refused orders or who had plotted to regain their freedom. The U.S. president was particularly struck by the fact that a church had stood over the dungeons where the male captives were kept, saying it "reminds us that sometimes we can tolerate and stand by great evil even as we think that we're doing good." As our Ghanaian guide told stories of women being dragged from their separate dungeons to be raped by the guards, I could almost hear their screams in the quiet. The screams, he said, belted through the church service. But no one stopped singing or praying, because slaves were considered property, not humans. At the end of the journey, my family, like the Obamas, walked down the narrow hallway and through the wooden Door of No Return, the last passageway on African soil. We stood for a moment and looked across the vast ocean before returning inside. Like the countless African-Americans who have made this journey in search of their roots, we felt great sadness. But there was also an overwhelming sense of pride. In spite of what our ancestors endured, we as a people had survived one of the world's greatest atrocities. We returned through the Door of No Return not only to reconnect with our past but to embrace it. Source: Dahleen Glanton Chicago Tribune