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Check out "Heroes of Africa" is a five part series celebrating people who are improving the health, education, and quality of Africans. Check back to read all five installments.

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Day 1: Cape Coast, Ghana
"Heroes of Africa" is a five-part series celebrating people who are improving the health, education and quality of life of Africans. Check back to read all five installments.
By Richard Bangs
Related Links
African Public Broadcasting
Adullam Orphanage
MSN Encarta on Ghana
UNESCO World Heritage Site listing for Ghana
MSN Encarta on Atlantic Slave Trade


Standing on the parapet of the first substantial European building on the African continent, on one side of me the snout of a black iron cannon points at the Bight of Benin. The medieval-style castle is one of 42 slave factories built along a 300-mile stretch of Africa's western coast between the 15th and 18th centuries, the greatest such concentration along the continent.


On the other side of me is Emmanuel Akyeampong, a Ghanaian-born professor of history at Harvard University. Emmanuel points down to the brushfire crackle of the Atlantic as it topples into foam on a shingled coast. "The slave ships landed here because most of West Africa is rimmed with mangrove. Here the beaches are rocky and accessible."


For over 200 years, this dark bench on the gold coast of West Africa was the continental egress point for millions of slaves -- some 20 million by some estimates -- half of whom died on what has been called the "Middle Passage" between Africa and the Caribbean in the largest involuntary diaspora in human history.


If travel to Africa is about a colliding of realities, it is no less about the breeding of illusions. Most Americans, black or white, who imagine Africa, place it in one of two categories: the romantic milieu of wildlife safaris and gin-and-tonics on bamboo porticos; or the troubled, starving, AIDS-ridden Africa so often depicted in the news. We’re on a trip to explore the Africa betwixt the dreams and the dispatches, the Africa hard beaten through the centuries, but brimming with promise and hope.


We plan on visiting four of the continent’s 53 nations, meeting with Africans who are attempting to make a difference for their homeland. The trip was conceived and designed by Paul Maritz, a retired Microsoft executive who was born in Rhodesia, and who has spent much time and effort in Africa in years recent in efforts to empower Africans through access to better health, education and technology. Paul is one of many who have chosen to place Africa first.


The past seems very much alive here. Single-sail pirogues pitch in the swells, as they have for centuries. Women in bright skirts sway along the palm-fringed quay with tightly packed baskets of food on their heads; men barter their freshly caught snapper and shrimp along the crescent-shaped beach; bare-bottomed children frolic in the surf. As we stand above it all, on the fusty ramparts of the 15th century Elmina Castle, with its angular white walls, thick turrets and bastions gleaming under the African sun, Emmanuel talks about how an understanding of the past can make a difference in attitudes towards the future.


The Dutch, Portuguese, British and other European powers jockeyed for control of this coast, where they plied a brisk trade in cloth, iron, cowry shells, beads, tobacco and gin with the Ashanti kingdom in exchange for slaves, stolen from the interior. The human chattel were brought to "castles" such as this one, built along the coast originally as gold depots, and stored in airless dungeons waiting for the next ship to take them to across the "Big River" to the Caribbean to work on plantations. When the time came the slaves were shuffled down a long passageway through the "Door of No Return," then crammed into the holds of ships and wrenched from their homeland forever.


Professor Akyeampong has returned through this stunted metal door to do his part to help Africa, his personal assignment to "foster confidence in the young," as he says, and to help turn a "culture of end-users to producers, innovators and social architects."


Emmanuel never meant to leave Africa. He was finishing a master’s at the University of Ghana in 1984 when then-president Jerry John Rawlings shut down the school, where students had been protesting and criticizing his government. Emmanuel wanted to finish his education, and felt he had no choice but to leave the country, so he went to the University of Virginia and emerged with a PhD in History in 1993. Not long after he found himself at Harvard, where he became chair of the Committee on African Studies and designed courses such as his 27 lecture series on the history of slavery, among others.


Throughout he kept his home in Ghana, and returned several times a year. Eventually he decided it was time to give back, and he jumped into two projects: the Adullam AIDS orphanage near the royal capital of Kumasi, his birthplace; and then something quite bold -- a project he hopes with transform Africa through free information dissemination: The African Public Broadcasting Foundation, of which he is the volunteer USA president. APBF aims to provide sub-Saharan Africa’s 500 million people—half of whom are under the age of 18—with the equivalent of America’s PBS and NPR, continual transmission of free knowledge-enhancing programming that "inspires, entertains, informs and educates.”


Until just over ten years ago television broadcasting throughout Africa was exclusively in the hands of state-owned broadcasters, who abused the pipe and poured out programming for political agendas. But pressure from the World Bank, which stated that objective journalism was required to stimulate the development of multi-party democracies, forced a change, and in 1994 the first commercial broadcasting was introduced. Now virtually every country in Africa has independent commercial broadcasters, but there is still nothing pan-Africa, and nothing that serves the public free of advertising.


Emmanuel committed to this project while teaching at Harvard, where he had witnessed first-hand how information could illuminate and radically change the thinking of his students, and that with an understanding of Africa’s past a better future course could be plotted. If it worked for his students, it would certainly have profound effects on the disenfranchised of Africa.


Emmanuel gives an example. HIV/AIDS, the scourge of Africa with infection rates as high as 40% in some regions, has yet to provoke an effective campaign that persuades significant behavior change. There are posters, radio and television commercials, and speeches from politicians, urging Africans to abstain, be faithful, or use condoms. But many rural Africans believe the AIDS pandemic is a white man’s conspiracy to convince black Africans to have fewer children, so the race will eventually die out.


The first project Emmanuel wants to undertake is a comprehensive, year-long survey and analysis of the effectiveness of the various AIDS awareness communications. Then he wants to create a series of relevant PSAs (public service announcements) that will productively impart the right messaging. From there he plans on distributing original and licensed content that inspires and educates, helping promote an African renaissance.


He points out that the convenient myth maintains that the barbarous slave trade was all about Europeans abducting Africans, where in fact Africans were trading in slaves long before a high-masted caravel arrived. And it was the Ashanti tribe, Emmanuel’s own, that was the most notorious slave broker in West Africa, trading linen and muskets for humans in irons. Just knowing that can change an attitude that blames another race or culture for all that is wrong with a life.

Emmanuel also points out that the slave trade stole some of the most physically fit stock, leaving behind the infirm to procreate; that it forced tribes into hiding in infertile areas, where they grew cassava and other less-than nourishing foods, affecting the well-being of next generations. Families were torn apart; social mores and traditions washed out to sea; a culture of fear was left behind. All these led to situations today where many young Africans don’t know of the history that has shaped their lot, and so they assume a sort of fatalism and ambivalence that self-perpetuates. Unlike Asian youths, "where the world is their oyster," young Africans are often puzzled and unsure, their vision of a future flat. Emmanuel believes that by considering the circumstances that thrust Africans to their current stations, they can move forward to unchain the continent. "Africa is ready to leap forward."


Emmanuel’s belief is so strong that last year he moved his wife and 7-year-old daughter from Boston to Accra, where she is being educated as an African. "I might even broadcast my lectures on the history of slavery," he considers aloud as he walks down the lime-washed steps of Elmina Castle, this stone testimonial to one of the world's most shameful events, and then across the drawbridge towards a future he is trying to design.


He’s on his way to catch a bus to Accra to meet with executives from the office of the African Broadcasting Network, a commercial pan-African broadcaster with whom he is negotiating a public/private partnership for distribution. "Many of the continent’s most intractable problems can be effectively ameliorated by good communication. APBF can be a stimulant for social and economic transformation, and that’s what my mission is."


At Harvard, Emmanuel has opened the hearts and minds of hundreds of his students. Now he wants to reach tens of millions of his fellow Africans, and open the door that dissolves the grim shadows with the dawn.

But many rural Africans believe the AIDS pandemic is a white man’s conspiracy to convince black Africans to have fewer children, so the race will eventually die out.

That is what is killing them..

You know what, this kind of thinking goes on not only in Africa, but in Asia the Caribbean and throughout the world... and I'm not saying they're all thinking the above in bold, but that they're definitely living in denial about getting the disease.

[QUOTE=Dutty]But many rural Africans believe the AIDS pandemic is a white man’s conspiracy to convince black Africans to have fewer children, so the race will eventually die out.


That is one of the reasons why they are dying..QUOTE]

*Had to correct my english..

I am still curious as to the Origins of this disease and why it is allowed to continue to destroy lives up to this day..

I also heard that in South Africa, men carrying the virus or full-blown disease purposely sleep with virgins believing that they will be cured..

When I heard that, that was unbelievable..thinking sleeping with a virgin girl will cure you..I wonder how many other places in the world carry similar beliefs..

It is multiplying at a unbelievable rate..