Karamagi Rujumba listed Elmina Castle in Cape Coast, Ghana as a "destination spotlight."
Memorable, impersonal, souvenir, picturesque in ways Kumasi could never be.
A hub of leftover ivory towers,
brilliant blue, transatlantic accommodations,
oceanfront view but only three stars:

Bone fragments line the brick floors
The archaeologists refuse to wash them away.
Blood trickles into the cracks of cement as if the blacktop has ridges and lifelines.
This inconvenience is regretted.

The Portuguese came in 1482 to scatter a diaspora that would never recall itself.
Guilt and recollection is buried somewhere at sea but
the tour guide will take your picture for you.

Refundable fare if you can’t understand him speaking
of chains and chucked ropes, slums and wooden shacks,
the dark residue in watch-your-step dungeons, of how easy it is
to rest your feet for just a moment at the base of a rusted cannon - lean your body on it
and the sub-Saharan sun will delay your realization
of what they used canons for here,
of ancestry that has collapsed like the orange roof of Elmina Castle,
of why the people who live on Cape Coast have the fairest skin in West Africa,
of what man has been capable of, of what man is still capable of

Today when you pass the door of no return,
fishermen and textile workers squat with their feet buried in the wet sand.
The coastal economy bustles on as its history is still screaming.