In the male slave dungeon, Rabbi Kohain N. Halevi called for a moment of silence. More than fifty bodies were crowded into the Cape Coast Castle prison. It seemed impossible that the underground room once held as many as 1,000 captives.
A cell phone trilled in the darkness. Another let off a series of beeps. And then, for an instant, there was only the sound of human breath.
This was a moment the PANAFEST pilgrims had traveled thousands of miles to experience.
Time dissolved. There was a sense of connection-physical, palpable-with the ones who had been there before.
For members of the Diaspora touring Ghana during this year's PANAFEST celebration, a visit to the Cape Coast Castle dungeons is often the emotional focus of the journey.
The pilgrims, most from the United States, come seeking a link to ancestors brought in chains to the Americas centuries before.
They find it in the physical details of the space where slaves were once held: the mark on the wall up to which nearly 18 inches of filth and human waste had accumulated, the three slits that provided the room's only ventilation, the channel in the floor for draining the seawater that also rushed through the ventilating slits. Standing in their tour groups, they feel the press of bodies in that dark room.
Rahman Irvin, an American from Chicago, had only understood slavery from books before he came to Cape Coast.
"We read about it a lot. It's a part of our heritage," he said.
Then he toured the slave dungeon as part of a Howard University alumni trip to Ghana. "To actually put brick and mortar to what you've heard," Mr. Irvin said, "is a totally different thing."
Anger and grief may be part of the visitors' reactions to the physical embodiment of slavery, but these are not the emotions they emphasize.
As he marched in a candlelight procession towards Cape Castle Tuesday night, Kerry Hodges, an American, was full of joy.
"Although we're celebrating something really horrible this is a beautiful moment for me," he said. "It's a victory."
The emphasis was on the slaves' strength, not their suffering, during the recent visit to Cape Coast Castle led by Rabbi Halevi, the executive secretary of PANAFEST.
The Africans who survived the grueling Middle Passage were the toughest, the most able to endure. Their ancestors were a strong people, the pilgrims were told as they stood in the castle's prison rooms.
In these historical surroundings, the focus was very much on contemporary problems that African-Americans and other Diaspora visitors face at home.
The endurance of their slave ancestors should provide inspiration for African-Americans to unite against pervasive racial profiling, police brutality, and other challenges, the leaders of the trip argued.
"We have to stop shooting each other," Professor James Small, a longtime PANAFEST organizer, told the pilgrims. "We should stop being disorganized."
Earlier, as he spoke in the male slave dungeon, Rabbi Halevi delivered a similar message. "No matter what the challenges we face there is no excuse for us to fail. No excuse," Rabbi Halevi said in his resonant voice. "The ancestors will not allow it."
As he spoke, voices responded with affirmation. "Yes," they told him. "Yes."
"You're not just here because you have money to buy a plane ticket," Rabbi Halevi said. "You have been called."
For many Diaspora visitors, the link to African ancestors in Ghana is based as much on longing as on fact.
Enslaved Africans were given new names, and during the centuries of slavery, much family history was lost. Many who visit the Cape Coast dungeons have no way of establishing if their ancestors passed through the Door of No Return here or elsewhere-perhaps in another country altogether.
Yedidah T. Yehudah, an American who lives outside New York City, is one of the lucky ones. Enough information has been passed down through her family, she said, that she has been able to establish that her ancestors came from Ghana. She also knows that the men who enslaved her were Scottish, and she hopes to use this information to tease out even more of her family's history.
In the absence of written records, PANAFEST organizers place a lot of weight on the indelible biological link between Diasporans and their slave ancestors.
"You have come back to give honor to yourself and your god and your ancestors in your DNA. You can say you have ancestral bodies living in you," Dr. Rosalind Jeffries, a PANAFEST organizer, said in an invocation before a group of pilgrims visited the slave dungeons.
All this focus on forging a link with slave ancestors and gaining inspiration from history may mean that visitors make few connections with the living Ghanaians around them.
PANAFEST organizer Ebeneezer Dadzie, an Assembly Member for Liverpool, says this is an area that PANAFEST needs to improve.
"I want to see it more getting down with the people," Dadzie said.
Viveca Motsieloa, a Swedish ethnologist studying identity formation at PANAFEST events, said she also sees a lack of connection between Ghanaians and Disapora visitors. PANAFEST's stated goal of re-uniting the African family may be more rhetoric than reality, Ms. Motsieloa said.
"They talk about the African people, but the way I see it, it is more about the Diaspora," she said.
She said she has observed the greatest gap between Ghanaians and visitors from the United States, to whom the conditions in Ghana may come as a shock.
"The Caribbeans are also part of the Third World, and they feel more connection to the people," Ms. Motsieloa said. "Americans tend to travel in buses, in groups. Caribbeans tend to come alone."
The majority of Ghanaians-other than the more well-informed citizens of Cape Coast and Elmina-may also not realize why a visit to the Cape Coast dungeons is so meaningful to foreign visitors, Motsieloa said.
"They don't really understand what the interest is," she said.
But Mr. Dadzie, the PANAFEST organizer, said that the Ghanaian perspective of Diaspora visitors has undergone a radical improvement over the past decade.
"Before 1991, I see them as tourists," Mr. Dadzie admitted.
Back then, Ghanaians would see a man with a camera around his neck and, regardless of skin color, use the same word they used on other foreigners.
Ten years ago, Mr. Dadzie said, "They will call them obroni."
Now hearing the word "obroni" applied to Diasporans is more the exception than the rule, Mr. Dadzie said.
Ghanaians have been carefully educated that "They are not white people, they are brothers and sisters," he said.
Some Ghanaians have gone further than that in their understanding of what brings Diasporan visitors, especially African-Americans, to this country.
Moro Amidu, a resident of Accra, traveled two hours by trotro to Cape Coast to march with the Diasporans in a PANAFEST candlelight procession last Tuesday.
Watching American films like "Con Air" has given him an understanding of the racism African-Americans face in their own country.
"I didn't feel good at all," he said of the movie's depiction of America. "There's a lot of blacks in jail."
What does make him feel good, he said, is connecting with African-Americans through PANAFEST. And, he said, it's also good for them.
"I think it helps them to know where they are from," he said.
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