Osu Castle, Door of No Return, and Moral Evolution

I believe humanity has undergone what I like to call moral evolution. This idea was reinforced during my recent trip to Ghana for the Emergent Ventures Unconference. Compared to our ancestors, we are kinder and more altruistic. There is no better time to be alive, from a moral standpoint, than now. Yes, we are still a work in progress, but it’s worth acknowledging some of the successes we’ve made as a species when it comes to our moral impulses.

Part of my short stay in Ghana involved a visit to the Osu Castle. The castle has a complicated history involving the Danes and the British dating as far back as the 1600s. The castle, like every other castle the Danes and/or British built across Ghana, mainly served as a collection and departure point for slaves that had been trafficked throughout West Africa. When they arrived, they were crammed up in dungeons where they stayed between three to six months with no ventilation and with minimal sunlight. Something about the air and walls of the dungeons conveyed to me unspoken evil and atrocity.

I asked the tour guide what the rough estimate was for the number of slaves that were trafficked there, and she said about 100,000, going by the records kept by the Danes. That probably doesn’t account for the many who died due to the unsanitary conditions they were subjected to before the ship that would ferry them away arrived. The ones who fell sick in the castle were given minimal medical care. And if they didn’t get better after a few days, they were thrown into the sea.

We ended the tour by descending a narrow spiral staircase that exits through what is famously called the door of no return.  That’s the door the slaves exited to the beach, and from there proceeded to a ship awaiting them. For most of them, it was the first time they would see the ocean. Imagine how frightened they would be seeing how boisterous and loud the ocean was. That’s one hell of a way to exit the African shore.

One of the interesting things about the castle is how it was repurposed as the seat of power by the Ghanaian government. It served as the seat of the Ghanaian president till 2013 (I may be messing up the date). When Queen Elizabeth visited Ghana, she was hosted at the castle (her bedroom remains preserved). Jerry Rawlings, arguably Ghana’s most famous dictator, used one of the rooms upstairs as his office. The choice was practical as it gave him a direct line of sight to the gate of the castle in the event of an attack. Also upstairs, above one the dungeons, is a church. How do you even reconcile those? Nonetheless, the repurposing of the castle from its slavish history to the seat of power is one of the biggest twists as far as history goes.

It’s interesting how much architecture can tell us about the human condition. Some of the most breathtaking architectural wonders of the world were either built on slave labour or used for human sacrifices. How can beautiful things have such horrid histories? That paradox of the human condition is humbling as it is terrifying. While at the dungeon, I felt angry when I tried to imagine how the slaves were crammed up in such a tiny space. But on second thought, it occurred to me that if I were alive during the heyday when this castle was used to collect and ship slaves away, I probably would have been a slave raider or something close. Being offended at the atrocities of the past (a perfectly justified feeling) is arguably a luxury modernity and moral evolution affords us.

We have a tendency to romanticise the past and the ways of our ancestors. This bias is reinforced given the sensational way news is being distributed today. Scenes of wars in distant locations dominate our social media feeds all day long, and that makes us conclude that we are worse than our ancestors. Surely our capacity for carnage is exponentially higher than it was for prior generations. Steven Pinker has argued that we’ve made progress not just in public health, agriculture, poverty reduction, but also in peace. In Rationality, he writes,

“the world has not yet put an end to war, as the folk singers of the 1960s dreamed, but it has dramatically reduced their number and lethality, from a toll of 21.9 battle deaths per 100,000 people in 1950 to just 0.7 in 2019.”

There is also this prevailing idea that our distant hunter-gatherer ancestors were egalitarian and peaceful. While that is mostly true, they were only egalitarian and peaceful in a clannish sense. They frequently engaged in inter-clan battles. Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox talks about the execution hypothesis – a system adopted by our egalitarian hunter-gatherer ancestors to eliminate anyone among them who displayed signs of tyranny. In yet another lesson on the paradox of the human condition, Richard Wrangham argues that the execution of these would-be tyrants reduced the frequency at which they would appear in the gene pool. It was a kind of self-domestication for humans. Again, how can something so macabre produce unintended positive results?

For Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World, the Christianisation of Europe had a lot of psychological and sociological by-products. Christianity reduced the instinct for clan-based interpersonal relationships, and it led to the growth of impersonal relationships (inclination to trust strangers). Another example of the psychological by-products of Christianising Europe is how intentionality became a factor when passing moral judgment on the accused. This is akin to mens rea in Western jurisprudence. The Blackstone’s ratio is probably the ultimate embodiment of this. Certainly, this is moral progress.

In The Goodness Paradox, Richard Wrangham writes about the possibility of having a world state in the distant future. He suggests this will take place between 2300 CE and 3500 CE, if extrapolations from past trends are anything to go by. To fully appreciate this, we need to recall that human societies have historically been heavily fractured. The nation-state is a relatively novel idea, certainly in Africa. Among the Yoruba people, for instance, the idea of a Yoruba nation did not exist despite the fact that the Yorubas share a common language and ancestry. As a matter of fact, the Yorubas fought almost a century of civil war among themselves. There is a theory that this constant infighting made it easy for the colonialists to subjugate them. The Oyo empire (the most politically and militarily sophisticated Yoruba kingdom) had an expansionist ambition and was busy enslaving and annexing lands everywhere to present day Togo and Benin Republic. No culture has a monopoly on evil.

All of this is not to whitewash the depravity of the modern world. There is the ongoing conflict in Gaza, Putin’s aggression against Ukraine, the anglophone crisis in Cameroon, the suppression of the Uyghurs Muslims in China, Boko Haram, Lakuruwa, Al-Qaeda, North Korea’s despotic dystopia, millions of out of school children who are subjected to vagrancy under a system called Almajiri in northern Nigeria, corruption and nepotism in government, and a bunch of other issues. Most of us are offended at these problems, and we wish we could do more to fix them. But we can take some comfort in Martin Luther King Jr’s aphorism: the moral arc of the universe is long but bends towards justice.