A GNA feature by Christian Agubretu
Accra, July 1, GNA - One of the greatest historical events to take place in Ghana will be the august visit of US President Barrack Obama. Already on the airwaves and the newspapers one can discern the warm and rousing welcome that awaits him to depict the proverbial Ghanaian hospitality.

The visit means so much t o Ghanaians and the whole of Africa and one cannot fail to measure the socio-economic benefits that would serve a purpose for which America stands.

President Obama would not be the first US President to come to Ghana. President William Jefferson Clinton visited Ghana in March 1998 and described the crowd that welcomed him to Accra as the largest that he had met in his political career.

His successor former President George Bush also visited Ghana in February 2008 and has never regretted setting foot on Ghanaian soil. President Obama's visit portends to be more hilarious and significant as the first Black American President has chosen Ghana to be his first official visit to Africa, barely six months after entering the White House.

The euphoria and the jingles are conquering the airwaves and the Obama fever has caught on with the Ghanaians, even more than when he was engaged in his campaign as a candidate.
Many glamorous events are earmarked for his visit, with one of the most significant being his request to visit the Cape Coast Castle, the main slave trading fort in days when Ghana was a British colony. Mrs Zita Okaikoi, Minister of Information, has said it was President Obama himself who requested to visit the Cape Coast Castle and that the Ghana government has to honour that request.

For an American President to specifically choose to visit the Cape Coast Castle, where hundreds of thousands of slaves were transported to the New World, speaks volumes.
The repercussions that followed the discovery of America by Amerigo Vespucci turned the fortunes of America and Africa. The Black man was considered to be hardy and able to withstand the vagaries of American weather to work on the plantations - tobacco, tea, maize and other crops - to feed Europe and America.
Amerigo Vespucci (March 9, 1454 - February 22, 1512) was an Italian explorer, navigator and cartographer. It has long been the notion that the continent of America derives its name from the feminized Latin version of his first name.
The slave trade showed man's inhumanity to man. It led to de-population of Africa and populated and increased agricultural production through slave labour in America which eventually facilitated the industrialization of that country.
President Obama himself knows the history more than this article can portray and that one needs not even go into that sordid past which can be considered unpleasant to such an august visitor.
All the same the slave trade remains indelible in the minds of the people of Africans.
Clearly, the dungeons, where the slaves were kept, and the "journey-of-no-return" that the slaves went through, were more than hell.
Americans must even be more informed about the Cape Coast Castle than many Ghanaians. Despite the scrubbing and the use of detergents, the stench of dead bodies, blood stains, human excreta still remain. Again, one can see the finger and toe marks on the walls when the slaves struggled for breath when they were in chains. It was horror. History cannot erase it. All the same blacks and whites have co-existed peacefully as creatures of God.
Every year tourists, especially African-Americans, who attend PANAFEST (Pan African Festival) in Ghana, break down in tears when they visualize the sordid conditions that human beings went through when they were being transported from the West coast of Africa across the Atlantic to America and other parts of the world.
On one occasion after Professor Kofi Anyidoho, a poet and a former lecturer at the University of Ghana, Legon, had conducted some tourists through the dungeons, many of the visitors broke down in tears. One of them said: "These are things we read in books back in the US and try to brush aside, but one cannot fail.to appreciate.what our forefathers really went through."
When President Obama sees those things he would definitely "cry" and this must be translated into a "Marshall Plan for Africa" to salvage her from dependency arising out of the slave trade, colonialism and neo-colonialism. 1 July 09