Weekend at Cape Coast: The Slave Castle

Weekend at Cape Coast
Dr. Sossou arranged for us to take a weekend vacation on the beach, as this weekend is the national holiday of Ghanaian independence. Two major activities were planned for the weekend: touring the Slave Castle and hiking in the Cocum Rainforest. The rest of our time will be spent simply enjoying the beach resort and working very hard on our tans. : )

Yesterday, we toured the Slave Castle. The Slave Castle was originally built as a fort for the British, but it exchanged hands many times among quarreling Europeans. But for most of its existence, it was developed and utilized as a storing and shipping point for African slaves to be taken to Europe or the New World. It may seem difficult to imagine that such a beautiful building could’ve imprisoned, tortured, and doomed so many thousands of innocent lives. It is a massive white castle, towering up to the sky and facing the sea. But the scene seems ominous from the beginning, because the sea is violent here. The waves crash upon jagged black shore stone, relentless.

We viewed the museum, which gave a brief history of slavery in Ghana. The museum included artifacts from the beginning to the end of the slave trade here. They provided estimates of over 25 million enslaved Africans having been forced from their home and into foreign hells. A small diagram proved to be the most disturbing artifact in the museum to me. The diagram illustrated how traders maximized space on the ships in order to transport as many Africans as possible in one trip. The diagram showed figures of men with their arms pinned to their sides, their necks and backs and limbs bent at impossible angles, some upside down, some right side up- one atop another…

The transport time from Africa to the destinations could more than three months. Because of the manner of storing the Africans, there would have been no way to let anyone out to stretch or to relieve themselves. Therefore, many Africans died just on the journey. I can’t imagine the confused horror of such a voyage, after being torn away from your homeland. How many Africans suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder for the rest of their lives, just from the experience of the voyage alone?

We toured the castle after the museum. Normally I hate tours, and especially tour guides, because they manage to cheese up really significant experiences- but our tour guide was Oscar, and Oscar was different. Oscar had a wide knowledge base, and a gentle manner. He carried the weight of Slave Castle’s history in his eloquent, soft voice. He seemed to understand that the history he was telling was true, that it had all really happened.

Oscar led us through storage dungeons, where captured Africans were warehoused for about six weeks at a time before actually being shipped out. The storage dungeons were underground, damp, and frightening. In many of the dungeons, there was no light but a complete, consuming darkness that by itself could drive a person to insanity. We were shown areas on the walls were people had bitten into the concrete or scratched at the stone with their bare nails, driven mad by the despair of it all.


I’m not sure if I believe in ghosts, but I knew if there were any in existence, they would have to be there beside me, inside this castle on the coast. I felt they would have to be furious, a type of ghost born out of desperation and rage. And I felt haunted by it all, by us living men, our ability and desire to organize ourselves and our architecture together purely in order to commit momentous and historic evil.

I wanted to leave. It was a beautiful castle, but now I understood why the sea was so angry, why the coast was so broken and barren and sharp. Something dark had occurred here- and not once, but over and over and over, by many different countries, by thousands of different men, over hundreds of years. I couldn’t stand s being in the exact spot where women had had their babies ripped from their arms, where women had then been raped and forced to have more children, and that those were taken too. Like livestock animals. And I couldn’t shake the reality of the fact that men had died here, and by cruel, slow means. Even if they survived, their lives and perhaps their sanity were still stolen from them, all those possibilities, gone forever.