Cape Coast Castle

Cape Coast Castle is a huge white former slave fort right on the rocks overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, and is the most popular tourist destination in Cape. The castle is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (tick, Kez) and although it cost nine cedis each to get in with a camera each, the guide English and it was a really good tour.

Barrack Obama had visited the same spot only a few months earlier, and this was commemorated by a plaque. Coming to think about it, there were huge posters and billboards all over town saying "Akwaaba" (welcome in Twi, local Ghanaian language) with a giant picture of Barrack and his wife Michelle. Another had a picture of the Ghanaian President with Obama saying "A new future together". Other things we'd seen across the trip included Obama t-shirts, restaurants and bars taking his name, bumper stickers, even Obama biscuits! They love him over here!

Anyway; back to the Castle. We started off in the museum because there weren't enough people for a guide quite yet. The museum was really informative and had displays on all sorts of things from the history of Ghana when it was the Gold Coast, to European contacts and the transatlantic slave trade, right through to famous and influential black people including Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jnr. The castle itself was a Portuguese building in the 15th Century, specialising in gold, ivory and spices as well as slaves, before being taken over in 1665 by the British who concentrated on the Transatlantic slave trade. Saying that though, I found it very interesting that a part of the museum concentrated on the slave trade by tribes before Europeans arrived, and who acted as middle men during the awful period.

The tour began in the main courtyard where Obama gave his speech, and we saw piles of cannon balls and a few graves of some VIPs from years ago. Interestingly one of them was the first black Christian minister who returned to Ghana after being abroad and gave sermons in a small chapel that was above the male slave dungeon. So he was praying with the Europeans whilst he could hear the groans and screams of his countrymen a few feet below...

Continuing on, the male dungeon was very dark, with only a small hole high in the roof to let in light. About 1000 slaves were kept in a room (each just over half the size a tennis court), and had to sleep, eat and go to the toilet over each other. There wasn't enough room for the waste to flow out and so it blocked up and they all had to sleep on top of it. Pretty horrific, but even worse when you hear that they had to stay in there for two months at a time, and any dead bodies weren't removed for days at a time. they would then be thrown over the side of the fort with weights attached. The guide at one point turned off the lights and we were in pitch black; you could really feel the heat and lack of ventilation as well.

We then took a walk above ground where we could wee the passage that the men took to the Door of No Return; from there they were herded onto ships bound for the Europe, America, Brazil or the Caribbean, that sometimes took many, many weeks. The women were kept separate, in equally revolting conditions, before also being forced into cramped conditions on the ships, where about 15 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic! The scale of the operation was shocking. Men, women and children were dragged away from their families, separated from everyone they knew and put through hell before mainly ending up for sale to work in plantations in the Americas.

We then saw the market room, where 'businessmen' bidded on them, and then looked inside a few tiny dungeons where those who tried to escape were tortured and left to die. The guide was truly excellent and explained everything very clearly, even about the Ashanti's, who lived in Ghana, and were one of the main facilitators of the slave trade, selling captives from battles and raids for guns and alcohol - what else eh?!

The place was very grim and sobering, but incrediblely informative. The guide really made the tour and I am pleased that I came to see it. The scratches on the walls of the dungeons where slaves had tried to climb out and the darkness of the dungeons were both sad but had an eerie feeling that the walls were talking to you.

After the trip we had a Fan Milk to cheer us up and went for a wander through town to two other places that were on the map. The Crab statue was purely that and London Bridge was barely a bridge over a small waste channel - maybe 6 feet across. After picking up some diced plantain (a bigger cousin of the banana) that had been fried in chilli powder - absolutely amazing, could have eaten five times the amount - we headed back to Sammos, our minds wandering quite a lot, and we sent a quick email to Green Turtle Bay, right on the coast, about Christmas reservations. That night we ate next to the Castle, and all had some kind of seafood. Got to by the coast haven't you!