Cape Coast Slave Castle

This weekend, I had the opportunity to travel to Cape Coast, an area of Ghana where I have been wanting to go since my arrival in September. While the trip overall was a great weekend getaway, I was most impacted by our trip to the Cape Coast Slave Castle and the reality of the atrocities that happened there during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. It was a painful, but incredible opportunity to visit this place…

The view from the Governor's bedroom...

I don’t know how exactly to put this experience into words... The Cape Coast castle served as a place where captured Africans were brought, sold for a price depending on their strength and health, and then kept for 2 weeks-3 months before they were put on a boat and shipped off to Europe or the United States to, again, be sold as a slave. We walked through the dungeons where they were held, standing on a floor comprised of their urine, feces, vomit, etc. that has hardened over time. We saw the room where anyone who tried to escape was put, which had no ventilation and where they received no water and no food… they literally starved and suffocated to death, their punishment for attempted rebellion. We saw the room where any woman who wouldn’t let the soldiers use her to “satisfy their need for sex,” as our tour guide put it, was put for punishment, receiving only a small daily amount of food and water through a slit in the wall. We saw the Governor’s room, which had a beautiful ocean front view with a huge living space and a separate bedroom. We saw the site of the first Anglican Church in the country, built directly on top on the dungeons… They would sing and preach ON TOP of the prisoners that they had deemed as dirt and sold as property. “Ironically, Heaven up there, Hell down here.” We walked through the door where the captives were loaded onto ships and sent off, the Door of No Return…

We saw just a small, small piece of the hell that these people went through… and it was painful! Painful to think of the horror that these innocent African men, women, and children went through… Painful to think of the Governor sitting on his high horse with his ocean view and his personal secretary… Painful to think that human trafficking is still happening all over this world, and it happened to the kids I live with! It’s one of those things that you learn about in history class time and time again, but to actually get a little glimpse of reality… It hurts.

And I’m not sure what to do with that.