Ghana Day 2

Today we boarded a bus at 7 am for a long journey from Tema through Accra to the Cape Coast and Elmina slave castles more than an hour west of Accra.

 Cape Coast is the capital of Central Ghana.  Europeans were attracted to the area because there was gold there. (Ghana was once called the Gold Coast.)    The castle was originally built by Swedes in 1653 as commercial marketplace for trade with the local population..  It was later controlled by Denmark and then Great Britain who used it in the transatlantic slave trade.   For that purpose, large underground dungeons were built to house as many as a thousand slaves at one time.

Elmina Castle was built by the Portuguese in 1482.  It was the first European structure built in Sub-Saharan African.   According to Wikipedia, this castle, "acted as a depot where slaves were bought in bartering fashion from local African chiefs and kings. The slaves, often captured in the African interior by the slave-catchers of coastal tribes, were sold to Portuguese traders in exchange for goods such as textiles and horses. The slaves were held captive in the castle before exiting through the castle's infamous "Door of No Return" to be transported and resold in newly colonized Brazil and other Portuguese colonies."

Now the castles are museums dedicated to the memory of those who died there and in the slave trade and committed to making sure nothing so horrible ever happens again.

Here we are at the Door of No Return at the Coast Castle.  Our guide was particularly eloquent there.

  

One of our students stooped to look at out the much smaller door at Elmina.

 It's impossible, really, to describe our feelings standing in places like this.  Especially, when visiting in the company of several African-American students from the ship.   There are or words to make sense of the fact that Christian chapels were built right on top of the dungeons.  This shows the Anglican chapel at the Cape Coast Castle.

 

 

Our guide closed one of the doors and turned off the lights behind us in one of the dungeons so we could see what a dungeon, with its minimal light and ventilation, was like for the people who spent from several weeks to three months in them before being forced into slave ships for the journey across the sea that millions would not survey.  And they may have been the lucky ones.

These are markings on the stone floors of the dungeon, made by the slaves chains.

For Barry, one of the most poignant moments was occurred in the museum at the Cape Coast Castle.  The museum featured a few of the famous pictures we've all seen that showed the horrors of slavery in the Americas.   There was a Canadian man of Africa descent touring the castle with our group with his family.   His young son, probably seven or eight years old, ask him, "Why were they doing that to those people?"  His father, couldn't answer: "I can't explain it to you son.   Ask me in about ten years."  Jayne rose to the occasion, explaining slavery in simple terms a child could understand.  

When the slave trade was abolished in Great Britain the passageway from the men's dungeons to the Door of No Return were bricked shut.  We learned from our guide that the castle was built on a rock considered sacred by the people of the region.  A few years ago, local elders insisted that a shrine to local gods be established in the last dungeon. The shrine was attended by a priest or a shaman when we were there today. Barry will be giving a presentation on the vibrant religious traditions of Africa for the Global Studies class that all students take.  This picture will be part of that presentation.

 

The village around Elmina is dedicated to fishing.   There is no fishing on Tuesdays because, according to our guide, Tuesday is the "Sabbath" for the god of fishing.   I suppose that is why there were so many fishing boats onshore today.

 

We took lots of pictures along the way and are still trying to make sense of all we saw.  And we had quite an adventurous journey back.  We write about all that tomorrow.