Slave Castles/Dungeons

In Ghana many people go to visit what is called the Slave Castles & Dungeons. We visited Cape Coast, which has one such castle. It looks out to a bright blue ocean and I can imagine it was once a beautiful looking place. It still is ridiculously beautiful, and could almost be peaceful, except that it is haunted by a very sad and unjust history.

Serving as a fort, it was taken over many times and finally run by the British in the 1600s as a holding place for African men, women and children who would be sold into the slave trade. We went on a tour of this place and learned even more about the atrocious conditions Africans had to withstand, and how there was an actual community and church functioning around and above the dungeons. Literally, a torture chamber is right next to the church, or the dungeons are right below administrative spaces. Our guide shared with us some very difficult truths as we went through the tour of these spaces, and entering into the actual dungeon made it both real and incomprehensible that people once survived there in this way.

First our tour guide took us to the suffocation cell, where they would lock people if they tried to escape. Here there would be absolutely no light, ventilation, food or water, so they would stay until they died. In the men’s dungeon, there were 1,000 men stuffed into a small space, divided in five compartments - strongest to weakest. There were small ditches in the ground to insufficiently carry human waste out to the ocean. As much as two feet of human waste would be lingering in the dungeon amongst these people – dead and living. I am still trying to comprehend how one even tries to sit or to sleep, or even breathe in such circumstances. 300 women stayed in another dungeon and were often pulled out to be washed and raped by soldiers and dealers. It is hard to imagine two months of this, with about 50 percent of the slaves surviving overall. When the slave ships came, they were walked through the dungeons and finally saw daylight after so long. There is a wonderful view of the ocean, with a sandy shoreline and waves crashing white spray against black rocks. I wonder if at this point the slaves had a glimpse of hope for something better, or a small moment to appreciate fresh ocean air… but I assume that they had lost much of their integrity, strength, hope, and especially their trust in the men leading them to their fate. These Africans walked through the “Door of No Return” to enter canoes that took them to the slave ships. The Door of No Return signifies that no African leaving through that door would ever return back to their continent of Africa, or their country. In the slave ships were even worse conditions. There they were shackled to each other and forced to lay two by two by two for months on their way to be traded and even more degraded in health and humanity. Forced to lay in their own waste and disease. Be hungry, seasick and motionless. Be witness to death and smells that no human should ever know. Sometimes all of the slave passengers would be thrown overboard alive, if the ship was in trouble of getting caught carrying slaves.

I just can’t comprehend or even begin to imagine how humans would get to a point of thinking that any of this was OK. To treat any living creature this way, especially human beings – I can’t imagine how it was reasoned or rationalized or taught; how anything on this earth would be treated that way without critical thought… and yet I see in our history how deeply impenetrable many forms of oppression are. Or how critical thought somehow floats away slowly without us realizing.