In Everlasting Memory

"The African continent was bled of its human resources [sic] via all possible routes: across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of Muslim countries…Four million enslaved people exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million across the Atlantic Ocean."

In a 500 km stretch of coastline in Ghana, 37 slave castles stand as monument to the atrocities of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Americas. 

Over 350 years, millions of African men, women and children were separated from their families, shackled, detained, beaten and sold into slavery at these forts.  African slaves were branded with a hot iron of their new owner’s insignia and pushed through the Door of No Return onto waiting boats for the New World.

The slave history and slave castles are an eerie backdrop to everyday life in coastal Ghana. These whitewashed forts sit on the edge of a beautiful coast, with rocky shoreline below, and the town’s center of commerce just behind them.  We visited the Cape Coast and Elmina castles on a hot, sunny day when the winter haramattan wind had clouded the humid air with dust.  Most folks went along their normal business of fishing and trading in the literal shadow of the castle. Inside the castle, however, there is a quiet reverence to the horrific experience that transpired there. 

The Portuguese arrived in Ghana in the late 15th century, initially for gold and ivory.  With the establishment of plantations in the Americas during the 16th century, slaves rapidly replaced gold as the prize export. Believed to be physically strong and well suited for work in the heat of colonies in the US south, Brazil and the Indies, West Africans were stolen from their homes and forced to walk hundreds of miles to forts along the southern coast.  Because many of these slave castles along the Gold Coast were originally built to store the first exports of gold ore, cocoa, timber and cotton, the castle cells are incredibly small, with little ventilation or light.  When the exhausted and starving captured Africans arrived at the coast, French, Spanish, Swedish, British and Portuguese colonizers packed 100 to 200 of them into these small cells. 

With five or so cells in each castle, up to 1000 people were held at one time, with enough food and water to stay alive, but not enough to retain their strength of body or spirit.  People slept and ate in their own waste in these rooms.  Disease spread through the weakened men. The Governor of the castle only called for women to be cleaned before he raped them.  The deceased were tossed to the ocean.  On-site chapels at each castle sanctioned it all.

The visit to the slave castles of Ghana was one of our last stops in West Africa.  It’s taken us almost three weeks to sit down to write this blog as we’ve processed the experience, at times bristling with disgust, at other times protectively detached.  After Ghana, we visited the pyramids in Cairo and ruins in ancient Greece – notably also built through slave labor. In the comparing slavery in each of these locations, what is so different about the trans-Atlantic slave trade is how massive the scale, how inhuman the brutality and how global the participation were in the exploitation of West and Central Africans. 

This systemic, economic and physical domination irrevocably changed the trajectory of peoples and nations for generations to come, both in Africa and in the New World.  In an economic analysis, the modern-day wealth of the West, the poverty and lack of infrastructure of Africa offer clear evidence that the impact of the slave trade is still felt around the world today.  And that says nothing of the toll that slavery has taken on the emotional, psychological and human aspect of all those who participated – either by choice or by force.

Today, at the door of each of the 37 slave castles, is a plaque that reads: