Okay here is a blog about everything that we learned at the Slave Castle
In April 1663 the whole Swedish Gold Coast (what Cape Coast was called in that time when Ghana was just an “area” of Africa) was seized by the Danish. In 1664 the Castle was conquered by the English and was extensively rebuilt by the Committee of Merchants (whose Governors administered the entire British colony) in the late 18th century. In 1844, it became the seat of the colonial Government of the British Gold Coast.
The Castle was built for the trade in timber and gold. Later the structure was used in the trans-Atlantic slave trade (which is mostly what I will talk about in this blog). The Castle, or Castle and Dungeon, to give it its official name, was first restored in the 1920s by the British Public Works Department to be a memorial and museum of what happened during the slave trade.
When we first entered the castle we started our tour. We learned that Slaves were not just randomly round up within Africa. When Africans were sent to these castles it was because they were criminals and had been caught for something in their area. For men most were theives or they were trying to overtake governement officials, rebels basically. For women it was mostly adulterers that were sent to the castle. Once they got to the castle (after grueling and torturous journeys from their area’s of africa, where along the journey they were often brutaly beaten) they were evaluated on whether they were weak, strong, or sick. They had different set of three letters for each category. Once determined if they were sick, strong, or weak they were then “branded”. Branded means that the governors of the castle would take a hot metal cast iron with the initals as a stamp on the bottom of it, they would make the stamp part of the metal cast iron pipng hot, and then they would scorch the three respective letters onto the persons back so that they could be identified while they were in the dungeons. Once they were branded there were separate dungeons, 3 male dungeons and 3 female dungeons, the strong were kept in the same room, weak in the same room, and sick in the same room (male and females were separated).
The first set of dungeons on our tour through the Castle were the male dungeons. These dungeons were about the size of an average persons living room, but there were on average 550 slaves kept in each dungeon. The dungeons are all underground and in each dungeon there was only a very small window close to the ceiling for ventilation and light. They were just empty rooms all cement bricks and so people were shackled and chained to the floor at their ankles, neck, and wrists in sections by the letter of their first name. All along the walls about a 2 feet up from the floor were letters of the alphabet that encircled the room to separate people. The guide told us that at most times these two feet from the floor was filled with the slaves own urine, feces, and vomit. This really hit a hard spot for me because to imagine people living for months on end before they got a slave job to do, they were living in a dark cell in a pool of their own waste . . . . It sounds horrible I know, but standing in that same room made it even worse. The guide turned off the lights (that were not there at the slave time) and closed the dungeon door while giving us all this information so we could get a feel for how it would have felt. They were fed yam, rice or fish once a day, and were given water once a day, but a lot of the emprisoned slaves tried to starve themselves, and if they were caught doing that they were immediately traded to be a slave in another country where “the white man” would be brutal to them. The slaves that were traded of to the North American Countries were generally the men in the “strong” dungeon room, then it moved to the “weak” and the guide said that the sick normally died in their respective dungeon. The “weak” dungeon room had a door of no return where people tried to escape but ended up dying. Also in this room there was a room the size of a closet where they put the sick to die! Directly above the male “strong” dungeon the castle governor built a protestant church. This was often refferred to as heaven and hell (heaven being the church, hell being the dungeon below) The female dungeons looked very similar and worked the same way.
When they were traded they were sent through the “door of no return” which was the only door leading outside to the coast in the castle, and it was the height of about your waist, and it was a very slender door. So they (while still shackled) were made to crawl outside of this door into sunlight for the first time in months to years, where they were immediately greeted by the North Americans and beaten while they were put on boats for them (aka us). A lot of the slaves were blinded and experienced blindness for quite some time after being outside because they had been in the dark for so long, the North Americans (us) usually beat them the entire way back on the boats trying to “beat the sight back into them”. Now imagine being me as a white person going through this tour and learning about how brutal and horrible we were . . . . I felt like crying most of the tour but I managed to hold it together . . . but it was like “foot in mouth” syndrome embarrasingly multiplied by hundreds L!
The next day on Sunday we went to the Elmina Castle. Elmina Castle was built by Portugal in 1482 as São Jorge da Mina (St. George of the Mine) Castle, also known simply as Mina or Feitoria da Mina) in present-day Elmina, Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast). It was the first trading post built on the Gulf of Guinea, so is the oldest European building in existence below the Sahara. First established as a trade settlement, the castle later became one of the most important stops on the route of the Atlantic slave trade. The Dutch seized the fort from the Portuguese in 1637, and took over all the Portuguese Gold Coast in 1642. The slave trade continued under the Dutch until 1814; in 1871 the Dutch Gold Coast, including the fort, became a possession of the British Empire.
By the seventeenth century, most trade in West Africa concentrated on the sale of slaves. São Jorge da Mina (Elmina Castle) played a significant part in the Atlantic Slave Trade. The 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.
So in this castle the slaves mainly went to Europe, Portugal, and South America. So that wasn’t us, but equally as bad.
In this castle I found there was much more authentic untouched antiques and materials. It is less renovated (than Cape Coast Castle) and so you can see markings, stains, evidence of struggles, and original cement bricks and wood. The Dungeons and the basic structure of this castle was the same as cape coast castle, as well as how they branded slaves and the conditions that they were kept. In some of the dungeons that we saw here there were still embeded fingernails and evident scratching marks of the prisoners trying to claw their way out of the dungeon, or if they were suffering while dying . . . It was a hard thing to be standing in front of! Also they had three of the original prison bars that were laid against they wall and in the rust you could see the finger prints. We also saw the actual shackles that were used at the time with blood stains still on them. Very heartbreaking, looking at this raw evidence and material brought a lump to my throat.
There were also cells for prisoners at the castle. There were two side by side. One was for foreigners (north americans, europeans, and south americans) who did crimes and they only stayed in that cell for a day. The cell beside it was called the death cell and it was for the slaves within the castle that disobeyed, or for slaves that were deemed useless once the “foreigners” got them and sent back. Above this cell was a skull and cross bones to signify death. This is because when the slaves were put in this cell for whatever reason they never came back out. They were given no food or water and starved to death. The bodies were only cleaned out of this cell once a month, so most prisoners in this very very tiny cell were surronded by dead bodies, a prediction of what they would soon be. We saw shrines to the dead prisoners and some of the bones which we were not allowed to take pictures of . . . understandably. But the only ventalation for these two cells was a window on the top of the wall in between the two cells, so the foreigners could hear the slaves dying. Pitch black cells.
At this castle there was a “door of no return” to the outside coast to be traded that is very similar in size to the Cape Coast Castle. The same type of situation happened as well.
At the top of each of these Castles there was the Governers Chambers which were ridiculously nice in comparison to the rest of the castle . . . quite disturbing really.
At the end of the tour there was a big plaque saying how they remember those who died and they are doing everything in their power to make sure that this kind of injustice never happens again.
The slave trade is sometimes called the Maafa by African and African-American scholars, meaning "holocaust" or "great disaster" in Swahili. Some scholars, such as Marimba Ani and Maulana Karenga use the terms African Holocaust or Holocaust of Enslavement. After being inside of these castles and learning what I did, I can understand why they would refer to it as the African Holocost.
I hope that you enjoyed learning about all of the things I learned at Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle. Please check my facebook for the photo’s . . . They are more shocking then all of this information was . . .
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