Everett-Castles and Slave Dungeons

Tuesday, Feb 14, 2012 Ghana

Ghana Day 2- Our second day (February 14th) in Ghana was probably the best day of the entire voyage so far. Cass and I went on a SAS sponsored trip to the Castles and Slave Dungeons of the Ghanaian coast. We set off at the ungodly hour of 7am and drove for 3 hours to Cape Coast, Ghana, to Castle Elmina.

There we were given an extensive history of the castle and its use during the height of the colonization period as a storehouse for gold, sugarcane, spices, and eventually (and most infamously) slaves. We were then taken on a tour of the grisly estate. Such morbid sights included the female slave dungeon were ~300 women were kept captive to live in their own filth for months before transport, the small courtyard where the women were herded out of the squalid chambers for display and humiliation (as punishment for disobedience), and the balcony above it where the Dutch Governor would make his pick of the women to take to his bed.

The Male sections of the dungeon were equally disturbing, as ~700 men were forced into rooms that seemed impossibly small for that number of bodies. The smell of accumulated filth, feces, and death still pervaded the cells, and many of the group were forced to hold their noses to avoid being sick.

In one end of the male dungeon, a small passageway branched out underneath the castle emptying into a room called the “room of no return” in which the slaves were put for several days before their final and inescapable transport onto the boats headed to the Americas and the Caribbean. To enter many of these chambers we were forced to stoop over because the ceilings were not high enough for people to stand upright.

Near the back of the castle were two cell doors which stood next to each other, one tiled in white, the other tiled in black and grey with a skull and crossbones over the doorframe. The one in white was for the white soldiers who misbehaved during their service, and used as a temporary punishment for the unruly soldiers. The inside was dark and stuffy, but a small amount of light permeated from the outside, and there was adequate ventilation to make the stay bearable although unpleasant. The neighboring cell, in contrast, was pitch black with no ventilation save for the bars on the door, as it was here that the more uncontrollable slaves were thrown without food and water until they died of starvation or thirst, as an example to the other slaves who might consider stepping out of line. At times up to fifty slaves could be put in these rooms and the Dutch would sometimes leave corpses in there until all the prisoners had starved to death forcing the captives to sit next to the lifeless bodies of their friends.