Places of Interest in Accra and Ghana- Cape Coast Castle

Cape Coast Castle

Seventy six miles, and around two and a half hours, by coach from Accra lies the town of Cape Coast, and " Cape Coast castle". It is generally accepted that the castle stands on a site where there have been several other fortifications including a timber construction built by the Swedish Africa Company, named Carolusborg after King Charles X of Sweden.

The first foreigners to have settled in the area were thought to have been the Portuguese.The name Cape Coast comes from the Portuguese "cabo corso" meaning "short cape", and it's known that from the 1480s the Portuguese traded with local tribes in the cape coast area.

The castle was originally used for holding traded goods but was converted & used as a human holding depot; slaves where kept against their will in dungeons until ships arrived to take them to the "new world" .

In one year it was estimated that over around 600,000 slaves were sent to Brazil, and throughout the Americas. The last thing the slaves saw of the castle was "the door of no return" which faces & opens seaward, and was so named since once through the door there was no chance of returning to Africa.

In recent years Black American descendants of slaves from Ghana have made pilgrimages back to The Cape Coast Castle to make a spiritual statement that ,as descendants of the slaves they have returned thus challenging the statement " the door of no return".

Looking out from Cape Coast Castle to Gulf of Guinea

Although the slave trade was technically abolished in 1807 it did not completely and physically end until the 1870's. It might be assumed that slavery was a one sided story with white people capturing black people & making slaves of them. If this was a fact it might be less depressing, but in truth Ghanaians were in fact implicit in the slave trade themselves.

Slaves in fact were often the end result of inter tribal disputes, the wining tribe capturing and selling the captives of the defeated tribe to the British. An excerpt from the times Newspaper on February the 9th 1875 gives some insight to this fact and the mentality of local Ghanaian chiefs.

Governor Strahan had meetings with the Kings and Chiefs of the Cape Coast town in 1875, outlining the British Governments stance on Slavery following the House of Commons abolition. The Chiefs were against total abolition & it states that "the chiefs were to be allowed to hold the slaves they now have, but not to ill-use them, to buy or sell them, to carry them one village to another or export them".

And in another extract in the times dated October 22nd 1842 quotes from a parliamentary report that "slavery on the Gold Coast prevails to a great extent among the natives".

On display in the castle & museum are historical objects used in the slave trade such as branding irons & shackles. Other emotionally moving sights include the dungeons where condemned slaves were kept; there was no light & they were given no food ,no water & it can be seen where they scratched away at the walls & floor before they died.