Slave Castles

Slave castles are places of paradox. First of all, the two that I’ve visited, Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle, are both white and grand and commanding. They could even by called beautiful, if your imagination wasn’t tainted with an understanding of what they were and what they represent.

Secondly, from the upper ramparts of one, you can stand in such a way that exactly half of your field of vision is filled with the view of a beautiful, even pristine beach with white sand and palm trees and quaint fishing canoe boats and bright colors and blue sky. The other half is white and gray and black – you can see down into this courtyard from which there are doorways leading into cellars and holding rooms and even a death room marked with what has come to be a cliché skull and crossbones, except this time the meaning is literal and real. You can see canons and stacks of cannonballs, and the officer’s third story flats and the wrought iron railings from which they could look down onto the whole scene.

Thirdly, you’re touring a place based on a history of pain and suffering and cruelty and power, but the act of you being there is supporting the local economy, and, fourth of all, the people who live in that community may have been descendants of both escaped slave conscripts and enriched slave traders. There’s a quotation in a photo book I bought about a slave-trade tour guide in the north who said, “We do not judge because we are the descendants of both those enslaved and those (Africans, and sometimes Europeans) who sold them into slavery.”

Some of the things that I remember from our tours: the men and women were separated and several hundred of them were kept in single chambered dark stone-walled rooms, partway underground. There may have been one or two small windows high up, but only enough to let in a gloomy amount of light each day, and a splashing of water each rain. There were small, shallowly inadequate sewage drains that ran through the middle of each room, more as cruel irony than any kind of practical sanitation. Over the years, the blood and vomit and urine and feces of hundreds of people built up in the rooms, forming a three foot deep floor entirely made of human waste. We walked over it.

The commanding officer’s three room apartment was built on the highest part of the castle, with a beautiful three window veranda facing the ocean. That damned contrast again – I imagine he must have been able to hear and smell the suffering beneath him even sheltered in his beautiful bedroom. There was a chapel directly above one of the slave chambers.

And there is a death room. They locked sixty men inside a completely dark chamber, and didn’t open the door again. At least, not until everyone inside was dead.

At the other castle, Elmina, our tour guide told us about how all of the women would be marched outside into a courtyard. Above them, from a terraced vantage point, the commanding officer would survey the women and pick out the one he wanted to rape that day. They would clean her up (after having lived in her own shit and blood for weeks without a shower,) and if she resisted, chain her up in the courtyard. If she became pregnant, she would be kept at the castle but treated a little better, and her kid might get some kind of education while she worked as a cook or cleaner.

There are some signs about how these places have been healed, have been transformed from bloody open sores to white scars on the landscape. First of all, they provide tourism and income for a lot of people. In Cape Coast, the castle was built on a holy religious site, so during the slave trade, the holy stone marking the place and representing Tibur, the God of Protection, was relocated to beneath a tree some distance away. Now, it has been brought back and there is a shrine offering type place in one of the slave rooms itself, where we saw a sacrificed goat’s head and watched a priest make an offering and sprinkle holy water. He explained that they give thanks to the Tibur for protecting those who passed through here and giving them the strength that they had.

We revisited the Cape Coast Castle several weeks after going on the tour – and I noticed that already, after only one other visit, the horror was more subdued and I could nap and laugh in the same places where I had cried and been silent.