Cape Coast and the Door of No Return

This weekend I went to Cape Coast to see and explore some of Ghana and West Africa’s beautiful coastline as well as to learn about the horrendous history of the slave trade that went on here for years and years.

Cape Coast Castle was the nerve centre of British colonial rule in the Gold Coast (the colonial name for Ghana) and, more importantly, it was one of the biggest trading posts in that most abhorrent of all cargoes, slaves.

Cape Coast Castle has slave dungeons. 1000 male slaves and 500 female slaves would be stored in the castle at any one time, and most of them would be locked up in the dungeon for six to 12 weeks, waiting for the slave ships to dock. They would be allowed out for fresh air two or three times a week, but apart from that they were imprisoned in dark, dank dungeons that would have been utterly disgusting.

The dungeons today are empty, echoing chambers that barely hint at what they would have been like with hundreds of slaves crammed in there, but with only a handful of barred windows to let in the breeze and a rough channel down the middle of the cells to carry away urine and faeces, it would have been repugnant. Half of them would die while being locked up in the dungeons. Those who showed any form of resistance to their destiny where thrown in to “the cell”, a closed room with no food, no water, no light and no air. Those who ended up in the cell did not come out alive, within days they were all suffocated to death. No need to say that the presence of death were just overwhelming.

Those who did survive long enough to be picked for shipping to the new world all entered the ships and a life in slavery through “The Door of No Return”.Conditions on the slave traders’ ships were even worse, as depicted in that famous plan drawing showing slaves crammed into every nook and cranny of a ship, genuinely as close as sardines in a can. It’s futile to even attempt to imagine what it was like to be wrenched from your home and family, dragged to Cape Coast Castle and left to rot for two or three months in the dungeon, before being jammed into a slave ship where between a quarter and a half of the slaves would die before reaching the Americas. Even assuming you survived the trip, you then had to contend with living the life of a slave, forever exiled from your home.

The inhumanity of the slave trade is beyond comprehension; being crammed into dungeons in remote castles, or the nightmare of being shoehorned into a ship so tightly that you can’t sit up, with the faeces and vomit of the people above dripping down on you as you lie there in the dark…

Well, enough said about that. My weekend at Cape Coast was not only a time for afterthought; it was most definitely a time for lazing in the sun and swimming in the sea An experience which resulted in a very nice lobster-red colour for both me and Phyllis ? But hey, who’s complaining? At least we got to spend some time at the beach – ME LIKE!

So the first week in Ghana has passed, it went pretty slow I must say, but I managed my way through it though. The first week is always the worst; luckily for me the second one has just started. 11 more weeks to go and a lot of work to be done! On Wednesday I will be joining Phyllis at the World Food Program and help out with feeding and weighing severely malnourished children, which is a problem here at camp. The program is both good and bad though. Good cause we can make sure that the children are fed and we can monitor them to make sure they become and stay healthy as long as they are with the program, but bad cause the programme benefits the mothers in the way that they, once the babies are well enough to get off the program, will stop to feed their babies in order to get back on the program and get free food for their children! And it is really hard to find any rewarding solutions that will motivate and make the mothers understand that they are harming their children by not feeding them in order to get on the food-programme. So this will for sure be a B-I-G challenge for me to do something about while working here at Budumburam. As Phyllis is leaving already on Sunday this week I hope to continue her work at WFP until I’m leaving in December, and hopefully there will be new volunteers that can continue the work then.

Well, that’s it for now. I’ll be going to Accra this weekend and it will for sure be easier to get online and post a new blog about my life with all it contains of adventures and challenges here in Budumburam ?

As always: Love you all! Hugs n kisses