Kakum & Cape Coast Castle

10/19/08

Sunday was a very productive tourist day for us. Our first stop was Kakum National Park, an hour drive by tro-tro from Cape Coast. My flip flop decided this would be a perfect time to break, so Denise put on her tennis shoes she luckily brought with her and I wore her flip flops. We climbed 150 feet above sea level and then hiked along a rock pathway to the start of the canopy walk. The canopy walk is a wood and rope walkway, 350m long and 40m high, and is suspended between 7 large trees. It was really fun and we hung toward the back of the group so we could take more pictures. In the early morning you can usually catch some of the monkeys in the park playing on the walkways. Forest elephants also live in the park, but are very hard to spot. We opted out of the associated nature walk, which was an additional fee. We had our own 9 mile nature walk the other day, and decided to save our money. The souvenir shop at the park was pretty expensive and didn’t have anything of interest to us so we walked back to the roadside to wait for a car or tro-tro heading back to Cape Coast.

As a side note, we came across a sign that said “USA Movies,” and were hopeful that perhaps there was a movie theater we could visit that evening. We found out that it’s an outdoor lot where they project one movie, usually Nigerian, each night.

After we were back in Cape Coast, we realized we had enough time to visit the Castle too. For me, this was the most interesting and rewarding part of the weekend’s excursion. When we first walked into the compound, it looked like any other fort you might see from that period that served as a trading post. Fishermen work just outside the castle grounds on the beach and locals are crowding the one safe area in the waves. The tide is too strong and dangerous much past the area where old ships come in. In an open area on the beach just between the rocks and the fishermen, a group of young men played soccer. Any other fort… until you actually tour the grounds and truly understand how grossly inhumane this structure had been.

They had a small museum with artifacts and descriptions about everything from the history of Cape Coast, the change in power from the Portuguese, then the Dutch, the Swedes for a few years, and eventually the British. Large drawings covered the walls depicting life in the 1600s. The women carried babies on their backs wrapped in cloth. It’s funny how some things stick throughout history. Plaques were mounted explaining how people lived before any foreign power, and other plaques briefly described trade in Ghana. It didn’t go into depth about the gold trade though, which is strange since that’s why Ghana didn’t even join the Slave Trade until much later… They had a diagram of a slave ship—illustrating how people were stacked like books on a shelf for the journey. Other displays talked about how slaves shackled and marched through the African brush, how they were branded and sold, and another display acknowledged people involved in fighting for the abolition of slavery as well as some other key people in African American history. I remember learning about the Slave Trade in school, but only how it applied to the United States. One third of slaves exported from the African coast went to Brazil, and another third went to the Caribbean (which is apparently where most of the torturous treatment of slaves occurred). The last third was split between the rest of South America and North America.

We toured castle, beginning with the dungeons where they used to keep 1500 slaves for 3 months before shipping them off overseas. They kept 200 men in one small cell with only 3 small windows at the very top for light and ventilation. There was a small hole close to the ceiling which carried down British voices singing hymns in the church atop the dungeon. Calling to both Heaven and Hell it seems… They defecated on the floor which ran down through the next room of 200 men. The women were held separately, but in similar conditions. The British would choose the most beautiful slave for the General. They would bathe her, clothe her, feed her, and take her to the General. If she refused to be raped, they would place her in the punishment cell, a small space of maybe 20 feet by 5 feet at its widest, for 1 week. Up to 50 women could be held in that space at a time. If a British soldier got a slave pregnant, she could live outside the dungeon, with the soldier until she gave birth. Once she gave birth, she would return to the slave dungeon, and the child would be sent to the first school built—the Cape Coast School. For 3 months, these people were simply held. If you became sick, you were condemned to a separate room, barricaded with 3 heavy locked doors, with no light, no air, no food, and no water, to die. Domestic slaves who worked at the castle would come in to retrieve the bodies. Once it was time to be shipped off, the men and women were led, separately, through tunnels out to the sand, through the Door of No Return. About 10 years ago, the bodies of two slaves (descendants of slaves who went through the Door of No Return) were returned, through the door, therefore breaking the meaning. A plaque is placed on the outside of the door, titling it the “Door of Return.”

The tour was powerful to say the least. You read about the slave trade and you learn the stories and you know of the horrible treatment that these people endured. But standing where they stood, in their dungeons, and looking at the same dark walls that haunted them during their 3 months in Cape Coast was utterly heart-wrenching. Livestock received better treatment than the torture forced upon slaves.

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Switching gears a bit…

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Inside the castle courtyard, several vendors had stands selling all sorts of drums and wood carvings—my favorite type of souvenir that I had been looking for. I picked up some key gifts for my family and a small drum for myself. Afterward, we went to the Cape Coast Castle restaurant right next door for dinner. A guy sitting on the ledge outside looking toward the ocean sat with a drum and saw I had one as well. I sat down next to him and set the drum between my knees and looked at him for instruction. He smiled and slowly started a rhythm I could manage and sure enough we sat there for a short while and he tried to teach me how to drum.

Denise and I sat in the corner of the open-air restaurant and ordered food—I had vegetable coconut curry with jallof rice and a pineapple pancake for dessert. While we were waiting for our food Denise began to teach me how to play gin or rummy. Neither of us are sure which game it is. After we ate, a deaf guy (age 22) named Kofi approached us. I’m not sure what prompted him to approach, but lucky for us (and him) Denise knows a little bit of sign language. She spelled words she didn’t know how to sign, and we used a pen and paper for those complicated sentences. He sat down and we taught him how to play gin or rummy. We played a few games, and then decided to head back to the hotel. We walked to save money, got a little bit lost on the way, but eventually found our street and our hotel.

A young guy who worked at the hotel was admiring my ONE bracelet and asked if I wanted to trade for his Ghanaian style beaded necklace he was wearing. I agreed, knowing I have more ONE bracelets at home, but was pleased to trade for something instead of just paying money. It’s more personal that way.