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Taken without a flash so you can see just how dark it is down here. People were kept here, sometimes for months, until a ship came to take them to the 'new world'
Now a children's library. Beneath the church were the female slave cells, so people were dying below ground, while people above prayed for their own souls. The square hole in the floor is where a spy would listen in on the women below.
Cape Coast Castle was built by the British in 1665 and used for the transatlantic slave trade. It was originally a Swedish fort and changed hands several times before the British took the site and remained there til Ghana became a republic in 1960.
The original door of no return was much smaller, this is the replacement after slavery was abolished.
...once the sky had finally cleared somewhat.
© Isabella Valenza. Do not use or reproduce anywhere without my permission.
The Door of No Return was renamed in August 1998 during the Emancipation Day Festival. Remains of two descendants of 'erstwhile captives' were exhumed from Kingston Town, Jamaica (Madam Crystal) and New York (Samuel Carson) and brought into the caste through the 'Door of No Return'. A ceremony was performed to break the jinx of the Door of No Return. The 'Door of Return' is a special call to all people of African descent in the diaspora to come back to their roots.
We took a tour of the Cape Coast Castle, a UNESCO World Heritage site. It was built in the 1600s and used for a couple hundred years as a point for selling slaves and then shipping them across the Atlantic. It was sobering to visit the dungeons where men and women were held before they were sold.