Cape Coast

After a relaxing week, I shuffled some plans around and ended up in a group heading towards Cape Coast, roughly three hours west of Accra on the coastline. I traveled with Thien Vinh, Natalia and Megan and after our morning egg sandwiches we taxied to the main bus station in town to buy tickets. The bus employees have a long history of treating people from our program really badly, so I was not looking forward to it, but the buses are the safest way to go long distances.
After lots of reading, napping, ipod listening, and one breakdown, we arrived in Cape Coast

We took a taxi to our room at a nice guesthouse and all sat in wonderment because we had a fridge and tv (which we never used) plus lots of space for the four of us.



Once we got established, we wandered around town for a little bit. Cape Coast is much more relaxed than Accra, but is a big enough city that you can walk around for a long time checking it out and finding new and exciting things. We had been given a tip off that near the town center was a vegetarian restaurant, and Thien Vinh, having chosen to maintain her vegetarianism in Ghana, could not have been happier. We had some onion burgers, which really turned out more like onion latkes, but were still yummy. At the restaurant we met up with Talia, Lauren and Emily who are Cape Coast veterans. They each now have boyfriends from town, and one of them owns a shop on the main road where we spent the early evening hanging out. The three late-arrivals were going to a show in a nearby town, but because transportation was an issue, everybody ended up staying in Cape Coast.
We all shared some tea at an ocean-side hotel as the sun set. After hanging around there for a little while, we walked to a bar in an "up and coming" neighborhood, and schmoozed more before turning in for the night.


I woke up early the next morning and the girls were still asleep, so I stole an opportunity I'd been waiting for. During orientation when I famously came down with malaria, the rest of the group made a trip to Cape Coast because it has one of the most famous monuments in Ghana: an old castle that started as a trading fort and transformed into a prison for slaves before they were shipped over the Atlantic. It is a beautifully kept whitewashed set of buildings, and I spent the first half hour there just wandering around, hearing the waves beat against its side, trying to imagine what it must have been like during the slave trade. All of the noise and sadness and livestock and everything, now replaced with the sounds of a rhythmic ocean. It was eerie to be standing in a monument to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, basically the worst thing that humans have ever done by measure of its scope, scale, brutality, and instant institutionalization that staved off any resistance for such a long time.










The first thing that welcomes you is this seal of Ghana's government with the words "Freedom and Justice" embossed under the eagles holding the seal. Those words take on a particular sense of irony and meaning printed on the side of a slave fort, especially in the greater context of the developing country that it represents, struggling to provide basic resources for its people. After wandering, I started on a tour. I was originally with a very large group of Ghanaian college students from Kumasi who were impossible to tour with. Like any large-group field trip, kids were listening to their ipods, chatting with each other about meaningless things. I felt that the castle deserved a more solemn mood and respect than they were giving it, especially as people coming from this country. But our tour group eventually separated, and I was left with a small group of a nice mix of Ghanaians from several regions and a few other foreigners. We saw the small cells that kept hundreds of slaves with no sanitation system with a church built right above it. We saw the chamber for slaves who resisted- a dark hole in the wall with scratch marks in the stone from people who went mad in the constant darkness as they slowly succumbed to a painful death.



Finally, we saw the "Door of No Return", where slaves were ushered down a tunnel paved with broken glass to prove their strength and then made to crawl through a very short door to get out of the castle. A man was selling tourist trinkets right outside, perhaps as a reminder that the economic conditions of this country leave it so indebted to the western world. It was not a feel-good couple of hours.

But it ended on a refreshing note, the small tour of people from all over the place, honestly recognizing how all of their ancestors had participated in (I'll say it again) the worst institution that has to my knowledge ever existed. This place represented the absolute rock bottom of human interaction. We have a long way to go to get past it, but it felt refreshing to recognize with Ghanaians and other foreigners alike how indebted we are to each other, how we all must carry the burden of making sure that such a thing never happens again. In that way, we are all now on the same team. Taking a deep breath together in the hold of the castle, feeling connected to each other even though we just met, proved how much of a positive experience could come out of such atrocities.