Cape Coast, Ghana - a Hot Town With a Chilling Past In Cape Coast, the men greet travellers with a flash of white teeth and a limp, drawn-out handshake which ends with a rather complicated finger click. Children refrain joyously from that ditches that line the roads, "Hello. How are you? I’m fine." Women smile shyly from the side of the road where they are braiding each other’s hair in divinely-named boutiques such as ‘Believe in God Hair Cut’ or ‘Rely on Jesus Beauty Salon.’ Such friendliness towards visitors is a dwindling commodity in some parts of the backpacking world but not in Ghana. And certainly not in Cape Coast, which is made all the more meaningful by the fact that this town was once a busy slaving port on the notoriously brutal Transatlantic Slave Route. Visiting the slaving forts of the Gold Coast - the former name of the area encompassing much of modern day Ghana - is a sobering, yet enriching, experience. Dotting the Ghanaian coast line from Prampram, in the east to Beyin, in the west; these fortresses are chilly reminders in a very hot country of humanity’s past wrongs against humanity. Undoubtedly, the most fascinating of these fortress towns is Cape Coast with its infamous castle which bears the same name. Entering Cape Coast, a visitor might be forgiven for mistaking this UNESCO World Heritage castle for one of the many rundown colonial buildings that line the town. Crouching by the coast, it is not as visually magnificent as some of the other coastal forts. However, the castle’s somewhat shabby exterior belies its shocking slaving history which has rendered it the most visited of all the forts in Ghana. Used originally to trade commodities far less innocuous than human beings, the strategic location of the castle on a rocky cape, with an adjoining natural harbor, made it an obvious choice for European occupiers from the mid 1600s. Swapping numerous times between rival colonizing administrations, it was eventually captured by the British in 1664 and made the government headquarters for British colonial administration until 1877. It was here, during the height of the slave trade, that many thousands of people were imprisoned in squalid dungeons before beginning their perilous journeys to the Americas. Touring the castle is a paradoxical experience. Walking around the battlements, it is difficult to reconcile the idyllic view of the surrounding palm-fringed beaches with the dank, airless dungeons that lie below. However, the urge to take endless photographs of
the stunning vista soon dwindles as the castle’s gruesome secrets begin to reveal themselves.
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