“That is why we call this the Door of Return”

If Ghana were to maintain any type of tourist circuit, Cape Coast and Elmina, two neighboring towns about a three hour bus ride from the city, would be the main points of interest. These coastal fishing villages represent the center of the former West African slave trade and are home to huge castles and forts built by various colonial powers in order to manage and defend this “industry.” My first stop after arriving on Saturday morning was the Cape Coast castle, a huge and imposing white structure built by the British in the mid-1600s and expanded regularly through the 1800s to take its present shape. We learn in American history that the slave trade was born out of unique circumstances of an imperialist economy fueled, of course, by deep prejudice and ignorance; we are taught to see it as a fact of history and not question the why or the how of it too deeply. Seeing the immensity of the Cape Coast Castle, especially in comparison to the humble village where it resides, I couldn’t help but think of the many hours of laboring and construction that it took to build—the many hours of planning and calculating that went into establishing the profit-filled slave trade—most importantly, I counted the many hours when the moral implications of such an “industry” were not considered. The slave trade didn’t “just happen”—it was considered, calculated and developed for hundreds of years.

The tour of Elmina Castle, the Portugese and later Dutch castle, was more extensive than that at Cape Coast and brought visitors further into the dungeons below the castle. The tour guide told us in great detail how many slaves were imprisoned in each and emphasized the point that no access to bathrooms or showers was permitted for each six-week interval that the slaves were kept in the dungeons. My guide emphatically disallowed anyone to cover their noses when entering the dungeons as the original floors are intact and the smell remains this many years later. He also detailed the method in which the female slaves were methodically raped by their colonial captors, explaining that the colonial wives were not brought along for the voyage for the threat of malaria.

At one point the guide stated that Elmina Castle operated slave trading for 400 years; I thought to myself, “He must have his math wrong. 400 years?” But, of course he was right and I read in the museum later that the Elmina castle was built by the Portugese in 1482, ten years before Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the Americas. Elmina Castle is the oldest colonial building in sub-Saharan Africa and remains a enlightening looking glass into one of history’s most disturbing periods.

Each castle has what is called a “Door of No Return” where the slaves were said to leave their dungeons filing onto the ships that were set to cross the Ocean en route to South America, the Caribbean or the United States. As descendents of these slaves have visited Cape Coast and Elmina, themselves filing back through the same door their descendents filed out of, the door developed a second name, “The Door of Return.” A bit kitschy? Of course…but “The Door of Return” is a meaningful tribute to the world’s ability to heal its most horrible wounds as well as a challenge to fully examine this period (and other dark periods) in history for the important lessons we might learn about human nature and ourselves.