Without apology, I’ve taken the title of this entry from a short handbook on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade written by a couple of Ghanaian academics and tourism professionals, one of who (Robert Kugbey) was our guide when we visited St George Castle in Elmina, for several hundred years, one of the centres of the West African slave trade.
St George Castle was built by the Portuguese in the late 15th century, but some 150 years later the castle was captured by the Dutch and expanded when slaves replaced gold as the primary export. In the early 19th century, the British purchased this part of the coast from the Dutch and with slavery abolished in the British empire, the castle took on administrative and defensive roles. Aside from the dungeons and the "Door Of No Return", this forbidding structure has other reminders of its horrific and brutal history. The female slave punishment yard; the execution cell into which several men at a time would be thrown, a space with no light or ventilation and where the incarcerated would starve or suffocate to death.
And then of course there was rape. The castle's Dutch governor lived in a suite of rooms on one of the upper levels. Female slaves would be paraded below him in the courtyard, allowing "his excellency" the possibility of picking whichever ones took his fancy. They would then be cleaned up, fed and watered and forced to climb a narrow staircase leading to a trapdoor into the governor's apartment where of course willingly or not, he would have his way with them. Any slave who became pregnant would not be shipped out. They remained at the castle and after delivery would be used as household slaves. The offspring, being of mixed race would be educated and then given administrative roles.
Cape Coast Castle, a little way east along the coast from St George Castle was the headquarters of the English slavery trade. Built in the late 17th century and in use as a slave trans-shipment centre until the beginning of the 19th century, it is likely that hundreds of thousands of Africans left this castle through its ominously named "Door Of No Return" to be shipped out for a life of slavery on the plantations of the New World. That is if they didn't perish from disease, suffocation, maltreatment or suicide on the horrendous journey across the Atlantic....
Estimates of the number of people shipped from Africa between 1450 and 1850 vary greatly. Our guide puts the number at around 12.5 million but numbers as low as 4 million and as high as 210 million have been suggested by various authorities. We'll of course never know for sure but whatever the figure, nobody can dispute that the trans-Atlantic slave trade orchestrated and executed by Europeans over several centuries is among the the greatest of atrocities and the darkest periods in human history
"Lest we forget...."