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Adventures with Kingsley Holgate
Adventures with Kingsley Holgate
Date: 2017-01-27
BUSH NOTE#2: Slaves, Castles, Voodoo and the Gates of No Return
Greetings from inside the whitewashed walls of the ancient, four-storey St George's Castle at Elmina on the coast of Ghana, where we've crossed the drawbridge and two moats into 534 years of Gold Coast history.
Founded in 1482, and one of 29 European forts and castles that line the Ghanian coast, it's said to be the oldest extant colonial building in sub-Saharan Africa and what better person to host us than 46-year old Robert Kofi Kugbey, who remembers us from our last visit, when by Land Rover we tracked the outline of Africa.
'The acceptable figure,' says Robert, whilst standing in the male slave branding room, 'Is 12,5 million slaves exported from Africa over a 400-year period in which African Chiefs, middlemen and the powerful western nations of the world involved themselves in the highly profitable, despicable trade in human flesh, from castles and forts such as these - originally set up to trade in gold and ivory in exchange for guns, gin, cloth and western trinkets.'
Only the male slaves were branded with the symbols of the various trading companies eg: ITA - the International Trade Association of the Portuguese, W - the Dutch West Indies Trading Company, SA - Senegal Adventurers (the French) and one of the British brands was ironically SPG - Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.
The oppressively hot female dungeons housed 400 women at a time and 'troublesome' females were chained to a canon ball in the courtyard, to suffer in the tropical sun. A convenient trapdoor led to the chambers above and supplied the Dutch Governor with females for his personal pleasure.
Both male and female slaves were herded down ramps and through the 'Gate of No Return' - a narrow opening in the sea-facing castle wall, to waiting slave ships and a sub-human 4-month journey to the New World, never to return.
In the castle courtyard, Robert shows us an engraved plaque on which present-day Chiefs of Ghana have apologized for their ancestors' role in the slave trade. Another plaque indicates where the Dutch Governor Van Tets, who arrived 18 Jan 1758 and died just a few months later at 41 years old from malaria, is buried.
258 years later, malaria is still a killer and so Robert helps gather pregnant mums and mums with young children from Elmina village and we give malaria education and distribute insecticide-treated bed nets in the courtyard of this ancient place.
From here, our Land Rover journey will take us to more forts, Cape 3 Points (the most southerly tip of Ghana) and inland to Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti Empire. Will keep you posted.