🇬🇭 [Cape Coast] DOOR OF NO RETURN

There are many castles in Ghana, and I felt sad knowing that many of them were built for the slave trade. Although I had heard about the transatlantic slave trade before, it had never really felt real to me because Africa is so far from where I live.

I visited Osu Castle, Cape Coast Castle, and Elmina Castle, and seeing these places in person made me realize just how cruel that history was. Looking at the places where enslaved people were imprisoned, I could hardly understand how they could have been treated as if they were not even human.

It made me realize why field trips are important. There are things you can learn and feel from seeing a place in person that you can never fully understand from a textbook.

The following is about my visit to Cape Coast Castle, where I stayed while volunteering in Ghana.

We visited castle at the end of the tour, listening the explanations of guide, I thought how people could be cruel like this to people. At that time, there was a slave trade. Before they were sold, they stayed in the ground which have only three small windows. Of course there is no toilet. There is a black layers on the red break, they are the remains of handling everything include toilets.

When we go up to the castle, we could see this room has 16 windows. And I could feel what it means that there are 16 windows only for a men whereas hundreds of black people stayed at dark cave with few windows.

And they named it DOOR OF NO RETURN because once they are sold to European country, they couldn't come back.

While staying in Ghana, I met many Black people from different countries who visited the slave castles in African countries to learn about their roots. Watching them made me realize that being forcibly separated from their families and having to live in an unfamiliar land was already heartbreaking, but not even knowing where they came from or being able to trace their roots was even more painful.

I know that many African country share these dark history. I wish many people remember this so that same history won't repeat.🙏