Cape Coast Trip- Jungle Canopy and Elmina Slave Castle- June 24 and 25

June 26, 2023

Saturday June 24

We woke up early and left in a van around 6 AM. It was over a 3 hour drive to Cape Coast but it was nice to drive out of the city and see lots of lush greenery.

Cape Coast is definitely still a large city but it isn’t as tightly packed as Accra and there’s more jungle. There were a ton of goats roaming around.

We went to the CFHI program house in cape coast which is actually bigger than the Accra house. There are only a couple people doing the program there but one of them did activities with us and it was interesting to hear his experience; the hospital he’s at sounds kinda bigger and maybe better funded than the Accra facilities we’re at.

It was absolutely pouring rain so we waited around a bit for it to stop then we went out to lunch. We ate at a place right on the water which was pretty but the food wasn’t our favorite- a lot of us had undercooked pizza.

I tried a Ghanaian dish I’ve been wanting to try the whole trip called Fufu which is a doughy and starchy ball made from cassava. It’s served with a soup and I ordered Groundnut soup (what they call peanuts) but they ended up giving me a different type of broth that had lots of fish in it (most of it had whole fish) and there was even beef skin in it which I’d never had before. It all tasted extremely fishy and I definitely didn’t finish it but I’m glad I tried it.

The rain had mostly stopped so we took our van to Kakum national forest and did the canopy walk. It was a thin walkway in the jungle canopy (with netting on the side) that was really beautiful.

It was about a 45 minute hike to it which was definitely really slippery.

We then went to the Elmina slave castle where enslaved captives were held until they were shipped off. We had a tour and learned a ton of information. It is the oldest and largest castle used in the trans Atlantic slave trade and was first built by the Portuguese then soon after the Dutch took over. This castle sent slave ships to South America but it was later used as headquarters by the British when they mainly used Cape Coast Castle to hold captives.

It was definitely really powerful and depressing to stand where the captives were held and see the dungeon rooms that were originally used as store rooms for goods when the castle was built for trading merchandise. We saw the “room of no return” where the captives were forced through a narrow tunnel into the boats, a room where “freedom fighter” leaders were put to starve to death, and the governor’s large room with a balcony where he’d overlook female captives and choose one to rape.

Another striking thing was seeing the churches- in the center courtyard was the original Catholic Church built by the Portuguese, but when the Dutch took over, they didn’t want to use the Catholic Church and built a Protestant one in a different area. It was depressing and angering to imagine the slave traders going to church while captives were held in dungeons below their feet.

When we first got to the castle, a group of men selling things swarmed our van and asked some of us our names and how to spell them. When we came out, they had shells with some of the names written on them that they would give to people…. And then ask for money of course. Most declined but one girl just said thank you and took it and didn’t cave when the guy later asked for money. There were also kids selling things and we gave them our rain ponchos that we had bought earlier.

We then went back to the house and had cake for a birthday then we went out pretty late to a club called Sahara. There were two other groups of Americans there, one said that they were architecture students building a house here and that she was from University of Miami in Ohio. I went home around 1:30 (we were driven back by one of our program coordinator’s friends; he grew up in cape coast) but many people stayed out later.

In the morning we waited around a while for people to get up then went to lunch at a vegetarian cafe that was a nonprofit that also had a craft shop. I had an omelette with moringa leaves, which they say is the healthiest leaf in the world.