Obama to Visit Former Slavery Outpost in Ghana

From GroundReport.com,the world's most trusted citizen journalism platform.

By Dawn Ganu

US President Barack Obama will visit Cape Coast Castle, a former slavery outpost in Ghana, on Saturday, July 11. Here he will witness some of the most gruesome images of the Slave Trade that saw the exportation of millions of Black Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas and Europe.

The Cape Coast Castle was the main point of departure for many slaves captured from the hinterlands and sold to slave merchants who transported them to America.

The building was started by Swedes in 1654 and completed by the British after they captured the castle and transformed it into the capital of their colonial administration of then 'Gold Coast' - now Ghana.

Many slaves died in this castle as a result of the dehumanizing treatments they received at the hands of their captors.

It has become one of the most prominent sites for Africans from the diaspora to 'link' to their roots. Visitors often break down and weep when they get to see the treatment of their ancestors.

The Cape Coast Castle houses a museum where relics of the slave trade are kept.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama will be the biggest visitors the Cape Coast Castle has received since the end of the slave trade.

The Cape Coast Castle has become a major destination for those tracing the routes of the slave trade.

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Comments

[sewickleygirl]

An earlier article mentioned that Obama was Kenya where there was no history of slavery. Incorrect. There is slave fort in the coastal town of Mombasa. Arab slavers were active in East African with their captives going to the Americas and to India.

[longtimegone]

I walked into the Cape Coast Castle one afternoon in 1976; it was eerily empty, not a living soul there. I saw the cells in which the captured were held, the elevated area from which the commanders of the castle could watch the women paraded below and select those they desired for their beds, and the long, dark corridor, then full of bats, down which the captured walked to be boarded onto slave ships. As I stood in that corridor, all I could think was "this was the last African soil on which their feet would have stepped." There were no signs, no guides, no tours; if I had not known the history of the building, I might have guessed nothing from the outside. The experience I had, all alone on that gray afternoon, remains with me to this day and, to my knowledge, I have no West African ancestors. The experience is bound to be a moving one for Obama, perhaps even more so for Michelle Obama. I envy them, visiting some the world's most relentlessly friendly people.

[roshni]

I am so thrilled that the people are so welcoming to my First Family. Your experience sounds incredible. I had a similar one in Zanzibar where slaves were packed into dhows and sent east.