Go Ghana Cycle Challenge – Ghana’s slave history

 Saturday 1^st October 

On arrival in Accra we are given a very useful phrase book.  “You can buy herrings under those trees” is a particular favourite, along with “Are there many executioners?” though I’m not sure when either will crop up in general conversation…

There is no cycling on our first day.  Instead we board a coach for a two hour drive from Accra to Cape Coast along a busy highway, our journey slowed by roadworks and Saturday markets. The jumble of stalls and shack shops, with everything from refrigerators to 3-piece suites set out under the trees reminds me of a previous trip to Tanzania.  Once again mobile phone operators dominate the advertising with logos printed on tin roofs and adobe walls.  And I can’t help admiring the snack vendors carrying their wares on their heads in plastic cubes.

Under a grey and gloomy sky, Cape Coast Castle is a white fortress with a grim history.  Over 2 million people were transported into slavery from this building alone - just part of the estimated 60 million slaves that left this coast in one of the most shameful episodes of our colonial history in Africa.  As we are shown the dungeons where hundreds of men and women were confined for months at a time before leaving their home soil forever through the Door of No Return, our guide’s repeated litany of their bodily functions paints a vivid picture of the fetid and hellish conditions in which they survived – or not.  Many didn’t make it to the transport ships, and many more died en route.  And when the trade continued after the abolition of slavery in England, if a British ship was sighted the human cargo was simply thrown overboard to drown

 

Today Cape Coast is a fishing village and on the beach at the far end of the castle the catch is hauled in by hand in a timeless scene that could have been played out for centuries past.

We move on a few miles to our hotel at Elmina.  After bike fitting, where I eventually find the one bike small enough for me, we head for the pool and pretend we are on a “proper” holiday, complete with cocktails.  Tomorrow all that will change.