Black Canadians Confront Cape Coast Slave History

CAPE COAST, Ghana–Dusk settles on the ghostly slave castle here, and the shadowy figures walking, weeping in a daze are trying, and failing, to deal with their past.

The 21 Canadians confronting their history last night have returned to Africa from the Caribbean, via Toronto, as free men and women, descendants of slaves. They've just emerged through the Door of No Return – survivors all. And the experience is shattering.

At the last stop on this disturbing tour of the Slave Dungeon, one of the female visitors loses it. She gags, wails and vomits on the floor where her ancestors did the same 300, 400 years ago.

Just outside the door labelled "Cell," her travelling companions sit in the castle's courtyard, in a stupor. Grown men are reduced to sobs. One is being comforted by a crying child.

They have come to reconnect with their roots, a past severed by one of the most brutal and destructive institutions in history, which saw 12 million or more Africans captured, enslaved and shipped to the Americas.

It is a despicable place...But the visitors say this is an odyssey they must complete. They want to see where their ancestors were warehoused in horrible conditions before they were spirited on slave ships across the Atlantic to the New World.

"There is a lot of pain, and some anger," explains Sherwin Modeste, a community housing manager in Toronto. "It's like a funeral procession. People ask why you go, if you know it is painful. But you still have to go."

"Haunting," says Violet Dennison, at 61, the oldest of the visitors. We approach the terrible door. Above it, the sign reads: Door of No Return. "It's called the Door of No Return because when you enter this, you never come back."

Through the door we go, onto the viewing deck where the slavers and merchants surveyed their wretched merchandise, animate and inanimate, before ascending 34 steps to conduct their bloody bartering – humans for gunpowder and ivory and trinkets – in the palaver room.

One last stop at the Cell. This room, barely 10 feet by 12 feet, is oppressively hot. Here is where they kept the slaves who couldn't be tamed – the ones who loved freedom more than life. And this is where they died.

And it's here the sister loses it and pours out her soul to her creator. She howls. She shakes. She throws up her breakfast. And it is a good while before she is comforted. (Source: The Star)

FEITORIAS: Slave Forts

"CASTELO DE ARGUIM": A PORTUGUESE FORT IN MAURITANIA

Feitorias - a Spanish term meaning 'factories', these forts were established by European explorers in order to facilitate trade with non-European nations. Feitorias were built by Portuguese traders all along the west coast of Africa from whence they conducted trade with local African rulers. With the advent of the slave trade, these strongholds were used not only as trade centres for material goods but as depots to which slaves would be brought for purchase and from whence they would travel to the New World. The feitorias were usually heavily fortified, to protect their inhabitants from attack by both dissatisfied Africans as well as from the interests of other European powers, who saw the factories as strategically and financially valuable for the promotion of their own interests