We Have Always Lived With the Castle

The following essay is about Cape Coast Castle in Ghana and contains references to torture, human trafficking and sexual violence. It was shortlisted for the Edinburgh Essay Award 2025.

—

I first see the castle from the back of a pragya, heading to the beach from our hotel, and despite the fact that I know it is here, is a place I intend to visit, I am taken aback to stumble across it like this, but where had I expected it to be? Of course it is standing in a principal position, looking out with its cannons from a hilltop at the sea.

So that’s the castle, I say to the man I am with, a Ghanaian I have known for just a week, but have nonetheless invited to come with me to Cape Coast where I decided I would get away for Christmas from Accra (I took the opportunity to leave the British winter and spend four months in the capital of Ghana, working on a few creative projects). Thus begins my four-day fascination with this spectre of a centuries-old slave fort.

When we leave the beachfront restaurant with its overpriced fish and good shito and go for an amble on the rocks, my new friend grins and bares his guns for photos with the castle nestled just behind his bicep.

And when on those same rocks two lads come up and lay some artwork on the granite, convincing me (and not my companion) they painted them themselves, largely due to the streaks of colour one has daubed onto the side of his neck, and I agree to buy a painting not (only) because of their spiel about going to school and sharing the proceeds with their mothers, but also because I feel the weight of the chasm between our economies, compounded by the fact I only have 100 cedis so the kids walk with us as I try and fail to get change, feeling increasingly foolish for getting us into this situation, which I’m finding unduly shameful after weeks of unbelonging in Accra, the castle oversees the scene with sun-bleached and unvarying indifference.

Later, from the top floor of the bar we will end up spending much of our time, looking down at the beach to a group of boys jogging in a circle, working their immature bodies towards a dream of future football success, the castle sits on the hill behind us all, its whiteness undimmed by the dusk.

And on Christmas Day from a cove a little further down the way than we had previously ventured, the castle wavers behind the wall of heat caused by a pyre of plastic trash, a large part of which is empty bottles of BEL~AQUA, the water subsidiary of a packaging conglomerate, based in Ghana but Indian-owned.

From Christmas Eve till Boxing Day the castle looks on in this way, and I cannot help but feel I am inside a poem. Like everything we live through has some emblematic subtext, a feeling no doubt heightened by my background; visiting this country, and this coastline in particular, does feel like an overdue correction. A way of saying to the people in my line, total strangers to whom I owe my life, here I am against all odds, back in a place, or near a place, you once called home. Which is to say, my thoughts about the castle were never going to be neutral.

On the fourth day we go on the visit I had always imagined would be my sole encounter and find that a guided tour is about to begin. We spend the preceding twenty minutes taking photos on the rampart, looking back at the beach on which we’ve made so many memories, reverting for a while the castle’s gaze.

Our tour group is big, around 20/ 30 people, and a mix of nationalities. A few Ghanaians, some Americans including a Black family of four, some White Europeans and a Black British woman. I am, to all appearances, the only one with the blood of both enslavers and enslaved.

The first place we move through is the male slave dungeon, an almost lightless cellar ― just one tiny window at the top of a wall. Our tour guide explains that up to a thousand men would be locked up in that space at any one time, waiting for anything from two weeks to three months for the next available ship. With no, and I mean zero, sanitation.

For as long as potentially one quarter of a year, that crush of human beings had to sleep, eat and stand in their own shit, piss and vomit. Over the 140-plus years the castle was an English slave fort, the excrement of the people who were trafficked filled the dungeon to above knee height (a 1970s excavation removed the petrified faeces revealing, several feet below, the original red brick floor).

The female dungeons are smaller, they held up to 400 women at a time, who also had to live in their own waste, including menstrual blood, and face the additional terrors of rape (though no doubt men were raped too), enforced pregnancy and child theft (women would be freed to give birth then re-enslaved once their babies had been taken, destined, too, to a life of chattel slavery).

Of course the castle had been present in my thoughts in the days leading up to the tour, but I hadn’t really thought that much about how it would feel to be there, to stand in the kind of place my paternal ancestors were held, before being forced onto a brutalising ship and taken to Jamaica. To say nothing of the ruthless plantations awaiting across the Atlantic. How can an African descendent, so much time and space removed that she is now considered an obroni (white person), prepare to return to such a site? Or even begin to fathom what it took to survive such unutterable violence?

In the women’s dungeon in particular (where, by the way, as it has not been excavated, you can still, still - or at least it seemed to me - faintly smell their waste), I was overcome with - what are even the words? respect? incredulity? grief? - for what my and others’ people have endured. I just kept repeating, ‘I’m so sorry,’ in my head, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry this happened to you.’

I could write more and more about the horrors of that place, surpassing any Hollywood production, but perhaps the most grotesque thing of all was the light-filled governor’s bedroom, a large airy chamber with nine (I think) arched windows and a panoramic ocean view. Above the piss-filled dungeons where Black humans were routinely raped and tortured, governors slept at night in the cool sea breeze. Less than two hundred years since the abolition of plantation slavery, how far have we really come from that bleak disparity?

We have no such landmarks in the country where I usually live. Although the modern equivalent of billions were made from the trade in trafficked Africans, evidence of which can be found across Britain from its street names to its statues to its rural stately homes, there is no place you can go and smell the shit of the people it enslaved. This truth does not exist in the national psyche. Nor have many people even heard of Cape Coast Castle. Like slavery itself it is in large part unremembered, not truly reckoned with or understood. Would that still be so if we had to live in the shadow of our dungeons? If we had some daily and visceral reminder of the facts? For all its ostensible privilege, White Britain is enfeebled by this lack of understanding. How ‘Great’ can a country ever truly be if its reflection in the mirror is a mask?

We leave the castle quietly, walk slowly towards food and begin to disentangle the threads of our visit. My friend, who went to school in Cape Coast but had not yet returned as an adult, says he’s left with a sense of clarity on what constitutes a good life. How to honour the fact of being alive, what it means to have survived.

For him, I think, this has a lot to do with ambition. Fulfilling long-held goals and achieving potential. And while I certainly understand what he means, and agree to some extent, the emphasis for me is very different.

Our four days in this town have been a feast of all good things, a self-directed festival of pleasure. We have not known each other long but the ease of our connection is sincere, affording us a precious, highly privileged, kind of freedom: our primary objective is delight.

There is nowhere to be, nothing to do except have fun. Our time belongs to us and us alone. And when the bodies of our ancestors were brutalised to generate wealth (much of which certain strata of Britain are still beneficiaries of); formed the bedrock of a system that depends on exploitation and the dangerous delusion that our worth is what we earn, what greater tribute to them could there be?

Me, a British-Jamaican woman, him, a Ghanaian man, embodying the corners of an infamous triangle and transforming it through time enough to not do anything, through the happiness that comes from simply resting on some rocks, listening to an ocean roar beneath a silent castle.

—

An earlier version of this essay appears in the inaugural Edinburgh Journal, published by the Scottish Arts Trust. Sculpture in featured image by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo. Image by Kofi Nartey.