We learn about history in school, but we don’t truly understand the past until we experience something that gives us a glimpse of what happened in the years before us. We are all very familiar with the transatlantic slave trade and how it continued for hundreds of years. When learning about these unfortunate events, everyone believes they understand what slaves went through and how they were treated, but they are wrong. Once you walk through a slave castle is when you truly recognize the tremendous amount of tragedy, injustice, and horrific history that took place hundreds of years ago.

After going to a magnificent beach resort over the weekend in Cape Coast, all of the happiness and joy was overshadowed by the visits to Elmina and Cape Coast slave castles. As we were walking through the entrance a local whispered to her friend, “They are the enemy,” and I instantly knew these visits would be much harder than I imagined. The first place we toured in the slave castles were the male slave dungeons, and I was in shock. I was standing where thousands of men were punished for the color of their skin. I stood where slaves slept, ate, bled, and died. I was standing where men fought over one another because of the differences in their tribes and where they were kept, surrounded in their own human waste. The governor’s quarters, where one man lived, was bigger than the place where over 250 living men suffered every single moment of their time at the castle. The hairs on my skin were straight up, and I tried to say something but I couldn’t. I was speechless.

When I thought the male slave dungeons were bad enough, hearing about the women gave me the chills. When hundreds of women entered the female quarters, the governor would stand above them and single handedly pick out the ones he wanted to rape. And if they said no, they were punished by being locked up in a tiny little cell with other female slaves who refused until they gave themselves up. When a female slave was impregnated, they would be sent to another location and once they gave birth, the mother would be returned to the female slave quarters and the baby would be born a slave for the rest of their life. This system was repeated for hundreds of years, and women would live their lives as a slave serving men who violated, raped, and abused them.

When men would fight back against the soldiers for their freedom, they only received one punishment: death. They would be pushed into a separate cell with no ventilation, no light, and would ultimately starve to death. These men were punished because they fought to live, which ultimately led to their demise. They knew once they were shoved through that gate in front of them there was only one possible outcome, death. They died because they believed that they shouldn’t be told what to do, shouldn’t be tortured, and shouldn’t be a slave. The door has a skull and crossbones hovering over it, because once you went into that cell, you would never return alive.