In the small paved courtyard, a well lay before me, as it has for hundreds of years. Behind me, the bars of a “female” dungeon. In front of me, a “female” dungeon. To my left, a staircase led up to a trap door and the floor above. Looking up 45 degrees, a sunny breezeway led to the governor’s room.

 Everything about the Elmina and Cape Coast castles was designed with meticulous intentionality. I thought I had known this, but witnessing the wooden top of the trap door, it truly hit me. A forever reminder that chattel slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade were anything but a mistake.

Our cohort drove four hours from Accra to visit the castles. The two structures sit along the Atlantic, positioned for direct access to the ships that would take these people away from their homelands forever.

In Elmina, we were brought to this courtyard first. Our guide explained how a woman would be taken from the dungeon and cleaned with water from the well, right then and there.

200 at a time, women were kept in dungeons, lacking lights, vents, bathrooms, covered in their own feces, urine, and menstrual blood. The stench of the dungeon was pungent, akin to a smack to the face. Hundreds of years of torture and dehumanization can be smelled to this day.

Then the women would be dressed, given a small ration of food for strength, and ushered up the stairs, through the trap door that lay right before entering the governor’s room. Standing on the breezeway, looking down at the courtyard and the torturous dungeons, my stomach churned.

It’s one thing to read about history, another to stand inside of it. 

The architecture alone felt like a calculated tool of violence. These weren’t just castles. They were machines, built to break spirits, to erase identities. Every stone, every gate, every trap door bore witness to unspeakable horror.

As I stood there, my throat tightened. In the heat I’m not yet acclimated to, I wanted to lean on something. But I refused to touch my surroundings. It felt disrespectful or scary? 

I was sickened not just by what had happened, but by the fact that this was designed. Slavery wasn’t chaos. It was a strategy. It was systematized. It was planned with cold, inhuman precision.

This was the part that unsettled me the most. That people, governors, traders, ship captains, could stand on that breezeway in the sun, while beneath them, human beings were caged in filth, stripped of dignity and hope. And they could look down, like gods surveying their domain.

We ventured into the church later on, the windows illuminating the rooms. The tour guide said the male dungeons lay beneath.

The juxtaposition felt like a painting. Above, all those who prayed to a Christian or Catholic god, felt the cooling winds and saw sunlight dancing while sitting in the pews. Below, humans suffered, suffocated by darkness and self made carbon dioxide, burning in the depths of a man-made hell. 

I felt shame, anger, sorrow, all crashing into each other like waves.
This history isn’t distant. It lives in the structures of our world today.

The castles may be silent now, but what they hold is louder than ever.