The Architecture of Atrocity

By Elijah Jagne

I really wasn’t sure I would write this post. Most of our blog entries focus on internships, cultural exchanges, and lighter experiences during our time abroad. But sometimes, experiences demand more from you. They require reflection, depth, and honesty, even if it’s uncomfortable. And this is uncomfortable, but perhaps necessary. Near the beginning of our time here in Ghana, we took a road trip down to Cape Coast, in what was previously known as “The Gold Coast.” 

The last road that we took towards the castle is long and unchanging. You start far away, and at some point along the way, you see a structure in the distance, a castle that just appears on the horizon. It’s, at first glance, beautiful. It’s this painterly white color and when the sun hits it just right, as it had that day, it seems to glow as if emanating an aura. From so far it almost looks inviting, its pristine white walls and commanding view of the ocean gave it the appearance of a luxury resort rather than a site of profound suffering. But I knew what this place was. Elmina Castle, built initially by the Portuguese in 1482 and later occupied by the Dutch and then the British, was one of THE central hubs of the transatlantic slave trade.

I spoke earlier of a sort of aura emanating off this castle, and there is one, but not the aura you would imagine from afar. I genuinely cannot express the sensation I felt as we approached. A deep, inexplicable sadness took hold, a feeling I’ve rarely experienced before. The closer we came to the castle, the heavier the feeling became.

By the time we were within its shadow, tears were quietly rolling down my cheeks. It wasn’t as though I was sobbing or outwardly crying. I doubt anyone even noticed I was feeling anything at all. The tears just sort of came. I met them with surprise and wiped them away.

We walked into the castle and were met with what I can only call a courtyard of contradiction. At the courtyard’s center was a church. Below the church were dungeons, to the sides of the church were dungeons. The church was built upon and within great evil, the only direction absent of it was above. I wonder how you can look up to your god and regard yourself a man of faith, worship, godliness, whilst immersed

in the screams and groans of men, women, and children. People being actively starved, tortured, raped, and murdered all by your hands and the hands of your peers. The audacity of this juxtaposition strikes me even as I write this. The cognitive dissonance necessary for such cruelty is something I still struggle to comprehend.

We were met in the church by our guide. His name is Ato and he was brilliant. Calm, methodical, and deeply informed not just about the facts, but about the why. He told us about what happened in this place, sure, but he talked about the logic behind it. The systems. The moral justifications that made such atrocities possible.

The hardest part was stepping into the dungeons, which were absolutely suffocating, figuratively, but some of them literally. These cramped cells once inhumanely held hundreds of people at a time. People. Not cargo. Not “slaves.” People. Human beings with names, families, dreams, languages, religions. The walls still bore the marks of humanity in pain, scratches at the walls, stains, even remnants of attempts at art. Haunting empty chains sat on the floor.

Throughout Elmina, visitors have left small memorials. Flowers, bottles of water, jewelry, handwritten notes. People come from all over, many are Black Americans, disconnected from their ancestral roots due to slavery. They leave the names of ancestors they never truly knew, symbolically returning them home. 

Cape Coast Castle came after Elmina. And honestly, by then, I was numb.

The details were different, but the pain was the same. Dungeons. Chains. A chapel above a pit. History pressed into stone. Tributes left by ancestors. Another place where human beings were reduced to inventory. Another place where money, power, and colonization dictated who suffered and who sailed home rich.

Cape Coast was built more explicitly for slavery than Elmina. It felt more clinical, more deliberate. But honestly, the experiences blurred together.

Cape Coast Castle however, has a sort of meaningful and unexpected addition. Both Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle have a “Door of No Return.” The last door that enslaved men, women, and children who survived the dungeons, would be ushered through before they were put onto ships.

These ships would sail them to far unknown lands, never to return. But in a symbolic gesture, they created a “Door of Return.”

The idea being that when those descendants of enslaved people come back, they bring with them a part of those who were taken. They retrace their steps and return them home, to their native land. It’s a beautiful idea, and one that brings the slightest spark of hope into an otherwise unfathomably oppressive place.

But the whole thing just had me asking something that unfortunately I’ve asked far too many times, when reading the news, seeing photos from war torn countries or those under siege, even when standing before sites of historical atrocity, such as this one.

How do you do this to another person and still call yourself human?

But that’s just the thing, only humanity is capable of such deep cruelty.

It is not an absence of humanity that causes men to do these things, to participate in such evil. It’s an absolute and abject abundance of humanity. Flawed, hateful, greedy, ugly humanity.

Humans dehumanizing others, and in the process, they dehumanize themselves. I wrote a poem about that once.

In 2022, I visited Dachau for the second time and Auschwitz for the first. The concentration camps in Germany and Poland are often, rightly I should add, framed as some of the darkest places on Earth. And the second you step through their gates, you feel it. Everything is dead. The trees, the air, the colors. It’s all gray and brown and suffocating. It is immediately crushing and openly evil.

Auschwitz and Dachau don’t hide what they are.

They don’t soften. They hit you in the face with what happened there. Concrete blocks. Barbed wire. Literal ovens. The landscape tells of grief and loss.

Conversely, Elmina and Cape Coast are deceptive with their picturesque beauty, hiding unimaginable horrors beneath brightly painted walls and ocean vistas. This contrast was jarring. It was almost more painful because it masked the suffering, or maybe it was more painful because I know it happened to my people.

The Holocaust and the transatlantic slave trade, itself a “400 Year Holocaust,” are distinct historical tragedies, each with unique contexts and consequences, but they share unsettling similarities rooted in the human capacity for systematic cruelty.

At their core, both types of locations, the camps and castles, reflect a terrifying capacity to dehumanize. Slavery and genocide rely on stripping individuals of humanity to justify cruelty, reducing people to numbers, cargo, or commodities. In both scenarios, ideology, profit, or twisted morality eclipsed basic empathy and compassion.

The Gambia is a nation whose population was devastated by the slave trade. My people were stolen. Some ended up in America. Some in Brazil. Some in places we’ll never know. And some, maybe many, were held in Elmina. Or Cape Coast. Or both. And they never came home.

There’s no record. No trace. They just vanished.

The families they left behind never got answers. Never got justice. They just had to carry on. And now here I am, walking the same stones they once lay on, trying to comprehend what was taken from them.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a Jewish person visiting Auschwitz. But I have some sense of what it feels like to stand inside the ruins of horror and realize the bones underneath might have once existed surrounded by the same blood that surrounds your bones.

I can’t even say it’s a type of grief. It didn’t happen to me. It didn’t happen to anyone I’ve ever known. But it did happen to those who share my DNA. So it’s not grief I feel. Just weight.

Leaving Cape Coast and Elmina, I felt emotionally exhausted, but perhaps I needed the reminder of our collective responsibility. History’s darkest chapters teach uncomfortable lessons, ones we often prefer to ignore. But ignorance is dangerous. We must confront and reflect on these legacies, ensuring they’re never repeated. 

Given how cliched the phrase “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it” has become, you’d really think we shouldn’t be at risk of such a thing… but just look around.