رتبها

CAPE COAST:
The campsite 🤩🤩🤩
Guess how many days we stayed?
A #Thread.... 🧵Loading...
From the Cape Coast, the Centre of slave trade in the west coast 😢, and now beautiful beaches 🏖️🏊
#OverlandingAfrica #AlphaLandrover #BreakingBorders

Cape Coast is the home to the Cape Coast castle. A large commercial fort, built on the Gold Coast of West Africa (now Ghana) by European traders.
Another castle, Elmina castle is a few kms from here too. Slave trade centres.
#OverlandingAfrica #AlphaLandrover #BreakingBorders

From slave trade to other trade...
As I walked the beach to see the castle from the other side, I was sold this on offer, just minutes upon arrival 🚬
Bei poa, quality poa (I guess 😅)
#OverlandingAfrica #AlphaLandrover #BreakingBorders

The Cape Coast castle was a Portuguese "feitoria" or trading post, established in 1555. It would later change hands from Portuguese to the Swedes, the Dutch, the Danes and later on the British captured it in the 18th century.
#AlphaLandrover #BreakingBorders #OverlandingAfrica

Slave trade was real. If you've visited Mombasa Fort Jesus, Zanzibar and other coastal forts, it bring tears of bad memories.
The sale of humans for manual labor, sexual abuse, physical abuse etc.
The story here is the same 😢
#AlphaLandrover #BreakingBorders #OverlandingAfrica

We have to continue the thread 🧵 later... Data issues, slow speeds 🤦‍♂️.
My local simcard data is misbehaving - I'm camping in some remote location.
Who knows someone pale @SafaricomPLC - mnipe connection. A roaming data partner jameni.
c.c @PeterNdegwa_
#OverlandingAfrica

We are back.
A #Thread.. Continued 🧵
#OverlandingAfrica

We started the castle tour with a brief. In simple terms, slave trade was the trade of humans for forced labor.
In Britain for example, companies like Barclays, Manchester, Liverpool etc were major traders.
#OverlandingAfrica #AlphaLandrover #BreakingBorders

After initial ferrying of African slaves to Europe, most would die or not perform.
A researcher proposed a a slave trial to the Americas where climatic conditions were close to Africa. - His research bore fruits, thus the start of Trans-Atlantic Slave trade.
#OverlandingAfrica

Thousands of men and women would be brought here, as a market place for slaves. European Companies would compete in bids for slaves in this market place.
Once bought, a slave would be shoulder-branded using a red-hot iron bar bearing the company names.
#OverlandingAfrica

Slaves would then be bundled in their thousands in Female and Male dungeaons. Dungeons dark as night.
They would be staying here for 1-3 months waiting for the ships from the participating buying companies.
Death happened here, in huge numbers.
#OverlandingAfrica

Inside these dungeons, they would stay for months without light. Most times standing due to space constraints. The toilet, pee, vomit - all would be where you are standing as the buckets provided would be full in a day and no one to empty them.
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The dungeon floor was fully transformed from the stone finish to a decomposed waste, faces, vomit and human waste. Tests of samples from these floors have shown a mix of all sort of human waste.
The small valley was meant for flow of human waste but it couldn't handle.

As this happened in the basement dungeons, a church was housed on top of the dungeons. And it would carry on with worship every day of sabbath. A single office on upper floors is bigger and well lit compared to the dungeons.
The contradictions !!
#OverlandingAfrica

A cell was used for punishing slaves considered to be problematic. Beaten & Assulted, no one would survive once moved to this cell.
Dark than night, once the door was closed behind us, we started feeling a state of suffocation in minutes.
PS/ Original door to date.

A similar cell for women too. This was largely used for women who refused sexual encounters from the whites. Once they gave in to forced sex, they would be transfered back to the better choice - the dungeons.
#AlphaLandrover #BreakingBorders #OverlandingAfrica

Women slaves who got pregnant of the whites would be released and held/housed if the man was interested in their child. Otherwise, they'd be released to the brokers to take them back home.
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As ships neared arrival, doctors would carry out medical examinations. Weak/sick slaves n pregnant women would be released to the brokers who sold them here. Brokers would abandon them and they would rarely find their way home, instead die in the forests.
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DOOR OF NO RETURN:
A tunnel from the dungeons leads to the door of no return. Where African slaves bid their goodbye to their home, forever never to return.
Pregnancy, sickness, weakness detected on board had one outcome - to be thrown in the sea alive.
#OverlandingAfrica

Current pics taken from the "DOOR OF NO RETURN" and the front.
While Britain and most European nations abolished slave trade years ago, slavery still goes on to date. In various forms. Neo-colonialism.
We must stand against it, in whatever form and nature.
Africa MUST be FREE !