12 Canons at the Castle

It is difficult to know quite how to react to Cape Coast Castle, says Briggs. So true. When you are standing in the dungeon, and the guide turns off the lights so that you can see the little 10 by 10 inch hole that brought in air for 1500 men, you are shocked. When he points out the chute high up on the wall, where food and water was dumped on the men, you are sickened. When you see on the wall the mark showing how high the floor was packed with the filth and everything that fell in it, you are ready to move on to the next exhibit. Above the dungeons are the bureaucratic offices. The castle has been so sanitized as to be -- well, if not quite unreal, then wholly un-African, remote from everything around and outside it. Evidently the people who ran the place had it rather comfy. Today we find shops, museums, a very clean rest room, and a library in the office portion of the fort. Part of the building was used as a prison until 1995.

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