From gold to human beings: how the trade grew on this coast, who ran it, who profited, how it ended, and what it left behind in Ghana and in Britain.
Europeans came to this coast for gold. The Portuguese arrived in 1471 and in 1482 built São Jorge da Mina, today Elmina Castle, to control the gold trade. For more than a century the trade was mostly gold, ivory and goods. The Portuguese even brought enslaved people from elsewhere on the West African coast to sell to Akan gold traders.
That changed in the seventeenth century, when sugar plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas created a demand for labour that seemed to have no end. The Dutch, the English, the Danes, the Swedes and the Brandenburgers all built forts on the Gold Coast, and the trade in human beings grew until it overshadowed everything else.
The Portuguese Gold Coast, 1471–1642On ghana-net.com. The Dutch Gold Coast, 1598–1872On ghana-net.com.The English built their first fort on the coast at Kormantse in the 1630s. In 1664 they seized the castle at Cape Coast, first built by the Swedes and held by the Dutch, and it became the headquarters of English and later British operations in West Africa for two centuries.
The trade was run by chartered companies: the Royal African Company from 1672, with members of the royal family and London's leading men among its investors, and from 1750 the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. By the second half of the eighteenth century Britain had become the largest slave-trading nation in the Atlantic world, with ships sailing from London, Bristol and above all Liverpool.
The British arrival on the Gold Coast, 1550–1800On ghana-net.com. Whispers in the ledgersThe archives of the Company of Merchants, on ghana-net.com.Ships arrived from Europe with textiles, guns, gunpowder, iron bars, alcohol and cowrie shells. Captives were brought down to the coast, often after long marches from the interior, and held in the dungeons of the forts and castles, sometimes for weeks, in darkness and filth, until a ship was ready. Many died before they ever saw the sea. Those who survived were taken through the gate the visitors' guides now call the Door of No Return, rowed out to the ships, and carried across the Atlantic to Jamaica, Barbados, the Carolinas and beyond.
Modern research estimates that well over a million people were shipped from the Gold Coast. In the Caribbean, people from this coast were known as "Coromantee", after the English fort at Kormantse, and were feared by planters for their resistance and rebellions.
The trade was not run by Europeans alone, and an honest account has to say so. The European companies rarely went inland. Captives were brought to the forts by African traders and states: prisoners of war, people seized in raids, debtors, and those condemned by courts. Powerful states such as Denkyira and later Asante, and coastal Fante brokers, grew rich on the trade. Coastal merchants like John Cabess of Komenda worked closely with the companies.
This does not shift the responsibility for an Atlantic system designed, financed and run for profit in Europe. It does mean the history is more complicated than either "Europeans came and took them" or "Africans sold their own". Most people in Ghana today know both sides of the story, and many families carry both.
Who sold whom?Ghana's slave history without the marketing, on ghana-net.com. John CabessOn ghana-net.com. The forgotten giants of the Atlantic slave tradeOn ghana-net.com. The Asante EmpireOn ghana-net.com.The British Parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807, after a long campaign by abolitionists, by the testimony of formerly enslaved people such as Olaudah Equiano, and by uprisings across the Caribbean. Slavery itself in the British Caribbean was abolished in 1833, with effect from 1834. The slave owners received huge compensation from the British state; the enslaved received nothing.
On the Gold Coast, the end of the Atlantic trade did not end slavery. The forts lost their purpose; the Company of Merchants was dissolved in 1821. Britain extended its control step by step, buying the Danish forts in 1850 and taking over the Dutch forts in 1872. Domestic slavery in the colony was only legally abolished in 1874, the year the Gold Coast Colony was proclaimed.
A Cape Coast man, Philip Quaque, became the first African ordained a priest in the Church of England and served as chaplain at Cape Coast Castle for half a century, preaching above the dungeons where the trade went on.
Philip QuaqueThe first African Anglican priest, on ghana-net.com. The Bond of 1844On ghana-net.com.Many of the captives who reached the coast came from the north, and slave raiding there continued long after the Atlantic trade ended. In the late nineteenth century raiders such as Babatu devastated the northern savannah, and Salaga, on the trade route between the forest and the Sahel, was one of the great slave markets of West Africa. At Pikworo near Paga, the rock camp where captives were held can still be visited.
Salaga slave marketOn ghana-net.com. Pikworo slave camp, PagaOn ghana-net.com. BabatuOn ghana-net.com.The trade shaped Britain too. The wealth of Liverpool, Bristol and London, country houses, banks and insurers, was built partly on it. Statues, street names and endowments carry the names of slave traders and planters, and the debate over what to do with them, and over reparations, is far from settled. Liverpool's International Slavery Museum is the place in the UK to start; the forts of the Gold Coast are where the story becomes physical.
Reparations: history and responsibilityOn africanindependence.com. British colonial and West African slave tradeThe full series, on ghana-net.com.Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle, both UNESCO World Heritage sites, are the two most important places to visit. Go with a guide, allow time, and be prepared: for many visitors, and especially for diaspora visitors, the dungeons are overwhelming. Assin Manso, inland, is a quieter place of remembrance. Every 1 August, Emancipation Day is marked at the castles and at Assin Manso.
Cape Coast Castle Museumcapecoastcastlemuseum.com Cape Coast Castlecapecoastcastle.com Elmina Castleelminacastle.info Forts and castles of GhanaEvery fort, region by region. Entrance feesForts, castles and museums, on ghanamuseums.com. Slavery in Ghana: forts, castles and hidden storiesOn ghana-net.com.A day tour from Accra to Cape Coast and Elmina takes the strain out of the long drive and gives you a guide who knows the history. Entrance fees are included in the tour price. Tips for your guide and driver are not included, but they are always welcome.