The Portuguese called it São Jorge da Mina, the castle of the mine, and they built it for gold.
1482, by the Portuguese
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Listening to Elmina Castle
Elmina Castle
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Elmina Castle
The Portuguese called it São Jorge da Mina, the castle of the mine, and they built it for gold. It is the oldest surviving European building south of the Sahara, and it went up eight years before Columbus sailed.
They came ashore, negotiated with the local chief — the tradition holds his name was Kwamena Ansah — and he did not want them there. He was overruled by circumstance and by the guns on the ships. They took stone from a sacred rock at the site to build with, which the community understood exactly as it was meant.
For its first century the trade really was gold. Then, over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the primary cargo changed. The Dutch took the castle from the Portuguese in 1637 and held it for over two hundred years, and it became one of the largest slave-trading posts on the West African coast. The British took it in 1872.
What a visitor sees now: a white fort, blindingly bright in the sun, above a working harbour packed with hundreds of painted fishing canoes. Inside, the male dungeon — a stone room, no windows to speak of, where hundreds were held at a time. Above the dungeon, on the upper floor, a church. The governor's quarters with a view over the sea and a staircase down into the women's yard. A punishment cell with a skull marked over the door, from which no one came out. And the door in the sea wall.
The contrast between the beauty of the place and what happened in it is not a paradox you can resolve. It is the experience.
If you visit Ghana. At Elmina Castle in the Central Region, allow time to understand both its gold-trade history and its later role in the Atlantic trade.
The Portuguese called it São Jorge da Mina, the castle of the mine, and they built it for gold. It is the oldest surviving European building south of the Sahara, and it went up eight years before Columbus sailed.
They came ashore, negotiated with the local chief — the tradition holds his name was Kwamena Ansah — and he did not want them there. He was overruled by circumstance and by the guns on the ships. They took stone from a sacred rock at the site to build with, which the community understood exactly as it was meant.
For its first century the trade really was gold. Then, over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the primary cargo changed. The Dutch took the castle from the Portuguese in 1637 and held it for over two hundred years, and it became one of the largest slave-trading posts on the West African coast. The British took it in 1872.
What a visitor sees now: a white fort, blindingly bright in the sun, above a working harbour packed with hundreds of painted fishing canoes. Inside, the male dungeon — a stone room, no windows to speak of, where hundreds were held at a time. Above the dungeon, on the upper floor, a church. The governor's quarters with a view over the sea and a staircase down into the women's yard. A punishment cell with a skull marked over the door, from which no one came out. And the door in the sea wall.
The contrast between the beauty of the place and what happened in it is not a paradox you can resolve. It is the experience.