The Danes built Fort Prinzenstein at Keta in 1784, out of stone, for the slave trade — the easternmost of the forts on this coast, holding several hundred people at a time in its cells.
Keta. Go now.
2 min readSource-backed story
Listening to The Fort the Sea Is Taking Back
The Fort the Sea Is Taking Back
Story 1 of 1
0:001:24
Read transcript
The Fort the Sea Is Taking Back
The Danes built Fort Prinzenstein at Keta in 1784, out of stone, for the slave trade — the easternmost of the forts on this coast, holding several hundred people at a time in its cells.
Denmark abolished the trade in 1803 and the fort became a prison and then a post and then nothing much.
And then the sea started coming.
Keta sits on a sandbar between the Atlantic and the Keta Lagoon, and the coast here is eroding fast — a hundred metres of town has gone into the water in living memory, houses, streets, cemeteries. The sea took most of Fort Prinzenstein too. What is left is a broken white shell on the beach with the surf running through the ruins of it, and the cells that remain are cells you can stand in with the ocean audible on the other side of the wall.
There is a coastal defence project now, and it has slowed things.
There is something in it that people find hard to name: a building put up to take people across that ocean, being dismantled by that same ocean, in front of you, at a rate you could measure.
The Danes built Fort Prinzenstein at Keta in 1784, out of stone, for the slave trade — the easternmost of the forts on this coast, holding several hundred people at a time in its cells.
Denmark abolished the trade in 1803 and the fort became a prison and then a post and then nothing much.
And then the sea started coming.
Keta sits on a sandbar between the Atlantic and the Keta Lagoon, and the coast here is eroding fast — a hundred metres of town has gone into the water in living memory, houses, streets, cemeteries. The sea took most of Fort Prinzenstein too. What is left is a broken white shell on the beach with the surf running through the ruins of it, and the cells that remain are cells you can stand in with the ocean audible on the other side of the wall.
There is a coastal defence project now, and it has slowed things.
There is something in it that people find hard to name: a building put up to take people across that ocean, being dismantled by that same ocean, in front of you, at a rate you could measure.