The Chartered Institute of Logistics & Transport (CILT-Ghana) has made a recommendation to the Ministry of Tourism and Ghana Tourist Authority to consider renaming the world heritage slave sites with its appropriate name ‘Slave Dungeon.’
According to CILT-Ghana, Cape Coast Castle may be appropriately called Cape Coast Slave Dungeon to help reveal the actual purpose it was used for without even having visited and elicit the right motivation to visit these sites.
At a public lecture delivered by the President of the Institute, Mr. Ebo Hammond FCILT, he indicated that the CILT is of the view that the name ‘Castle’ as it has been named is a misnomer and should appropriately be renamed Slave Dungeons.
“A castle is a type of fortified structure built most during the Middle Ages primarily as residence for the nobility, royalty or as military stations. The ‘castles’ in the Gold Coast so named were not occupied by any royalty but for storage of human ‘cargo’ (as was referred to by the European traders) to be sold into slavery,” he said.
According to CILT-Ghana President, the naming of these monuments as castles wrongly give a wrong impression of glamour and comfort associated with them and that it is until people enter these monuments that they get shocked of what really happened there.
It would be recalled that no too long ago, the President of Ghana, His Excellency Nana Akufo-Addo declared and formally launched the “Year of Return, Ghana 2019” in September 2018, Washington, D.C. for Africans in the Diaspora and other well-wishers.
This gave fresh impetus to the quest to unite Africans on the continent with their brothers and sisters in the diaspora. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (TAST) lasted for about 400 years from the 16 th to the 19th Century.
The Slave trade he said, involved three continents Africa, Americas and Europe which ensured the deportation of about 12 million enslaved Africans to mainly the Americas; and was christened the Triangular Trade.
“The trade also saw the deaths of about 4 million Africans through wars, suicide, summary execution and disease, among others. The major trading countries were Portugal, Spain, England, France, Netherlands, etc. It is described by some historians as an African version of the holocaust,” he said.
CILT Ghana organized a public lecture titled “Ethno-Logistics: Mapping the Logistics and supply chain of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade” which explored the application of logistics and supply chain principles such as procurement/sourcing, transportation, packaging, warehousing, inventory management, marketing and sales and reverse logistics, among others.
The lecture revealed that most of what is termed castles in Ghana now were really slave dungeons. They were initially built by the Europeans as fornications against attacks from other Europeans.
However, they were redeveloped and redesigned to ensure the storage of slaves captured from the Gold Coast and bound for the Americas. These monuments, such as the Cape Coast and Elmina castles are world heritage sites.
By PROSPER AGBENYEGA
