On my first day in Ghana, I participated in a field lab that went to El Mina and Cape Cast Castles. These two castles were two of the main slave castles during the 16th-19th centuries. We traveled to El Mina castle first.
El Mina was built in 1482. It was captured by the Butch in 1647, who sold it to the British in 1872. The British abolished slavery. El Mina is the largest and the oldest slave castle in Sub-Saharan Africa. People who would soon become slaves, would walk two months to get to El Mina, and then wait around three months to get onto a ship to go to the Americas. While they waited, they were separated into male and female “dungeons,” which were rooms two floors belong the governor’s residence. Here, the people who eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom in the same room. They had red brick floors which came from Portugal, and yellow brick walls that came from Holland. If someone misbehaved, they were put in a room that was marked with a skull and crossbones. In here, they were not fed or given any water. Three million slaves left from El Mina Castle.
After El Mina and lunch, we went to Cape Coast Castle. This castle is famous for the “Door of No Return.”
Once you went out of this door, you never came back because the ships that led to the Americas was on the other side. At this castle, the slaves were actually kept in dungeons below the ground. Each small room held up to 150 slaves. The men were branded with different marks to signify who “their owners” were. The women were not branded because it affected their appearance. The exit was made very small so that it was easier to count the slaves as they exited so that every single one was accounted for. 
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