United States Vice President Kamala Harris has sent a message to fellow Americans and charged the rest of the world to take lessons from the inhumane activities that occurred during the slave trade era after she visited the historic Cape Coast Castle in Ghana.
The 17th-century slave fortification was one of the numerous coastal structures used during the transatlantic slave trade, which forcefully abducted 12.5 million people, mostly from Central and West Africa, and put them to work across the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean. Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff explored the castle as they listened to lectures.
According to reports, the couple appeared emotional and moved as Kamala placed flowers in the female slave prison and entered the slave ship through the infamous “Door of No Return.”
“Being here was — was immensely powerful and moving, when we think about how human beings were treated by the hundreds of thousands in this very place that we now stand, the crimes that happened here, the blood that was shed here,” she said from Cape Coast Castle.
Today, I visited Cape Coast Castle in Ghana.
Hundreds of thousands of enslaved African people were forced here, tortured, and brutalized.
The horrific journey that began here shaped the history of the world. This history must always be remembered, understood, and taught. pic.twitter.com/8GD1WZN1G8
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) March 29, 2023
“They came to this place of horror — some to die, many to starve and be tortured, women to be raped — before they were then forcibly taken on a journey thousands of miles from their home to be sold by so-called merchants and taken to the Americas, to the Caribbean to be an enslaved people.”
Harris said the horror of what had happened there must be remembered. “It cannot be denied. It must be taught. History must be learned,” she said.
