Essay on Life inside the Cape Coast Castle

Introduction

Cape Coast Castle is just but one of the many castles in Cape Coast (present-day Ghana) built by the Europeans to facilitate trade in gold. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a tunnel through which the trans-Atlantic slave trade was carried out. This was a time when African slaves were treated brutally and disrespected. They were used as a trading commodity, just like gold and timber. Then came the British between 1750 and 1821, when slavery was improved. Although the slaves were still treated as property, they got wages, we're entitled to some rights, and could be allowed to mingle with the local community. Later, in the 18th century, much higher wages were paid to the slaves. This was an incentive to make them work harder and better and increase their loyalty to their masters. This paper, thus, seeks to illustrate the Life inside the cape coast castle, bringing into focus three key areas, history of the dungeon, company slavery, and slavery wages.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

History of the Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery and the Spirit of Capitalism in Cape Coast Castle

A dungeon is a dark chamber. According to Coleman Jordan's "rhizomorphic" analysis of the architecture of race in Cape Coast Castle, the underground dungeon is a space of terror, death, and above all blackness, in vertical contrast to the European living quarters and commanding heights of whiteness above. The dungeon of Cape Coast Castle, now known as a UNESCO World Heritage Site commemorating four centuries of Atlantic slavery and the European presence in West Africa, consists of chambers where slaves were stored and a door known as "Door of no Return" through which they exited, never to return. Along these chambers is Nana Tabir's altar, on which priests in attendance receive gifts in honor of the dead. Nana Tabir has not gone unnoticed in the growing scholarship on Ghana's slave forts and castles. He was the rock god. There are three approaches to historical interpretation that bring the critical dimensions of Cape Coast's Afro-European encounter.

The first approach examines the production of historical events and trajectories through the cultural logics that render them intelligible to motivated actors and constituencies on the ground (Marshall Sahlins). This is based on research done by Marshall Sahlins in 2004. He collected preliminary oral histories from the priest and priestesses of Tabir and the second in June 2011 when he returned to do a more intensive interview. The Europeans arrived by sea. This was a problem for Africans who had to determine what and whom they were dealing with. This made Tabir a point of ritual articulation between land and sea, coast and hinterland, Africans and Europeans, developing coastal polities, and converging orders of structural differentiation resulting from Cape Coast's incorporation into the growing Atlantic economy.

The second approach consists of the African strategies of ritual acquisition that converted the symbolic forms of Atlantic slavery into "fetishes" of power and value. Michael Taussig gives us glimpses of Tabir's past as it pushes into the present. Nana Tabir is said to have had early contact with Europeans who arrived on the coast. One reason for this is the presence of gifts associated with the Atlantic slave trade in his dungeon shrine. Tabir was a white god associated with a rock overlooking the sea. He was first encountered inland Fetu immigrants who settled on the coast and was subsequently incorporated into Cape Coast Castle after Europeans arrived and established their presence. According to historians, Tabir's rocky shrine was incorporated into the Castle of dungeons when it was first built. At first, he was against the slave trade and was praised in songs for this. Since the beginning of the slave trade, he never left the dungeon. He harassed the Europeans spiritually. The Europeans then reported him to Opanyin Koho Amoah, the Oguaa community leader and a native doctor.

In the third approach, we focus on Davenant's identification of the "rock called Tabora," which locates Tabir at the epicenter of these Afro-Atlantic transformations where merchant capital, market forces, and hinterland captives converged. Tabir's fluid identification with Europeans clearly shows he was a ritual figure of mediation and exchange. John Atkins tells us how these ritual practices were shaped. He recounts the arrival of the British in pursuit of pirates. This, coupled with the high rise in the Atlantic slave trade, brought about intermarriages. As a result, the number of white Negroes in Cape Coast increased.

The residents in Cape Coast try to suppress the slavery that was widespread there, but it becomes impossible through Tahir's spiritual possession and collective purification of the Fetu Afhaye festival. This festival usually began in the morning with a ritual in the cape coast castle's dungeon shrine where Tabir lived. After the rituals, there was a procession in the afternoon with a white bull on the streets of CC to Omanhen's palace and back to the CC. The Omanhen then cut the throat of the bull as a sacrifice on behalf of the entire kingdom. This festival was prohibited by the British colonizers but was later revived by Kwameh Nkurumah. Tabir's lasting association with Cape Coast Castle in the Fetu Afahye festival highlights the centrality of ritual in shaping the history of Afro-European relations as the Atlantic economy developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Tabir is a critical point of ritual articulation that brought Cape Coast society and the Atlantic economy into historical relations of joint development.

Facilitating the Slave Trade: Company Slaves at Cape Coast Castle

In 1751, the slave trade in Ghana, with Britain's Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, took a new turn. This British company aimed to facilitate Britain's African trade by maintaining a coastal infrastructure through a series of coastal trading forts. British traders could store supplies and slaves and create a cordial relationship with the African locals. This, however, did not come to pass as the Africans worked hard to gain more from the company. This prompted the company representatives to adopt company slaves as their source of labor. These company slaves were entitled to wages, worked on set hours, and were allowed to live in town and not in castles, as was the case with British predecessor, the Royal African Company.

Further study of company slavery at Cape Coast Castle shows another varied form that slavery took within the Atlantic while demonstrating the critical role that the company slaves played in the movement of goods into West Africa and the movement of slaves out of West Africa. The labor offered by the company slaves within a port facilitated the maritime activity of the Atlantic trade. Cape Coast became a slave enclave and administrative center of Britain's Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. This company found outside slaves, mostly from Gambia, less troublesome than the Cape Coast locals and sought more of the outsiders. As the Atlantic slave trade grew, the movement of slaves within the West African countries increased, with Gambian slaves still being the most preferred.

During the Anomabu fort's construction, more Gambian slaves were acquired, some of whom were trained as bricklayers. Eventually, Governor Thomas Melvil made Anomabu a training center. The skilled labor jobs were primarily reserved for men. At the same time, women were given menial physical tasks such as sweeping, cooking, gathering cotton, among others, within and around the Cape Coast Castle. The most important tasks for the company slaves included maintaining the trading forts, maritime activities where they operated the canoes, and transporting and converting shells into lime. Increased need for skilled labor forced the company to train most of these company slaves. One option was to take them to Britain for training. However, this was costly, so they opted for an apprenticeship where the skilled Europeans and the already trained slaves would train the company slaves.

In 1767, there was a disease outbreak that led to a shortage of laborers in the company. Cudjoe Caboceer, the de facto leader of Cape Coast, the company's most potent coastal proponent, and a dominant slave trader, provided 50 free laborers to the company. Surprisingly, when these slaves were paid, Cudjoe Caboceer took away all their wages, claiming the slaves were his. These free laborers were not dependent on the company since they continued their other livelihoods while laboring for the company. They worked when they pleased and made demands. For instance, in 1753, the free canoe men at Anomabu stopped working and demanded higher wages. To resolve this, company slave canoe men were sent from Cape Coast to help off-load the supplies. The use of free slaves made the company slaves understand that the company had no power over them. This made the company slaves to do less work. The company realized that it did not have enough company slaves to run their coastal trading forts. This prompted one company officer, William Roberts, to travel to Accra to strengthen the fort there. Sadly, he found very few company slaves there and requested more slaves from Cape Coast. The governor in Cape Coast sent bricklayers who were, unfortunately, abducted by the chief in Tantumkweri after he offered them better pay. Roberts had to hire more slaves.

Apart from maintaining the Castle, the castle slaves had to protect it too. This was due to the low survival rate of crimped European laborers and soldiers. The company, therefore, relied on company slaves to protect the British coastal interests.

Waged Slavery

Slavery is often assumed to be an institution where slaves are not reimbursed for their labor. However, this is not true, as proven in the rewarding of unfree labor in Cape Coast Castle in the eighteenth century. The payments were relatively high and not just for sustaining the needs of the slaves as it was in other slave societies. To make slaves work, several means were used, the main ones being coercion and punishments. However, some slave societies used various kinds of rewards to compel the slaves to work as opposed to punishments. Nigel Bolland argues that slave payments were increasingly made in the nineteenth century, categorizing the payments into three parts: overtime payments, slave hiring payments, and bonuses for good conduct and loyalty.

The institution of castle slavery in Cape Coast castle greatly improved due to the European establishments on the West Coast. Rebecca Shumway argues that castle slaves were provided with monetary payments, which were also meant to cater to their subsistence needs. This way, the company did not incur the cost of providing food to the slaves, as they were expected to sell the goods they received as wages in kind to buy food. Yet, the payments made to castle slaves cannot be described as merely subsistence payments as they were way more than that. To determine how high or low wages would be, the company implemented differentiated wage levels. Many factors must have contributed to the wage differentials in Cape Coast castle, two theoretical ones being the opportunity cost of shirking and loyalty to the master.

Conclusion

In the opportunity cost of shirking, the slaves were rewarded to ensure that they do not evade work. The reward was done majorly depending on how complex a task is or how productive a slave was. The opportunity cost of shirking was influenced by gender, age, and disability. As seen earlier, men were trained to undertake the skilled and more complex tasks hence higher reward than women who undertook more straightforward tasks.