Upstairs, Downstairs and Cape Coast Castle

Guest blog from fellow historian Rob Smith

Cape Coast Castle. The name is benign, pleasant even, betraying none of the true horrors of its history.

It started life as a trading post in the 16th century, before being rebuilt by the British in the 18th century. I remember visiting the castle when I lived in Ghana. The tour guide welcomed us and said something I have never forgotten;

"This castle is Ghana's real life version of Upstairs, Downstairs."

For those unfamiliar, Upstairs, Downstairs is a 1971 television series set in central London during the early years of the 20th century. Spanning thirty years in the show, it showed the decline of the British aristocracy, depicting the servants downstairs and their masters upstairs.

In a way the tour guide is right. The castle is one of harsh and extreme contrasts. The chambers above are beautifully furnished, spacious, airy with spectacular views. The beauty is almost mocking, as you realise that only a few metres below you was immeasurable suffering, being inflicted. The facilitators of this appalling trade were detached, seeing people as commodities and the castle's physical structure enabled this.

Life is not a television show. The underground dungeon is not a Belgravia mansion's basement and living quarters. It was, and remains, a space of abject horror, terror, darkness and fear. People torn from their families would wait in these cramped dungeons before boats would take them far away, never to return. In the dungeon, your eyes take a while to get used to the darkness. But there is a single source of light. A small tiny window, more a hole, which allows the sea to pour in if the waves are high enough. You can only imagine how terrifying it must have been.

I was only in there for less than an hour. But it still haunts me. And now we must turn to Greek mythology and a foolish king to help us never forget what happened in those walls.

Midas is remembered for his ability to turn everything he touched into gold. And in the mythos, he offended the god Apollo, who gave him the ears of a donkey. Midas attempted to cover up his ears but his barber knew of his secret. Whilst sworn to secrecy, the barber could not keep it and dug a hole in a meadow. He whispered the secret into the hole and covered it up. When reeds sprang up from the hole, they whispered the story in the wind and Midas' secret was exposed.

If you stand on the beach and look towards the castle, you'll see it simply as a white building with a terracotta roof. It's appearance is normal, picturesque even. Palm trees dot around it. But think of it differently. Think of those palm trees as the reeds in the Midas story, and instead of the wind whispering his secret, hear the screams and horror of thousands of people who were wrenched from their families, their lives and their homes, and seen as nothing more than commodities. And as Captain Jean-Luc Picard said in the 1998 film Star Trek: Insurrection,

"some of the darkest chapters in the history of my world involve the forced relocation of one group of people to satisfy the demands of another."