Part 4: Visit to Cape Coast Castle, Ghana, West Africa: Walking Through The Door of No Return

Part 4: Visit to Cape Coast Castle, Ghana, West Africa: Walking Through The Door of No Return
Author

Jeevan A. Robinson (MNI Alive Media)

Release Date

Sunday, February 26, 2017

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Imagine yourself one day being captured by unknown persons; taken to a holding facility and mercilessly brutalised; then bounded unto a waiting vessel to be taken away from your homeland and property with no prospect of return.

That, which I have just described, was essentially the fate captured Black Africans had to endure during the era of Slavery.

The "Door of No Return" is the focus of the 4th instalment of our feature articles looking at my visit to Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, West Africa - the former slave holding facility.

The "Door of No Return" was the final indignation our Ancestors would have suffered on African soil. This Door was the place where they were taken to meet up with the other captured female slaves, before they were forced to exit this door, where they were then placed on waiting boats to be taken out into the Atlantic Ocean to be herded on the bigger slave ships that were docked in the open ocean, waiting to transport them to the New World into slavery.

The "Door of No Return" may indeed have a very fitting name at the time when its use was prolific, but the symbolism of it as a place where a former lives of freedom gave way to a future life of servitude and slavery, and a final goodbye to the soil of Africa - that very exit through this door must have evoked great mental anguish and despair in the bosoms of our Ancestors as they left the Cape Coast Castle permanently.

Today, the "Door of No Return" offers a different symbolism.

On the walk through of Cape Coast Castle, you are taken through the Exit to experience that final feeling of loss that our Ancestors felt. However, in somewhat of a Spiritual gesture, you are also walked back through the "Door of No Return" into the Castle as a returning descendant of The Ancestors - coming back to the soil of Africa through the same door they were forced to leave through all those years ago.

That experience conjures a Spiritual rebirth, and a deep re-awakening of the Soul - where a once permanent exit from the African soil, that was once a certainty that bore no semblance of hope - now in modern times that gate is used symbolically as a "Door of Re-entry" that explodes as a point of connective energies and a reunification with Africa as our true and original home.

View Video Below of The Door of No Return:



Jeevan Robinson is Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief of Marketing, News & Information Media – MNI Alive Media. He can be reached at jeevan@mnialive.com



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