Elmina

The Portuguese reached this coast in 1471 and found a gold trade already thriving. In 1481 King John II sent the materials for a fortress in prefitted form aboard ten caravels and two transports, and under Diogo de Azambuja the fleet arrived at Elmina in January 1482. The local chief, Kwamin Ansah, was wary of a permanent settlement; the Portuguese offered gifts, made promises and hinted at consequences, and got their reluctant agreement. Building began the next morning. To clear the most defensible ground the Portuguese demolished villagers' homes and tried to quarry a rock the people of Elmina held sacred as the home of the Benya river god. The villagers attacked; the Portuguese burned the village in reprisal. Even so, the first storey of the tower was up within twenty days, and Castelo de São Jorge da Mina — St. George of the Mine — became the first prefabricated European building planned and executed in sub-Saharan Africa. It was the first trading post on the Gulf of Guinea, and it is the oldest European structure still standing south of the Sahara.

For a century it was a gold fortress. At the height of the trade in the early sixteenth century some 680,000 grams of gold left the Gold Coast each year, about a tenth of the world's supply. Then the trade turned, and the castle became something far darker. From the outset the Portuguese preferred not to capture people themselves, buying captives instead from the Slave Coast and São Tomé and holding them here as a transshipment point. By the seventeenth century most West African trade was in human beings, and St. George served as a depot where enslaved Africans from many kingdoms were held before sale. The Dutch seized the castle in 1637 after a failed attempt in 1596, made it the capital of the Dutch Gold Coast, and continued the triangular Atlantic trade until 1814, when they abolished it under the Anglo-Dutch treaty. They rebuilt much of the castle between 1770 and 1775. In 1682 the French author Jean Barbot judged it to have "no equal on all the coast of Guinea" for beauty and strength. Britain took over the Dutch Gold Coast in 1872, and Ghana has held the castle since independence in 1957. UNESCO inscribed it in 1979. Today it is a national museum and a place of pilgrimage for many African Americans seeking their heritage. Walk its courtyards and dungeons slowly, and let the guides — who speak plainly about what happened here — set the pace.

The Dutch learned in 1637 that whoever held the hill above the castle could bombard it. They used the height as a gun position to take Elmina from the Portuguese, then built an earthwork there the following year so no one could do the same to them. In the 1660s Director General J. Valckenburgh replaced it with a permanent fort of local sandstone, on the site of a Portuguese chapel to Saint Jago that the Dutch had burned. Fort Coenraadsburg was purely military — no warehouses — and served as a prison for European convicts and a disciplinary post for officers. After 1872 it passed through uses as a prison, a hospital and a rest house, and it stands in good condition today.

Below it, in what was once called "the Garden", the Dutch laid out a cemetery in 1806 on the orders of Governor Johannes Petrus Hoogenboom, because the space inside and around the castle had run out. About seventy people are buried there, among them governor-general Herman Willem Daendels, the Euro-African merchant Carel Hendrik Bartels, R. P. Baffour, Chief Kweku Andoh and Elmina King Nana Kobina Gyan. Hoogenboom himself was one of the first interred, after he was killed by Elminese people with whom he had quarrelled. The Dutch embassy funded a restoration in 2006, and the gate again carries its Dutch inscription: "O weldadige moeder, ontvang uwe kinderen weder" — Oh benevolent mother, receive your children once again.

A short walk away is a stranger chapter. Between 1831 and 1872 some three thousand African recruits sailed from Elmina to Batavia, now Jakarta, to serve in the Dutch colonial army in the East Indies. Veterans who returned were given plots behind St. George's Castle, on ground still called Java Hill, and collected their pensions in the castle. On Java they and their descendants were known as Belanda Hitam, Black Dutchmen. The Elmina Java Museum, opened in 2003 and funded by the Edward A. Ulzen Memorial Foundation, tells their story — the first private museum in Ghana, and a family's act of remembrance.

Elmina's Fante name is Edina, and its older name was Anomansah, from its position on the peninsula between the Benya Lagoon and the sea. Oral tradition credits its founding to Kwaa Amankwaa, a hunter who found a stream and said "M'enya" — I have found it. The town grew around the castle and was part of the Eguafo kingdom until the late sixteenth century, when it broke away with Portuguese backing. Its economy today rests on fishing, salt production and tourism, and the fishing is not a performance. The harbour is the third largest fish landing site in Ghana, after Tema and Sekondi; the town accounts for about fifteen per cent of the country's total fish output, and roughly three-quarters of local livelihoods depend on fishing or related work. Boats land from around six in the morning and head out again in the evening, and the market on the quay beside the castle runs on that rhythm.

Once a year the whole town turns out for the water. The Bakatue Festival, recorded by the Dutch as far back as 1847, falls on the first Tuesday of July and takes its name from the Fante for "draining of a lagoon". It marks the opening of the fishing season. On the Monday the customary rites are performed; on the Tuesday the paramount chief, his sub-chiefs and the state of Elmina offer eggs and mashed yam mixed with palm oil to Nana Brenya, the river god, and pray for peace. Chiefs ride in decorated palanquins, there is a durbar with drumming and dancing, and the chief priest casts his net three times into the Benya Lagoon. Tuesday is held to be the sea god's day, which is why Elmina's fishermen do not put to sea on Tuesdays at all.