U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has visited a slave castle in Ghana’s central region as part of her tour of the West African nation.
She was joined by her husband, Doug Emhoff for the tour of the 17th-century slave fortress in Cape Coast.
The Cape Coast castle is one of many fortresses built along the coasts of Africa to support the transatlantic slave trade.
Over 12.5 million people, mainly from Central and West Africa were sent from the continent to work across the Americas, Europe and the Caribbean.
She laid flowers in the female slave dungeon and went through the “Door of no Return” where slaves were shipped out.
“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,” Harris said from Cape Coast Castle.
“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 must be remembered. “It cannot be denied. It must be taught. History must be learned,” she said.
Earlier she had delivered a speech to thousands of young Ghanaians on Tuesday in Accra on women’s empowerment.
In her speech in front of the Black Star Gate, a monument to remember Ghana’s independence from Britain in 1957, Harris said “We must invest in the African ingenuity and creativity, which will unlock incredible economic growth and opportunities, not only for the people of the 54 countries that make up this diverse continent, but for the American people and people around the world.”
Her visit to Ghana, the first stop on an African tour that will also take her to Tanzania and Zambia.
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Source: Africafeeds.com
