Archbishop of Canterbury vows to support £100m pledge helping communities affected by enslavement
Sarah Mullally made the comments during a visit to the Cape Coast castle, a 17th-century fortress built by Swedish traders, but occupied by the Danish and the Dutch, before the British seized it in 1664.
It was part of a 10-day tour of Ghana and Cameroon at the invitation of the head of the Anglican church’s west Africa province, the archbishop Cyril Kobina Ben-Smith.
“Being at Cape Coast castle today and seeing the horrific conditions that thousands of people were kept in, it is impossible not to feel the weight of the immense evil that drove the transatlantic slave trade,” Mullally said on Thursday.
She was shown the dungeons used to keep enslaved people, before praying in a former Anglican chapel above them. She also visited the “Door of No Return”, where enslaved people were loaded on to ships and ferried across the Atlantic. It has since been renamed the “Door of Return”.