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About the product
Elmina, like other West African slave fortresses, housed more luxury suites for the Europeans in the upper levels. The slave dungeons below were cramped and filthy, each cell often housing as many as 200 people at a time, without enough space to even lie down on the floor of the dungeon. Outbreaks of malaria and yellow fever were common. Staircases led directly from the Governor 's chambers to the women's dungeons below, making it easy for him to select personal concubines from amongst the women.

At the seaboard side of the castle was the 'Door of No Return', the portal through which slaves boarded the ships that would take them on the treacherous journey across the Atlantic known as the Middle Passage. By the 18th century, 30,000 slaves on their way to North and South America passed through Elmina's Door of No Return each year.
The castle was sold to the British in the 1872, together with all other Dutch castles on the Gold Coast. As slavery was outlawed in Britain in 1807, it would not have been used to transfer slaves while owned by the British.

While used by the British it was used to imprison the King of the Kumasi based Ashanti in 1896-97 before he and his followers were exiled to Freetown, Sierra Leone and in 1900 on Maha in the Seychelles, retuning in 1924, in 1926 gained a ceremonial role and in 1936 regaining the role as leader of the Ashanti People. While they were held at Elmina the King was held in one of the large rooms on the roof of the castle, on the seaward side and his main supporters in the second one on the landward side.

The castle has had many uses since including at one point being the training centre for the police.

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