Cape Coast - Canopies, castles and crime

We woke up early on Saturday morning in Cape Coast and headed to the canopy walkway in Kakum National Park. Chuckled at the people who were getting scared until we reached the platform and realised that the bridges were just planks of wood held up with a bit of string netting. I would like to describe the rainforest in detail, but once the boys started messing around behind me and the plank started wiggling from side to side, I put my head down and marched over the bridges, completely missing the scenery altogether.

Safely back on firm ground, we took part in a nature walk and then headed back to Cape Coast for some food and a rest. We ate dinner by candlelight as the electricity went out and then headed out towards a beach bar/restaurant.

Feeling exhausted from a day of rainforest walking, four of us decided to head back to the hotel at around midnight. It wasn't far so we naively walked past the taxis and decided to walk.

Apart from a number of homeless people sleeping on the sides of the road, the streets were empty with only the sounds of the waves breaking against the shore.

Gut instinct told me that I was about to be mugged just before two men walked past us, made a quick about-turn and then grabbed my bag. Looped over my head and shoulder, it was difficult to get off and as the metal clutch dug into my skin I just remember hoping that the strap would snap quickly so that they could get away without hurting anybody.

Left standing bag-less in the middle of the street, I heard my friend running after them shouting and then the sound of metal hitting the ground. This later turned out to be a blade that one of the men had thrown at him, fortunately not injuring him, before running away.

We immediately piled into the first taxi we saw and headed straight back to the hotel, where we rang the others and told them to take a taxi home.

As expected, making a police statement took a long time. It took a few minutes to explain why I was there and then a lot of repetition of the main facts. As I was waiting, a non-uniformed officer (I had to ask if he was a policeman, there were no introductions) submitted me to an informal but aggressive questioning. "How can you prove you had any of these things in your bag?” he asked and "Why didn't you go for help?" I explained as calmly as I could that of course I couldn't prove what was in my bag and that our priority was to get back to the hotel safely not to hang around speaking to people roaming the streets at night.

Other than that, blank faces and little sympathy was the predominant reaction until a friendly police officer who had just been to church popped into the station and tried to help. He explained that he had a good friend from the UK who was living in Ghana and the next thing I know, I am on the phone to the British man who is offering to come over and help.

The police officer writing the statement then attempted to charge me 10 cedis for the privilege. To which I told him that I was pretty sure that was illegal and he could speak to the British Embassy if he wanted any money - as I had all my money stolen!

One of the girls sat outside with me while we waited for them to copy out the statement again. At which point the British guy arrived, looking about as depleted as I was starting to feel. It turned out that his Ghanaian wife had recently left him for a Nigerian man, stealing his money and leaving him with their young daughter. The friendly police officer had an equally sorry tale whereby his girlfriend of seven years had left him three days before their wedding.

Both men seemed to have bonded closely because of the wily females in their lives and seemed a little disillusioned with women in general. We were invited up to his barracks, where there seemed to be more furniture than space, to hear about their tales of woe.

We eventually got the police statement and the two men walked us to Cape Coast Castle to meet our friends. As we walked the police officer told me how he cried bitterly for his fiancé and that he still had her wedding dress in the wardrobe. The two men bid us farewell and walked away with their broken hearts.

The castle tour was a poignant experience. We stood in the female slave dungeon where 150 women stood at a time, awaiting their fate in the darkness, some killing their babies in a bid to save them from a life of slavery. We stood by a trap door next to the church, where the slave traders could look down into the men's dungeon, at the hundreds of white eyes looking out from the darkness, before they went into the comfort of their church to pray. We stood in the cell where the slaves who tried to escape or fight back were condemned to a death by lack of food and oxygen. No air, no light and, like scars etched onto a building of human suffering, the ground and walls were marked with the scratches of shackles and nails.

Although over a hundred years have passed, you can still smell the oppressive stench of human beings absorbed into the walls. After having little emotional reaction to being mugged, I felt physically sick in the castle and was glad to stand outside in the sea air after our tour.

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