If you want to see where the captured Africans took their last bath before being marched down to the coast and its slave castles, you’ll want to visit Assin Manso. It’s known as the Ancestral Slave River Park.
When I traveled to Ghana, I partnered with Ashanti African Tours and it was a truly rewarding, educational, memorable trip. I learned that Assin Manso was one of the largest slave markets for gathering people to sell into slavery.
Assin Manso is where people from North Africa were taken for their last bath, before they were thrown into the dungeons in the slave castles on the coast. To walk the same path barefoot as my ancestors probably did hundreds of year ago was harrowing.
It’s one thing to read about it in a book. But to walk down the wooded path, and touch the water they last bathed in, you could only imagine what they were thinking. I began to think how they felt, in chains, knowing they’d never see their family again. They had no idea what the future held for them. I’m sure they were looking for a way to escape. But to where? There was nothing but forest all around, and the river’s current was mighty fast.
Assin Manso also has the Memorial Wall of Return, where African descendants from the Americas write their names on the wall indicating they have found their roots.
It is located about 40 miles from Cape Coast, on the Cape Coast Kumasi highway between Kumasi and Cape Coast.
