Upon arrival to Ghana, the “Year of the Return” was in full effect as the airport was PACKED, and I can imagine it had been that way all week. Ghana and other West African countries receive an annual influx of holiday travelers, often ex-patriots visiting relatives and friends with gifts and festive spirit. In 2019, that sentiment was accompanied by an estimated 1 million+ people of the African diaspora answering a nationwide beckoning titled “Year of Return”. For many, itineraries would include music festivals, cuisine, historical tours and connecting with locals and other travelers. I, like many other travelers voyaged to the Mother continent in search of an introduction and greater connection to my African heritage. I’ve been an amateur genealogist and family historian for the last 12 years and started a tour of my American roots in Louisiana and Mississippi a few months prior. Having taken both Ancestry and 23andMe’s ancestral DNA tests and some general knowledge of the transatlantic slave trade, I know there’s a strong likelihood that many of my ancestors were taken from their homelands in present-day Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Senegal and other colonized ports, to be sold in the Americas as slaves. I didn’t think twice at the chance to glimpse into what their culture, language and tradition may have been. My immersion into my ancestral connection to the continent began in a city in Ghana called Cape Coast. We left early for a 3-hour drive from Accra and arrived at the Cape Coast slave castle early as many local residents were preparing for church in their Sunday’s best. There are similar slave castles all along the coast of the West African region and we came to find out none were too dissimilar save for size or the captors controlling them. Ghana, or “Gold Coast” as it was known during the slave trade has about 40 slave castles. Cape Coast in particular was built by the Portuguese as a trading post and later controlled by the Dutch until the fort was captured and rebuilt by the British during the 18th century. In the moment of our tour, I didn’t feel the overwhelming raw emotion that I expected or have heard about from others, but after having time to process and reflect, I realized that my emotion manifested as anger and disgust. The atrocity of human slavery is already impossible to stomach. But seeing the conditions our ancestors somehow survived—blinding darkness, inhumane cramped quarters, fatal cruelty and psychotic design, was both humbling and inconceivable. When I travel and even at home in Chicago, I often find myself marveling at architecture and landscape views. And what was most troubling for me through this experience was the building’s composition. Cape Coast would be no different from Almina Castle a few miles away and Goree Island in Senegal: at the center of each slave castle’s walls stands a chapel. Often Catholic, the structure stands above dungeons that held hundreds of African slaves, who were no longer free to practice their own worship and religion. We stood in darkness where there would’ve been cries of agony and desperation and where you could see a small peephole into the pulpit above. Historically, many religions have spread through war, political and principle opposition but the juxtaposition here—of Christian sovereignty above and chattel slavery below felt different, like a literal heaven and hell was lived out within those walls. Families were separated prior to arrival at a castle as slave dungeons and were organized according to gender and age. We witnessed where slaves received their final baths before being shipped as cargo in the transatlantic trade. When we walked through the “Door of No Return”, despite a number of ongoing Instagram photoshoots, I thought of a maternal ancestor, Mary, who according to the 1880 US Census was born about 1804 with a birthplace: “On the Ocean”. I couldn’t fathom the amount of strength it would have taken for her mother to survive a horrific and fatal journey to an inexplicably strange, foreign place and to survive and start anew—a new family, language, and culture. The tour of Cape Coast was a lot to process, but an experience that I will never forget.