We started our second-to-last day in Accra and Ghana at Ussher Fort. This fort had also been built by the British to serve as a slave trading port, but has not been refurbished like many of the other old slave forts along the coast. After the slave trade was abolished, the British, and later, the Ghanaian government, used the fort as a prison.

Our “guide,” who was actually just a caretaker, started off by showing us the old key room that held the keys to many of the doors and cells. Ironically, the key to the key room had been lost, meaning that we had to look through the keyhole in the door to see the giant keyrings of old, giant skeleton keys hanging on hooks on the wall. Then he showed us the gloomy “hanging room,” where, instead of a gallows, first unruly slaves, and later, prisoners, had been hung from the ceiling over a pit in the floor. The rest of the tour mostly involved visits to decrepit cells, with scratched and drawn-upon walls from times when they held prisoners.

Inquiring about the many crude pictures around the courtyards and Arabic graffiti in the cells that seemed relatively new, we found that the old slave fort-turned-prison had also served as a temporary shelter for many Sudanese refugees who had arrived in Ghana in 2004 and 2005. Poignantly, near the exit, a nameless refugee had drawn a rough sketch of the UN logo with the ominous inscription “Have you heard us today?” scrawled below.

After our walk around the fort/prison/refugee camp, we headed to Obruni Waewoo – the Dead Whitey Market – to look for some shoes and sunglasses. While we have our own Dead Whitey Market in Nouakchott, the Accra version had, not surprisingly, a much more abundant selection. That evening, we raced the onset of rain to an Argentinean restaurant that had ostrich and alligator tail on offer for a nice (non-ostrich/alligator-) meat-filled dinner.