An hour an half away from the Cape Coast Slave Castle is Assin Manso, a town known for the role it played as one of the largest slave markets on the West African coast and home to the last bath slave river, where slaves were washed before the journey to the Americas.
The NAACP delegation held another ancestral tribute at the landing of the slave river, a tribute similar to the ceremony held in Jamestown, Virginia just a week earlier.
400 years ago, slaves walked down this path chained at their hands and feet in a single file line. Whipped and beaten, they were forced to the river have their last bath and wash away the signs of their journey down from the slave route beginning as north as Burkina Faso and Mali. Today, their descendants walked down that same path as free people, singing wade in the water as they too walked bare feet into the river, honoring their ancestors and the fight towards freedom.
Walking out of the river, they wrote a letter to their ancestors and placed it in a fire. Before leaving the Assin Manso site, NAACP President and CEO, Derrick Johnson, Vice-Chair, Karen Boykin-Towns, Board Members, Rev. Amos Brown, Rev. Wendell Anthony and Akosua Ali, NAACP Foundation Board Member, Nate Miles, presented the museum with a wreath.
Half of the group will end their tour tomorrow after the Kumasi Akwasidae Festival.
