Seven countries in 13 days in luxurious comfort. Had I heard this 20 years ago when driving through West Africa, I would have rolled my eyes in disbelief. Back then I recalled hot days along potholed roads, hotels of dubious character and ‘negotiations’ – fiscal ones – at multiple border crossings. West African travel can be as challenging as it is richly rewarding.
Now, departing from Tema, Ghana, on Swan Hellenic’s small 76-cabin expedition cruise vessel, Vega, I would explore West Africa’s little-travelled coastline while scarcely breaking sweat or laying out a fistful of euros.
Unheralded as this coast may be, off-the-beaten track Africa is in demand from consumers. Vega was repositioning from Antarctica for its Arctic summer season via a West African cruise with a completely full complement of passengers. So few vessels explore this coast that when we docked in Liberia, their tourism minister appeared on deck to inspect the first visiting cruise ship in 12 years.
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From my large cabin on the sixth deck, balcony doors flung open to enjoy ever-present dolphins and Atlantic breezes tempering 28C heat, I watched Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau and The Gambia come and go during a 1,759 nautical mile voyage to Senegal. Soporific sea days alternated with landings at major ports. It wasn’t always plain sailing, as languid officialdom held up disembarkations, and high sea temperatures (meaning denser seawater) slowed Vega down.
Yet the exposure to Portuguese, British, and Francophone colonial influences and ethnic groups proved an engrossing, and at times sobering, voyage into the unknown. If the region’s beleaguered wildlife has little reputation for nature-based tourism, West Africa remains the visceral core of the transatlantic slave trade. It was the main conduit for the ‘middle passage’ shippage of 10–12 million Africans to the Americas.
Take Elmina, our first stop along Ghana’s Gold Coast. Its wharves thronged with energy, hundreds of wooden fishing pirogues emblazoned with platitudes to God and decorated with flags. Barracuda and red snapper is feverishly traded quayside and moved in baskets on the heads of sashaying Ghanaian women. Just outside Elmina is Cape Coast Castle.
“Thirteen hundred slaves were kept here at any one time,” said local guide, Marc Tetteh, as we explored the whitewashed 17th-century British castle, where sunshine beat down on corroded cannon and mounds of cannonballs. Marc found us shade inside a gloomy dungeon that once enslaved 200 Africans at a time. Those who survived this hellhole were spirited away across the Atlantic. Above us the chapel of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel once existed. “They didn’t think it was wrong to pray while Africans suffered beneath their feet,” said Marc.
An intriguing debate on slavery continued during lectures with guest experts in the seventh-floor observation lounge, where complimentary cocktails were served each evening. “Ninety per cent of all slaves transported from Africa were already in some form of forced labour,” said Dr Dean Allen, a South African academic. “Although without the Europeans there would have been no transatlantic trade.”
Over the next three days, we visited capitals forged by returning Africans. In Monrovia, Liberia, we pass Provenance Island, where repatriated slaves from the US arrived from 1821 on ships chartered by the American Colonization Society.
Later in Freetown, Sierra Leona, a 400-year-old cotton tree marked where freed returnees met under its shade. Freetown was established by former slaves from London in 1787, known as the ‘Black Poor’ who were ‘returned’ by British abolitionists. In 2023, a heavy rainstorm felled the cotton tree, leaving a fractured stump.
By contrast, the lack of enslavement meted upon Guinea-Bissau, reached a few days later, accounts for a cultural authenticity that proved my highlight of the voyage. Guinea-Bissau is near anonymous, receiving few annual visitors. We entered a shimmering delta of 88 shallow water islands off the country’s coast called the Bijagós Archipelago.
“The Bijagós people sold slaves from inland ethnicities but were never subject themselves to slavery,” explained Sonia Durris, a Portuguese-born islander who joined us to talk about their unbroken animist traditions. “Slavers were afraid of their fierceness and their pagan worship of forest spirits.”
During a fabulous day on two islands, we stepped ashore on Boloma, once Guinea-Bissau’s Portuguese colonial capital. The eponymous town crackled with birdsong in palm forests laden with hanging fruit-bats. The late 19th-century architecture is collapsed and abandoned, the governor’s palace, built during a century-long British occupation, is a magnificent ruin with a façade of 10 Corinthian columns.
Later, we waded ashore at Canhabaque Island, onto a broad caramel-hued beach to the beat of multiple djembe drums urging on a young man to perform a mask dance. He wore cow-horns to symbolise bovine strength and was covered in little bells exchanged with Portuguese traders. Sonia explained the dance was part of a lifelong journey to nurture the soul towards old age usually performed in secret in their matriarchal jungle villages. She said 100 days each year are given over to their ceremonial life.
Our odyssey ended soon after in Senegal, in its energetic capital Dakar, where offshore is the Unesco-prescribed Gorée Island, where transatlantic slavery continued unabated between 1536 and 1848.
West Africa will forever remain a coast of lost souls. Yet when seen from the sea, it yielded access to untold stories of darker days and captivating colour that illuminated this unheralded coast more than I ever could’ve imagined.
Travel essentials
Mark Stratton travelled with Swan Hellenic on the 14-night Crucibles of West Africa cruise. A cabin costs from £5,981pp (based on two sharing), all-inclusive; the next departure is in April 2025.
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