Ouidah's Door of No Return: a road to the sea, not a door in a wall

Four days before this, on another coast, we had gone down into the cellars at Cape Coast
and come out through a doorway in a sea wall. Ouidah holds the same history and holds it
in the opposite shape, and the difference is the reason to stop.

There is a fort here - the Portuguese built one in the eighteenth century, it still
stands in the town and it is the history museum now. We did not go into it. But the
fort is not the memorial, and that is the difference. What Ouidah has is a road.

The route runs a few kilometres from the old auction ground in the town down to the
water, and it is the way people were actually walked. It is marked the whole distance,
with memorials and statues set along it, and it finishes at an arch standing by itself
on a wide open beach.

The arch is modern. The route it stands at the end of is not. Across the top is a relief
of a column of chained figures walking away from you toward a waiting ship. You look
through the opening underneath and there is sand, then surf, then nothing at all.

That emptiness is what makes it land differently from a fort. At Cape Coast the building
does the work: you are underground, in the dark, and the door is a hole in a thick wall
with the sea immediately beyond it. Here everything happens in the open, in hard bright
light, on a beach that looks like any other beach on this coast. Nothing is hidden.
There is no architecture to absorb it. There is just a long way to walk and, at the end
of it, a great deal of water.

We were quiet driving on, the same as we had been in Ghana.

It is a short stop off the coast road and it does not need a morning.