Above header: Map of volume and direction of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, 1514-1867, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, courtesy of David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, New Haven: Yale University Press 2010. From the sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, over twelve million African men, women, and children were enslaved, transported to the Americas, and bought and sold by European and American slaveholders as chattel property to be used for their labor and skills.
Richter’s House began as a merchant residence in Osu, Accra, long before it became a fort. The property belonged to Heinrich Richter, a German‑Danish trader who married traditionally into a Ga family. This union produced two mulatto sons, who inherited not only their father’s compound but also his position in the coastal trade.
By 1807, the brothers had transformed the residence into a large fort, deliberately designed to mirror the inner courtyard of Osu Castle (Christiansborg). The architecture was imposing: thick walls, enclosed courtyards, and staircases that spoke of power and permanence. It was not a minor lodge but a fortified complex, capable of holding captives and conducting trade with discretion.
Ghana-Net.com · Accra · Osu · Forts & Castles
Denmark outlawed the slave trade with effect from 1803. Henrich Richter built this fortified compound around 1807–1809 — thick walls, capacity for hundreds of captives, and a tunnel running to the dungeons of Osu Castle. In 1836 a Danish official wrote home that Richter had four hundred slaves. When he died in 1849 a Danish commission catalogued 1,059 of his possessions. What it recorded about the people has never been published.
Put four numbers next to each other and this building stops being a merchant's house and becomes a piece of evidence.
You do not build a fortified holding compound four years after the trade is banned unless you intend to go on trading.
That is the case against this building, and it is made by the building itself. Not by oral history, not by inference, not by anyone's politics — by a construction date and a legal date, four years apart, in that order.
Henrich Richter (1785–1849) was Euro-African: son of Johan Emanuel Richter, a Danish official and trader, and of a Ga mother. He inherited his father's commercial network and became one of the most powerful private traders anywhere on this coast.
The detail that matters is the father's job description. Johan Emanuel Richter was not simply a merchant who happened to be Danish. He was an official of the colonial administration and a trader. The family was inside the state and inside the business at the same time.
Danish men on this coast took Ga wives, and their children inherited both the trading networks and standing in two societies. That produced a merchant class that answered fully to neither Copenhagen nor the Ga stools, and could operate in the space between.
Scholarship describes Richter as having more employees, serfs and enslaved people than Fort Christiansborg itself. A private household outweighing the colonial garrison it sat beside.
Abolition was a Danish law binding Danish subjects and Danish ships. A Euro-African private trader with his own compound, his own walls and his own tunnel was a considerably harder thing to regulate than a company ship in a harbour.
The Danish Gold Coast did not stop being a slave society in 1803. Plantation slavery and other forms of enslavement continued, and Christiansborg remained Danish until 1850. Abolition changed what could be done openly, not what was done.
This was not a house with a lock-up attached. Historical accounts describe an estate with large rooms, thick defensive walls, artillery, and considerable enclosed space — room for hundreds of people, free and enslaved, who kept the commercial operation running.
Heritage sources associated with the site state that Richter Fort could hold up to 400 captives at its peak, and describe it plainly as a holding place for people awaiting illegal transportation.
It stood on a busy Osu roadway, close to the walls of Christiansborg, and it overlooked the castle — a fact that would matter a great deal in 1854.
Consider what "fortified private compound" means in practice. Walls and guns are for keeping people out, or keeping people in, and a merchant's residence needs neither on that scale. The architecture was specified for the business.
An underground passage ran from Richter House to the dungeons of Osu Castle, and out toward the shore.
The Christiansborg Archaeological Heritage Project has documented it. Its stated purpose is unambiguous: moving captives from the private slave-trading compound directly toward the ships, reducing the possibility of escape and avoiding the attention of neighbours.
Research by historians, archaeologists and human-rights scholars adds a second function. Moving people underground also meant avoiding Danish taxation and regulatory oversight — the tunnel was a way around the colonial state before it was a way around the colonial ban.
Small chambers and narrow corridors, consistent with the forced movement and confinement of people. Not a service passage. Not a drain.
At Osu Castle, there is a door on the left-hand side of the Door of No Return. That is the castle end.
Substantial parts remain, though sections are sealed or collapsed and it is blocked around the midpoint. Portions are documented through mapping, oral history and archaeological study.
No full excavation published, no interpretation at either end, no marker at street level. Archaeological work has run on the castle site since 2014; this is not among the findings put before the public.
A private family dug a tunnel into a state fortress so that human beings could be moved without the state seeing them. That is the infrastructure of the trade, and it was built into a home.
In 1836, the Danish administrator Wulff Joseph Wulff wrote home about Richter. The sentence is short and it is contemporary:
"He has 400 slaves…"
Not an estimate by a later historian. A Danish official, on the coast, writing privately to his family in 1836 — thirty-three years after abolition took effect.
One historical account records that Richter held captives from the Asante royal household — including a thirteen-year-old girl named Sewah, and members of the family of Asantehene Osei Yaw Akoto.
Sewah was thirteen. Somebody wrote her name down.
That is more than we have for the three hundred buried in the courtyard at Osu Castle, a few minutes' walk away. The record preserves a name when the captive is royal and the transaction is politically significant. The rest are a number.
Honesty requires distinguishing them, and most accounts do not.
Richter's four hundred sit across all three categories, and the proportions are not established. The archaeological project's oral-history work with the family and community records plainly that private trading continued after abolition. What it does not establish is how many were shipped, how many were held, and how many died here.
We say so rather than filling the gap. The gap is the point.
Henrich Richter died in July 1849. The Danish government appointed a commission to deal with his affairs.
The file survives, catalogued in the Danish National Archives under the colonial administration's records:
Protokol for Behandling af de Richterske Affairer ved den i den Anledning nedsatte
Commission — 1849
Protocol for the handling of the Richter affairs, by the commission established for that
purpose, 1849.
The auction of his possessions is recorded: 1,059 movable items, valued at roughly $18,138. Furniture, goods, trade stock, catalogued piece by piece.
They counted the chairs. The question is what they wrote about the people.
Four hundred enslaved people recorded in 1836. Richter dies in 1849. A Danish commission investigates his estate. Denmark transfers Christiansborg to Britain in 1850. Thirteen years, one death, one commission, one handover.
An estate commission accounts for assets. In a slave-holding society, enslaved people were treated as assets. A body that catalogued 1,059 movable items had to say something about several hundred human beings attached to the same household.
Sale, transfer, manumission, dispersal, flight, or simple silence. Each answer tells a different story about what happened to those people in the year before the British arrived.
The Danish National Archives, Copenhagen, with the Guinea and colonial administration material. Catalogued and, as far as we can establish, unpublished on this question.
We have not seen this file and we make no claim about its contents. We are naming it because it exists, because it is findable, and because the answer to the largest unanswered question about this building is more likely to be in a Copenhagen archive box than anywhere in Osu.
In 1852 the British — who had bought Christiansborg in 1850 — imposed a poll tax across the Gold Coast: one shilling per man, woman and child. Labadi, Osu, Teshie and other Ga towns refused to pay, and resisted British attempts to turn land into something bought and sold.
On 13 September 1854, during Homowo — the Ga harvest festival — those towns were bombarded by the British warship HMS Scourge, commissioned that April under Commander John Adams RN for the West Coast of Africa as flagship of the squadron.
Afterwards the British demolished the houses standing close to the castle, presenting it as a security measure: buildings that near the fort could give cover or elevation to anyone attacking the garrison.
The Richter family's large stone house, which overlooked the castle, was among the buildings destroyed.
Read the sequence. Richter's tunnel ran into Christiansborg. Five years after his death, the British shelled Osu from Christiansborg's guns and from a warship offshore, and then demolished his family's house.
Both ends of that operation were removed within half a decade — not out of any concern about what had been done there, but because a stone house overlooking a fort is a military problem.
These events are frequently confused. 1854 was the bombardment and demolition. 1862 was the earthquake that badly damaged the castle itself. Eight years apart.
The houses close to the castle, and then the ground fenced to keep local people away from the walls. What remains is the open space in front of Osu Castle, now used as a forecourt and car park.
Historic remains, in the heart of Osu, on a busy road, with no visitor provision worth the name.
It survives as a rare example of the Euro-African merchant architecture that shaped early Accra — one of the last structures connected not only to the Danish presence in Ghana but to the hidden infrastructure of the trade: the systems built into private homes, tunnels and informal networks rather than into official forts.
Osu, not far from the walls of Osu Castle. Ask locally — this is a street, not a signposted site, and people in Osu know where it is.
Remains rather than a monument. No ticket office, no guide, no interpretation. If you want the history you bring it with you, which is why this page exists.
People live and work around it. Ask before photographing anyone, and do not treat a residential street as an exhibit.
With Osu Castle, and with the other four Accra forts. See The five forts of Accra for the route.
Why preservation matters here more than at most sites. The great castles are inscribed, funded and photographed. Richter Fort is the evidence that the machinery of slavery ran through private hands — homes, family enterprises, local power structures — and that evidence is a ruin on a road, unlisted and undefended. Buildings like this disappear without anybody deciding they should.
One further reason this site is not merely historical.
Research published in the Journal of Modern Slavery — Collins Quartey's "The Ghost at the Junction: Exploring the Links Between Historic and Modern Slavery in Accra, Ghana" — examines the connections between the historic trade and forms of exploitation in Accra today.
The link that page draws is not sentimental. Trafficking, bonded labour and the exploitation of children exist in the same city, and in some cases in the same districts, as the sites where the historic trade was run from private compounds.
The mechanism Richter used — private hands, informal networks, movement out of official sight — did not stop working when it stopped being legal. It has never stopped working anywhere.
Which is the strongest argument for marking this ruin rather than letting it fall down. A castle teaches that states did this. A merchant's house teaches that neighbours did, and that the arrangement was invisible because it was designed to be.
Details last verified . The construction of Richter House around 1807–1809; the identification of Henrich Richter (1785–1849) as the son of the Danish official and trader Johan Emanuel Richter; the description of the estate as a fortified trading base with large rooms, thick defensive walls and space for hundreds of workers, free and enslaved; and the account of the tunnel connecting the house to the dungeons of Osu Castle, its small chambers and narrow corridors, its use to move captives discreetly and to avoid Danish taxation and regulatory oversight, are as set out in the sources listed above and on our dedicated Christiansborg site. Danish prohibition of the transatlantic slave trade was declared in 1792 with effect from 1803; Christiansborg remained Danish until 1850. Wulff Joseph Wulff's 1836 statement that Richter had 400 slaves is contained in his contemporary correspondence and quoted in modern scholarship. The description of Richter as having more employees, serfs and enslaved people than Fort Christiansborg itself, and the statement that Richter Fort could hold up to 400 captives at its peak as a holding place for people awaiting illegal transportation, are as published. The account of captives from the Asante royal household, including a thirteen-year-old girl named Sewah and members of the family of Asantehene Osei Yaw Akoto, is as recorded in one historical account. The oral-history finding that private trading continued after abolition is as published by the Christiansborg Archaeological Heritage Project. The 1849 commission file Protokol for Behandling af de Richterske Affairer ved den i den Anledning nedsatte Commission, held in the Danish National Archives, and the record of 1,059 movable items valued at approximately $18,138, are as cited in published scholarship; we have not examined the commission file and make no claim whatever about its contents. The 1852 poll tax, the bombardment of Osu, Labadi and Teshie by HMS Scourge on 13 September 1854 during Homowo, and the subsequent demolition of houses close to the castle including the Richter family's stone house, are as documented; HMS Scourge was commissioned in April 1854 under Commander John Adams RN for the West Coast of Africa as flagship of the squadron. The 1862 earthquake is a separate event. Where sources differ or the record is silent — particularly on how many of Richter's four hundred were held, shipped or died — this page says so rather than filling the gap. No allegation is made against any living descendant of any person named here. All photography © Remo Kurka. Usage strictly by prior authorisation only.
What remains of Richter's Fort or Righters House, Osu, Accra, photographer by (c) Remo Kurka
Africa, polities with long slave-trading histories such as Dahomey and Ngoyo were unwilling or unable to halt the supply of captives to the coast, or to expel foreign slave dealers who resided there, despite commitments to do both. Meanwhile, the illegal slave trade became increasingly difficult to suppress. British and American merchants engaged indirectly in the traffic by supplying Latin American slave traders with ships and goods exchangeable for captives on the African coast. The U.S. government also denied other nations the right to search U.S. ships suspected of slave trading, and soon a large portion of the entire illegal trans-Atlantic slave traffic took place under the shield of the U.S. flag. Under these conditions, slave imports to Brazil and Cuba rose to levels higher than those before abolition. - Full Text Here (new window)
Here are authoritative sources that document the continued and clandestine slave trade shipments long after official abolition in the 19th century. These works show that abolition laws did not immediately end the Atlantic trade, and illegal trafficking persisted well into the mid‑1800s.
Jake Subryan Richards, LSE Research (2025)
Research shows that almost a quarter of the entire transatlantic trade occurred after Britain’s 1807 Abolition Act, with millions trafficked illegally. Freed Africans were often thrust into new forms of bondage due to loopholes in treaties and courts London School of Economics and Political Science.
Britannica – Western Africa: Abolition, Slavery, Emancipation
Notes that abolition decisions were made in Europe, but enforcement in Africa was weak. Illegal shipments continued because economic demand in the Americas remained high Britannica.
Blockade of Africa (Wikipedia, based on naval records)
Documents the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron (1808–1870), which intercepted hundreds of illegal slave ships. Despite patrols, clandestine shipments persisted until the 1860s Wikipedia.
Historic England – Slavery After 1807
Explains that while Britain outlawed the trade in 1807, slavery itself remained legal until 1834, and “apprenticeships” until 1838. Illegal trafficking continued during this period Historic England.
Marika Sherwood, After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade Since 1807 (I.B. Tauris, 2007)
A detailed monograph showing Britain’s ongoing entanglement with clandestine slave trading networks after abolition, including complicity of merchants and colonial officials Origins.
Lowcountry Digital History Initiative – Voyage of the Echo
Case study of the Echo, an illegal slave ship captured in 1858, proving that clandestine shipments continued decades after abolition Lowcountry Digital History Initiative.
Natalie Swanepoel, “Socio‑Political Change on a Slave‑Raiding Frontier: War, Trade and Big Men in 19th‑Century Sisalaland, Northern Ghana” (JSTOR)
Demonstrates that slave raiding and trading persisted in Ghana’s interior well into the 19th century, feeding coastal networks despite abolition JSTOR.
👉 Admiralty records, Danish Gold Coast papers) that specifically mention illegal shipments from Ghana and neighboring coasts after 1807.
