Pushed through the"door of no return", millions of Africans were shipped from places like this whitewashed fort in Elmina, Ghana, to a life of slavery in Brazil, the Caribbean and America...

As Britain marks the bicentenary of its abolition of the slave trade on March 25, Ghanaians are still coming to terms with slavery's impact on their country's development and the role Africans played in the capture and sale of fellow Africans.

The view from Elmina, built by the Portuguese in 1482 and later held by the Dutch and the British, is picturesque with fishing boats bobbing in the sea off a white sand beach lined with palm trees.

But Elmina has a brutal history -- shared with other slave forts on West Africa's coast, ports in Western Europe and what was then known as the New World, the Americas -- in a triangular trade that fueled Europe's colonial empires.

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