Historians work to preserve slave castle in Sierra Leone

Wealthy anonymous donors in the United States, a group of historians, archaeologists and concerned citizens are working to preserve what's left of the infamous slave castle on Bunce Island near Sierra Leone in Africa. The area is a crucial site in remembering America's slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. Philanthropists now want to build a museum that explores the island's role in the transatlantic slave trade.

LOS ANGELES. CA (Catholic Online) - Bunce Island now is but a tiny scrap of land on West Africa's Atlantic coast. At one point, however it was the notorious site for hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who were stolen from their homes and sold into slavery, many of them bound for the rice plantations of Georgia or South Carolina.

Bunce Island, along with it's notorious "slave castle," is overgrown by jungle, and only gets a handful of tourists every year. The ruins of the castle is smothered by vines and eroded by the 13 feet of rain that fall every year in Sierra Leone.

"It's the most important historic site in Africa for the United States," Joseph Opala told the Christian Science Monitor. An American historian and the director of the U.S. branch of the Bunce Island Coalition, Opala's organization that is working to preserve the island....