By Christine Mullen Kreamer

This article was published in Museum News March/April 2007.

Artifacts are more than silent witnesses to lives and times past or present. Along with the historical evidence that artifacts can provide, the social life of things—as anthropologist and social theorist Arjun Appadurai put it—sheds light on the many ways objects are used and interpreted and the changing meanings objects have over their histories. Part of the power of objects is vested in the spaces in which they are made, used or eventually reside. Because of that, spaces are imbued with much the same set of interpretations assigned to artifacts and, in fact, become artifacts in their own right, rich with history, meaning and memory. The 15th-, 16th- and 17th-century forts and castles that line Ghana’s coast speak of the west African nation’s long, complex and largely tragic history of trade and interaction with Europe and the Americas. Centuries ago, these structures served as trading lodges, storehouses, residences, schools and churches for Europeans and some Africans working together, although not equally, in the trade. Some sites served as points of embarkation for enslaved Africans forced from their homelands and shipped as commodities to distant shores in Europe and the Americas. Some of these structures were the final resting places of the enslaved men, women and children who died before beginning a Middle Passage journey.

In more recent times, several of these forts and castles have served as prisons, training colleges, administrative offices, museums and post offices, and one in Accra remains the presidential headquarters of Ghana’s republic. More than a confrontation with the colonial past—several of these structures functioned as administrative centers for European colonial authority—the forts and castles speak of an even longer history of foreign political and economic imperialism whose legacy continues to challenge the nation of Ghana today.

For many national and international visitors who tour these impressive buildings and ruins each year, Ghana’s coastal monuments are places of pilgrimage. Visitors who move through these spaces, tour the dungeons and admire the ocean views from long ramparts lined with ancient cannons cannot help but be impressed with the size, grandeur and sheer age of the buildings. At the same time many are horrified at the inhumanity of enslavement that is the legacy of these historic sites. It is the rare visitor who remains unmoved upon entering one of the dungeons of Cape Coast Castle, dating to 1635, where the stench of all manner of human suffering still lingers after hundreds of years. The same can be said for the earliest of Ghana’s forts, the nearby Elmina Castle, which dates to 1482. The impact of walking through these spaces inspires visitors to write in comment books that “we must never again allow such unspeakable cruelty.” Visitors—particularly those of African descent—often emerge from the dungeons angry, in tears and emotionally drained. This is coupled with respect and admiration for those who survived, resisted and lived to talk about the horrors of captivity, the wretched conditions of the Middle Passage journey and the brutality of working conditions in the Americas.

As anthropologist Paulla Ebron points out, “Travel routes in such contemporary ‘return’ journeys to the continent are maps of collective memory; to participants the visit becomes a ‘revisit,’ tending to the trauma of capture—the capture of Africans taken to the New World as slaves.” Anthropologist Jack Kugelmass notes similar experiences as American Jewish tourists visit sites of the Holocaust, including concentration camps. Such visits relive a painful history, where time and space are compressed and the history of their community is re-experienced, “invoking the spirits of the tribe and laying claim to their martyrdom, but they are also making past time present.” Similarly, the “Crossroads of People, Crossroads of Trade” exhibition at the Cape Coast Castle Museum in Ghana illustrates how memories of diaspora stretch across national boundaries and extend into the global arena. Although it opened in December 1994, it continues to inspire research and debate by raising complex problems and issues that must be resolved by taking the concerns of both local and global constituencies into account.

As powerful places of memory, particularly for African Americans who come to Ghana’s Central Region to pay homage to their ancestors, Ghana’s forts and castle are tangible sacred links with a complex and largely tragic past. For many African American visitors, the pilgrimage to Ghana—to Africa—becomes a search for peace and renewal through return to the homeland. Ebron describes the journeys as part of how “African American transatlantic imaginaries create history and memory scapes.”

This essay briefly highlights some of the aspects of globalization, memory and the politics of cultural representation of an international economic and cultural development project (called The Ghana Natural Resource Conservation and Historic Preservation Project) set in Ghana, in the early to mid-1990s, within which the “Crossroads” exhibition was produced. By their very nature, such large-scale initiatives are complex undertakings that involve multiple constituents who bring to the process their own interests, expectations and perceptions of project objectives and outcomes—factors that lead, at times, to contradictions, misunderstandings and power struggles. Add to the mix a large influx of U.S. donor agency funds, the designation of the Ghanaian sites as UNESCO World Heritage monuments and the financial implications of increasing cultural tourism, and the potential is high for multiple sites of contestation that pit the local against the global.

It is likely that the plaque was installed after the opening of the “Crossroads” exhibition, perhaps as a way to begin a process of reconciliation following years of tense and, at times, acrimonious debate about the ownership, use and interpretation of Cape Coast Castle and, by extension, other historic sites associated with the slave trade. The debates were articulated by individuals and groups—local Ghanaian citizens, but especially museum and government officials; an international team (largely American) of technical experts, myself included; resident expatriate African Americans and international tourists to Ghana, primarily African Americans and others of African descent who were and remain particularly invested in visiting Ghana’s historic sites.

To understand the globalizing processes that were in play during the project, one must first consider its audience. The project addressed multiple audiences including Ghanaians, local and national, civilian and governmental; African Americans, including both local expatriate residents of Ghana and those living in the Americas who travel to Ghana as part of heritage tours; general international tourists and, finally, those from international organizations such as embassies, donor agencies  and cultural heritage groups. One of the local audiences the castle serves, for example, is shrine priests and priestesses who are custodians of a shrine, located in the castle’s dungeon, dedicated to an important Cape Coast deity, whose shrine was originally located on the land where the castle was constructed. 

Funding also plays a prominent role complicating the relationship between global and local interests. While the government of Ghana provided considerable logistical but limited financial support, the bulk of the project’s funding was provided by international donor agencies, particularly the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and, earlier in project development, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). As one can imagine, the considerable pressures facing host-country organizations in meeting the objectives of a project funded largely from outside sources emphasized the dynamics between funding and authority.

The third, and perhaps the most important area to consider in terms of the global dynamics of sites associated with the slave trade, is the interpretation of the sites and the extent to which multiple constituencies have a voice in that interpretation. In the case of the Ghana project, interpretation comprised the preparation of the physical structures of Cape Coast and Elmina castles as well as the content of the exhibitions for these sites, particularly the “Crossroads” exhibition at Cape Coast Castle. Both areas of interpretation were contested terrain with competing local and global claims to authority, voice and ownership.

The “Crossroads” exhibition adopted both a local and a global view and was guided by a team of Ghanaian scholars and museum professionals. The content was designed to address the 500-year history of Ghana’s interactions with European economic and political interests, to celebrate Ghana’s struggle for freedom and independence from colonial domination and to underscore the continued flourishing of Central Region culture today.

At the same time, a broader international story would also be told: namely, the history of the transatlantic slave trade in the region and the struggle for freedom and equality of peoples of African descent in the Americas. Large-scale images and selected shackles from the museum’s collection were used to illustrate the history of slavery. Though there was broad agreement among key constituents about the exhibition content, there was disagreement on how much emphasis would be placed on the African Diaspora and particularly the history of slavery and resistance in the United States. This was a story that resonated with expatriate African Americans and would likely appeal to African American tourists who visit Ghana’s forts and castles each year. But it was viewed by Ghanaian content specialists as only one of many stories the exhibition would tell, one that did not lend itself particularly well to the limited collections of the Cape Coast Castle museum. Further, the content developers wished to illustrate the multiple uses of the Castle over the centuries, to emphasize Ghana’s own struggle for freedom from colonial rule and to highlight the vibrancy of Ghana’s cultural traditions in the Central Region today. 

As tensions mounted regarding the exhibition content as well as the conservation work on the Castle itself, the American director of the museum component of the project made the decision to hire an African American consultant to develop an expanded section on the African American struggle for freedom. This expansion resulted in the significant reduction of Ghana’s own story of the struggle for freedom, which was reduced to just one panel focusing on Kwame Nkrumah and Ghanaian independence in 1957.

The most significant controversies over the project arose in the area of conservation work at Cape Coast and Elmina castles, and it brought to light fundamental issues of power and control over World Heritage sites. The government of Ghana’s decision to restore some of the forts and castles to conditions that would stimulate increased local and international tourism ignited an acrimonious debate among local and international constituents over how much these World Heritage sites, and particularly the dungeons, should be restored. The historic preservation work at Elmina and Cape Coast castles was launched under the direction of three Ghanaian preservationists trained in Britain and an expatriate technical expert working with the U.S. branch of the International Council of Monuments and Sites. Stories in the international press, such as “Is the Black Man’s History Being Whitewashed?” and “Heritage Battle Rages at Slavery’s Sacred Sites,” give a sense of the nature and tone of the debate that emerged.

Ghanaians are proud of their World Heritage monuments and wish to keep them in good condition. Because of that, they have, on a fairly regular basis over the centuries, applied a mixture of lime, sand and (later) cement to protect the walls and ramparts from the corrosive effects of the coastal salt air. Far from “whitewashing” history, Ghanaians see this work as necessary to preserve the structures for the future—and a fulfillment of their charge to maintain these World Heritage sites. 

A small group of African American expatriate residents in Ghana who engendered the support of other African American individuals representing, among other interests, the tourist trade and the Nation of Islam opposed this conservation and stabilization work. They advocated returning the sites to their “original condition”—something that had less to do with historical accuracy and more to do with a feeling of something old, dark, tragic and, to some degree, terrifying. This image did not fit with freshly whitewashed walls and new windows and doors, many replacing so-called “old fixtures” that dated only to 30 or 50 years ago. Such repairs were perceived as potentially jarring, especially to African Diasporan tourists who might feel it interfered with their connection “with the African past [that] is an integral part of the pilgrimage tour.” Similarly, electric lighting, installed decades ago to allow visitors to see within the dark recesses of the castle dungeons, was viewed as inappropriate and detracting from the horrors experienced by enslaved Africans who were held in dark captivity there hundreds of years ago. Erroneous reports that dungeons were to be painted a festive yellow further fueled the debate. What was overlooked was that within less than six months the brightly whitewashed walls and ramparts would begin to show the dark stains and peelings that come with the high-salt coastal environment.

Critics of the architectural conservation work saw it as “beautifying” structures with such a terrible history and thus, according to one article, creating “a false, superficial, and artificial appearance or effect.” Rather than stabilization and restoration, African Americans critical of the project charged that the historical conservation work was renovation and destruction “of an important monument of the African holocaust that befell [African] people over four hundred years ago.” For many African Americans, the legacy of slavery designates Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle in general, and the dungeons in particular, as hallowed grounds. Indeed, these debates cast in sharp relief two distinct approaches in promoting tourism at sites associated with the slave trade: “thanatourism,” which seeks to reproduce the conditions of terror and death as part of the tourist experience, and heritage tourism, which seeks to display cultural and historical products and achievement. These are critically different goals that in the case of “Crossroads” led to conflicts—some unresolved—between some Ghanaian and African American constituents invested in the project.

One of the subtexts in this controversy has been the extent to which Ghanaians are willing to remember and discuss the role of their ancestors in facilitating the slave trade. Though never overtly expressed during content development, the “Crossroads” exhibition’s absence of details on African complicity in the slave trade could be interpreted as selectively avoiding uncomfortable content that might offend Ghanaian visitors and detract from a positive tourist experience.

Given the acrimonious debates surrounding the Cape Coast Castle project, efforts were made by the regional government and local leaders to promote healing and reconciliation with members of African Diasporan communities. In December 1994, shortly after the “Crossroads” exhibition opened, a ceremony at Cape Coast Castle was performed for visiting African Americans by some local Ghanaian chiefs to atone for the complicity of their ancestors in the slave trade. This event was received with mixed reviews by Ghanaians, some of whom felt offended and coerced by the more affluent foreigners to participate in such events or to admit that Ghana’s ancestors had played a role in the trade.

Elements of Cape Coast Castle project share striking similarities with Ebron’s analysis of the 1994 heritage tour to Senegal and Gambia, where “transnational trends and ideas about culture and identity converged with the strategies of multinational capitalists, the dreams of diasporic communities, and the income-generating plans of African national governments to produce Africa as a commodified cultural object of global significance.” Thus, the Ghana project illustrates what folklorist and specialist in performance studies Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett identifies as “the metacultural operations in which heritage is created and, as a result, raises questions of ownership at the local, national and international levels.” It demonstrates how museums and world heritage sites are modes of cultural production—in this case the production of knowledge and memory—and how the interpretive work of museums animates the public sphere by fostering, among diverse constituents, lively and ongoing dialogues and debates that bridge the local and the global. Furthermore, because heritage tends to be claimed by multiple partners, it is essentially contested.

The controversy over the use and interpretation of Cape Coast Castle is but one example of an increasing sense of ownership among people of African descent for sites in Africa associated with the transatlantic slave trade. From a Diasporan perspective, places such as Gorée off the coast of Senegal, Elmina and Cape Coast castles in Ghana and the UNESCO Slave Route in Benin are akin to shrines where people of African descent come to mourn their enslaved ancestors, to question the culpability of Africans during the slave trade and to create mechanisms that allow for reconciliation. These places are, to borrow historian Pierre Nora’s terminology, “sites of memory” and places where “memory crystallizes and secretes itself.” 17 However, the African owners and custodians of these historic structures are often reluctant to reduce their commemorative meaning to the singular theme of the slave trade. This is not to diminish the compelling and tragic history of enslavement that imbues these sites with great pathos but rather reflects the differing sensibilities, experiences and memories that Africans and people of African descent bring to the sites.

The disjuncture in how these sites were and continue to be perceived and used by local and international audiences fueled the debates surrounding the Cape Coast Castle project in the early to mid-1990s. The debate goes on as the Ghanaians immediately responsible for managing these World Heritage sites continue to grapple with issues of ownership and representation in the face of increasing annual numbers of international tourists.

Globalization is not just a dichotomy of local/global or insider/outsider. Rather, it speaks to a rearrangement of relationships, including power, that occur across time and space as previously separated cultures are linked together as part of the global movement of people and ideas. Indeed, globalization links communities of discourse that are not necessarily grounded in locality but that do address shared concerns. The debates that circulated around the Cape Coast Castle project did not form a seamless whole within any one constituency, nor did they represent general public opinion. Rather, they represented the viewpoints of a small group of individuals who might be said to be invested in and sensitized to the political dynamics of representation and heritage tourism at sites associated with the slave trade. The sense of memory and identity that many African Americans have with sites of enslavement fosters a feeling of shared ownership of these heritage sites, which often comes into conflict with African visions of their use and disposition, thus producing contested terrain.