“Links to the Present”: The Long History of Contested Heritage in Ghana’s Slave Castles

The rise in African American heritage tourism to the castles has produced an abundance of scholarly books and articles. These works often try to place African American tourism to Ghana in the context of global heritage tourism or the Black Atlantic. Most of these works are anthropological, covering the sometimes volatile encounter between African Americans and Ghanaians at the castles. These ethnographies show some consistent themes: African American tourists can feel anger toward the commercialization of the forts, and feel as though Ghanaians dodge their own complicity in the slave trade. Their Ghanaian hosts react angrily to the accusation, and feel the castles are equally part of their heritage. History as a discipline has lagged behind in investigating these encounters. Although some works discuss the castles in the era of the slave trade, no studies I have come across have looked at how the castles were understood from the 1830s to Ghana’s independence in 1957. This lacuna is unsurprising. The recent rise in tourism to the Ghanaian slave castles is so current, and the theoretical issues so contemporary, that history appears to have little to say about these ideas. But the use and misuse of these slave castles as sites of heritage is much older than these studies will grant. Of course, an idea’s past does not always control how the idea operates in the present. Sometimes, though, the past grabs hold of an idea’s structure, and stubbornly refuses to let it go. The politics of heritage remains the platform on which anthropologists, with their presentist concerns, stage the debate over the castles. The anthropological literature seems content with presuming that the heritage of these castles must “belong” to one of the two groups, African Americans or Ghanaians, and assigning their true value to one group or the other, or both. A historical perspective, however, shows how this debate is much older than it seems. Such a perspective demonstrates how its construction still unnecessarily influences the false choice that “owning” heritage represents. This paper will first review the theory that underlies anthropological critiques of Ghanaian heritage tourism in order to explain how the current anthropological literature leads to a dead-end. Instead of looking for ways to move beyond the debate over heritage, anthropologists have been more interesting in blaming one side or the other for lacking sensitivity or interest. This approach, I contend, is unproductive. Then, I examine the transformations in how the forts were understood and incorporated into travel writing, first in British colonial travel literature, and then credit