In this chapter, we shift from Ghana in the 1960s to Ghana today. But keep our focus on the interactions between Africans and African Americans. This is Elmina Castle located on the Central Ghanaian coast just outside the town of Cape Coast. This massive ancient structure will serve as a flash point of our discussion today. As it has been a site of contention between the Ghanaians that live and work here and the African American tourists who came to visit the castle. The castle was one of the main points of departure for enslaved Africans into the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. And so, today it serves as a place of return for African Americans who seek to understand and ponder the brutal past of their ancestors. For the Ghanaians however, these African American tourists are foreign tourists, no different in many ways from other Western tourists that visit the castle. It is these differing perceptions that have led to a series of debates about who has the right to control what happens at Ghana's slave castles and exposed a complicated relationship between Ghanaians and Americans. For our purposes in this course, this engagement between Ghanaians and African Americans also serves as a context in which to reflect on how African Americans are viewed through African eyes. Elmina Castle has a long history, one with which the local Ghanaians are quite familiar. The castle was built by the Portuguese in 1482 as a trading post, used to barter for gold from the local population. However, as demands for slaves increased in America and the Caribbean, Elmina Castle became a strategic base for the slave trade. In 1637, the Dutch captured Elmina Castle and continued using it as a trading port for slaves and gold. The slave trade peaked between 1700 and 1850 with over 30,000 slaves leaving each year, never to return. It is this period of the castle's history that most interests African American tourists who see their trips to Ghana as a return to their roots. In contrast, memories of colonialism are fresher to the Ghanaians than those of the slave trade. They think of the castle in the context of a longer history. After the peak of the Dutch slave trade, the British gained control of Elmina in 1872, and held it under colonialist control until Ghana gained its independence in 1957. Once the Ghanaians had control of Elmina Castle, they used it for a variety of functions. Today, Elmina Castle is preserved as a national monument and even has been designated a world heritage sight by UNESCO. As you can tell, Elmina Castle has been the setting for a great many people, events, and activities. And so what Ghanaians think about the castle, it is linked to their long history of interactions with the West. Some of them horrible like the slave trade, but some of them remarkable like their independence from colonialism. For Ghanaians therefore, the preservation and restoration of Elmina Castle is about their national history. And it might even be seen as a monument to their ability to overcome the massive historical inequities of imperialism and colonialism. African American tourists come to Elmina and other Ghanaians castles as a way to deal with a painful past, related to the displacement and horrors of slavery. As tourists, they toured the castles and entered the dungeons and holding cells where slaves were once kept before being loaded onto ships bound for North and South America. We can understand the visits to these castles as a ritual process and many African American tourists are overwhelmed by moving through and experiencing the slave castles. In many ways, this is the experience they are seeking. They've come to both deal with the pain and loss of slavery and diaspora, but also to see their roots. Many African American tourists come with a sense that Africa is a home and seek to build a kinship with the place and the people there. Therefore, although they come as tourists, they hope to experience the place as locals, and this leads to many complications with Ghanaian people. The Ghanaians' however, have a very different view of African American tourists. First, they classify them as obruni, the term they use for white visitors to Ghana. For the Ghanaians, they see no difference between African American tourists and other visitors. And they have similar complaints about them, that they take pictures of local people without asking, that they dress inappropriately. And that they seek out what Ghanaians see as embarrassing aspects of life, like poverty and run down parts of towns and villages. The real debate, however, has come over how the castles themselves should be maintained and presented. For the Ghanaians, they want to use the castles to tell the full story of Ghanaian history and they want to preserve and maintain the structures. This has meant cleaning, fixing, and painting the buildings, as well as installing lighting and heating. But attempts to do this work have provoked a strong reaction from African Americans that live in Ghana and those that have heard about the changes made to the castles. They see efforts to clean and maintain the castles as whitewashing of the horrors of slavery. And they want to be able to experience the dark, dank places that their enslaved ancestors passed through and to have an authentic experience. But the Ghanaians see such efforts as simply intrusions into what is essentially, a government matter. It is the Ghanaians who are responsible for maintaining and preserving the cultural heritage of the country for the future. And they have been dismayed by the way African American tourists have attempted to insert themselves into the conversation. As we can see, this is a difficult and complicated situation. One where Ghanaians and African Americans have very different perspectives of how Elmina castle should be preserved, maintained, and interpreted. What's fascinating about this case, is the way that the Ghanaians perceive African American tourists as just part of a larger population of Western tourists and as such, have no special claims over the castle. It is this attitude that is particularly hurtful to African Americans, who seek in their return to Ghana, not just memorials to their ancestors' enslavement, but also a homeland to which they can connect.
