Julia O’Connell Davidson

In 2023, Cape Coast and Elmina Castles respectively attracted 101,134 visitors and 78,870 visitors. Perhaps some of these visitors regard the castles merely as places of abstract or general historical interest. But for many, they are sites of profound emotional, spiritual and/or political meaning. In particular, African diaspora visitors who are descendants of those kidnapped and forced into slavery in the Americas often share the motivations and sentiments expressed by Saidiya Hartman in her celebrated 2001 book, Lose Your Mother, which details her own journey along a slave route in Ghana, including visits to the castles. “I am the progeny of the captives. I am the vestige of the dead”, she wrote, explaining that she had travelled to Ghana in search of “the remnants of those who had vanished” because she “wanted to bring the past closer”. The castles are a material manifestation of the violent rupture of many African diaspora visitors’ own familial history, one that forever estranged them from kin. They also materially manifest the past that created a present in which Black life continues to be diminished and devalued.

On tours of Cape Coast and Elmina Castles, guides lead visitors to the dark and airless dungeons where thousands of women, men and children were crammed together, sometimes for months, before being forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas to be sold into chattel slavery. In these spaces, the physical and mental torment endured by captives becomes tangible. Moreover, in an effort to communicate the unrelenting horror that victims of the slave trade experienced, guides explain to visitors that archaeological research has revealed that the dungeon floors still contain residues of the excrement of the people incarcerated there. Numerous blog posts by African-diasporic visitors testify to how impactful that information is. For example:

“The prisoners were treated like cargo, stacked on top each other and forced to live in their own fecal matter, urine, vomit, and leftover food scraps”

“We were actually standing on the faeces, vomit, blood, flesh, urine and bones of those brave individuals who had been captured and imprisoned in this castle”.

The human body is never merely a biological body, always a site of cultural expression and personhood. To hold people in such conditions is not just to subject them to immense physical suffering, but also to dehumanise them, strip them of dignity and sever them from their culture. For many visitors, the thought of standing on the faeces of captive ancestors sparks a visceral empathic connection to their humanity and suffering. This, alongside making offerings and laying wreaths, is

part of process that is often understood by diasporic visitors as a form of catharsis, reconnection, or healing – a closing of the void between past and present.

Outside the castles is home to a local community, some of whom are also descended from people once held captive in the dungeons. They live immediately adjacent to the castles in makeshift housing, without basic infrastructure, including sewerage, clean water, and municipal rubbish collection. The harsh living and working conditions endured by members of these communities, and their global and national marginalisation, is also rooted in the long and violent history of slavery and colonisation. But where tours of Elmina and Cape Coast castles actively encourage and facilitate emotional and spiritual connections with the dead, they do not actively seek to foster understanding and solidarities between the living. Indeed, the challenges of daily life that members of these communities face are largely invisible to tourists, and efforts are made to keep it that way.

Tourists visiting Cape Coast castle mostly stay in hotels some distance from the town itself and are taken to the castle itself by coach. The tour operators typically arrange for the coaches to arrive via a well-built, tree lined road that skirts the town, as opposed to navigating through the dusty, potholed and litter strewn roads of the town itself. Because we were interviewing members of the local community, we walked through the town to get to the castle. As we walked, we saw some children defaecating in gulleys at the edge of the shanty town on the castle’s periphery. Other children played alongside the gulleys used for this purpose. We were invited into the home of one our interviewees. It was built from stone and wood, with an old corrugated iron roof, and was just large enough for a bed, a stove, a set of drawers, and a chair. There was no bathroom. There are no sewers in this community, and no public toilets either. People must meet their bodily needs as and where they can. Yet in 2023, officials expressed outrage about ‘open defecation’ on the rocky sea defense on the eastern side of Cape Coast castle. One spokesperson stated that the practice threatened tourism and the ‘sanctity of the magnificent historical edifice’, and that ‘perpetrators will not be spared when caught’. Similar concerns had previously been expressed about local people’s practices on the outskirts of Elmina Castle.

Not only are visitors to the castles mostly protected from such sights, but the tourism infrastructure also ensures that tourists need not worry about managing their own bodily needs. Washrooms have been installed in the castles for their comfort and dignity. Signage outside the washrooms make it clear they are for visitor use only. And as the entry fee for Ghanaian nationals is the equivalent of the daily minimum wage, it is hardly possible that local people could use these facilities instead of the open land adjacent to the castles, or gulleys in the area where they live. Indeed, the entry fee works to exclude most local people from ever entering the portals of the ‘magnificent historical edifice’ in the shadow of which they live.

Clearly, there is no parallel between the challenges faced by people living in communities adjacent to the castles today and the torture, physical agony and dehumanisation experienced by those once held captive in the dungeons of Elmina and Cape Coast castles. But the lives of people in the community today are nonetheless blighted in multiple ways by structural forces and inequalities set in motion by the history of transatlantic slavery. They too live ‘in the wake of slavery’. The local people we spoke to understood well the significance of the castles for diasporian visitors, and were sympathetic to their quest to bring the past closer and make some kind of ancestral connection.

Several also spoke of having met individual diasporian tourists who were equally empathic about the situation of local people. Some diasporian tourists even offered solidarity in the form of economic support for local people and businesses. Yet in general, international, including diasporian, visitors to Ghana have much greater awareness of what the afterlives of slavery look and feel like in the USA, Britain and other European countries than of how they play out and what they mean for communities like those who live in Cape Coast and Elmina, and the current organisation of heritage tourism in these sites does not counteract that asymmetry. We hope that our project will help start a conversation about how curators of museums and sites of heritage can help to change this.