In February 2026, team members Julia Davidson, Maeli Farias and Sam Okyere visited Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle as part of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project “Slavery and Its Legacies: Contestations, Memory and Change.” The visit formed part of our broader effort to map how slavery and its afterlives are remembered, narrated and politically mobilised across different project sites. Interviews and focus group discussions with residents of the communities immediately surrounding the castles sharpened and deepened our reflections on reparations, redress and the enduring material consequences of the transatlantic slave trade in the present.

Our visit took place amid renewed political demands for reparatory justice. Only days earlier, at the African Union and the United Nations, Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, had delivered speeches reiterating calls for the transatlantic slave trade to be formally recognised as a crime against humanity and for reparations to follow such recognition. His intervention reflects an expanding global discourse that insists racial slavery must not be treated as a closed historical episode but as a system whose deleterious effects remain embedded in contemporary global inequalities. These arguments resonate strongly with scholarship on racial capitalism, which challenges narratives that equate capitalism with freedom and instead posits that racial slavery and racialised exploitation were constitutive of the modern global economic order. Capitalist extraction did not emerge in spite of slavery but through it, with regimes of racial domination integral to processes of accumulation, dispossession and global market formation (Robinson, 1983; Beckert, 2014).

At the same time, calls for reparations raise difficult and pressing questions as discussed in the literature. What, in concrete terms, constitutes repair. Who is recognised as a legitimate subject of redress. Through what institutional and political mechanisms should such repair be enacted. These questions acquire particular urgency at sites such as Cape Coast and Elmina, where global memory initiatives intersect directly with local precarity. The castles are Ghana’s most visited heritage sites. They attract diasporic Africans seeking reconnection with ancestral histories, alongside tourists pursuing educational and affective encounters with the architecture and narratives of enslavement. From the courtyards to the dungeons and the so called doors of no return, the curated experiences are emotionally powerful and morally charged. Yet, as scholars of memory and heritage have argued, heritage sites do not simply transmit history. They also produce selective narratives shaped by institutional priorities, political contexts and commercial imperatives (Macdonald, 2013).

At both Cape Coast and Elmina, dominant tour scripts tend to cater primarily to the expectations of diasporic visitors. The castles are presented as spaces of rupture, trauma and possible reconciliation and largely symbolising a break between past and present. However, the socio economic conditions in the neighbourhoods immediately beyond the castles’ walls tell a different story, one of continuity rather than rupture. Laurajane Smith’s concept of the Authorised Heritage Discourse is instructive here, reminding us that official narratives often render certain interpretations more visible and legitimate than others, while marginalising lived realities that do not easily fit established scripts of remembrance (Smith, 2006). In this context, the brutality of the past is made highly legible, while the endurance of its structural consequences in the present is less explicitly foregrounded.

Our conversations with residents living immediately around the castles revealed persistent socio economic hardship. Basic infrastructure, including sanitation, waste management and secure housing, remains inadequate. Youth unemployment is widespread, and opportunities for socio economic mobility are severely constrained. Residents repeatedly described the castles not only as reminders of ancestral suffering but also as visible markers of their own contemporary exclusion. They spoke of bearing the everyday burdens associated with tourism, including congestion, littering and the disruption of privacy through unsolicited photography, without enjoying proportionate access to its benefits. During our visit, we observed that tour buses deliver visitors directly to the castle gates, guide them through tightly scheduled tours and depart soon after. The organisation of visits ensures minimal interaction with surrounding communities and limited exposure to residents’ lived realities. As a result, very little tourism spending circulates within these neighbourhoods. For diasporic visitors seeking reconnection, the encounter is inarguably therefore mediated through carefully curated scripts and timetables, raising questions about the depth and reciprocity of that reconnection.

In reflecting on their circumstances, several residents told us that, in their view, slavery has not ended. They were not referring to so called “modern slavery”. Rather, they were articulating a sense of continuity in systems of unequal power, racialised exploitation and elite domination that once dehumanised their forebears and that, in their view, continue to structure their marginalisation today. The castles and the memory work surrounding them generate symbolic and economic value that is widely managed, packaged and consumed, while those whose lives are most intimately entangled with these historically saturated spaces remain structurally marginalised. Their accounts resonate with Saidiya Hartman’s notion of the afterlife of slavery, which draws attention to how conditions of dispossession, constrained opportunity and diminished life chances persist long after formal abolition (Hartman, 2007). The formal end of enslavement did not dissolve the structures of inequality it produced.

If reparative justice is to be meaningful, it must engage directly with these localised continuities. Residents articulated repair in material and participatory terms. Meaningful reparation, in their view, would involve substantial investment in infrastructure such as toilets, sanitation systems, waste management and housing. It would also include sustained youth employment initiatives, educational and vocational training programmes and broader opportunities for social and economic advancement. Equally important is the demand for participatory governance structures that ensure communities have a genuine voice in decisions about how tourism revenue is generated, managed and distributed. Reimagining heritage tourism itself is central to this vision, with greater emphasis on community engagement, locally led storytelling and guaranteed economic participation for local traders and service providers. Such measures would align with restorative justice frameworks that position affected communities as active agents of transformation rather than passive recipients of policy. They would also challenge the extractive logics that currently shape the organisation of heritage tourism at these sites.

Standing in the dungeons of Elmina and Cape Coast, one confronts the stark brutality of the past. Standing outside, in sustained conversation with residents, one confronts the persistence of inequality in the present. These experiences are not analytically separable. To render reparations meaningful at the local level requires an explicit connection between historical crime and contemporary consequence. Both the memory and material conditions of slavery’s afterlives must be addressed to begin to transform the lived realities of those who continue to most marginalised by it.