Polly Pattullo
Visitors look at new places with eyes that are loaded with their perceptions about the world and where they come from. Depending on the “view”, we can be fascinated, bored or anguished. It can be unforgettable or mundane. Our hosts, who look at that same view every day, see things differently.
Such confusion usually makes only for passing amusement or embarrassment. But in some cases, the contradictions are fundamental and the responses more complicated. Sometimes, it is the visitors who dictate the agenda, forcing the hosts to make difficult compromises. What happens, for example, at places that were once witnesses to horror and that have now become shrines? As tourist attractions, what are they there for and for whom? And what is the responsibility of the hosts who find themselves the caretakers of such memorials?
These questions have recently become pertinent in West Africa where some of the coastal trading forts are now open to the public. They were built for trade in gold, ivory – and slaves. Now Unesco World Heritage sites, the forts at Elmina and Cape Coast, in particular, have become key features of Ghana’s tourist industry.
The history of Elmina fort began in 1482. The Portuguese established the first European building in tropical Africa there on a promontory on the edge of the Atlantic. Trading with African partners, its wealth was generated from the hinterland – a land of gold and, later, slaves destined for the Middle Passage. The Dutch captured Elmina in 1637 (being pragmatic Protestants they turned its chapel into an auction house). Then it was the turn of the British, who held it from 1872 until independence in 1957. During British rule, it was used to imprison an Ashanti monarch.
Since independence, Ghanaians have used it as a school, a government office and a police training academy. And now, with its buildings restored, it staunch walls whitewashed, with its views of the town’s fishing fleet, the curved beach and the swirling waves of the Atlantic at its feet, it has become a tourist attraction. It has been many things to many people. And so it remains.
For Ghanaians, the forts – and the slave trade – are one aspect of their history. Their interest as tourists to Elmina Castle may be in exploring the rooms where the Ashanti leader, King Prempeh I, was imprisoned in 1896 before being exiled to the Seychelles. Their interest as hosts may be to construct a tourism that brings money to the local economy and ensures that local people play a central role in determining what should happen at the castle.
For whites, the details of life in the slave forts produce a shamble of emotions. We are shown, for example, “the door of no return”, that narrow slit in a wall through which slaves were forced on to a waiting ship.
The Ghanaian guide is neither melodramatic nor evasive; perhaps he edits his talk according to his clientele. Whatever, we white tourists shuffle helplessly. We cannot quite imagine ourselves as those Africans. But we can think of what role we might have played in that dismal history. But then, with the tour over, we have a drink in the caf, turn our back on the fort and watch the fishing boats, a picturesque tourist image of bustling, modern Ghana.
So, too, can African-Americans. But they are not there to admire the view. For them, the forts hold a particular intensity. As an American anthropologist pointed out, for some visitors from the black diaspora, the “castles are sacred ground not to be desecrated. They do not want the castles to be made beautiful or to be whitewashed. They want the original stench to remain in the dungeons.”
For them, these unembellished forts are places of pilgrimage. And those tourists bring wreaths and flowers and perform ceremonies of purification and remembrance in the dungeons. They are there to reclaim their own history.
Ghana must balance such different needs and perceptions in displaying its forts to the world. Complete with souvenir shops and interpretive centres, they have become destinations competing with rainforests, festivals and markets for a slice of the tourist trade. At the same time, they must respect the needs of those for whom the forts are a spiritual home.