by: Cheryl Finley
In a strange way, then, the horror of these monuments becomes aestheticized in the act of making photographs. Even Richard Wright was taken by the hypnotizing beauty of Elmina: "Towers rise two hundred feet in the air. What spacious dreams! What august faith! How elegantly laid-out the castle is! What bold plunging lines! What, yes, taste" (384). Wright's own photographs of Elmina emphasized the symmetry of the walls. It is significant that most people do not return to the dungeons to make photographs, nor do they take many pictures there at all. Perhaps this is in reverence to "the ancestors," or for more practical reasons, such as the lack of sufficient light. The bright flashes needed to get a decent photograph in the darkness of the dungeons would not only disturb the somber mood for other visitors, but would surely ruin the "authentic" gloom cast by the deep shadows.
Filming a documentary about Cape Coast
Without a doubt, snapping photographs has become a required part of the tourist experience. But, in the case of roots tourism, it has a special commemorative function, a different familial appeal. As roots tourists gather in front of the cannon at Cape Coast Castle or the Portuguese Church at Elmina, they are consciously participating in an act of remembrance--symbolically taking possession of the past. Their photographs are evidence of a return to the ancestral homeland, of the buildings that still stand as a reminder of the birth of the African Diaspora in the transatlantic slave trade. Back home, they share their snapshots with family and friends as proof of having been there, of having walked through the Door of No Return. Of having "returned home," and then returned home.
In fact, the Door of No Return is one of the popular--almost required--sites that roots tourists choose to record on film.
At Cape Coast Castle, the Door of No Return is located at the base of the central courtyard, just beyond the female dungeons. The enormous arched doorway encloses two impressive black doors. At the top of the doorframe, a standard GMMB sign labels the door in neat white letters, "DOOR OF NO RETURN," marking it as a site of special interest. At Cape Coast Castle, the Door of No Return is often the last stop on the guided tour, a climactic moment where visitors watch in quiet anticipation as the guide opens the door to reveal the expanse of angry sea where enslaved Africans would have been led to awaiting ships. After the group walks across the threshold to the beach, the guide points out other places of interest that lie outside the castle walls. Meanwhile, local children, who know to wait for the opening of the door, try to engage tourists in conversation or ask for money. Some groups of cultural heritage tourists choose this spot for pouring libations to ancestors.
Finally, as the guide motions to the group that it is time to go back inside, he points out a relatively new sign above the door, visible from the outside upon reentry. In the now-recognizable neat white lettering, it reads, "DOOR OF RETURN".
Placed there as a gesture of reconciliation, the guide explains that is meant to welcome back the thousands of African Diaspora tourists who flock to the monuments each year.
But is such a return really possible? Think about it. What does it mean to rename the infamous DOOR OF NO RETURN, the DOOR OF RETURN? Is the sign simply a marketing tool aimed at the African Diaspora segment of the tourist industry? Does such an act signify an attempt to erase the brutal history of the castles and the dungeons beneath them? Does it mean that time--four hundred years--has healed the wounds? Is it asking us to forget and move on?
Choosing the Perfect Souvenir
Before leaving, most visitors stop by the gift shop to purchase post cards, tourist art, textiles, jewelry, carved wooden sculpture and T-shirts. Some of the T-shirts bear slogans echoing pressing issues of debate for black Americans, such as reparations for slavery. One T-shirt for sale read: front, "Back to our heritage, Elmina Castle, 1482," with an illustration of the castle; and back, "Damn right! Our people worked for 400 years without a paycheck. Reparations are due!" One of the popular books sold in the gift shop is Castles & Forts of Ghana, written by prominent Ghanaian archeologist, Kwesi J. Anquandah and illustrated with seductive color photographs by Thierry Secretan. Published by the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, the book has the strange feeling of being part colonial/architectural history, part travel brochure. With photographs of whitewashed forts drenched in the pink light of sunset, it succeeds in glamorizing the forts, making them a desirable tourist destination. Moreover, like the renamed Door of Return at Cape Coast Castle, this book seems to be targeted towards the returning African Diaspora. Even the souvenirs that visitors choose to purchase are telling indicators of their own need to symbolically possess the past.
Upon leaving, visitors are invited to list their nationalities, names, and addresses and to write their impressions of the tour and the castle in comment books placed on the podium just by the entrance. The comment books serve as a census of visitors and their impressions. They help site administrators, curators, and the GMMB gauge visitors' approval of the job they are doing. At the same time, the comment books often satisfy visitors' needs to express their feelings after cathartic experiences in the dungeons. Writing about their experiences helps them to begin the process of making sense of their visit. The comments left in these books form a continuing dialogue, one that is often played out over days, weeks, and months as successive visitors respond to the comments of those that came before them. While seemingly an innocent gesture on the part of the GMMB to document its visitors, the comment books are the place of many discussions about race, history, politics, and commemoration. It is here that the visitors' final performances of remembrance, race, and identity are recorded.
No Place Like Home
The castles and forts of Ghana always have been sites of African/European contact and centers of cultural exchange. While their fundamental role in facilitating the slave trade is undeniable, it is important to bear in mind that they also served many different purposes, often simultaneously. During the period of the slave trade, Cape Coast Castle served as defense against rival competitors, a prison for the enslaved, a residence for foreign workers and visitors, a trading hall, a warehouse, a court of mediation, a dining hall, a place of worship, a missionary school, and a meeting place for local and foreign dignitaries. Thus, in one way or another, priests, slaves, doctors, carpenters, servants, traders, cooks, kings, and schoolchildren might have interacted with each other and occupied the same space.
The castles and forts developed a symbiotic relationship with the towns that grew around them, relying upon them for their work forces, housing stock, food production, and natural resources. Moreover, in response to the needs of local, national, or international interests, these buildings were continually adapted and converted to different uses. Likewise, the local economy shifted and changed. Today, the castles and the cities that surround them remain almost inseparable--spiritually, economically, and intrinsically. In the case of Cape Coast and Elmina, they share the same name; they thrive off of one another and it has long been that way. For nearly thirty years, the castles have been steadily renovated to prepare for their latest incarnation, as World Heritage Monuments. Following suit, the towns around them have shifted their economies towards tourism, with the construction of world class hotels and resorts, the preservation and restoration of historic architecture, the opening of new restaurants, the development of walking tours, a new international performing arts festival--Panafest--in 1992, and the improvement of roads and infrastructure. The castles indeed forge a sense of community, albeit one filled with contradictions.
Until recently, local inhabitants understood the historical function of these buildings to be fluid and constantly changing. But since the forts and castles were designated as World Heritage Monuments--a term that requires that they be preserved and conserved for the understanding of future generations of the international community--the multiplicity of meanings and uses that they once shared has dwindled. Designated as World Heritage Monuments, the forts and castles are marketed to tourists as memorials to the victims of the slave trade.
Many African American visitors to the Cape Coast and Elmina see these sites as tangible and necessary memorials, some of the very few places where physical evidence of their heritage can be seen, touched, walked through, and experienced with all of their physical senses. For them, having a physical place to link to their bodies--to the way they imagine the past--is the primary reason for their visit. There is something about the significance of a place for people who cannot trace their ancestry specifically, but know that their people at one time came from that place, passed through its doors, suffocated in the stench of its dungeons, were raped in the governors' quarters, and carried across the still-turbulent sea just outside the Door of (No) Return. These pilgrims, by "returning" to, or making recuperative homages to the dungeons, are staking a claim for their history, symbolically taking possession of their past. Their individual acts of performing memory--walking through the dungeons, leaving memorials, lighting candles, saying prayers, taking photographs, and writing about their experiences in the visitor comment books--leave physical evidence of their visits to these monumental memorials.
Their individual acts of remembrance and interaction with others like or unlike them speak to the power that physical places have for the articulation of memory and identity.
Further Reading:
The remarks by Richard Wright can be found in his Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954; reprint, New York, 1995); the comment by my sister, Lisa Lennon, was made in a personal communication, May 1999; opinions of the GMMB regarding the development of tourism at the forts and castles, the attitudes of Ghanaian and non-Ghanaian visitors, and the various restoration and renovation projects were obtained in interviews with Nana Ocran, director of education, Cape Coast Castle; Stephen Korsah, tour guide, Elmina Castle; and Gina Haney, US/ICOMOS, August 1999. Opinions of tourists were obtained in interviews conducted in August 1999 or from the visitor comment books. The viewpoints of people living in Cape Coast, Elmina, and other neighboring villages regarding the castles, forts, and tourism were obtained in interviews in August 1999. The comment by Farah Jasmine Griffin was obtained from the visitor comment book and in a personal communication, April 21, 2001. For aspects of architectural and cultural history of the forts and castles see, for example, Kwesi J. Anquandah, Castles & Forts of Ghana (Accra, 1999); Albert van Dantzig, Forts and Castles of Ghana (1980; reprint, Accra, 1998); and J. Erskine Graham Jr., Cape Coast In History (Cape Coast, 1994). For a general history of Ghana, see for example, F. Buah, A History of Ghana (New York, 1980) and F. Agbodeka, An Economic History of Ghana (Accra, 1992). For a general history of the slave trade see, for example, James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York, 1981); Philip D. Curtin Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wisc., 1969); Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760-1810. For Dolores Hayden's comment regarding place memory, see her Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Mass., 1995). For more on cultural heritage tourism, see James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Edward M. Bruner and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "Maasi on the Lawn: Tourist Realism in East Africa," Cultural Anthropology 9:435-70; Chris Rojek and John Urry, Touring Cultures: Transformation of Travel and Theory (London, 1997); and Edward M. Bruner, "Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora," American Anthropologist 98, no. 2 (1996): 290-304.
Acknowledgements:
For generously funding the field research for this project, I would like to acknowledge the following entities at Yale University: the History of Art Department (Lehman Traveling Fellowship), the John F. Enders Research Fellowship, the Pew Program in Religion and American History, and the Center for the Study of Race, Inequality and Politics. For contributing their hospitality, wisdom, and helpful comments, I would like to thank the following individuals: Professor Kellie Jones, Professor Laura Wexler, Kofi Blankson, Paa Kwesi Ocancey, Rosamund H. Arkorful, Grace Amonoo, Sara Asafu Adjaye, Zelda Cheatle, Michael Birt, Nana Ocran, Stephen Korsah, Gina Haney, and Mwenda, Japhiyah and Menefese Kudumu-Clavell. Finally, I would like to offer my deepest appreciation to Robert Forbes, executive coordinator of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, for recommending me to Common-place.
