"One African American visitor to Cape Coast suggested, 'White visitors should come on different days than the black visitors.'"

The Door of (No) Return
Cheryl Finley

Part I | II | III | IV | V | VI

Performing Memory, Performing Race, Performing Identity
Upon entering Cape Coast or Elmina, visitors are invited to see and participate in layered and nuanced performances of remembrance. First, they become aware of themselves as a particular type of tourist--as Ghanaian nationals or non-Ghanaian nationals--based on the price of the admission ticket. Then, as if to prepare visitors for the horror of the dungeons, to soften the emotional blow that they are about to experience, they are directed to visit a museum before going on a guided tour of the castle.

In order to reach the museum at Cape Coast Castle, visitors must walk across an expansive, cobblestone courtyard that opens out to the sea. The museum is located on the second floor in cool, darkened rooms that formerly engaged the business of the slave trade and the administration of the British Gold Coast Colony. Upon entering the museum, most visitors experience momentary blindness as their eyes become accustomed to the sharp transition from brightness to darkness. Outside, pure, equatorial sunlight reflects off the whitewashed exterior of the castle and the crashing sea, providing a high contrast with the simulated museum environment lit in deliberately low lumens in order to protect the artifacts on display. Other contrasts of light and dark are found throughout the tour of the castle, most obviously between the gloom of the dungeons and the intensity of the sun in exterior spaces--or metaphorically, between blacks and whites (fig. 8).

Fig. 8. Tourists at Cape Coast Castle. This is the most popular spot for taking photographs at Cape Coast.

According to the curators, the museum's exhibition, Crossroads of a People, Crossroads of Trade, "examines more than 500 years of Ghana's history, placing the castle within its broad economic, political, and historical contexts, including the legacy of the slave trade. It also offers a glimpse into the life today and the rich cultural heritage of the Central Region." The exhibition was developed in 1994 in close consultation with North American advisors, designers, curators, and historians, as well as local and national scholars, chiefs, and archeologists. Crossroads begins with the pre-colonial history of the Central Region of Ghana, using artifacts, such as gold weights and measuring scales, stone implements for hunting, and terracotta figurines. The coming of the Europeans is represented by large blowups of European engravings that depict West African scenes or West African/European contact. The development of the slave trade is told through maps of the trade routes, engravings of the coffle marching through the hinterlands, and examples of the artifacts of barter and exchange--glass beads, pottery, whiskey bottles, and firearms. Midway through the exhibition, visitors pass through a dark, wood-paneled space meant to represent the hold of the slave ships in which captive Africans were forcibly transported to the New World. Walking through this cramped, minimally designed space, visitors are confronted with a heap of heavy rope from a ship, a pair of shackles connected to chains, and other iron restraint devices, which are fastened to the raw hewn wooden walls. One section of the wall has rough, wooden planks meant to resemble the narrow decks on which enslaved men, women, and children were closely confined. There is also a large black-and-white print of the slave ship icon and two popular nineteenth-century engravings of captives onboard a slave ship. Overhead, a wooden grate simulates the hatch that would have brought in fresh air from the ship's upper deck (fig. 9).

Fig. 9. Installation simulating the hold of a slave ship at Cape Coast Castle Museum. Influence from Western museum exhibition designers is seen in the use of black-and-white illustrations of the slave ship icon (left) and captives on the deck of a captured slave ship (from a mid-nineteenth-century engraving after a daguerreotype published in Harper's Weekly).

Equipped with artifacts, illustrations, and a faint musty smell, this fabricated, transitional space is obviously meant to impress upon the visitor's imagination the horror of the Middle Passage. Similar installations replicating the hold of a slave ship have been utilized by museum professionals in England and the United States, often to great effect. But here, ironically, such an installation fails to have the same impact because the main attractions--the physical edifice of the castle and slave dungeons--are themselves so real and tangible that they need no theatrical accompaniments. They provide the "authentic" experience.

Upon exiting the "hold," the visitor is thrust immediately upon a simulated auction block in the Southern United States. The transition is abrupt, and not without impact. The next room summarizes the trials and achievements of New World blacks, using black-and-white photographs or engravings of notable people. These images visualize moments of African Diaspora history in the Caribbean and North America, from the Haitian Revolution to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. There are familiar portraits of people like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Duke Ellington, Billie Holliday, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, Angela Davis, and Bob Marley. Although many of these people are well known in Ghana and around the world today, this part of the exhibition has a distinctly American and mostly masculine feeling. The last part of the exhibit describes the contemporary cultural history of Ghana and the Central Region using examples of local crafts, including brightly colored cloths and carved wooden utensils and musical instruments. With a mood that is upbeat and exuding vitality, this closing section ends with explanations of local and national traditions, economy, politics, and agriculture.

The museum at Elmina is much smaller and less sophisticated, and its focus on local history instead of larger history of the slave trade gives it special charm for many tourists. It is located on the first floor of the former Portuguese church, a squat red-brick building that dominates the central courtyard. The exhibit, Images of Elmina across the Centuries, charts the history of the village of Elmina from pre-colonial times to the present. Opened in 1996, the exhibition was organized by the GMMB in conjunction with the same group of American consultants that advised the Cape Coast design team. Using little in the way of complex design or theatrical installations, the Elmina exhibit effectively employs two-dimensional illustrative materials--mostly prints, photographs, and text--on large folding panels to relate an intimate local history. At the museums at Cape Coast and Elmina, the influence of Western consultants is notable in the design, layout, and type of art and artifacts selected to relate the histories.

After visitors take in the exhibitions at either Cape Coast or Elmina, they go to meet a tour guide in the courtyard. Each tour guide leads a group of about twenty people, which usually ends up being racially and ethnically diverse as well as international in character. Diversity doesn't mean harmony, however. Indeed, some members of such mixed tour groups complain of being singled out by other visitors in their groups for derogatory comments. An American tourist from Connecticut briefly described his experience during an Elmina Castle tour in the site's logbook: "Very impressive castle. Tour was very good. Great views toward the city, beach and ocean. One concern--a man during the tour was distracting an[d] I felt offended by his anti-white sentiments, as he kept saying, 'white people this . . .' I couldn't understand exactly, but he should respect other people more who are trying to follow the tour guide. Overall, I enjoyed my visit here." A Ghanaian member of the same tour group added, "[I]t should be strictly forbidden for visitors in the group to keep making offensive comments which directly or indirectly concern individuals in the group."

Organized tour groups often request to have their own guide. These groups are usually more homogeneous, either racially, or by their affiliation with schools, churches, or missionary organizations. Often, organized groups of African American tourists ask that no white people accompany their tour. One African American visitor to Cape Coast suggested, "White visitors should come on different days than the black visitors." In addition, some African American groups request that no white people be present when they go to the dungeons for the first time, explaining that they don't want to experience the pain of their ancestors with a descendant of the oppressor present. One African American visitor to Cape Coast expressed his feelings of "rage and hostility towards the Dutch and Portuguese"--past and present--after going on the tour.

The guided tours at both Cape Coast and Elmina focus on the points of pain and suffering, and of strength and resistance, to lend a sense of authenticity to the historical and contemporary significance of the sites. Indeed, the notion of authenticity is central to the allure of cultural heritage tourism as an industry. In their efforts to show "how it really was," the principal highlights of the castle tours dramatize key features that offer up a notion of life as it was once experienced there. Thus, visitors learn about how enslaved women were raped by European traders, governors, and officers and about the types of torture inflicted upon defiant captives. They also sense the ironic presence of the church inside the castle, and the dramatic contrast between the spacious governors' and officers' quarters on the upper levels and the stench and horror of the underground dungeons. Perhaps most disturbing, and in this sense most authentic, is the visitor's final glimpse of the "Door of No Return," from which enslaved Africans were led to awaiting ships, never to come back.

Most, if not all of the rooms that tourists pass through are empty. The churches have no pews. Nor are the governors' or officers' quarters decorated with period furniture. This means that visitors have to imagine what it might have been like to live in these spaces. One visitor at Cape Coast demanded: "Please authenticate the Governor's residence to look exactly the way it was then. I think that will make the necessary contrast with the dungeons." When I visited Cape Coast Castle, restorations to the governor's quarters, which were scheduled to include arrangements of furniture and decorations from the colonial period, had begun. At Elmina, there was talk of restoring the two tower prisons on top of the seaward bastions in which the Asantehene or king of Ashanti, Prempeh I, and his royal family were held by the British for four years at the end of the nineteenth century. These restorations would likely aim to give a sense of Ashanti culture, in particular of the way in which a turn-of-the-century royal Asantehene lived. Such a restoration, focusing on the history of a known national figure, would provide a powerful contrast to the better-known stories of the colonial officials who occupied the second-story living quarters. It's relatively easy to imagine how to restore the quarters of the colonial and local elites.

But how might the dungeons be "authenticated"? A visitor to Elmina had one possible solution: "Renovate with models of slaves, sound effects, [and] smells to give authenticity and real feel for what it was like for our ancestors." But might such a renovation go too far? How would the curators and designers choose the models to represent the slaves? Would they opt for wax figures of the type seen at natural history museums or at the popular international tourist attraction, Madame Tussaud's? Or might they use actual people to make the body casts? This was the case at the Museum of African American History in Detroit, where city residents were used as models for the life-sized figures of fifty shackled youths, cast in bronze. Until recently, these figures were part of a central exhibit about the Middle Passage, now being demolished due to its lack of popularity with visitors. Some of the restorative changes to the female dungeons at Elmina aim at the kind of authentication the visitors' logbooks call for, especially the new metal bars that were placed in the arched window openings (fig. 10).

Fig. 10. The courtyard surrounded by female dungeons at Elmina Castle. A cistern used to hold drinking water is in the center. The upper balcony is connected to the governor's quarters, overlooking where the women were kept. The photograph is taken through (new) iron bars on arched windows of the female dungeons.

But the fresh coats of white paint inside of some of the male dungeons have left many visitors in a state of outrage. As one person commented, "The Jews would not paint the ovens in Germany!" What is more, when one of the male dungeons at Elmina was remodeled into a gift shop, so many visitors complained about it that it was eventually dismantled and moved to an outer service area across from the castle restaurant. They felt that the presence of a gift shop in a former dungeon not only trivialized, but also erased the memory of those who were once held prisoner there. Moreover the bitter irony of a dungeon-cum-gift shop drew attention to the consumer side of the monuments as tourist attractions.

But the deepest sense of irony becomes clear when we consider the way in which the monuments are packaged and marketed for global tourism, especially for cultural heritage tourism. Here, the thing that is being sold (back) to the tourist is the memory of their ancestors: the now-absent black bodies that become part of the allure of these monuments. It is an irony some visitors to the castles have complained about. As one person put it, "Don't turn our memories into a tourist attraction." In the current age of global tourism, memory itself becomes a commodity--a thing to be bought, sold, and traded.

At Cape Coast Castle, a different type of authentication takes place inside the male dungeons. A large altar to the local god, Nana Tabir, has been erected in front of the blocked entranceway to an old tunnel leading to the Door of No Return. One of the oldest gods of Cape Coast, Nana Tabir was known to protect the local fishermen as well as the traders who met in Cape Coast Castle. The god took the form of a sacred rock, the very rock from which the dungeons were carved during the late seventeenth century. The present shrine to Nana Tabir was erected by the chief of Cape Coast, Nana Kwesi Atta, to replace the one that was there prior to the construction of the dungeons and castle. The altar is decorated with candles, flowers, fruits, notes, and monetary offerings from visitors. It is attended by a local priest, who will say a prayer to Nana Tabir in exchange for a donation.

There have been mixed reactions to the presence of the altar deep within the cavernous male dungeon. Some feel that the monetary donations, often urged by the tour guide, have made the dungeon commercial. Others, including local Christians, dismiss it as simple idolatry, while local believers in the panoply of household and state gods feel their beliefs are given notice at Cape Coast Castle. Yet many black people from the diaspora find the presence of the altar comforting. It is a place where they can bring offerings to their lost ancestors. For them, it takes on a different, double meaning, serving as an altar to Nan Tabir as well as a shrine to the people once enslaved there.

Elsewhere, the dungeons are left hauntingly bare, with the exception of the wreaths, flowers, notes, and burning candles left on a daily basis by visitors. And most people seem to prefer the dungeons that way. They feel that the emptiness best signifies the absence of the many millions gone. For them, empty is the only authentic way for the dungeons to be represented. Visitors regularly choose the emptiness of the dungeons to perform rituals of tribute and commemoration. Some burn incense there. Others weep, almost incessantly. Some groups recite poetry, sing songs, or pray together. What sound effects could compete with the cries, shrieks, chants, prayers, and songs of today's visitors? What could be more "authentic"?

All photographs the copyright of Cheryl Finley.