Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes the histories and identities surrounding encounters, past and present, between Ghanaians and African Americans. With Ghanaian slave forts as the primary sites of interaction between African American tourists and local tour guides, we explore various struggles over the meaning of identities connected through histories of slavery. This paper argues that guides have designed “heritage tours” not only to provide a palatable historical narrative of slavery, but also to meet the expectations of Diasporan tourists whose pilgrimages to West Africa bring hopes of recovering a connection to an African homeland. The paper interrogates the notion of West Africa as a place for African Americans to “return” from both Ghanaian and American perspectives. It also examines divergent states of mind related to negotiations around the creation and interpretation of the history of slavery and the 200 years since the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. This paper pays particular attention to African Americans who visit Ghanaian slave forts, including Elmina, Cape Coast, and Fort Amsterdam, and their creation of fictive pasts and fictive identities in order to define their African heritage. We examine Ghanaian responses to the presence of tourists from the Diaspora and focus on misunderstandings that arise over various negotiations of defining race and belonging when and where Africans and Diasporans meet. Based on fieldwork interviews, slave fort guest books, popular culture commentaries, and autobiographies of expatriates in Ghana, this paper interrogates a history of tensions and misunderstandings that have resulted from the construction, interpretation, and contestation of the history of Atlantic slavery.