"Routes of Remembrance: The Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Ghanaian Imagination" by Bayo Holsey

Bayo Holsey

Deposited 2003

Abstract
This dissertation examines the significance of the slave trade in Ghanaian constructions of history. I focus particularly on Cape Coast and Elmina, two coastal towns that served as departure points for slaves during the Atlantic trade. Over the course of the past decade, the tourist industry has emphasized the role of these towns in the slave trade in order attract diaspora tourists to them. But among local residents, the slave trade is a topic largely sequestered from discourse. Through an exploration of the construction of the past within family histories, popular historical discourses, and schools, I examine the ways in which the articulation of certain histories and the silencing of others serve to construct coastal residents as the embracers of a European modernity while masking their collusion in the slave trade. I then examine the impact of the tourist industry's elaboration of a history of the slave trade at Cape Coast and Elmina Castles, where slaves were kept before they were shipped to the New World, and during Panafest and Emancipation Day, both celebrations that further focus attention on the slave trade largely for the benefit of diaspora tourists. These tourists are deeply rooted in a collective memory of the slave trade, but their insistence on its remembrance often encounters resistance from Ghanaians. The competing claims regarding the past in Ghana reflect the significance of the slave trade in contemporary constructions of history, memory, and identity.