VISITORS WITHOUT BORDERS? Concords and Discords among National Communities in the Visitors’ Books

Abstract

Since the Government of Ghana declared 2019 as the Year of Return, visitations to the former slave dungeons of Cape Coast and Elmina have significantly increased. As they trudge through the doors and corridors of these monuments of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, visitors are taken through the harrowing experiences - which enslaved Africans suffered centuries ago before they were shipped to the various countries mainly in the New World. Together, these two sites have a long and varied history, and although they are places of incontestable human tragedy, they are equally spaces of contention. This paper explores how visitors to Cape Coast and Elmina castles coalesce or disagree on issues raised in the visitors’ books. Using contextual analysis, the research pays attention to, and attempts to draw the line between nationality and positionality. How, for example, does nationality affect observation, opinion or themes expressed? The paper contextually analyses a two month-long collation of visitors’ impressions, gathered around the period of the celebration - in Cape Coast - of PANAFEST/Emancipation Day which also marked 400 years of the start of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Data gathered from the two monuments tend to support the position of scholarship on visitor studies, which states that as they engage in the collaborative enterprise of reading and logging their own comments, visitors contribute to the building of communities around specific subject matters raised on the pages. Though some research have been conducted on the representation of both castles, not much has been done on visitor comment and citizenship. While paying close attention to how comments are framed, the research attempts to piece together correlations between the issues visitors inscribe vis-a-vis the politics of their national identities. Recognising that over their centuries-long history, the two monuments have been built and owned by at least, five different nations, the study deconstructs their respective visitors’ books as inter-cultural sounding boards of consensus and contention.