Among the many fascinating UNESCO World Heritage sites to visit in Africa, perhaps none are quite as poignant for American tourists as Ghana's relics of the slave trading forts.
What are World Heritage Sites?
As UNESCO describes it, World Heritage is the “designation for places on earth that are of outstanding universal value to humanity and as such, have been inscribed on the World Heritage List to be protected for future generations to appreciate and enjoy.”
About 900 places around the world are designated environmental or cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
About Ghana
Ghana, on Africa’s east coast, has a population of about 20 million and fills an area about the size of Oregon. Its capital—and the destination for most international flights—is Accra. The population is predominantly Christian, having been colonized at about the same time that Columbus landed in America
A former British colony named Gold Coast, Ghana has been independent since 1957.
US President Obama's visit to Slave Fort
Ghana hosted US President Barack Obama in July 2009.
As the first African American president of the United States, his visit to one particular site of human devastation was especially important: Cape Coast Castle.
Cape Coast Castle was, historically, a notorious slave-trading post.
Ghana's Slave Trade Forts
Cape Coast Castle is just one of several of Ghana’s World Heritage Sites, designated by UNESCO simply as “the Forts and Castles of Volta, Greater Accra, and Ghana’s Central and Western Regions.”
But this benign description of "forts and castles" doesn’t begin to do justice to the human dramas and tragedies that unfolded here. Families were separated, men and women were shackled and lives were devastated.
Gold, ivory—and, most importantly, slaves --were traded from many of these fortified trading posts, built over a three-hundred year period from 1482 through 1786, and situated strategically up and down Ghana’s coast. The Dutch built Fort Good Hope in 1705 in hopes of striking it rich through gold trade. When that didn’t pan out, the fort was used for the slave trade.
Many American visitors, of all races, have borne witness to the devastating firsthand impact of seeing the slave forts of Ghana, Thousands of miles away from the US, these old forts bring American history home.
Slave Forts Are Evocative for Americans
A recent student visitor to Ghana, Elias Halloran of New York, described feelings of disbelief upon seeing the slave forts and hearing the stories about what went on there. He said it was distressing “to see in a first hand way, the manner in which people were taken from their homeland without any possibility of their return.” And, he added, “It provoked me to think more deeply about the fact that slave labor was used in building parts of the America which I benefit from today. “
A Place in African American, and American History
From the cave paintings and natural wonders of uKhahlamba-Drakensberg Park in South Africa, to Ethiopia's rock carved churches, Africa's UNESCO World Heritage Sites offer a varied, and compelling, menu of travel experiences for Americans. Given the history of black Americans, and all Americans, the slave trading forts of Ghana flesh out the details of a familiar, yet terrible story of slavery that continues to resonate through American contemporary life.
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