A Happy People but a Tragic History

Sombre reminders of slavery do not stand in the way of plans to attract visitors, writes Michael Knipe

The first sight of Elmina Castle, with its white walls, thick turrets and bastions gleaming under the African sun, instantly brings to life the building's 15th-century origins.

Behind the castle, the Atlantic breakers crash on the endless sandy beach. At its front, beneath the coconut trees, lie dozens of long dugout canoes. Around them swarm the local villagers, women in colourful skirts swaying along with basins of food on their heads; men lounging, or bartering their freshly caught fish.

This is a scene that has hardly changed in the past 500 years.

Ghana has the densest concentration of such castles and fortresses in Africa. During a 300-years-period one was built every ten miles along the coast - and three of them, including Elmina, have been declared World Heritage Sites by Unesco.

In 1482, the Portuguese built the first, Castle Sao Jorge da Mina, now the Elmina Castle, to protect the gold and ivory-rich coast they "discovered" in 1471. Surrounded by a moat and modelled on late medieval European fortresses, it was constructed with flagstones and timber imported from Europe and was the first substantial European building on the African continent.

In 1637 it was captured by the Dutch and used as a holding base for slaves being transported to America. A thousand or more of them could be held at any one time in Elmina's dungeon cells and their plight is vividly detailed by the guides who conduct tourists around the cells.

This is a particularly poignant experience for the increasing number of African-Americans visiting Ghana. Was this where their recent ancestors began their journey to America? Would their lives have been better if there had been no slave trade and they had been born in Africa? These are questions they must, inevitably, ask themselves.

On a wall of the castle is a plaque which reads: "In everlasting memory of the anguish of our ancestors. May the thousands who died rest in peace. May those who return find their roots. May humanity never again perpetrate such injustice against humanity. We, the living, vow to uphold this."

When the slave trade was finally abolished the Dutch ceded Elmina Castle to the British. It was used as a training base for the West African Volunteer Force during the Second World War, then a police training school, before becoming a tourist attraction.

Ghana has good claims to being
the friendliest country in Africa

Western visitors are not rare any more but they still attract the attention of a cluster of bare-chested boys who scrabble to hand over scraps of paper with their names and postbox numbers carefully written in advance, in the hope of receiving a coin or a biro in return.

Elmina is 110 miles west along the coast from Accra and, on the way, tourists can also visit the Kakum National Park. Of Ghana's once extensive rainforest, only 10 per cent remains. Kakum covers 360 square miles of semi-deciduous forest and is home to at least 40 large mammal species, including giant forest hog, bushbuck, forest elephant, flying squirrel, leopard and a huge variety of monkeys. There are also about 600 species of butterflies and 300 species of birds.

The main tourist attraction at Kakum is a series of single wooden planks with rope handrails strung at a height of 30 metres that enables visitors to walk through the top branches of the forest.

For the more intrepid traveller, with a head for heights and a good sense of balance, this is an extraordinary, Tarzan-like experience. If you prefer to keep your feet on the ground it is possible to arrange overnight camping trips in the park with the prospect of elephant tracking and birdwatching.

Ghana has good claims to be the friendliest and most cheerful country in Africa. Its people are enterprising and receptive to visitors. And it is a place where you can walk the crowded streets with a degree of safety that is, nowadays, rare on this continent.

Each of its ten regions has its own distinct folklore and cultural traditions. And, in addition to its colonial castles and forts and its hot sunny weather, the country has lively festivals, exuberant highlife music, dramatic metal sculpture, wood carvings and exotic jewellery, vividly-patterned kente cloth and other colourful costumes, and a fascinating pre and post-colonial history.

What it does not have yet is enough tourists, even though numbers have increased from 20,000 a year, a while ago, to 370,000 a year at present. Tourism is nevertheless the nation's third largest foreign currency earner.

Michael Gizo, the Minister of Tourism, says the Government is aiming to attract one million-plus visitors annually within ten years. "Eco-tourism is becoming particularly important to us," he says, "because when we look at examples like Kakum National Park, it is one of the attractions that has created community involvement and a sustainable restoration of the environment as opposed to the degrading of the environment that was happening in the past."

The basic infrastructure is in place and the Government is planning to spend a further $200 million in the next decade. It hopes to attract foreign investors with the necessary expertise to commit a further $600 million.

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