Indeed, the fortresses that competing national European chartered companies erected in West Africa offer grounds for both popular and scholarly research into their existential realities. From the scholarly perspective, they are ‘frozen’ historical sources for the study of local as well as global interactions and connections. This understanding relates to the original raison d’être of the buildings as strategic infrastructure to facilitate and secure the respective national shares of the trans-Atlantic trade, of which the slave trade was for over two decades the central component. As historical sources, their presence allows for the study of their impact on society and the physical space of West Africa, on the one hand, and their role in the wider Atlantic context, on the other. From the contemporary perspective of memory, heritage, and tourism, the buildings represent ‘living’ mementos of the capability of human beings to contrive and convert architectural forms into tools of oppression for profit. This is even more pertinent in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, where European trading companies used the fortresses as platforms through which they violently engendered a forced labour regime through the capture and transportation West Africans, and their enslavement in the Americas. One of the enduring consequences of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was the creation of an African-American diaspora, the descendants of the enslaved. Significantly, many members of this diaspora imagine as well as seek a return to their ancestral homeland through an examination of the tools of their ancestors’ oppression. Paradoxical? Not quite. For, without the presence of the remnants of the fortresses the experience of the suffering that their ancestors had to endure could not be visualised and felt so poignantly.
Despite having this overarching theoretical consensus – namely, to discuss and examine the positions, utilities, and socio-spatial impacts of the fortresses within West Africa and globally (in the case of the Dutch-Elmina-Java links) – the conference agenda did not seek to impose any specific theoretical or methodological approaches on its attendees. Rather, the individual authors, all of whom are established scholars and experts in their fields of history, were required to bring their own theoretical and methodological angles to the exploration of the object of study and theme under investigation. This open-endedness has led to a diverse set of theoretical and methodological approaches that, through individual case studies of the Afro-European interactions on the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast, respectively, have produced alternative understandings of the fortresses thereon. This diversity of approaches is also reflected in the varied lengths of the individual chapters in this collected volume. Professor Emeritus Irene Odotei’s video presentation during the conference featuring interviews and ritual performances relating to the shrine of the local deity Nana Tabiri, which is located in the ‘male slave dungeon’ of Cape Coast Castle, would have added an interesting angle on the theme of forts, ritual, and spirituality had it been developed into a chapter for this volume.
At the conference, the issue of ‘labelling’ provided moments of lively discussion. For instance, the participants keenly debated the extent to which the ‘European’ label is still suitable as a contemporary descriptive of the fortresses,
John Kwadwo Osei-Tutu
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)