In the Ghastly Shadows of Christiansborg Castle: "Aban" or Castellated Houses in the History and Contested Public Memory of the Gold Coast and Ghana

The European-built forts and castles dotted along Ghana’s Atlantic coast are gruesome reminders of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the African captives kept in these dungeons. While scholars emphasize the crucial roles of these structures in the creation of the African diaspora, the broader Gold Coast cultural and historical contexts of European and African-built castellated houses remain understudied. In response to the popularity of Black heritage tourism since the 1990s, scholars have tended to focus on the ethnography of conflicting African and African American memories and perspectives on sites of enslavement in West Africa. While these perspectives are important, this paper shifts the focus of the literature to emphasize the deep cultural histories of African-built castellated and carceral spaces of oppression as emblematic tools of elite Gold Coast self-aggrandizement, wealth, power, and prestige. By this approach, I lend more cultural and historical contexts to the conflicting meanings and memories that contemporary Ghanaians and African Americans accord these sites.