ABSTRACT
The slave trade topos is certainly of outstanding importance to most Africans from the diaspora who are coming to Ghana. It is at the core of a pilgrimage discourse advanced by African-American visitors as well as Ghanaian and American tourism officials alike. The pilgrimage metaphor has also been taken up in the academic literature that deals with African diasporan homecoming, yet often without deeper analysis. The pilgrimage vocabulary denotes an attitude of reverence with which the journey ought to be undertaken as well as represented. The current literature on pilgrimage shows that the framing of pilgrimage within the discourse and practice of the tourism industry is far from unusual. In more recent times both in terms of historical distance as well as epistemological approach the commercial aspects of sacred travel, and for that matter the intrinsic linkage between pilgrimage and tourism, have moved to the foreground.
