ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on recent efforts of representing the history of slavery in Ghana. It focuses on two heritage projects that play a role in the recent upsurge of interest in the northern slave sites. In the official representations of the history of slavery in northern Ghana, as they are presented by the Ghana Tourist Board via local tour guides, this fact is either downplayed or ignored. The memory work that the project attempts to stimulate addresses the whole of humanity, thereby potentially erasing all differences between victims and perpetrators, or rather between their descendants and their varying political and emotional positions toward that history. Even though the commemorative evocation of the past, as it is done in the ritual staging of the pilgrimage or in the museum approach followed by UNESCO, can be seen as an attempt to eventually close this chapter of history, it is shown that such closure remains an illusion.
