The Slave Trade Route: A Regional and Local Development Catalyst

The conservation of and focus on slave export points turned tourist monuments in Cape Coast and Elmina, Ghana, are incomplete without linkages to other complicit places in the interior that together completes the chain of darkness, the trade in humans along the Atlantic coast of Ghana, as well as in the interior. Completed, it will highlight the infrastructure of the slave business, the domestic, as well as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. When the chain (route) of the different complicit communities in the interior to these export monuments along the Atlantic coast is conserved, it shall herald a completeness to the slave trade business infrastructure that otherwise was disjointed, isolated, diminished, and objectified as a sort of “retail tourism.” Devoid of authenticity, these retail tourism monuments to slavery are marketed to the ill-informed casual, impressionable visitor, desirable to satisfy the euphoria of visiting a significant slave monument