The Year of Return brought a wave of visitors to Cape Coast that the city had never seen before. Hotels filled, tours sold out, and the castles became sites of pilgrimage for a global Black diaspora reconnecting with origin.
Five years on, the picture is more complicated. The economic uplift is real but uneven. The emotional weight on local guides — many of whom retell histories of enslavement multiple times a day — is rarely discussed.
This is a story about what tourism can and cannot do. About how a city holds the memory of one of history’s gravest crimes while also trying to build a future for the people who live there now.