Vous consultezRituel et mémoire au Ghana : les usages politiques de la diaspora

Ritual and Memory in Ghana: The Political Uses of the Diaspora

The Ghanian industry of Diaspora tourism seeks to attract African-American visitors by showing them old slave trade sites. It in this framework that the forts of Cape Coast and Elmina were restored in the 1990s and that an annual commemoration, Emancipation Day, was created in 1998. In 2007, the Ministry of Tourism added the “healing ceremony” to the list of festivities. This is part of a larger initiative, the Joseph Cultural Project, which seeks to attract long-term investment from members of the African Diaspora. This ceremony puts the biblical episode of Joseph’s enslavement by his family to use in order to elaborate a discourse concerning the Ghanian roots of the African Diaspora. The Joseph Project suggests that the Diaspora can cure Ghanians of their troubles, whether they be of an economic nature or stem from their relationship to the past. In so doing, it tends to confine Ghana to the role of a quaint homeland and African-Americans to that of rich visitors. Using ritual to reinforce this distribution of roles, the Joseph Project draws on multicultural neoliberalism in the aim of developing a conservative politics of the diasporic relationship. ■