Introduction

The bustling town of Ho in Ghana is not a typical tourist destination, those places where buses filled with camera-wielding tourists have become an everyday occurrence. Ho is the administrative capital of the Volta Region in the mainly Ewe speaking South East of the country, where the few luxury hotels located there are used primarily by Ghanaian and foreign governmental and non-governmental organisations for meetings, conferences and workshops. Nonetheless, some tourists do come to stay in Ho for a few days at a time, making it a base from which to explore the famous waterfalls, mountains and monkey sanctuaries within the region. In addition, the annual Yam Festival which lasts for the month of September attracts a number of tourists keen to witness local culture and to get a glimpse of chiefs in their ceremonial splendour. Tourism is rarely out of public and political debate for long; there is ongoing discussion concerning how tourism in Ghana should be promoted and how tourism might encourage and facilitate economic growth and development for the country. One of the main sources of income generated from tourism in Ghana at present comes from what is often described in the anthropology of tourism literature as ‘roots tourism’. Every year, thousands of African Americans travel to Ghana and its slave forts, especially at Elmina and Cape Coast, to connect with their ancestral heritage. However, as Katharina Schramm has stressed, in this context the word tourism is rarely used and the visits made by African Americans are rather framed as ‘homecomings’.