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Robert Fidler

outside the home he built in

Salfords near Redhill, Surrey, UK.

© Press Associa-tion Images.

Roberts • Castles 89

Castles

slave forts, tourist resorts, and the burden of the past

Jonathan Roberts

On a Fall day in 2002, Robert Fidler jumped into his excavator and began piling up bales of straw. He stacked them, one at a time, until he built a forty foot wall around his old cow shed in Redhill, Surrey, south of London. Then he cut a small arch into the straw and embedded a doorway into the wall. Over the next four years, he moved back and forth through that door with bricks and mortar, secretly building a dream home for his wife Linda. Four years later, he jumped back into the excavator and tore down the walls of straw to reveal Honeycrock Castle, a two-turret, four-bedroom dream home complete with vaulted ceilings, a duck pond, and a cannon.

Honeycrock Castle has attracted national attention from the media in the UK, and not just because Robert built it as a labour of love. As it turns out, Fidler built his castle on a green belt, in violation of agricul-tural reserve regulations. The Reigate and Banstead Town Council was not amused. Fidler, they claimed, had al-ready stretched the meaning of land use by-laws by expanding a reservoir for livestock into a decorative pond, and they consid-ered the construction of his new home to be a “blatant attempt at deception.” Fidler responded by saying that his house was perfectly legal because no one had complained about it during the mandated four-year waiting peri-od. Not surprisingly, the case of the “straw bale castle” has become a cause célèbre in the United Kingdom, pitting libertarians and romantics against pragmatists and environmentalists. The building is still stand-ing, but it is marked for demolition. Fidler has publicly declared that “an Englishman is entitled to have his castle,” and he has appealed the demolition order all the way to the European Court of Human Rights. As a steadfast Christian, he believes that God is involved in his case: “This house will never be knocked down. This is a beautiful house that has been lovingly created. I will do whatever it takes to keep it.”

But Robert Fidler has been doing more than just guarding the ram-parts of his new home. About the same time that he started to build

Fidler has publicly declared that “an Englishman is entitled to have his castle.”

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Honeycrock Castle, Robert Fidler took interest in another forti�cation, this time in Africa.

In 1698, the Royal African Company built Fort Metal Cross on a rocky outcrop overlooking the �shing village of Dixcove. As a link in a chain of trading depots along the coast of West Africa, the four-bas-tion fortress served as a warehouse where ship captains could take on food, water, and timber, or pick up valuable commodities such as ivory, gold, and human captives. Initially, the slave trade was a small part of the business conducted at Fort Metal Cross, so it was not built with dungeons. When the slaving business expanded in the eighteenth century, its courtyard and its vaulted storage rooms served as short-term holding pens for human captives, who were either sold quickly on to passing ships or shipped by canoe to major slave forts at Elmina and Cape Coast. To be sure, Fort Metal Cross is a foreboding edi�ce—whitewashed and luminous against the dark clouds on the southern horizon—but is it a “slave fort” or a “castle”? When Robert Fidler �rst laid his eyes on Fort Metal Cross, he saw a castle.

“I came here in the 1990s,” recalled Robert Fidler when interviewed by a Ghanaian TV crew in 2007. “I came to the castle and I was told that it was built by the English and I am an Englishman. When I came here I was shocked to see that no one was taking good care of this castle.” When asked by the reporters why he chose Fort Metal Cross over one of the other forts along the coast, Robert Fidler immediately said, “Be-cause it was English. It was an English Castle.” He claimed that since many Englishmen had perished in their efforts to construct Fort Metal Cross, and since it was still in good condition, he should take it upon himself to renovate it and preserve it for the future.

The South Prospect of

Dixcove Fort Drawn 1727.In Thirty Different Drafts of Guinea

by William Smith. Etching,

Yale Center for British Art,

Paul Mellon Collection.

Roberts • Castles 91

People do travel to Ghana to visit the relics of the transatlantic slave trade. In 1979, UNESCO designated nineteen forts along the coast as monuments to the grim era of the traf�c in human beings, and today they attract an estimated 100,000 visitors a year. A key subgroup of that tourist trade are African Americans, the so-called “Roots” tourists who seek reconnection with their ancestral lineage. When President Obama visited Ghana in 2013, he stopped at Cape Coast Castle, one of the largest and best maintained sites in Africa. The Obama family partici-pated in a ceremonial transition through the “Door of No Return,” a ritual intended to create a spiritual link to ancestors stolen away from the continent. Afterwards, the President was famously photographed striding alone across the eerie white ramparts of the building.

But tourists and dignitaries rarely make it to Fort Metal Cross. Situat-ed in a remote �shing village in the Western Region of the country, Fort Metal Cross is miles away from the nearest international airport and an hour’s drive from the major city of Takoradi. As a result, the Fort averages fewer than one hundred visitors a month. It is only by circumstance that the heat, humidity, and salt spray of the Atlantic didn’t collapse the walls of the fort. Neighboring forts, like the Dutch Fort Batenstein in Butre (only ten miles away from Dixcove), are in ruin. Fort Metal Cross is still standing by virtue of its utilitarian role as a colonial district of�cer’s headquarters, a post of�ce, a telephone exchange, a police barracks, and lately, as a nascent resort.

When Robert Fidler �xed his eyes on Fort Metal Cross, he saw an opportunity to rebuild it according to his own vision, without the “red tape” he had encountered in the UK. He applied to the government of Ghana for a twenty-year lease on the building, and, in 2001, the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board gave him permission to begin his project. Fidler took up residence in the former District Of�cer’s tower, furnishing it as a home and of�ce for his contracting business in Ghana. Since then, Fidler has spent more than £20,000 renovating Fort Metal Cross.

Fidler’s stated goal has always been to enhance the site for tourists who want to visit what he calls a “British castle in West Africa.” But ini-tially, his plans were impeded by the fact that Africans, Ahanta-speaking folks from Dixcove, happened to be living on the heritage site. For cen-turies, the rocky foreshore of the fortress has been known as Alatakron, a piece of land granted to the Yoruba masons and carpenters who built Dixcove over 300 years ago. When Fidler arrived, Alatakron consisted

To be sure, Fort Metal Cross is a foreboding edifice, but is it a “slave fort” or a “castle”? When Robert Fidler first laid his eyes on Fort Metal Cross, he saw a castle.

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of a cluster of roughly maintained homes housing approximately 200 people. To realise his vision, Fidler had to ask these people to leave: “all the land around the castle was being occupied by people who shouldn’t really be living here,” said Fidler in 2011. “They were living in very poor quality houses. Mud houses and tin and plastic. It was not nice. So I promised the chiefs that I would give them better houses.” In exchange for their land, Fidler promised to relocate the residents of Alatakron to 150 new homes on a hillside behind the fort.

To ful�l his pledge, Robert Fidler partnered with a local contrac-tor, Robert Mensah, who brought in the building supplies and hired the skilled tradesmen to construct the new town site. After several years of dogged perseverance, the two men �nished the project. The houses are modest one- or two-room dwellings, but they were superior to what had been available at the base of the fort. When the new town site was �nished, Robert Fidler then called upon his friends in the UK to help him fund a school for the children of Upper Dixcove. With donated money and volunteer labour, Fidler completed the school, graded the road to the neighbouring tourist town of Busua, and assembled an iron bridge across the Busua River. All of this, Fidler insists, was done with his own money, for the good of the community, and always with the blessing of local chiefs and the district government.

Chalet (under con-struction) in

lee of Fort Metal Cross.

©2012 Jenny Davison.

Roberts • Castles 93

Robert Mensah remembers the heady days of early construction. “He came to ask me to help him,” Mensah recalled.

But he came with a bunch of rough boys from the village so, at �rst, I didn’t trust him. But he needed me because I am the biggest contractor in Dixcove, so later he invit-ed me to meet with him alone in the castle. It was then that he asked me to help him relocate the people of Alatakron. I helped him because I am from Dixcove and I know those people and I knew that it would be good for the community. Robert left the money for me to start the work and I put up over one hundred apartments in six months. Robert did complain about how much it was costing but when he came back from England and saw what I had done, he called me the “Lion of Dixcove!”

Meanwhile, back on the castle grounds, the renovations had begun. Fidler bulldozed the remains of Alatakron and scraped the land ªat. At the foot of an old grove of trees, he scooped out a large hole for the swimming pool, sealed it with concrete, and then began work on

Swimming pool (under construc-tion) and “ruins” beside the Classical Garden. ©2012 Jenny Davison.

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stone benches and faux broken columns at the water’s edge. The pool is yet to be �lled with water, and the vines have yet to creep along the concrete nouveaux-ruins, but the plans are evident: Fidler envisions a sitting area reminiscent of an ancient classical garden. Behind the fort, a peaked roof of a conference centre has been mounted on concrete posts, and down the hill, Fidler has erected several chalets modeled on the architectural motifs of Fort Metal Cross, with arrow-slits and lime-washed walls.

• • •

A castle can be de�ned as a “forti�ed, private residence,” typically a central keep surrounded by stone walls. But a castle is also a setting for passion and romance. The parapets of castles are the site of the roman-tic liaisons of Tristan and Iseult, and it is in antechambers of castles that Sir Lancelot, Queen Guinevere, and King Arthur are connected in a love triangle. But castles are also emblematic of violence. The ghosts of Helsingor and Cawdor cry out for justice, and, in doing so, transform the castle into a site of bloody revenge. The prisoners of the Gothic castle scream out from the claustrophobic oubliette—the forgotten space of con�nement where unimaginable cruelties are perpetrated. The castle: heroism springs forth from the ramparts, love smoulders in the courtyards, chains clank in the corridors, and screams echo in the dungeons.

Fort Metal Cross is, technically, a castle. It is certainly “forti�ed.” The stone walls are several feet thick in some areas and its ramparts once bristled with cannons. Soldiers kept guard against attack by Dutch or

French ships that dared sail past Dixcove, and against attack by African armies who dared test its defences.

Fort Metal Cross is also a “residence,” but the romance is lacking. The domes-tic chamber in the central tower was never home to kings or queens. Rather, it was inhabited by single men—the comman-dants of the Royal African Company or the district of�cers of the Colony of the Gold Coast. The windows of the tower, moreover,

were not built for a monarch to step out on a balcony to lovingly greet her subjects. Rather, they offered a vantage point of surveillance. But who was being watched? And who was doing the watching?

Robert Fidler says that the residence of the central tower is made of concrete, and therefore is an addition built during the colonial

The castle: heroism springs forth from the

ramparts, love smoulders in the courtyards,

chains clank in the corridors, and screams echo in the dungeons.

Roberts • Castles 95

era. His assessment of the structural materials is correct. The tower has been renovated. However, a woodcut from 1727 portrays the same iconic structure thrusting upward from the ramparts. A central keep comprised of an elevated tower is typical of the forts of the Guinea Coast, a Benthamite panopticon replicated at places like Fort São Jago da Mina and Cape Coast Castle. At these forts, tour guides tell sordid tales of the commandant peering down at slave women lined up be-fore them, selecting the one who piqued his lurid interest. Did these things happen at Fort Metal Cross? Such depravities are silent within the archival records. Sean Kelley, a historian of slavery, notes that while commandants at Fort Metal Cross probably did abuse women before they were sold across the Atlantic, white men did not have to turn to “sale slaves” for sexual grati�cation. The immense power wielded by Europeans living on the Guinea Coast offered them plenty of oppor-tunities for sex, either with “castle slaves” (women held as permanent captives at the fort) or with “consa wives” (women engaged to Europe-ans via locally-sancti�ed marriage contracts). Stories about lecherous white slave commandants, according to Kelley, “bear the earmarks of the sort of metaphor or parable that you see a lot in the public memory of slavery—a bit too simple and perhaps not literally true (according to written records), but we can think of them as morally true.” Whether these legends are authentic or not, it is hard to think of another point

District Offi-cer’s former residence in the central tower at Fort Met-al Cross (currently occupied by Robert Fidler). ©2012 Jenny Davison.

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on earth where the oppressive forces of race, class, and gender became so viscerally intertwined.

• • •

It is a cool early morning in June of 2013. Dawn is breaking in Halifax, Nova Scotia and I am sitting on the ªoor of my house with my laptop, in the corner, by the window. This is where the wi� is the strongest. I wiggle the computer to get more bars so the Skype call doesn’t cut out. I am on the phone with Robert Fidler and he is yelling at me. He has just read the �rst draft of this article, and he tells me it is a bunch of “rubbish and lies.” I defend my account as objective but he is not interested in balance. He ªatly states that, if it is printed, it will cause a lot of strife.

“For more than ten years, I have worked hard in the UK to earn what money I can from my tenanted farm and contract work. I have used ev-

ery available pound to make something of Fort Metal Cross and the town of Dixcove, I have employed many local boys, teaching them what I know and working alongside them and paying more than a fair rate. Maybe you would like to help, maybe you are just a stirrer or a troublemaker, I don’t know you.”

Actually, Robert doesn’t know me. We have never met. I am a professor of history in Canada, who happens to be married to a Ghanaian from Apam. He is a contractor

with two castles, one in the UK and one in Ghana. I had never heard of him until a few years ago, when a colleague of mine, Laura Murphy, asked me in passing, “Did you hear about that white guy living in that slave fort in Ghana?” I thought it was the opening line of a bad joke. But it was true, and when I traveled to Ghana in 2012, I set out to meet the Englishman living in the former English slave fort. Accompanied by my brother-in-law, Ellis (who speaks several of the local languages), I walked up the hill to the castle to meet Robert. But he wasn’t there. According to the caretaker of the Fort’s museum, Mr. Aggrey, “Mr. Rob” had traveled to Kumasi, a day’s drive away, on business. We made several more trips to meet Mr. Rob, but he was never around.

So Ellis and I started poking around Dixcove, chatting with some of the residents of the town. After a couple of days of marching up and down hills, talking to chiefs, elders, �shermen, pastors, and govern-ment of�cials, a narrative started to emerge. Robert Fidler, once hailed

A colleague of mine asked me in passing, “Did you hear about that white guy living

in that slave fort in Ghana?” I thought it was the opening line of a bad joke.

Roberts • Castles 97

as an visionary, is no longer a friend to the people of Dixcove. Several bad decisions (and some awful luck) have alienated him from the local population. With few exceptions, they want him out of the fort.

The �rst grumblings came from the Methodists. The Methodists make up the largest Christian congregation in the Western Region, and they have several houses of worship in Dixcove. Methodist elders protested when Fidler allowed members of the upstart African Gate-way Chapel, a Pentecostal church from Kumasi, to worship inside Fort Metal Cross. Fidler has a close relationship with the Head Apostle of African Gateway Chapel, Ko� Frimpong, and Robert often visits him in Kumasi. Their goal is to expand the new church (which currently has twelve branches) deeper into the Western Region, with Dixcove as its regional headquarters. Fidler envisions the grounds of Fort Metal Cross as a site for church conventions, or what are called “Crusades” in Ghana. Methodist elders protested, arguing that the UNESCO heritage site was not a place of worship. Robert brushed off their complaints as “jealousy,” but he did move the church out of the fort and into a de-crepit mission house up the hill, which he is renovating. This rankled the Methodists further, as the mission house was formerly the property of the Methodist Church.

The chiefs of Dixcove were also alarmed by Fidler’s activities at Fort Metal Cross, and when he started excavating the site, popular opinion

“Ruins” of Classical Garden. ©2012 Jenny Davison.

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in Dixcove was that he was rummaging through a burial ground, steal-ing the ceremonial gold jewelry that had been buried with the former chiefs of Dixcove. The chiefs even claimed that Fidler was so busy digging up the graves that he would not let them into the castle to celebrate their annual Kundum Festival.

I throw this one at Fidler: “There are a lot of wild rumours about gold in town,” I say. “They say it is in the graves in and around the castle. Some people say that you took the lease on Fort Metal Cross because you were interested in recovering that gold, but I brushed this off as mere rumour and I have decided not to write about it. What do you think?”

“You should write about it!” Fidler responds, surprisingly. “Funny story—when I was removing some spilled cement on the stones in the courtyard, somebody looked in and thought that I was taking the ªoor up and excavating the graves under the castle!” Robert assures me that he would never dream of doing such a thing, but he does mention

that the grave under Fort Metal Cross is ru-moured to contain the remains of a virgin buried alive, along with substantial quan-tities of gold. As for restricting access to the fort, Fidler regards it as an insigni�cant issue because, during the past several years (due to disputes over who will ascend to the of�ce of chief), the Kundum festival has been only partially celebrated or cancelled altogether.

More grumblings could be heard when the residents of Alatakron moved into the new town site at Upper Dixcove. They dis-covered that their plumbing and lighting

had not been fully connected and that some of the units were smaller than what they had been accustomed to in the past. Since they lacked the resources to maintain the structures, they hoped that Fidler would eventually add some improvements to their new neighborhood. This attitude deeply annoys Robert Fidler, who says that the residents of the new town are expected to contribute something from their own pockets to improve their living conditions.

In Lower Dixcove, the �shermen living near the harbour were out-raged when they heard that Fidler was using a slingshot to hurl stones at people defecating along the shoreline of the castle. The rocky beach below the castle is secluded from the village of Lower Dixcove, which has made it a quiet spot for people to relieve themselves from time im-memorial. Since there are few toilets available near the harbour, people continued to use the waterfront as a toilet even when Fidler began his

A windstorm ripped through Dixcove

Harbour, capsizing two large fishing canoes and

sending five fishermen to their deaths. Fishermen

claim they were impeded by a wall Fidler had built

to keep people from defecating on his land.

Roberts • Castles 99

renovations. When I mentioned this to Robert over the phone, he ex-asperatedly declared, “What was I to do! I have spent hours and hours stopping them shitting right in front of here. We are gradually trying to teach them to use the toilet. They even shit between chalets. They come in here and shit all over the place.” His colleague Robert Mensah backs him up on this point, saying that “a local would have done something more brutal than he did.”

Fidler also created a public outcry on a local radio station when he raised the Union Jack above the fort in 2007. The Ghana Museums and Monuments Board ordered Fidler to lower the ªag, asserting that it was inappropriate to raise a colonial symbol on Ghanaian government land. Fidler complied, but he was a bit confused: “I only put the Union Jack up as a second ªag. It was never a local issue. I have always ªown them together. I felt that because it was a British castle and because of the fact that I lived there I should be able to ªy the Union Jack. I didn’t think it unreasonable to ªy them together. That is what I have always done.” But in 2007, on the 50th Anniversary of Ghanaian Independence, the incident became a national story when newspapers ran photos of the Union Jack above the ramparts of the fort, with the Ghanaian national ªag conveniently cropped out of the picture.

But it was a real tempest, not one concocted by the media, which decisively turned public opinion against Robert Fidler. In 2011, a

Southern View of Fort Metal Cross at Dixcove.©2012 Jenny Davison.

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windstorm ripped through Dixcove Harbour, capsizing two large �sh-ing canoes and sending �ve �shermen to their deaths. Fishermen on shore made an attempt to rescue them by bringing boats to the edges of the castle site, but they claim they were impeded by a wall Fidler had built to keep people from defecating on his land. Fidler watched the scene develop from the ramparts of the castle:

At that time there were hundreds of people standing on the grounds of castle, but there was no reason to be there because there was nothing they could do. They just stood there wailing. None of the boys can swim, or at least hardly any of them can swim. They have no lifejackets, no nothing. I sadly watched two of the boys trying to resurface. Their heads bobbed up and down but they didn’t make it to the rocks. Even if they had made it to the rocks they would have been dashed up against them. After a while they never came up. I don’t think they ever found their bodies.

Robert was deeply saddened by the tragedy he witnessed, but he is adamant that he is not responsible. Nonetheless, the incident has left him isolated in his castle, with few true friends in the town. Even the “Lion of Dixcove,” Robert Mensah, is estranged from Fidler, due to ac-cusations of the misappropriation of building supplies. Mensah laments their disagreement and blames the people who surround Fidler for driving a wedge between the two contractors: “The people of this vil-lage are not good. They are supposed to embrace the project because, at the end of the day, Mr. Rob is bringing money to Dixcove, but they just don’t get it.” Mensah still supports Fidler’s project and told me to make sure that Fidler knows that “he has nothing bad to say about him.”

Robert Fidler is strong-willed, and would be capable of sustaining his project without the support of the people of Dixcove, but his actions have also drawn the attention of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board. Arguing that his renovations have damaged the archaeological integrity of the castle, the Monuments Board wants him out of Fort Metal Cross.

In Accra, the capital city of Ghana, I took a walk down a long hallway in the Ghana National Museum in search of Mr. Barth Acheampong, the public relations of�cer for the Monuments Board. I found him seated in his of�ce, well-prepared, ready to talk about Fort Metal Cross. He opened our conversation by bluntly stating that Robert Fidler was

Roberts • Castles 101

facing eviction. Handing me the lease agreement, Mr. Acheampong pointed to the regulations stating that all renovations to the heritage site must be approved by the Monuments Board, and he told me ªat-ly that Fidler is in gross violation of these rules. The excavation of the swimming pool, the foundation for the conference centre, the landscaping, and the driveways had all been constructed in what the Mu-seum Board delineated as a ‘buffer zone’ around the castle. The archaeological site, which was rich with centuries of material culture, is now decimated. Moreover, the Monuments Board considers the tile roof-ing, cement staircases, and a wooden can-opy that Fidler built over the courtyard as a deviation from the authentic character of Fort Metal Cross. “The British never used tiles,” Mr. Acheampong states with a wry smile. “Mr. Fidler will tell you that the structure was leaking and that he repaired it for his comfort—but no GMMB staff would allow tiles on that roof!” I am sensing that the two have had a run-in recently, and I �nd out later that this is true. Fidler, behind on his rent due to a lack of noti�cation from the Monuments Board, recently tried to pay it forward, but he was rebuffed. Apparently Fidler shot back, “If I were renting a British apartment, the landlord would come to me!” and then stormed out of the building.

As I am leaving, Mr. Acheampong tells me that Robert Fidler has had it easy: “He says he is a pastor now. Trying to win souls for the Lord. How can I doubt him? When the white man came, they had the Bible and we had our land. Now we have the Bible and they have our land.” He laughs, but his visage reveals a determination to evict Robert Fidler.

Robert Fidler bristles and raises his voice again over the phone in reaction to Acheampong’s comments: “The whole development, including the building inside the castle, was designed by the museum board themselves . . . They even designed the restaurant!” He tells me about a scheme by Acheampong to thwart his plans. Acheampong was just a “small boy” (a Ghanaian term for a low-ranking of�cial—but in-sulting just the same), says Fidler, when the lease on the castle became available. One of Acheampong’s relations (no one seems to know who) had wanted to take over Fort Metal Cross, so he was bitter when he lost out, and has since been scheming to take back the fort.

• • •

“He says he is a pastor now. Trying to win souls for the Lord. How can I doubt him? When the white man came, they had the Bible and we had our land. Now we have the Bible and they have our land.”

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Robert Fidler is con�dent that he can fend off any legal challenge brought forth by the Monuments Board. But if he does �nish his re-sort, can he unchain his castle from the burden of history and actually convince tourists to visit it? When President Obama visited Cape Coast Castle in 2013, he said it was reminiscent of the concentration camp at Buchenwald “because it reminds us of the capacity of human beings to commit great evil.” There are no chalets modeled on the infamous clock tower of Buchenwald, for reasons clear to anyone who knows the history of the place. Will tourists be willing to sleep in chalets modeled on what was once a slave fort?

“My �rst reaction to the development was one of horror,” blogs Australian travel writer Fiona Leonard about her �rst visit to the site of Fort Metal Cross. “The notion of sunbathing poolside, or swimming over and ordering a drink in the shadow of a slaving fort just seems really tacky and disrespectful: something akin to ordering a martini while lazing in the pool alongside Auschwitz.”

Leonard’s reaction is not unique. According to the caretaker, Ag-grey, African Americans who visit Fort Metal Cross are visibly up-

set by the redevelopment of the fort. As anthropologist Edward M. Bruner has noted, African American visitors want to fuse the meaning of the forts of Ghana with the tragedy of the transatlantic slave trade, regardless of the way that locals and Ghanaian nationals might think of the buildings. And since Ghana became independent in 1957, hundreds of Afri-can Americans—among them, W.E.B. Du Bois—have moved “back” to Ghana in or-der to reconnect with their ancestry and dwell in an independent black republic. Dr. Robert Lee, a dentist who moved to Ghana in the 1950s and never returned to

the United States, felt that the slave forts were essential sites of memo-ry, where past injustices might be reckoned with. To Dr. Lee, the “Door of No Return” ceremony is a “necessary act of self-realization.” The dungeons of the slave forts remain, as Obama quipped, “the portal through which the diaspora began.”

I relay this information to Robert, and he has a simple but effective response: “You can probably count on your hand the number of African Americans who come to Fort Metal Cross in a year.” This information is con�rmed by caretaker Aggrey. Dixcove is just too far away from the major centres to attract the diaspora legacy tourist trade. There isn’t even a “door of no return” at Fort Metal Cross, says Fidler—and

There are no chalets modeled on the

infamous clock tower of Buchenwald, for reasons

clear to anyone who knows the history of

the place. Will tourists be willing to sleep in

chalets modeled on what was once a slave fort?

Roberts • Castles 103

anyway, tourists tell him that they think he is doing an excellent job of preserving Fort Metal Cross as a monument.

Moreover, to the residents of Dixcove, Fort Metal Cross has a much more complicated history. After all, many of the people who live around the forts are the ancestors of the people who somehow managed not to be taken in bondage across the ocean. Did their ancestors participate in enslaving fellow Africans? Yes, some did, and many others prospered from the commerce that the trade generated. But to Ghanaians, there is no lingering guilt. All of this seems like it happened in the olden days. For more than two hundred years, buildings like Fort Metal Cross have been used for mundane purposes—as warehouses, post of�ces, tele-phone exchanges, customs of�ces, and guest houses for government workers. As Caretaker Aggrey says, “The Israelis of today cannot punish the Egyptians for what they did to them in the Bible.”

Additionally, maintaining the buildings to sustain memories of slav-ery for people across the Atlantic is a burden to both local residents and the government of Ghana. Professor Michel Doortmont, an expert in the architectural heritage of the Gold Coast, notes that the forts and castles of the Guinea Coast are European architectural impositions, ill-suited to the hot, salty, humid environment.

Foundations of stone walls subsided, which made them collapse; clay walls watered in, and collapsed; ªat brick and cement roofs were prone to leakage, support beams rotted away due to water damage, dry rot, or attacks by white ants (termites), and the roofs collapsed; wooden windows, doors, stairs and bridges were continuously exposed to the salty sea wind, lost their paint, watered in and rotted away. As soon as one maintenance activity was �nished, the next one was already overdue.

When the British abandoned the Gold Coast in 1957, they slyly handed over the nineteen remaining forts to the new government of Ghana, like a �gurative herd of white elephants. Because they are impossible to maintain without extensive resources, many of the forts and castles of Ghana have since slipped into disrepair. Fort Metal Cross, for example, is in pristine condition when compared to the old Dutch Fort Baten-stein in Butre, a village ten miles from Dixcove. While Robert Fidler is sprucing up Fort Metal Cross, trees are growing out of the walls of Fort Batenstein.

* * *

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Along a bumpy, almost impassable rocky road to the west of Dixcove lies the tiny seaside village of Akyowa. The main occupation here is �shing and farming, but the place is also home to Nana Okomfo Enua, a spirit medium who channels the local gods and goddesses. We are sitting in her tiny room, within earshot of the breakers crashing up on the beach nearby. She breathes deeply, pours libation with local gin, and, after a few minutes, goes into a trance. The spirit who emerges is agitated and nervous.

“Who are you?” she asks with a husky voice. “Are you going to arrest me?”

Before I can respond, she shouts out, “I am Nana Awonta. Be care-ful. I am afraid of the whites. They have chased all the gods away. They have made my brother, Nana Eko Obroni, angry. The whites and the elders and the chiefs are capsizing canoes and people are dying.”

The gods and goddesses continue to speak through Nana Okomfo Enua as her eyes roll back in her head.

“Nana Awonta and Nana Eko Obroni are very angry at Robert. We challenge him, but he paci�es us. Robert has eyes. He can see us. He pours libation. He sacri�ces a chicken in the ocean. He calls to us to help him. But we will not. If he lived in this village, he would not survive one day, two days, three days. . . .”

Nana Okomfo Enua is covered in sweat and beginning to fatigue.

Shrine to Nana Awonta,

now part of the Classi-cal Garden. ©2012 Jenny

Davison.

Roberts • Castles 105

“People are ignoring the gods. They take us to churches for exor-cism, so the gods are hiding themselves away. But they are still here.”

Nana Okomfo Enua goes silent. Then she slumps down, exhausted.We leave her for several minutes, sitting on the steps outside. She

emerges, wiping her brow. The gods are hiding, she says, but not just because of people like Robert Fidler or because of Pentecostal Chris-tianity. It has become too expensive to learn the way of the deities. To train under a priestess, to learn how to embody the energy of a spirit and to channel its knowledge, takes years and thousands of dollars in gifts of livestock, cloth, liquor, and cash. A cheaper solution is to send the person to have an exorcism at a church. But the gods will remain, she warns, and they will continue to guide the people of Dixcove and the surrounding villages. They are the only ones who can speak about the deep legacy of the town.

It seems that Robert is now surrounded by challengers, both cor-poreal and ephemeral. The spirits that inhabit the land around the castle, that live in the nearby streams, and that dot the shoreline appear to be watch-ing him. If he believed in them, he would know that even the thick walls of Fort Met-al Cross cannot protect him from spiritual eviction.

But he doesn’t believe in them. And he doesn’t have time for what he regards as pre-Christian superstition. Over the phone, Robert asks me if I am a Christian. I say yes (which is true—I am baptised as a Presby-terian, and I do go to church), but I know that this answer isn’t enough for me to qualify as a Christian in his eyes. The Pentecostal movement requires a declaration of Christ as one’s savior, a baptism to cleanse oneself with the blood of Christ, and, most importantly, actions that show that one is truly Born Again. Robert ends our communication with a challenge: “I hope you will now do the right thing. Either be helpful or just back off and let me do something good with this place. My mission is to take the good news of the Christian Gospel into unchurched rural villages. Dixcove is my base and starting point. What is your mission in life?”

I don’t have an answer for that.

• • •

Before I leave Ghana, I pass by the Monuments Board of�ce in Accra for one more meeting with Mr. Acheampong. But he isn’t there. Mr.

The gods will remain, she warns, and they will continue to guide the people of Dixcove and the surrounding villages. They are the only ones who can speak about the deep legacy of the town.

106 Transition 114

Acheampong, apparently, has retired. “Can I get ahold of him?” I ask a secretary. “I need to continue my interview.”

“No,” she says politely, “we are no longer in contact with him.” In-stead, she sets up a meeting with the new executive director, Dr. Zagba Narh Oyortey.

Dr. Zagba sends his driver for me. We weave our way across town, through traf�c, to the Buka, a restaurant that rises like a treehouse above the streets of the afªuent Osu quarter of the city. I drink a beer to cool off. Dr. Zagba has read the draft of this article and he knows the story of Robert Fidler, but is more interested in me. “Why are you here? Why do you want to know about Fort Metal Cross?” I lay out my story, telling him that I am an historian but that this contemporary storyline simply begs to be told.

“Are you interested in taking the lease on Fort Metal Cross?”This takes me by surprise. No, I protest. I am an academic, not a

businessman. But he presses me on it and, somehow, I slip up. I am not interested in Fort Metal Cross, I insist. But the Dutch forti�cation, Fort Patience in Apam, now that is another matter. I admit that I had thoughts of building a historical eco-lodge there, in my wife’s home-town, funded by a consortium of Canadian universities. The pictur-esque fort, elevated so quaintly above a tropical lagoon, could be trans-formed from its current squalor (the rooms are reputedly loaned out

Fort Patience at Apam. Note the dilapidated condition, ero-

sion, and anach-ronistic addition of a new room.

©2012 Jenny Davison.

Roberts • Castles 107

by the hour) to a magni�cent site of anthropological, archaeological, and historical inquiry, where students from abroad could be introduced to the material culture of the West African past. Dr. Zagba encourages me with more questions and, admittedly, mesmerizes me a little bit, but I snap out of it. This is just an historian’s idle fancy. The question, I shoot back, is whether the Monuments Board wants the story of Fort Metal Cross to be told. He says that they have nothing to hide.

As he walks me back to the car, Dr. Zag-ba reminds me about Fort Patience in Apam. “Do think about it,” he says sugges-tively, leaving the thought to linger in my mind. But aren’t castles also symbols of folly? Castles in the air are �g-ments of reverie, and castles in the sand are washed away by the tide. If Robert Fidler cannot enchant the people of Dixcove with his vision for Fort Metal Cross, how could I presume to transform Fort Patience into a centre of learning? After all, the only reason I would bother is because it’s a castle.

My mission is to take the good news of the Christian Gospel into unchurched rural villages. What is your mission in life?”