Paper short abstract:

Institutionalized performance storytelling at Cape Coast Castle and Robben Island invites the visitor to participate in the production of history in ways that reminds the visitors that history is neither neutral or past, but actively produced sometimes in physical participation and engagement.

Paper long abstract:

Heritage sites like Robben Island, the slave forts along the coast of West Africa provide rich examples of Institutionalised Storytelling Performance (ISP) that combines African orality with the promise of new relationship to history. The storytelling at the Cape Castle fort in Cape Coast, Ghana and Robben Island in Cape Town produces a history that is as fluid as it is flexible to cater to the demands of the global visitor and the “globalized” local. At these sites, the interaction between the wieldy narratives of the guides and the ritualized acts of remembrance by the visitors when they choose to participate create a dense area of engagement. What is worth examining about the performance of history and its oral narrativity at these sites is the flexibility of the performances and its subjection to the needs of the visitor. Stories told at Robben Island, where former inmates at the prison act as guides, resemble testimony that was heard at the TRC hearings. Whereas the storytelling by the guides at Cape Castle for instance, resembles modes of heritage narratives often encountered in popular culture. The point of the storytelling is not to extract a past long forgotten, the encouragement to “experience” history at these heritage sites are tied to exigencies of the present. This paper discusses the performance of history at the Cape Coast Castle in Cape Coast, and Robben Island near Cape Town as disruptions of colonial forms of knowledge production and a turn toward indigenous ways of doing history.