In the 1980s, Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings launched heritage tourism as a means to economic development in Ghana. Under his initiative, Ghana’s forts and castles—where enslaved Africans were forcibly put on slave ships to cross the Atlantic Ocean into slavery in the Americas—were turned into heritage sites for tourism. It united Africans and African descendant people living in the diaspora.
Rawlings was Ghana’s youngest and longest-serving post-independence leader. He led military uprisings in 1979 and 1981 and served as elected president from 1992 to 2000. When Rawlings came to power in 1981, Ghana faced numerous challenges. Food was scarce, medicines unavailable, over a million Ghanaians were deported from Nigeria, and…