Our history

About Digital Kormantin

The COVID-19 pandemic massively disrupted humanities institutions by closing museums, libraries, archives, and universities, thereby cutting off the main ways that most Americans learn about the past. Their closures and the suspension of foreign and domestic travel led countless Americans to miss these vital public history sites during their months-long home confinements as our physical worlds shrank sharply. Tens of millions of restless, homebound citizens turned to digital escapes and travel surrogates in the form of video games, few of which, unfortunately, convey meaningful historical knowledge.

Digital Kormantin proposes to make a highly innovative digital intervention to address these twin humanities needs by creating virtual heritage tours for Fort Kormantin at Abandze, Ghana, a critical site in African American history and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Founded in 1631, the fort was England’s first permanent base in West Africa and was among the first places to send enslaved Africans to colonial English America. Although the Dutch captured Kormantin in 1665 and Cape Coast Castle thereafter became England’s principal slave-trading base, the ethnonym “Coromantee” and “Kromantin” persisted in the Americas to identify England’s Gold Coast slaves generally. Akin to the “Jamestown” of West Africa, this important historic site is little known, little visited, and in a ruinous condition.