Ghana’s New Cultural Policy: Protecting Elmina’s Living Heritage Beyond the Castle
ELMINA, Ghana. When the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts published the Cultural Policy of Ghana in June 2026, it made an argument that, for us at Museum Elmina, reads less like new policy and more like long-overdue recognition. The nation’s culture, the policy says, is not decoration. It is an economic and social asset worth protecting, funding and passing on. And for the first time, the intangible sits beside the monumental as heritage worth the same care.
That single shift is the reason this document matters to us, and to Elmina.
What the policy says, in plain terms
The 106-page policy replaces the version that had guided Ghana since 2004. It reframes heritage, both tangible and intangible, as national capital that has been undervalued and under-protected. It is backed by a dedicated Culture and Heritage Fund and promises tax relief for organisations that invest in cultural work. It commits the State to documenting, safeguarding and promoting the practices that make communities who they are.
The older policy leaned heavily on the tangible: the forts, the castles, the monuments. The 2026 policy keeps all of that, and Museum Elmina maintains its own record of Elmina’s tangible heritage, from the Elmina Castle and Fort St Jago, both inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979, to the Dutch cemetery and the town’s colonial-era fabric. But the policy now places equal weight on the living and the intangible: festivals, language, spiritual practice, music, craft, knowledge and the everyday culture of a community. That is where our focus lies, and it is where this policy changes the conversation.
What this means for Elmina’s intangible cultural heritage
Elmina’s intangible heritage is vast, and it is not evenly protected. Some of it is performed every year in full public view. Some of it lives only in the memory of a few elders and has never been written down.
At Museum Elmina we organise this living heritage into eight domains, and each carries its own urgency. Traditional authority and governance, expressed through the royal hierarchy of the Edina Traditional Council. Social structure and identity, carried in the clans and Ebusua and in the Dutch family names that mark Elmina’s entangled history. Collective memory and knowledge, held in oral histories and genealogical records. Spiritual and cosmological systems, including Akan spiritual practice and ritual. Festivals and ritual expression, above all Edina Bakatue and Edina Bronya. Economic and daily life, rooted in the town’s centuries-old fishing and harbour culture. Performance and communal expression, in music and the traditions of the Asafo companies. And language and oral expression, in the Fante language, its proverbs and its literature.
The policy’s significance is that it now recognises all of this as heritage worth safeguarding, not as folklore or as a backdrop to the castle. For a town whose intangible culture has long been overshadowed by its monuments, that recognition is not symbolic. It is the ground on which documentation, funding and protection can now stand.
Our position: safeguard, do not sell off
We want to be clear about something the policy itself flags. It warns that tourism, while it generates income and can help preserve culture, must be managed so that it does not damage the very heritage it draws on.
Museum Elmina shares that caution without reservation. Living heritage is not a product to be packaged and sold to the highest number of visitors. The risk in any heritage economy is over-commodification: the hollowing-out of culture until only the performance remains and the meaning is gone. Some of what we document, particularly in spiritual practice and in the structures of clan and family, belongs first to the community and its custodians, and is handled with their guidance and consent. Our purpose is to safeguard and to share responsibly, not to commodify. We read the new policy as licence to protect Elmina’s heritage, not to strip it for parts.
What it means for Museum Elmina
Museum Elmina is a community-led, research-led digital heritage initiative built on the “Elmina as a Living Museum” framework. The idea is simple and, we think, important: the whole town is the museum. Not a building you enter, but a living place whose history, traditions and people are the exhibition. The project carries the support of the Edina Traditional Council under Nana Kodwo Conduah VI and has been recognised by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ghana.
The new policy validates the premise we have been working from all along, that Elmina’s intangible heritage is a national asset worth documenting before it is lost to underdocumentation. Several of the policy’s own commitments, to safeguard intangible heritage, to support digitisation and technology in the cultural sector, and to serve the Pan-African diaspora, describe work already under way here.
We are candid about where we are. The platform is not yet public. Our digital infrastructure is built, and we are now in the demanding middle phase: research, collection and the digitisation of content across the eight domains. This is the slow, unglamorous work of heritage, sitting with elders, recording oral histories, validating Fante terms, documenting fishing grounds whose names live only in the memory of ageing knowledge-holders. We are working towards a public launch by the close of 2026. When the site goes live, Elmina’s living heritage will be accessible in one place to the town’s own indigenes, to the wider Ghanaian public, to the global diaspora, to researchers and to educators.
That last point matters most to us. Access is the mission. A heritage that only experts can reach is a heritage already half-lost. Museum Elmina exists so that a young person in Elmina, a descendant in the diaspora, and a researcher abroad can all reach the same living record of who this community is.
A forward-looking word on partnership
The policy is honest that its delivery depends on institutions working together, and that much of the real work happens locally rather than in Accra. We take that as an invitation.
This is work we have already begun. We have formalised discussions on an academic research partnership with the A. G. Leventis Digital Resource Centre for African Culture, based at the University of Ghana’s Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, covering collaborative field research and the digital documentation of material culture across the Elmina coastal zone. We are also in active partnership with Museum Rotterdam on research and knowledge sharing, a relationship grounded in the documented history that ties Elmina and Rotterdam together. These collaborations show what the policy’s vision looks like in practice.
That is the model we would welcome more of. Museum Elmina would welcome genuine partnership with the Ghana Tourism Authority, the Ministry and the district assembly too, not occasional and one-directional requests, but the kind of standing collaboration on documentation and safeguarding that we are already building with academic and institutional partners. The infrastructure the policy describes, the Culture and Heritage Fund, the commitment to digitisation, the recognition of intangible heritage, gives every party a shared reason to build those partnerships now. We are already on the ground doing the work. The policy makes the case for meeting it with support.
The bottom line
For Museum Elmina, the Cultural Policy of Ghana confirms what this project has assumed from the start: that Elmina is far more than its two famous fortifications, and that its festivals, its language, its faith, its fishing and its music are heritage of the first order.
The framework now exists. The recognition is on record. What remains is the work, careful, consented, community-led documentation of a living culture, and the commitment to make it accessible rather than to sell it off. That work is ours to continue, and Elmina’s to own.