Material noise at Cape Coast Castle: The costs of decolonizing heritage

Taking Cape Coast Castle as a case, this article asks how material remains sustain decolonial memory while unsettling the institutional arrangements that make it possible. Drawing on guided tours, local conversations, material observation, and institutional discussions, it shows how slavery memory is translated into controlled discomfort: powerful, recognizable, yet ordered enough to remain visitable and comfortable. The article argues that material remains are simultaneously docile and unruly: dampness, residues, corrosion, salt, microbial growth, and climatic weathering give emotional scripts sensory density, while the same traces become material noise when they demand cleaning, repair, conservation, funding, and responsibility. Digital heritage intensifies this tension as decolonial efforts to relieve material burdens risk reproducing coloniality through technological and donor dependency. Decolonization is therefore not the overcoming of pain, but a costly, unsettling, and unresolved struggle to live with material noise.