Africa Today

The commemoration of the centenary of the anticolonial war led by Yaa Asantewa in 1900 was launched both to honor her memory and to boost the tourist industry in the Ashanti Region. Though the events and initiatives of the commemoration may eventually bring economic gains to the region, this paper suggests that, like tourist development in other parts of the world, the tourist-development effort initiated new configurations of local cultural maps. The centenary events were important vectors of new cultural understandings consumed and shared by the people of the region, but the article asserts that the future success of tourist development will require the elaboration of new global cultural linkages connecting the people of the Ashanti Region and diasporic Africans, who comprise a growing percentage of visiting tourists.