Built Heritage, Place Attachment and Emotional Wellbeing in West Africa: A Critical Scoping Review and Research Agenda
This critical scoping review of sixteen publications reveals that while West African built heritage research documents powerful emotional attachments and diverse affective responses, it predominantly focuses on diaspora tourists at monumental sites and lacks resident-centered studies using validated measures to establish a causal link between heritage and emotional wellbeing.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Old buildings are never just piles of stone or wood. They are places where people feel they belong, where they remember their ancestors, or where they confront painful history. When someone stands inside a centuries-old fort, walks through a historic neighborhood, or visits a sacred grove, they are not just looking at architecture; they are having an emotional experience. This feeling of connection to a place is called place attachment. It is the bond that forms between a person and a specific location, built up over time through memory, identity, and daily use. Scientists have long wondered if these strong bonds and the emotions they trigger actually improve a person's long-term emotional health, or what psychologists call emotional wellbeing. This is a subtle but important difference: feeling a sudden rush of pride or sorrow is an immediate emotion, whereas emotional wellbeing is a steady state of feeling balanced, capable, and satisfied with life over time.
For decades, researchers have studied how historic sites affect people in Europe and North America, often finding that these places can boost mental health. But a large part of the world has been left out of this conversation. West Africa, a region with sixteen countries and a rich mix of ancient cities, colonial forts, and sacred landscapes, has been largely missing from the global research. To understand why this matters, one must look at the unique history of the region. It is home to the sites of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, vibrant Islamic cities, and everyday neighborhoods where people have lived for generations. The question is whether the stories told about these places, and the way people interact with them, actually help the people who live there feel better about their lives.
A researcher named Bori Oluwole-Ojo from Birmingham City University set out to answer this question by looking at every piece of academic research available on the topic. The goal was not to prove that old buildings make people happy, but to map what has actually been studied and what has been missed. The researcher gathered sixteen published studies that examined how people in West Africa feel about their historic places. These studies had to look at real people and their actual feelings, whether they were visitors, tourists, or local residents. The search covered countries like Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone, looking for evidence of how these places influence identity, memory, and emotional health.
What the researcher found was a landscape of knowledge that is both powerful and surprisingly narrow. The sixteen studies were concentrated heavily in just five countries, with eleven of them focused entirely on Ghana. Almost all of the research centered on a specific type of historic site: the forts and castles built during the era of the slave trade, such as Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle. These sites are famous for "roots tourism," where people from the African diaspora return to their ancestral lands to connect with their history. The studies showed that these visits are deeply emotional. People reported feeling a mix of sorrow, anger, horror, and profound connection. For many, visiting these places was like a pilgrimage, a way to reclaim a part of their identity that had been lost.
However, the research also revealed a significant gap. While the studies documented intense feelings and strong bonds to these places, none of them actually measured emotional wellbeing. The researchers looked at how people felt in the moment—whether they were sad, proud, or moved—but they did not use standard tools to check if these visits improved the visitors' or residents' long-term mental health or life satisfaction. In fact, most of the people studied were tourists or visitors from abroad. Very few studies focused on the local residents who live next to these historic sites every day. The few studies that did look at residents found that their feelings were complex; some felt a sense of ownership and pride, while others felt excluded or saw the sites primarily as tourist attractions that did not benefit their daily lives.
The review also highlighted that the emotional impact of these places is not automatic. It depends on many factors, such as who is telling the story, how the site is arranged, and whether local people feel they have a say in how the place is managed. For example, at some sites, the way guides explain the history can make a visitor feel deeply connected, while at others, the same history might feel distant or even painful if the local community is not involved. The research suggests that simply having a historic building does not guarantee that people will feel better or more attached to it. The relationship is shaped by fairness, access, and the ability of people to participate in the story of their own heritage.
The most important conclusion from this work is not that heritage fails to help people, but that we do not yet have the evidence to say it does. The existing research shows that West African historic places are emotionally powerful and that they can trigger strong feelings of identity and belonging. But it stops short of proving that these feelings translate into lasting emotional wellbeing. The studies are like a map that shows the peaks and valleys of human emotion but leaves the long-term journey uncharted. This is especially true for the eleven West African countries that were not represented in the research at all, and for the ordinary historic neighborhoods that are not famous tourist destinations.
The paper proposes a new path forward for researchers. Instead of just asking tourists how they feel after a visit, future studies should focus on the people who live in these places every day. They should look at a wider variety of sites, from Islamic cities to everyday markets, not just the famous slave forts. Most importantly, future research needs to use better tools to measure emotional wellbeing, checking not just for immediate feelings but for lasting changes in how people live and cope with life. Until then, the story of how West Africa's built heritage affects the hearts and minds of its people remains a powerful but incomplete picture, waiting for the next generation of researchers to fill in the missing pieces.
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