Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Product Information

It is worth noting that slavery in Ghana continued even after the abolition of the transatlantic trade.

A. Philip Randolph, and Horace Mann (at the request of Nkrumah and against the expressed wishes of the U. In the middle of explaining how black farmers lost it all—to night riders, banks, and the government—Poppa drifted into a story about slavery, because for men like Poppa and my great-great-great-grandfather to be landless was to be a slave. It goes on being lonely, and it's how you adjust yourself to that loneliness that matters, not how you adjust to Africa. Guns, brandy, cowries, and gold decided their fate, ensured their disappearance, and dictated that they be forgotten. Many of the streets of Accra were lined with open sewers, and poor neighborhoods were often without toilet facilities, but this was more intense than usual.Was it foolish to long for a territory in which you could risk imagining a future that didn't replicate the defeats of the present? I came of age in the demise of liberation movements and after the visionaries had been assassinated. As the Ghanaian poet Kofi Anyidoho says, “We knew we were giving away our people, we were giving them away for things. None of which prevented her from describing Accra as a "dream come true, for here is a city in a country that is black up and down.

All the terrible details of the slave trade thundered in my head and I spent the day battling nausea. That is a very truncated version of what was an eye-opening exploration of the history of slave trading within and beyond Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.I've been to the British Museum, the Public Records Office in Kew, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and to the National Archives in Accra. The political exiles of the late fifties and sixties possessed pedigrees much more impressive than my own. I peered from behind the heavy gold curtains and saw soldiers and jeeps and armored tanks moving along the streets of the capital. Unlike the concentration camp, the gulag, and the killing field, which had as their intended end the extermination of a population, the Atlantic trade created millions of corpses, but as a corollary to the making of commodities.

I found myself, like most members of the small community of nearly one thousand African-American expatriates, living on the periphery of Ghanaian society. So I hurried up Osu Road as blind to the future Sankara had envisioned as every other beleaguered pedestrian.Whenever he was drunk, Mary Ellen would say, "We're losing my husband," as if to assure herself that the belligerent man tottering through the living room wasn't the same man she had married. The new era was to incarnate the best features of antiquity and to create "the golden city of our heart's desire. As far as I could tell, not one taxi driver in Accra could find his way to African Liberation Square, but almost all knew the location of the U.