A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route - Saidiya Hartman

African-American professor of English and Comparative Literature at Colombia, Saidiya Hartman traveled to Ghana to view sites of the transatlantic slave trade. Hartman went to Salaga, the most active nineteenth-century slave market in Ghana,  and Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle, two slave dungeons where African men and women were “warehoused” by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British before being transported to the New World to become slaves on plantations.  Hartman blends history, travel narrative, and personal memoir into a fascinating, if painful, book.

She explains, “[T]he Afro-European trade in slaves did not begin in Ghana as it did elsewhere with Africans selling slaves and Europeans buying them. It began with Europeans selling slaves and Africans buying them.” She says that African elites in empires captured commoners and strangers, Muslims enslaved animists. The strong and powerful  warriors converted vulnerable farmers and nomads into commodities. They exchanged them for "[g]old dust, copper basins, brass bracelets, bars, and pots, colored textiles, linen and Indian cloth, barrel-shaped coral beads, strings of glass beads, red beads fashioned from bones, enamel beads, felt caps, and horse tails. “ The hunger for Cowrie shells and other luxury items caused unimaginable suffering and contributed zilch to long-term prosperity.

In addition to this painful history, Hartman examines how the commerce in human beings has remained a festering wound even in the present day. She goes over problems such as the sense of belonging and not belonging, the irreparable sense of loss of a home, and the sense that one is unwanted in one’s own country. Hartman makes her sense of grief and disappointment palpable.