Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route

“The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger. Torn from kin and community, exiled from one’s country, dishonored and violated, the slave defines the position of the outsider.”

Hartman emphasizes the existential condition of the slave as someone taken from a home and a family and transported to a foreign world. What did it feel like? What did it mean to the slave? Slaves were told to forget their mother, to let go of Africa, and to erase all connection to their family. Having no history and nothing to long for, their enslavers could manipulate them more easily. This treatment also made them into outsiders wherever they lived.

“I had not come to marvel at the wonders of African civilization or to be made proud by the royal court of Asante, or to admire the great states that harvested captives and sold them as slaves. I was not wistful for aristocratic origins. Instead, I would see commoners, the unwilling and coerced migrants who created a new culture in the hostile world of the Americas and who fashioned themselves again, making possibility out of dispossession.”

Prior efforts by African Americans to find their roots in Africa mistakenly assumed that the aristocratic Asante culture could be claimed as their own. Hartman dispels this illusion. The aristocratic warriors were enslavers; they did not get sent to the Americas. Many Africans still look to these warriors as heroes, but Hartman thinks it is more important to emphasize the fate of the victims, what she calls the “commoners” who were enslaved. No one has spoken for them. It is time to do so.

“By the time the captives arrived on the coast, often after trekking hundreds of miles, passed through the hands of African and European traders, and boarded the slaver, they were strangers. In Ghana, it is said that a stranger is like water running over the ground after a rainstorm: it soon dries up and leaves no trace behind. When the children of Elmina christened a stranger, they called me by my ancestors’ name.”

Hartman is saddened that few traces of slavery remain and that most contemporary Ghanaians are bent on forgetting. When she first arrives in Ghana, she visits Elmina, a place that was central to the slave trade. She is met by boys who call her stranger, and she reflects on the fact that enslaved people were also called that: Once enslaved, they became strangers in their own home. Hartman and other African Americans remain strangers to contemporary Ghanaians, who do not recognize them as fellow Africans.

“The seat of government was housed in what had been a Danish slave-trading post and then the headquarters of British colonial administration. Before the heels of parliamentarians clicked against the polished floors of the castle, captives restrained with neck rings and iron clamps were imprisoned inside the garrison until Danish, English, Portuguese, and French slave ships transported them to the Americas. Guns, brandy, cowries, and gold decided their fate, ensured their disappearance, and dictated that they be forgotten. Centuries later, this state of oblivion has yet to be remedied.”

Hartman would like to remedy the problems that enslavers created. Colonial enslavers made enslaved laborers into forgotten people. They were urged to forget their homes, and by keeping no records, enslavers ensured they were erased from history. This exercise of power continues, Hartman argues, despite the end of slavery. We continue its practice of forgetting and erasure. She argues that more should be done to change this situation and to commemorate the victims of slavery.

“Every step you take in Ghana crosses the trail of slaves. It’s not hard to find a slave route.”

One of the odd things about Ghana, Hartman discovers, is the palpable presence of slave history in the form of a castle, the dungeons, and the old slave routes across the landscape. On the dungeon floors, there is a foot or more of soil that is the result of congealed and dried excrement. The slave routes also reveal evidence. Abandoned villages are a reminder that enslavers came and took their prey. And yet, Ghanaians go about their lives as if none of this happened. They ignore the places that commemorate the struggle against colonialism and behave as if that struggle never occurred. This dismays Hartman. Finally, she says that they are still victims of a form of neo-colonialism that means that wealth lies elsewhere.

“The old days had ended, and the era of freedom had arrived. And after all, at this late date, what claim would slaves, factors, and merchants have on the seat of government? Why diminish the glory of nationhood with mention of an ugly past? Independence had done away with all of that. The uncanny feeling that the new days were too much like the old ones plagued only dissidents, intellectuals, and the poor.”

Hartman is troubled that Ghanaians deny the history of slavery. Many believe that once independence was achieved, the history of colonial domination could be forgotten and put behind modern Ghana. Evoking that ugly history would only sully the reputation of the new nation. Many notice, however, that economic inequality persists and that many are reduced to a condition of near servitude. They might as well be enslaved still.

“People are still being bought and sold in Ghana.”

John Ray, an African American who has lived in Ghana for more than 20 years, offered one of the harshest perspectives on Ghana. He is disappointed, as are so many, that the promise of liberation was never realized. Early dreams of a socialist utopia in Ghana have been set aside. People now no longer dream of a pan-African union that would bind Africa together in the way Europe has banded together. Instead, nations such as Ghana have allowed themselves to be dominated anew by more economically powerful countries.

“Impossible to fathom was that all this death had been incidental to the acquisition of profit and to the rise of capitalism. Today, we might describe it as collateral damage. The unavoidable losses created in pursuit of the greater objective. Death wasn’t a goal of its own but just a byproduct of commerce, which has had the lasting effect of making negligible all the millions of lives lost. Incidental death occurs when life has no normative value, when no humans are involved, when the population is, in effect, seen as already dead.”

Hartman discusses how people were deprived of their human value in slavery. Once they were converted into things and reduced to the conditions of tradable commodities on the market, enslaved individuals acquired a purely commercial value. Like other factors of production, they could be counted on to produce a certain amount of value, but they could also be assumed to account for losses. Human life thus became a feature of capitalist economics. To lose a life was simply to suffer an economic loss rather, than a human one.

“In the ’60s, it was still possible to believe that the past could be left behind because it appeared as though the future, finally, had arrived; whereas in my age, racism and colonialism seemed nearly indestructible. Mine was not the age of romance. The Eden of Ghana had vanished long before I arrived.”

After independence, many dreamed that Ghana would become a beacon of progress for Africans seeking an end to colonialism. It also offered the ideal of a socialist economy that would bring equality rather than inequality. The problem with this vision was that it ignored the past and assumed history could be erased. The same forces that drove slavery drive modern economics, and they are present as well in the military elites who frequently end democracy in places like Ghana and institute dictatorships that are beneficial to only a few—as was the case during the slavery era.

“The narrative of liberation had ceased to be a blueprint for the future. The decisive break the revolutionaries had hoped to institute between the past and the present failed. The old forms of tyranny, which they had endeavored to defeat, were resuscitated and the despots lived long and vigorous lives. The freedom dreams had been routed and driven underground. […] Pan-Africanism had yielded to the dashed hopes of neocolonialism and postcolonialism, and African socialism (which Nkrumah defined as the traditional spirit of African humanism and communalism refashioned for the modern world), had been ambushed by the West and bankrupted by African dictators and kleptocrats, all of whom had made a travesty of independence.”

Originally animated by a spirit of hope, Hartman’s quest results in discoveries that trouble her and cause her to question assumptions. She expected to find people in Ghana who shared her desire to connect with the past. She thought she would find in Ghana a place of greater equality and freedom, where being Black did not mark one for mistreatment and exclusion (as in America). Instead, she finds a world characterized by mercenary behavior and corruption. What disappoints her, especially as a socialist who shares the early dreams of liberation, is that the idealism of the generation that liberated the country has disappeared and been replaced by a harsh realism regarding survival. Military despots, who are content as long as their coffers are filled by income from corruption, sold the country to foreign economic powers. Hartman blames this on the West, which is as much responsible for the new colonialism as it was for slavery.

“Europe’s merchant princes and Africa’s royals commenced the transatlantic slave trade proper and established the protocols of theft, kidnapping, and war.”

Hartman places great emphasis on the collaborative nature of slavery. Africans enslaved people from the country’s interior and then shipped them to the coast, where European enslavers shipped them to the Americas to perform labor on plantations. Some present-day Africans are content with this history and speak with pride of the wealth it brought to their ancestors. Others seek ways to justify it or deny its significance. Too few, Hartman feels, are sorry for the behavior of their ancestors toward their fellow Africans.

“Only the blessings of the slave trade remained, according to the town’s residents, by which they meant their modernity. The Atlantic slave trade had introduced them to literacy and Christianity, and of this they were very proud.”

One of the oddest attitudes Harman encounters, one that cuts against the grain of all of her expectations, is that slavery was a good thing. It put Africa into contact with Europe, and Europeans made Africa more modern by introducing literacy. Many of those who hold this position are evangelical Christians, who also are grateful to the Europeans for bringing that religion to Africa. Few seem to realize that Jesus’ teachings would not condone slavery.

“I had imagined a world less racist than the one from which I came. I had longed for a country in which my inheritance would amount to more than dispossession and in which I would no longer feel like a problem. Three months in Ghana were enough to disabuse me of these notions.”

Hartman’s story is a narrative of disappointment. She comes in a spirit of hope to her native Ghana, but she leaves feeling disillusioned. Racism in the US is a factor in racial difference. The cohabitation of white and black people, with white people having most of the economic power, means that Black people are reminded constantly of their difference. Often that means being reminded of their exclusion or economic subordination. Hartman had hoped that, in Africa, racial difference would disappear and she would lose the feeling of being dispossessed. Unfortunately, modern Ghana itself is characterized by exclusion and subordination, and one of the first she encounters is her exclusion because she is not a real African. She is lesser because she comes from elsewhere, and, oddly, she is considered less real because she is a descendant of slaves who carries irrelevant grievances with her.

“The randomness and contingency of history nonetheless produces two classes: winners and losers. Like men at a gaming table, over the course of time the gap between these groups will become bigger and bigger.”

Hartman encounters cynicism in Africa that disturbs her. Many cynically are grateful for the enslavement of their fellow man because it brought wealth to their ancestors. If only it had continued, they think. Such attitudes shock Hartman. She expected all to share her sense of pain at having ancestors who were enslaved and sent into exile. For her, slavery underscores a history lesson: that some are dominant and others are dominated. Because domination allows one to accumulate more, the difference between the two groups keeps increasing. Often in the book, she wonders what can be done to change this situation.

“A male slave in the prime of his life was the standard against which other slaves were measured. Slaves possessing limited physical abilities or who were elderly constituted a fraction of a pieza.”

The story of slavery is a human story, but it is also a commercial story, and that, of course, accounts for its strangeness. The human aspects of enslavement, what it means emotionally for people kidnapped from their homes, and the commercial aspects, as people became things whose value was measured so they could be sold, fascinates Hartman. What especially interests her is the way humans become tokens of value. A single healthy man might be worth a woman and two children, for example.

“‘People pride themselves that their great-grandfathers rather kept slaves, and were not among the numerous slaves that abounded,’ as one man explained. ‘To be called a slave is an insignia of shame. The dishonor of the slave had persisted, as had the dignity and self-respect of the affluent and the powerful. The regret was that the wealth had not lasted.’”

One of the most dismaying realities Hartman encounters is the attitude among many Ghanaians who felt that slavery was a good institution, and they are proud of their ancestors for having engaged in it. This lack of care for others seems a clear legacy of the beliefs that allowed the ancestors to engage in slavery. The enslavers were as callous toward others then as their descendants are today.

“The slave is always the stranger who resides in one place and belongs to another. The slave is always the one missing from home.”

Hartman is elegaic in her evocation of the personal reality of enslavement—the loss of community, autonomy, and home. Enslaved people lose all rights and all freedom, but they also lose important other aspects of humanity such as a personal history, a sense of family identity or belonging, and a past. They are defined by homelessness, an absence of the usual emblems of belonging most humans possess.

“We may have forgotten our country, but we haven’t forgotten our dispossession. It’s why we never tire of dreaming of a place that we can call home, a place better than here, wherever here might be. It’s why 100 square blocks of Los Angeles can be destroyed in an evening. We stay there, but we don’t live there.”

Hartman repeatedly connects the story of slavery to the experience of contemporary African Americans in the US. She feels that the original dispossession set by enslavement persists in contemporary African American life, where death is more likely at an early age and poverty reduces longevity. That is the case because Black Americans were deprived of something many other racial groups have: inherited wealth. African Americans also lack a historical home apart from an Africa that no longer feels any connection to them.

“I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it. It is the ongoing crisis of citizenship […]. If the ghost of slavery still haunts our present, it is because we are still looking for an exit from the prison.”

Slavery left a legacy that is still being lived out by contemporary African Americans. Brought to the US as non-citizens, they continue to live there in a state of lessened or diminished citizenship. Victims of racist violence, they also suffer from a lack of resources other ethnic groups enjoy. As a result, they do not share the same sense of freedom. For Hartman, the dream of full equality between ethnic groups in America is an important one that must be pursued.

“The heirs of slaves wanted a past of which they could be proud, so they conveniently forgot the distinction between rulers and the ruled and closed their eyes to slavery in Africa. They pretended that their ancestors had worn the king’s vestments and assumed the grand civilization of Asante as their own.”

Hartman is especially critical of Alex Haley, whose book Roots (1976) celebrated his Asante lineage. Hartman points out that the Asante aristocrats Haley thought were his ancestors were enslavers who cooperated with the European colonialists.

“History is a battle royal, a contest between the powerful and the powerless in what happened, as well as in the stories we tell about what happened—a fight to the death over the meaning of the past. The narrative of the defeated never triumphs; like them, it ekes out an existence in the shadow of the victors. But must the story of the defeated always be a story of defeat? Is it too late to imagine that their lives might be redeemed or to fashion an antidote to oblivion? Is it too late to believe their struggles cast a shadow into a future in which they might finally win?”

Hartman tells a story of disappointed ideals and frustrated assumptions, but she concludes in a spirit of quiet, tempered hope. She wanted to speak for the commoners, the voiceless who had been silenced by enslavement, and she found that difficult, given how persistently they deny and try to forget what happened. But that does not mean one should stop striving to create a world in which slavery can never again occur.

“In West Africa, the Atlantic slave trade intensified inequality and fueled war. Public roads were unsafe. Commoners became impoverished and endangered. The merchant princes and traders became fat. The wealth accumulated by wars and plunder and theft created aristocratic and merchant societies in which the economy was divided between subsistence and luxury. The predatory state fed upon the communities within its reach, and then the British, French, and Germans took over, carved up the territory, and made themselves the new masters.”

Hartman begins with queries about slavery. She wants to know its truth, but she finds that truth is difficult because it requires accountability. One major point of accountability is the responsibility Africans themselves bear in the act of slavery. Slavery was an event with social effects. It allowed one group to become wealthy as another was dispossessed. On one side was luxury; on the other was a poor and inhuman existence. This state of affairs persists, and one hope she expresses is that it can be addressed and remedied.

“Crossing the savanna, one came face-to-face with the violence of the slave trade. The vast stretches of empty space and the far-flung settlements testified to the long history of war and raiding.”

Hartman takes a trek into what was slave country, the land in the north of Ghana where most slaves were captured. She sees signs of enslavement everywhere, especially in the abandoned villages, once homes to thriving communities. But the inhabitants were taken and shipped away, leaving behind just small traces of their lives. One of the greatest difficulties Hartman faces is the finding of such traces. Victory erases the lives of the defeated.