Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route

Hartman visits Elmina, the location of the infamous castle where enslaved people were kept before being transported to other countries. Now it is a modern marketplace, and she is struck by the way Ghanaians are consumed with everyday commerce. Sellers sit at tables with their goods displayed. Shoppers stroll by and bargain. Wealthy people drive past in Range Rovers. To Hartman, it is strange that people are so focused on the present and immune to the message of the past: “It was to my eyes a terrible beauty. It didn’t seem right that this prodigal and teeming display of life brushed against the walls of a slave warehouse and failed to notice it” (50). Ghanaians do not seem to know or care that the emblem of slavery stands so close by.

The market reminds Hartman of gold, and she describes the way the search for gold brought the Portuguese to Africa’s west coast in the 16th century. Initially, the Portuguese colonialists were not interested in enslaved people, but they learned that if they bought enslaved people from African royalty elsewhere and brought them to the “Gold Coast,” they could sell them for gold to other Africans. “The exchange between persons and things, or property rights exercised in people, were common modes of acquiring wealth in Africa” (69).