The Slave Route

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman journeys along a slave route in Ghana, following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast. She retraces the history of the Atlantic slave trade from the fifteenth to the twentieth century and reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy. There were no survivors of Hartman's lineage, nor far-flung relatives in Ghana of whom she had come in search. She traveled to Ghana in search of strangers. The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger—torn from kin and country. To lose your mother is to suffer the loss of kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as a stranger. As both the offspring of slaves and an American in Africa, Hartman, too, was a stranger. Her reflections on history and memory unfold as an intimate encounter with places—a holding cell, a slave market, a walled town built to repel slave raiders—and with people: an Akan prince who granted the Portuguese permission to build the first permanent trading fort in West Africa; an adolescent boy who was kidnapped while playing; a fourteen-year-old girl who was murdered aboard a slave ship. Eloquent, thoughtful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a powerful meditation on history, memory, and the Atlantic slave trade.

Unesco celebrated 2004 as the international year to commemorate the struggle against slavery and its abolition. The Ghanaian Government's National Slave Route Project Committee held an international conference on transatlantic slave as part of that initiative. These papers are largely the proceedings of that conference, with the inclusion of a few papers from the National Conference on the Slave Trade in 2003. Supported by the Netherlands Embassy, Unesco, and an individual benefactor, the conference brought together over 400 people: Government Ministers, Unesco and diplomatic representatives, and scholars from Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, Europe and the USA. Twenty-nine papers and statements are included. The book is divided into opening statements, followed by papers on three main themes: landmarks, legacies and expectations.

Of all institutions, common to all societies throughout human history, slavery is the only constant. It would not be wildly inaccurate to suggest that well over 90% of all humanity has been subjected to slavery of some description. In one form or another, the institution has been the basis of human progression. For example, slaves built the Egyptian pyramids, as they did the Mayan and Aztec pyramids in the Americas; the Golden Years of Greece and Rome were the result of slavery; slaves built the Parthenon. Today through China, India, Africa, the Middle East, Eurasia, the Americas and Indonesia - through varying degrees of indentured labour - slavery continues to underpin our lives, and what we consume. The Slave Route is an entertaining account of one man s journey through distant lands. Artist Harry Holcroft visits over twenty countries across Africa and America as he retraces the path of the ancient slave routes, adopting the various historical means of travel along the way. AUTHOR: Harry Holcroft was educated at Hertford College, Oxford, the Ruskin School of Drawing and the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He has travelled extensively in the remotest parts of the world, resulting in nearly twenty exhibitions in both America and Europe. Illustrated

Over the past fifteen years, visitors from the African diaspora have flocked to Cape Coast and Elmina, two towns in Ghana whose chief tourist attractions are the castles and dungeons where slaves were imprisoned before embarking for the New World. This desire to commemorate the Middle Passage contrasts sharply with the silence that normally cloaks the subject within Ghana. Why do Ghanaians suppress the history of enslavement? And why is this history expressed so differently on the other side of the Atlantic? Routes of Remembrance tackles these questions by analyzing the slave trade’s absence from public versions of coastal Ghanaian family and community histories, its troubled presentation in the country’s classrooms and nationalist narratives, and its elaboration by the transnational tourism industry. Bayo Holsey discovers that in the past, African involvement in the slave trade was used by Europeans to denigrate local residents, and this stigma continues to shape the way Ghanaians imagine their historical past. Today, however, due to international attention and the curiosity of young Ghanaians, the slave trade has at last entered the public sphere, transforming it from a stigmatizing history to one that holds the potential to contest global inequalities. Holsey’s study will be crucial to anyone involved in the global debate over how the slave trade endures in history and in memory.

The public memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, which some years ago could be observed especially in North America, has slowly emerged into a transnational phenomenon now encompassing Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and even Asia – allowing the populations of African descent, organized groups, governments, non-governmental organizations and societies in these different regions to individually and collectively update and reconstruct the slave past. This edited volume examines the recent transnational emergence of the public memory of slavery, shedding light on the work of memory produced by groups of individuals who are descendants of slaves. The chapters in this book explore how the memory of the enslaved and slavers is shaped and displayed in the public space not only in the former slave societies but also in the regions that provided captives to the former American colonies and European metropoles. Through the analysis of exhibitions, museums, monuments, accounts, and public performances, the volume makes sense of the political stakes involved in the phenomenon of memorialization of slavery and the slave trade in the public sphere.

The anti-slavery movement, which followed in the wake of the European slave trade, has attracted much less attention than the latter. This is particularly true for the abolition movement in the French colonies.

A collection of 38 papers from the Ouidah Conference held in September 1994 in Ouidah, Benin as the launching conference for UNESCO's international Slave Route Project.