Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

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He was fiercely intelligent and self-educated, so he had little patience for most academics, whom he could think circles around and whom he found tedious. The revolutionaries had come to Ghana believing they could be made anew, reborn as the African men and women they would have been had their ancestors not been stolen four hundred years ago.

The reasons we were in Ghana could be summed up with a glance: the gerontocracy, those over-sixty-five men and women who had been invited to Ghana by President Nkrumah because of their skills as engineers, physicians, educators, and contractors were settled in upscale enclaves like Labone or Cantonments. 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.Hartman's pursuit of the naked truth is at times hard to take, even as someone who detests political optimism and cheap cultural-nationalist sentiment. She extended her arm and patted the top of my hand in a gesture that I might have mistaken for maternal if it hadn't seemed so perfunctory.

I identified the street on which I lived as Volta River Club Street, because the club was adjacent to the apartment building and no other street markers existed. In changing the name of the Gold Coast to Ghana, which had been an ancient kingdom at the edge of the desert and a seat of civilization more than a thousand years ago when Europe was still in the Dark Ages, Nkrumah "conjured up the image of a New Jerusalem.Nearly a century and a half later, in 1951, when William Patterson, the national executive secretary of the Civil Rights Congress, and Paul Robeson presented a petition to the UN charging the United States with genocide against the Negro people, they too conceded that black folks in the United States were without a state to protect their human rights. The expatriates crossed the Atlantic to break the chains of slavery, and I did so doubting that I would ever be free of them. The summer of 1974 would be the last time we visited Montgomery, Alabama, for anything other than a brief four-day trip, and Poppa, sensing this, introduced us to our past.

Or forget the disobedient wives who were sold under the pretext of witchcraft, the quarrelsome young men who were sentenced to slavery for being troublemakers, and the ever-growing list of petty infractions punishable by slavery that cost many commoners their lives. I found myself, like most members of the small community of nearly one thousand African-American expatriates, living on the periphery of Ghanaian society. He muttered, "uh-huh," and then he asked, "When you go to Chicago, do you expect black folks there to welcome you because you're from New York?

Ghana's current president, Jerry Rawlings, had been a flight lieutenant in the Air Force when he seized the state through a military revolt on December 31, 1981; he had staged the last successful coup. Historians still debate whether twelve million or sixty million had been sentenced to death to meet the demands of the transatlantic commerce in black bodies. To lose your mother is to suffer the loss of kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as a stranger.

The British-educated elite and the conservative middle classes were hostile to Nkrumah's socialist revolution, and they resented his attacks on traditional forms of caste and privilege.As I drank the beer Mary Ellen placed in my hand, I wondered how Ghana would look in my eyes by the end of the year.