Chapter Excerpt - “A Coastline of Fortresses”

Making foutou, a staple food, in a village in western Cote d'Ivoire

Slave forts are the foundation of almost 200 years of the capture and deportation of tens of thousands of people from countries all along the west coast of Africa. They spring up in town after town, formidable, misleadingly-beautiful and almost castle-like. They stand as landmarks in practically every town that allowed access to the open seas, bigger, stronger and exuding more power than any buildings constructed there today. For Ghanaians, to live in their midst is a constant reminder of an era when the families of their ancestors were split apart without a moment’s warning, shipped away to an unknown destination and an even lesser-known fate.

What kind of impact must such a legacy have on a nation? I wondered. On my visits to South Africa in the 1990s, I was horrified to realize that almost every black South African that I queried had been directly touched in some way by the long-reaching arm of the National Party’s apartheid government. Everyone had a brother or an aunt or a neighbour that had been jailed, beaten or even killed. There were so many stories to tell, and all within a thirty-year span. In my mind, I can imagine that the people who grew up in the Gold Coast era of Ghana would have had similar stories to tell, and unfortunately spanning a much larger time frame. Generation after generation would have dealt with the presence of slave traders in their midst, or even worse, tribesmen who were cooperatives for the traders, earning some copper or gold in return for handing their own people over.

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