Cape Coast Slave Fort. Photo by antonella sinopoli//flickr.cc(by-nc)
On 21 August 2016, for the very first time, a memorial service was held at Trafalgar Square in London to commemorate the transatlantic slave trade. The icon and theme for the event was ‘Sankofa’, a popular Ghanaian (Ashanti) symbol. A bird with its neck turned backwards, Sankofa implies going back or retracing one’s steps to fetch items, practices or memories which have been left behind or forgotten. I found the theme quite apt, for as a Ghanaian living in Britain, I have been struck by the walls of silence, convenient conflations and half-truths produced by both societies to shield themselves from their histories of the transatlantic slave trade.
Reliable figures are hard to come by, but some historians suggest that by the end of the transatlantic slave trade, an estimated 1.5 million people (excluding those who died or were deliberately drowned at sea) had been transported from Ghana alone (then the Gold Coast) to slavery in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the ‘New World’. The legacies and icons of this tragedy spanning over 300 years are dotted all over the country. To name just a few, we have Jamestown, where slaves were purportedly sold to European merchants for the very first time; the castles and forts in Accra and Cape Coast, where men, women and children were held in dungeons until their perilous transportation across the Atlantic; and the slave market at Salaga. Despite this visible and visceral evidence, discussion of Ghana’s connections to the transatlantic slave trade are rare; and as yet, there is no national remembrance event or annual memorial day for what is undoubtedly a national tragedy.
