Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route is a non-fiction work in which US literature scholar Saidiya Hartman journeys to Ghana to explore the history of slavery and her own ancestry. The book is unique because it is an admission of failure as much as a description of her findings. She concludes that, as an African-American, one cannot return to one’s roots because slavery has erased them.

She emphasizes that slavery began as a product of internal power dynamics and externally-imposed colonialist imperatives. An African aristocratic warrior group preyed on weaker neighbors and captured many of them to be slaves. Eventually, slavery became a global economic activity: The Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British arrived in Africa and claimed colonies of indigenous peoples for themselves. By the end of the 17th century, the Atlantic slave trade, the “seed” of European capitalism that provided free labor and ample wealth, was thriving—and it endured until the 19th century. Its legacy is the large population of African slave descendants who live in the Americas and Europe today.

During the 1950s and 1960s, a period of rebellions against European colonialism in places such as Africa, many slave descendants dreamed of returning to Africa to find the freedom denied them in places such as the US. Initially, in Ghana, many found that liberation. Military despots killed that dream, however; a dictatorship friendly to a neocolonial economic system throttled the socialist aspiration for liberation and the equality proclaimed by Ghanaian leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah.

As a result, in Ghana, Hartman discovers a world of inequality and hardship where people do not share her desire to explore the history of slavery. Today’s Ghanaians are focused on survival; no one has time to think about the past. Plus, they prefer to forget it. Not only are they embarrassed, they are also ashamed of their ancestors’ role in selling other Africans to Europeans. Some Ghanaians live in denial about their nation’s slave past. Hartman’s journey begins with hope, but people treat her as an outsider and a stranger; Africans simply have no fellow feeling for her. In many cases, they are descended from slavers and proud of their ancestors who were successful and wealthy. Hartman finds this attitude odd. The sad thing for many Ghanaians is that the wealth is now gone. Some even long for colonialism because they felt life was better.

Meanwhile, Hartman’s fellow African-Americans are also skeptical about her desire to know the truth of slavery and to speak for the commoners who were enslaved. They tell her that Ghana is still in many ways a slave society because some have the power to dominate others economically.

Physical places hold great significance for Hartman. For example, she ponders the meaning of a castle that once served as the Dutch slave depot and is now the seat of government; slaves were confined in its dungeons while they waited for ships to take them to the Americas. In the countryside, Hartman also finds abandoned settlements where once-vibrant communities died out when their inhabitants were captured and enslaved. Finally, she comes to a walled town that successfully defended itself against the slavers.

It saddens Hartman that all the stories and songs she unearths celebrate the warrior class of slavers rather than their victims. No one speaks for the commoners, such as Hartman’s ancestors. She concludes that history encompasses both the reality of struggles endured and how that reality is remembered and reported.