Coast, Trade & MemoryGhanaianDiasporadocumented history
The Numbers, and What Is Owed
Somewhere around 12.5 million people were forced onto ships in Africa and sent across the Atlantic between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth.
Cape Coast; Elmina; Assin Manso; Salaga.
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The Numbers, and What Is Owed
Somewhere around 12.5 million people were forced onto ships in Africa and sent across the Atlantic between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth. Roughly 10.7 million survived the crossing. Something close to 1.8 million died at sea and were put over the side.
The stretch of coast that is now Ghana — the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast to its east — accounted for a very large share of the departures. There were more European forts and castles per mile here than anywhere else on the continent: over thirty of them along about 500 kilometres, Portuguese, Dutch, British, Danish, Swedish, Brandenburger, changing hands by treaty and by siege. Several are on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Some are ruins. One is a police post. One was, until recently, a prison.
Most of the people who went through them were taken inland: in wars between African states, in raids, as judicial punishment, as debt. They were sold on by African brokers to European buyers at the coast. The system was created and financed and shipped by Europe, at a scale and with a racial logic Africa had not produced — and it could not have run without local participation, and both of those sentences are true and neither cancels the other.
Ghana has said so out loud. Chiefs have made public apologies to the descendants of the enslaved. In 2006 a formal reconciliation ceremony was held, and traditional rulers have repeated the apology since. Ghana observes Emancipation Day. Ghana opened the Door of Return.
And Ghana is also part of the reparations argument. The African Union named reparatory justice its theme for 2025, with Ghana's president among the more vocal heads of state, and CARICOM's ten-point plan and the AU's position have converged — an unusual moment in which the continent and the Caribbean are asking for the same thing at the same time.
The numbers tell us the scale. The question of what is owed asks what those numbers should require from governments, institutions and the people who inherit the wealth created by that history.
If you visit Ghana. Cape Coast; Elmina; Assin Manso; Salaga.
Somewhere around 12.5 million people were forced onto ships in Africa and sent across the Atlantic between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth. Roughly 10.7 million survived the crossing. Something close to 1.8 million died at sea and were put over the side.
The stretch of coast that is now Ghana — the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast to its east — accounted for a very large share of the departures. There were more European forts and castles per mile here than anywhere else on the continent: over thirty of them along about 500 kilometres, Portuguese, Dutch, British, Danish, Swedish, Brandenburger, changing hands by treaty and by siege. Several are on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Some are ruins. One is a police post. One was, until recently, a prison.
Most of the people who went through them were taken inland: in wars between African states, in raids, as judicial punishment, as debt. They were sold on by African brokers to European buyers at the coast. The system was created and financed and shipped by Europe, at a scale and with a racial logic Africa had not produced — and it could not have run without local participation, and both of those sentences are true and neither cancels the other.
Ghana has said so out loud. Chiefs have made public apologies to the descendants of the enslaved. In 2006 a formal reconciliation ceremony was held, and traditional rulers have repeated the apology since. Ghana observes Emancipation Day. Ghana opened the Door of Return.
And Ghana is also part of the reparations argument. The African Union named reparatory justice its theme for 2025, with Ghana's president among the more vocal heads of state, and CARICOM's ten-point plan and the AU's position have converged — an unusual moment in which the continent and the Caribbean are asking for the same thing at the same time.
The numbers tell us the scale. The question of what is owed asks what those numbers should require from governments, institutions and the people who inherit the wealth created by that history.