Emancipation: Some facts that will shock even you
This year’s Emancipation Day celebrations would have passed off as a routine observance on the tourism calendar, but for a statement or two attributed to Ghana’s current Minister of Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts.
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The Minister, Mrs Elizabeth Ofosu-Adjare, used the occasion of the wreath-laying ceremony at the W.E.B. Du Bois Centre, to make some statements which no Ghanaian minister of tourism before her and, indeed, most (or all) Ghanaian and other African leaders have gathered courage enough to touch on.
She referred to “recriminations, suspicions, blame and mutual distrust between the African diaspora and those on the continent” and appealed for “genuine reconciliation between all the sons and daughters of Africa”.
I did a little vox pop in the ministries area in Accra based on the issues the minister raised, and I was shocked at the result. Thirteen out of the 20 young civil servants I spoke to did not know that there existed “recriminations, suspicions, blame and mutual distrust”.
When I referred them to the minister’s statement about present-day Africans voluntarily returning into slavery across the deserts in the hope of getting to Europe, even at their peril, my vox pop turned into a litany of condemnations. Reacting with anger, all my respondents, without exception, blamed Africa’s woes, past and present, on the “wickedness”, “greed” and “selfishness” of Africa’s leaders, past and present.
To throw some light on why the “recriminations” exist, I have decided that on this occasion of Emancipation Day 2015, I will devote this week’s column to present some facts and figures which have led some African Americans to conclude that we, in the motherland, are as guilty as the whites.
(The facts below are excerpts from ‘The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: Landmarks, Legacies, Expectations’ a book edited by the revered Professor James Kwesi Anquandah, with our own beloved Professor Naana Jane Opoku -Agyemang and one Michel R.Doortmont as assistant editors).
1. One Gold Coast chief (name withheld by this columnist) who had hundreds of slave prisoners on his hands after the abolition of the slave trade was furious. He told Joseph Depuis (1824): “If the white men now think the slave trade is bad, why did they think it good before?”
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2. The King of Dahomey, in the mid 18th century, complained to Governor Abson of the African Company Fort at Whyda: “We have a right to sell delinquent prisoners to the white men to be taken to a far country, don’t we?”
3. In his book, ‘A Reliable Account of The Coast of Guinea’, L.F. Romer, a Danish colonial official and trade agent at Fort Fredensborg, Ningo, quoted a Gold Coast citizen as saying: “It is you, you whites, who have brought all the evil among us… The desire we have for your enticing goods and brandy has brought distrust between brothers and friends. Yes! Even a father and a son.”
4. A white official reporting on the trade recounted: “Before one is allowed to trade in slaves, one is compelled to pay the king (Gold Coast chief) 720 pounds weight of cowries as customary duties and 30 pounds to the town crier who announces when the traders are allowed to sell their slaves… One also has to pay the value of one slave to the interpreter before he is willing to announce your desires to the king, and one slave for the watchman who receives and guards the goods when they are brought ashore.”
5. There is evidence that Akan brokers from Kormantse, Cape Coast, Elmina etc. physically took residence at Whydah, Popo, Ardra and purchased slaves for direct export to the Gold Coast and that the resulting influx of slaves went to meet the growing demands of the gold mines at Eguafo, Efutu Akyem Tafo, Wassa, Ankobra, Abokro, Pra-Offin basin etc . The local traders also brought slaves to the English and took their gold to the Dutch.
If, like this columnist, you had always wondered why the slaves did not escape from their African captors during the long journey from the hinterland to the coast where they were sold to the whites, here is the explanation.
The slaves were chained to trees (by their African captors) and they stayed under the trees until they found purchasers. On one occasion, there was a strong wind and one of the big trees under which the slaves were chained fell down. This crushed the slaves under the tree.
Finally, for the information of our brothers and sisters in the Diaspora, some of whom are often quick to point at the guilt of Africans in the motherland, here is something to chew on. It is on record that “after the Law of Emancipation had been passed in the USA, a substantial number of emancipated African Americans who themselves owned slaves, were for some time, most unwilling to liberate their slaves!”
If you asked me, the language of the game is greed. It has no colour. It is not African: it is human. So as the current Ghanaian Tourism Minister has counselled, let bygones be bygones. Let us learn from our mistakes and vow to not repeat them.