A four-century long journey home across the Atlantic

Xinhua - On May 13, 2024, the Ghanaian capital of Accra witnessed an emotional homecoming as Stevie Wonder, an iconic American musician, received his certificate of Ghanaian citizenship from President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, marking a deeply personal milestone on his 74th birthday.

For Wonder, Ghana is full of associations with his ancestral roots. "When I first came here, I felt the essence of it, as if I had been here before.

I knew this is where I needed to be," Wonder reflected.

In 1619, the first recorded African slaves were brought to the British colony of Virginia, marking the inception of the shameful transatlantic slave trade that would uproot millions from their homelands.

Four centuries later, the Ghanaian government launched the Year of Return in 2019, inviting descendants of those enslaved Africans to retrace the roots to their original heritage.

Ghana, once the last sight of home for countless Africans forced into slavery, also became the birthplace of the African independence movement and Pan-Africanism in the 20th century.

REMINDERS OF A DARK PAST

"We see very beautiful architecture here," said Robert Morgan Mensah, who has been a guide for 18 years at Cape Coast Castle, "but the sad history behind it reminds us of what transpired during the transatlantic slave trade."

Cape Coast Castle, perched on the shores of Ghana's Central Province, has walls with canons facing the Atlantic. According to Mensah, Europeans constructed over 60 castles along the West African coastline, with more than 40 in Ghana alone, to facilitate the transatlantic slave trade.

When Europeans arrived in the Gulf of Guinea in the mid-15th century, they named regions after the commodities they sought. Ghana was the "Gold Coast;" Cote d'Ivoire became the "Ivory Coast;" and parts of modern Togo, Benin, and Nigeria were dubbed the "Slave Coast."

Driven by hefty profits, Europeans colonized the Americas and the Caribbean, seizing land and resources while decimating indigenous populations. In the face of a pressing need for labour, Europeans turned to Africa.

Encouraged by their governments, European merchants engaged in the large-scale slave trade that Karl Marx described as "traffic in human flesh."

This trade, known as the "triangular trade," linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Slave traders sailed from Europe to West Africa with goods like wine, fabrics, and guns, and then transported enslaved Africans across the Atlantic in a harrowing six-to-ten-week voyage known as the Middle Passage.

Once in the Americas, the enslaved were sold to plantation and mine owners, and the traders returned to Europe with massive shipments of agricultural and mineral products.

Cape Coast Castle, one of the largest of these West African fortresses, was initially built by the Swedes before being taken over by the British.

Enslaved Africans captured inland were held in dungeons for weeks or months until the slave ships arrived.

Mensah described the grim conditions: each of the five dungeons housed 150 to 200 shackled slaves, crammed into the dark, stuffy space.

"The dungeons were full of filth, and disease spread rapidly," Mensah said. "Many died here, their bodies thrown into the sea along with those who hadn't yet broken."

Above the dungeons, a small church offered a stark contrast.

"They must have heard the cries of the slaves as they sang hymns," Mensah said, noting that both the enslaved and their captors lived and prayed within the same walls.

In his work "The American Slave-Trade: An Account of Its Origin, Growth and Suppression," American author John Randolph Spears detailed the misery aboard slave ships, where enslaved men were shackled in pairs, forced to lie flat or on their sides in stifling conditions.

Poor living conditions and the long voyage led to many deaths, with a mortality rate averaging 15 percent.

When resources ran low, slavers would throw the weakest overboard to lighten the load, later claiming insurance compensation for "lost cargo."

Missouri Sherman-Peter, permanent observer of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to the United Nations, has highlighted that 12-20 million Africans were taken into slavery across four centuries.

TOILING TO DEATH ACROSS ATLANTIC

About 450 km east of Cape Coast Castle, another haunting monument stands on the beach of Ouidah, Benin.

The "Door of No Return" commemorates the Africans who were forcibly taken from the "Slave Coast" to the Americas.

"A cannon could be traded for 15 male slaves or 21 female slaves," said Espero de Souza, a 20-year-old Beninese guide descending from Francisco Felix de Souza, a notorious slave trader.

Slaves were auctioned at Chacha Square, a hub for the brutal trade that de Souza's ancestor dominated.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to land in Brazil in the early 16th century, drawn by the promise of wealth.

They established sugarcane plantations, but the indigenous population, decimated by forced labour and disease, proved insufficient.

The plantation owners looked to African slaves, who were deemed more resistant to disease and easier to control.

By 1630, some 170,000 African slaves had been transported to Brazil, making sugarcane a crop intrinsically linked to slavery.

As historian Wolfgang Leonhard observed, by 1638, 100 percent of sugar plantation workers were enslaved Africans.

In her book Captives as Commodities: The Transatlantic Slave Trade, American scholar Lisa Lindsay depicts the harsh reality of plantation life.

Plantation owners, calculating the cost of labour, found it more profitable to work slaves to death and then replace them rather than provide better conditions.

By the 19th century, Valongo Wharf, an old dock located in the port area of Rio de Janeiro, had become the main entry point for African slaves in Brazil, receiving millions over two decades.

The area around the port, known as Pequena Africa, or Little Africa, became a hub of Afro-Brazilian culture and the birthplace of the lively samba.

Samba, now a cultural symbol of Brazil, is believed to have origins in the Kimbundu language of West Africa, where "Semba" was known as a spirited dance.

According to one theory, slave traders forced enslaved Africans to dance on deck during the voyage to keep them agile, making them more marketable upon arrival.

SINISTER DAWN OF CAPITALIST PRODUCTION

In 1814, a European visitor documented his impressions of a city filled with towering factories, each with colossal chimneys belching black soot into the sky.

This was Manchester, England.

At the dawn of the 18th century, Manchester was a modest town with hardly 10,000 inhabitants.

By the mid-19th century, it had become a vital hub of Britain's textile industry, boasting hundreds of cotton mills with products exported across the globe.

Trinidad and Tobago's first prime minister, historian Eric Williams, encapsulated the profound impact of the slave trade on industrialization in the West.

"It was this tremendous dependence on the triangular trade that made Manchester," he said, referring to the British Empire as "a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power on an African foundation."

Liverpool, once a small fishing village, thrived as a major slave-trading port before becoming an industrial town. In October 1699, the first documented British slave ship left Liverpool for the Caribbean, carrying around 220 African captives. Over the 18th century, Liverpool's slave ships trafficked some 1.5 million Africans.

Cities like London, Bristol, Nantes, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, and Zeeland also prospered from the brutal slave trade.

The profits from this inhumane enterprise drove the growth of manufacturing and transportation industries across Europe.

In his major work "Capital: A Critique of Political Economy", Karl Marx identified the enslavement and exploitation of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, the plundering of India, and the transformation of Africa into a commercial hunting ground for human lives as defining moments of capitalist production's early stages.

These events were crucial to the primitive accumulation of capital.

Slave traders, often starting with modest capital, made extraordinary profits, sometimes tenfold.

One captain recorded a net profit of over 40,000 U.S. dollars on a single voyage in 1827, despite an initial outlay of less than 4,000 dollars.

The slave trade also stimulated the growth of Europe's financial and insurance sectors.

Banks and insurance companies eagerly launched businesses tied to the trade, while Western merchants who amassed fortunes from slavery became bankers, investing their blood-soaked profits in emerging enterprises.

Research from the University College London's Legacies of British Slave Ownership project reveals that a significant portion of Britain's current wealth is linked to slavery. Institutions such as Barclays Bank and Lloyds Bank built their fortunes on the slave trade, underscoring London's rise as a global financial centre.

In the United States, plantation owners profited immensely from the forced labour of African slaves, particularly in the production of cotton.

By the mid-19th century, cotton from slaveholding states accounted for over half of all U.S. exports, as noted by historian Sven Beckert in Empire of Cotton.

The transatlantic slave trade, spanning four centuries, generated immense wealth for Western nations and played a critical role in the accumulation of capital, reflecting the brutal reality of a globalization process dominated by these countries.

MOTIVATION BEHIND ABOLITION OF SLAVERY

While studying at Oxford University in 1938, Eric Williams made a groundbreaking claim in his booklet "Capitalism and Slavery," arguing that the abolition of slavery in the West was driven not by moral awakening but by economic interests and strategic needs.

This argument caused a stir in academic circles, as it challenged a prevailing view that humanitarianism was the primary force behind the abolitionist movement. Williams' manuscript was initially rejected by British publisher Fredric Warburg as "contrary to the English tradition."

Williams, who later became prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, demonstrated that the wealth generated by enslaved people fuelled the Industrial Revolution and that, as capitalism matured, slavery became an obstacle to free trade and further capitalist expansion.

Ghanaian historian Yaw Anokye Frimpong explained that the decline in demand for enslaved labor was primarily due to technological advancements.

As machines began operating around the clock in industrialized countries, the need for manual labour decreased, rendering enslaved people, limited in both efficiency and work hours, an economic burden.

The end of slavery, opined the historian, was not a sudden moral epiphany but the result of various factors, including shifts in production patterns, moral debates, and legal challenges.

Moreover, when slave traders and owners were required to relinquish their "property," they received substantial compensation.

For instance, former British Prime Minister David Cameron's ancestors received a large sum after the passage of the 1833 Act for the Abolition of Slavery.

However, the millions of enslaved Africans received nothing for their centuries of suffering.

As the Industrial Revolution advanced, newly empowered Western capitalists sought cheaper raw materials and expanded markets.

Colonial plantations, reliant on enslaved labour, monopolized raw material supplies.

Long-term forced labour and soil depletion led to reduced productivity and higher costs, prompting emerging capitalists to seek the destruction of the slavery-dependent plantation economy.

Simultaneously, Africans never ceased resisting enslavement.

Inspired by the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, large-scale revolts erupted in the late 18th century, notably the Haitian Revolution.

These uprisings increased the costs of maintaining slavery.

In 1807, the British Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, followed by similar legislation in other European countries.

However, the lucrative trade persisted "underground."

To dodge fines, slavers sometimes tied their captives to rocks and threw them overboard when pursued at sea.

The transatlantic slave trade only effectively ended in the late 19th century.

But Africa's suffering was far from over.

After the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, Western powers intensified their scramble for Africa, leading to the continent's partition.

This reckless division left a legacy of poverty and underdevelopment in Africa that persists today.

"We originally had our own writing and ways of communication. Slavery led to the loss of many young Africans and wreaked havoc on Africa's civilizational heritage and social development," Anokye Frimpong said.

He also noted that the imposition of artificial borders during colonization further fragmented African unity, a division that lingers in countries like Ghana.

"AFRICA MUST UNITE"

Inside the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park in Accra, a quote from the Pan-Africanist leader reads, "I am not African because I was born in Africa, but because Africa was born in me."

Ghana declared its independence on March 6, 1957, becoming the first sub-Saharan African nation to break free from Western colonial rule.

On that historic day, Nkrumah proclaimed, "our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent."

Nkrumah, celebrated as the "Father of Ghana," was a fervent advocate for Pan-Africanism.

In his book "Africa Must Unite," he called for the unification of all African nations to achieve true independence and prosperity.

The Pan-Africanist vision resonated with the descendants of enslaved Africans across the diaspora.

The first Pan-African Conference held in London in 1900 brought together delegates from the United States, the West Indies and Africa to discuss the global plight of Black people and demand self-governance for African and Caribbean colonies.

A year after Ghana's independence, the first Conference of Independent African States was held in Accra in April 1958, laying the groundwork for what would become the Organization of African Unity (OAU).

"Ghana's fight for independence was not just about freeing one country, it was about liberating the entire continent from colonial rule and restoring African unity," said Anokye Frimpong.

"Today, African nations are striving to overcome historical legacies and build a united, prosperous future."

Founded in 1963, the OAU embodied the Pan-Africanist ideal, playing a crucial role in decolonizing Africa and mediating interstate conflicts. The OAU was succeeded by the African Union (AU) in 2002, marking a new chapter in Africa's quest for self-reliance and development.

On Aug. 1, 1998, the remains of two enslaved Africans passed through the "Door of No Return" at Cape Coast Castle, Ghana, to return to their homeland.

This symbolic act transformed the "Door of No Return" into the "Door of Return," ushering a new era of remembrance, reconciliation and solidarity.

At a joint meeting in Accra in November 2023, AU and CARICOM delegates agreed to establish a global reparations fund.

This initiative seeks a formal apology and reparations from European nations for the atrocities of slavery.

Speaking at the conference, President Akufo-Addo of Ghana stressed that while no amount of money can restore the damage caused by the transatlantic slave trade, the issue of reparations is one that the world must confront and can no longer ignore.

Mensah, the guide in Ghana, said they will forge ahead but should never forget history. It is important to cherish the culture and values and let them guide the future, so that the tragedy in history does not repeat itself, he said.

Indeed, African people have never forgotten the atrocities of the past. With the Global South becoming more vocal, African people, being part of it, are becoming more confident and self-empowered to fight for justice and rights they deserve.

Xinhua