Lose Your Mother A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Unlike we come together or we who fled or we who were liberated, African people crossed the lines of raider and captive, broker and commodity, master and slave, kin and stranger. The capaciousness of these words African people was as dangerous as it was promising. No doubt, for the priest, the longing that resided within them concerned what we might become together or the possibility of solidarity, which would enable us to defeat the enemy again, except that they described the enemy too.

The enslaved knew that freedom had to be taken; it was not the kind of thing that could ever be given to you. The kind of freedom that could be given to you could just as easily be taken back. Freedom is the kind of thing that required you to leave your bones on the hills at Brimsbay, or to burn the cane fields, or to live in a garret for seven years, or to stage a general strike, or to create a new republic. It is won and lost, again and again. It is a glimpse of possibility, an opening, a solicitation without any guarantee of duration before it flickers and then is extinguished.

The story of slavery fabricated for African Americans had nothing to do with the present struggles of most Ghanaians. What each community made of slavery and how they understood it provided little ground for solidarity. African Americans wanted to regain their African patrimony and to escape racism in the United States. Ghanaians wanted an escape from the impoverishment of the present, and the road to freedom, which they most often imagined, was migration to the United States. African Americans entertained fantasies of return and Ghanaians of departure.

From where we each were standing, we did not see the same past, nor did we share a common vision of the Promised Land. The ghost of slavery was being conjured to very different ends.

It is only when you are stranded in a hostile country that you need a romance of origins; it is only when you lose your mother that she becomes a myth; it is only when you fear the dislocation of the new that the old ways become precious, imperiled, and what your great-great-grandchildren will one day wistfully describe as African.

first read as a graduate student: We must have the courage to invent the future. All that comes from man's imagination is realizable," or sobered by them: "We are backed up against the wall in our destitution like bald and mangy dogs whose lamentations and cries disturb the quiet peace of the manufacturers and merchants of misery." On the anniversary of Sankara's assassination, I didn't respect his memory with a moment of si- lence or think of the makeshift grave in which his body had been dumped or shed a tear because another path to Utopia had been blocked. These grand visions and beautiful promises were the ruins of another age and as remote and distant from my present as the dream of forty acres and a mule. So I hurried up Osu Road as blind to the future Sankara had envi- sioned as every other beleaguered pedestrian.

pendence as everyone else in Accra. I passed through Thomas Sankara Circle every afternoon on the way home, oblivious to his dream of erad- icating poverty, hunger, and illiteracy and unaware of the ten million trees he intended to plant in the sahel to contain the spread of the desert, mend the ravages of slavery and colonialism, and right the balance among hu- mans, nature, and society. I was not bolstered by his words, which I had

If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were en- trenched centuries ago.