Author’s African trek leads to identity crisis

Kam Williams

“If in the era of the [slave] trade the enslaved had been forced to forget mother, now their descendants were being encouraged to do the impossible and reclaim her … Under the stewardship of Shell Oil, USAID, and a consortium of North American universities, the Ghanaian Ministry of Tourism and the Museum and Monuments Board crafted a story for the ten thousand black tourists who visited the country every year hungering for knowledge of slave ancestors. Tourism provided a ready response with a tale of the Atlantic slave trade as a distinctly African-American story … Local cottage industries in slave route tourism began sprouting up all over Ghana … Every town or village had an atrocity to promote — a mass grave, an auction block, a slave river, a massacre. It was Ghana’s equivalent to a fried chicken franchise.

“Few of the tour operators, docents, and guides put any stock in the potted history of the ‘white man’s barbarism’ and the ‘crimes against humanity’ that they marketed to black tourists or believed the Atlantic trade had anything to do with them. They only hoped that slavery would help make them prosperous.”

— Excerpted from Chapter Eight, “Lose Your Mother”

When Saidiya Hartman was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, she decided to spend 1997 in Ghana studying the slave trade. As an African American, she expected to be welcomed as a long-lost sister upon her arrival on the continent, but instead was greeted only by the slur “obruni” (meaning “white foreigner”) everywhere she went.

Even more disturbing to Hartman than the ostracizing appellation was the attitude of the indigenous people, as the natives either “teased me about searching for my roots” or “responded with indifference to all my talk of slavery” because “they were used to Americans with identity problems.” They even made fun of her having adopted the Swahili name Saidiya.

Needless to say, this dismissive treatment was a bitter pill to swallow, contrasting profoundly with what Hartman had anticipated encountering on the continent. But she stuck it out for the full year, conducting exhaustive, emotionally draining field research. She trekked across the country, visiting all sorts of sites related to Ghana’s history with slavery, from dungeons, prisons and pens to forts, castles and auction blocks.

The upshot of her efforts is “Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route,” an enigmatic memoir as much about exorcising demons borne of delusion as it is about a futile search for traces of ancestors nowhere to be found. And at every turn Hartman, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, found herself a lonely outsider dealing with the anguish stirred up by the ghosts of slavery she sensed all around her.

The hard cold truth she discovered was that no one in Africa cared about her profound sadness and emptiness when it came to unearthing her past. Her hosts merely saw her obsession with the slave trade as something to be exploited. In fact, they thought of it as silly, since most in Ghana now want to migrate to America.

Thus, as suggested by the book’s title, Hartman seems to be saying that it is foolish for other black Americans to think fondly about Africa as their motherland because of all the unsympathetic hustlers there who see the returning descendants of slaves not as brothers and sisters, but as relatively rich marks to be exploited for their naïveté.

Written in a very engaging fashion, Hartman’s thought-provoking and ultimately heartbreaking narrative is a clarion call for a serious attitude readjustment. If embraced, it is likely to lead to an overhaul in Pan-Africanist thinking, for the fundamental question raised by “Lose Your Mother” is whether African Americans are more African than American, or vice versa. Hartman provides plenty of anecdotal evidence to support her thesis: that the latter just might be the answer.