The Throne of Zion

When I arrived in Ghana, my narrative of slavery was one of black victimhood and white violence. I didn’t know much of anything about the history, complexity, or semantics of slavery on the African side of the Atlantic. I knew about field slaves and house slaves and thought of them mainly as tied to American plantations, deep in the past. To my mind they were chattel without rights; commodities who could be bought, sold, and inherited; property who were not considered human; people whose children inherited their status in perpetuity. Until I read the book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, by Saidiya Hartman, I didn’t know the many words in Akan for “slave,” the particular shades of meaning for Ghana’s own peculiar institution. Akoa—“a subject, assistant, or vassal”; awowa—“a bondservant pawned for a relative’s debt”; akyere—“a peon enslaved as punishment for a crime”; domun—“a captive of war”; odonkor—“a person for sale in the market.” This was the book my eyes strained to read in the weak light of my hotel room. I hadn’t known that of these words, odonkor, closest to what we mean by “slave” in the West, was the only one colored by stigma and shame, a brand of dishonor that made the topic of slavery, as I understood it, utterly taboo to discuss with Ghanaians. And I wouldn’t know until later about the scope of contemporary slave traffic in Ghana—grand enough to land it on the Tier 2 Watch List of the U.S. State Department’s 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report, which opens:

Ghana is a source, transit, and destination country for children and women trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation. Trafficking within the country is more prevalent than transnational trafficking and the majority of victims are children. Both boys and girls are trafficked within Ghana for forced labor in agriculture and the fishing industry, for street hawking, forced begging by religious instructors, as porters, and possibly for forced kente weaving. Over 30,000 children are believed to be working as porters, or Kayaye, in Accra alone. Annually, the IOM [International Organization for Migration] reports numerous deaths of boys trafficked for hazardous forced labor in the Lake Volta fishing industry. Girls are trafficked within the country for domestic servitude and sexual exploitation. To a lesser extent, boys are also trafficked internally for sexual exploitation, primarily for sex tourism… In 2008, the UN reported that a form of ritual servitude called Trokosi, in which young girls are subjected to forced labor and sexual servitude, continues in at least 23 fetish...