CLCS 316T Transatlantic Slave Trade: Ghana
Dozens of castles and forts built by Europeans as trading posts between 1481 and 1786 dot the Western coast of Ghana. They were used to hold enslaved Africans before they were shipped to the Caribbean or the Southern United States in what is known today as the transatlantic slave trade, or the triangular trade. The triangular trade describes different configurations of three-way Atlantic trading systems between the Americas, Africa and Europe that allowed traders to exchange their goods from Europe or the Americas for human cargo in Africa before embarking on the so-called Middle Passage and slave markets in the new world. Under British colonial rule, Ghana evolved into the center of the transatlantic slave trade and remnants of it remain in architectural structures such as the castles and forts, different forms of physical resistance built by villages to defend against the slavers and in artefacts, literary accounts, music, and art.
In the pre-travel portion of this course, we will explore the history, economics and global impact of the transatlantic slave trade alongside the rise of a pervasive and racialist ideology that legitimized the transformation of humans into commodities. In Ghana, we will trace the legacy of the slave trade and its memorialization in the architectural remnants of the castles, in museum exhibits, cultural narratives and global initiatives such as the UNESCO Slave Route Project. In the final part, we will grapple with questions of memory and memorialization, cross-cultural conceptions of enslavement, systemic economic inequalities, and the current debate around reparations.