Bringing home a complex history

Christopher Farai Charamba The Reader
As a student of history one period of the African past that has always intrigued me is the slave trade. At a decoloniality conference I attended a few months ago, one of the professors posited that we should stop using the term slave trade because Africa was not a continent of slaves. By calling it a slave trade and not the enslavement or kidnapping of people, it somewhat sanitises it; objectifies and dehumanises the African people, making them seem to be mere stock which was rounded up and traded off.

The history of how Africa was robbed of her people by Europeans, who sold them off to the plantations in the Americans in return for rum, sugar, tobacco and cotton is a harrowing one. The devastation that it caused to black people on the continent and the millions of Africans taken into slavery has lasting effects up until today.

In the historical novel “Homegoing” by Ghanian author Yaa Gyasi, she explores the history of the enslavement of African people and the effects that it had on black people in her home country Ghana and in their new home, America.

The story begins in the 18th century and follows the lineage of two half-sisters Effia and Esi, born in different villages in Ghana, who end up experiencing different fates as Effia is married off to an Englishman and Esi sold into slavery.

Gyasi then takes us through the history of the different descendants of these two women, both in Ghana and in America. She threads the story in two separate lines running parallel to each other, interchanging between Ghana and America.

In the early chapters of the book, on the Ghanaian side, Gyasi explores the history of the slave trade, how African chiefs collaborated with the English, capturing Africans from other tribes and selling them to the British for guns, cloth and other provisions.

Some of her characters battle with the reality of enslaving other Africans and also with being mixed race as they are descendants of the Englishman James Collins who married Effia.

One aspect that drew me to the Ghanaian thread of the novel was how division among the African people themselves contributed to the Europeans being able to conquer the land.

Following the abolishment of the slave trade, some of the descendants of Effia battle with how the British manage to wield control in Ghana. The story looks at how the desecration of Asante religion and culture played a role in the conquering of a people.

It juxtaposes Christianity with traditional African belief and how the former was used to stamp out and vilify the latter.

The American thread of the story looks at the life of Esi’s descendants from the time they reach America. It speaks to how the descendants almost immediately lose their African identity. It covers life on the plantations and the sacrifices that one would have to make to escape.

Included in this thread was the treatment of black people who were deemed to be free, it covers the history of the imprisonment of black people and exploitation in forced labour situations. The thread continues through time covering the segregation of black people and the affect that drugs in underprivileged areas had on them.

Each of the family members through whom Gyasi tells her story battles with issues of identity and belonging be it on the Ghanaian or American side. The author intertwines in this issues of feminism and the role that women played in raising and preserving the family particularly in the face of the oppression that black men were under, but also the absenteeism of men from their children’s lives.

Gyasi is able to bring the story full circle and show the link between modern independent Africa and America.

She explores how education, or rather the pursuit of it has served to elevate the status of black people both on the continent and broad and brought African and African Americans together.

The author cleverly captures the various nuances in the history of black Africans and deserves recognition for telling a complex past in such a creative way.

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