41 pages • 1 hour read
Saidiya V. HartmanLose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Saidiya Hartman
Saidiya Hartman recounts her journey to Ghana to research a project on slavery. She has a strong affinity for Ghanaians because they are her ancestors. At the same time, she feels increasingly alienated from them as she finds that many people in Ghana have little sympathy for the descendants of enslaved people. She begins the project with the hope of finding and connecting with her origins and celebrating the stories of descendants of enslaved people. She ends disappointed. She discovers that slavery is predicated on erasing the lives and histories of those who are enslaved and that recovering those histories in the present is difficult in ways she had not imagined. Her experience of slavery and racism as an African American is starkly different from the experiences of today’s Ghanaians. She concludes that she is an orphan—that enslavement made orphans of her ancestors and that this severing from the past cannot be undone. The enslaved person and all that person’s descendants dream of returning home, but Africa is not, in fact, “home.” The project leaves her still dreaming of a world of equality and freedom for Black people everywhere, but she is more convinced than ever that building this world will require radical structural change.
Mary Ellen Ray & John Ray
This African American married couple came to Ghana in the 1960s and 1970s with a dream of finding a world of greater equality. They were disappointed by what they found, and John Ray cautions Hartman not to be too hopeful. He plays the part of hard-truth-teller in Hartman’s narrative. He has seen many naive Americans troubled by what they find in Ghana. In the past, Ghanaians mistreated one another by engaging in slavery and by cooperating with the European colonial powers; today, they still mistreat one another, he insists. John Ray’s understanding of Ghanaian politics and history informs and complicates Hartman’s own. Many Black Americans have imagined that all Africans share a common victimhood and that they will thus celebrate the return of those lost to the slave trade. This idealization elides the profound power imbalances present in West African societies. Some still practice modern forms of slavery, he tells her, while others perpetuate the harms of slavery by denying their existence.
Kwame Nkrumah
Kwame Nkrumah led the liberation movement that brought independence to Ghana in 1957. As the first president of the newly independent Ghana, Nkrumah sought to unite a country comprised of many, often warring ethnic groups. His Avoidance of Discrimination Act, signed into law in the same year that Ghana gained its independence, banned political parties based on regional or tribal identities. Nkrumah was a proponent of socialism and pan-Africanism, and his goal was to build a unified and equitable society in Ghana, one which would serve as an example to the world, showing that African states could be independent, democratic, and stable. His Convention People’s Party (CCP) built an effective national education system and modernized Ghana’s infrastructure.
In the 1960s, Nkrumah’s efforts to unify a fractious country led increasingly to accusations that he was suppressing his opposition. A 1964 constitutional amendment effectively made Ghana a one-party state, with Nkrumah appointing himself president for life. In 1966, he was overthrown by a military coup and exiled from the country. He died of an unknown illness in Bucharest, Romania in 1972. Nkrumah represents the first wave of post-colonial liberation leaders who sought to create ideal egalitarian societies, but military despots who enriched themselves at the expense of the population shattered their dreams. Hartman cites him positively as an example of what could still be in Ghana and elsewhere.
William Wilberforce
Wilberforce was a British member of parliament in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He played a leading role in the movement to end Great Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Wilberforce introduced bills to abolish the slave trade many times between 1791 and 1806—when, after more than a decade of relentless advocacy, one such bill finally passed. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman recounts how Wilberforce used the prosecution of a slave ship captain for the torture and murder of an enslaved girl to help build a case for the abolition of the slave trade.
