Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) — Ghana, once the place where countless Africans captured into slavery took their last look at their homeland, became the cradle of the African independence movement and Pan-Africanism in the 20th century.

On 13 May 2024, Ghana’s capital, Accra, witnessed an emotional homecoming: iconic American musician Stevie Wonder received a certificate of Ghanaian citizenship from President Nana Akufo-Addo, marking a deeply personal milestone in his life on his 74th birthday.

For Wonder, Ghana symbolizes ancestral roots. “When I first came here, I felt its essence, as if I had been here before. I realized that this is where I need to be,” he said.

In 1619, the first documented group of African slaves was brought to the British colony of Virginia, marking the beginning of the infamous transatlantic slave trade that forced millions to leave their homelands. Four centuries later, the government of Ghana declared 2019 the Year of Return, inviting descendants of enslaved Africans to return to their roots.

Ghana, from which countless abducted Africans were shipped to America, also became the birthplace of the African independence movement and Pan-Africanism in the 20th century.

TRACES OF A DARK PAST

“We see here very beautiful architecture,” says Robert Morgan Mensah, who has worked as a guide at Cape Coast Castle for 18 years. “But the sad story behind this reminds us of what happened during the transatlantic slave trade.”

The cannons on the walls of Cape Coast Castle, located on the coast of Ghana’s Central Region, face the Atlantic Ocean. According to Mensah, Europeans built more than 60 castles along the West African coast, including over 40 in Ghana, to facilitate the transatlantic slave trade.

When Europeans arrived in the Gulf of Guinea in the mid-15th century, they named local regions after the goods they sought. Ghana became known as the “Gold Coast,” Ivory Coast as the “Ivory Coast,” and parts of present-day Togo, Benin, and Nigeria were termed the “Slave Coast.”

In pursuit of staggering profits, Europeans colonized America and the Caribbean, seizing land and resources while simultaneously decimating indigenous populations. Faced with an acute labor shortage, they turned their attention to Africa. Encouraged by their governments, European traders engaged in large-scale slave trading, which Karl Marx described as “the trade in human flesh.”

The so-called triangular trade connected Europe, Africa, and America. Slave traders sailed from Europe to West Africa with goods such as wine, textiles, and weapons, then transported captured Africans across the Atlantic. The harrowing journey lasted from six to ten weeks. In America, slaves were sold to plantation and mine owners, while traders returned to Europe with large shipments of agricultural products and minerals.

Cape Coast Castle, one of West Africa’s largest fortifications, was originally built by the Swedes and later seized by the English. Africans captured from the interior were kept in dungeons for weeks or months awaiting slave ships. According to Mensah, each of the five dark, cramped dungeons housed between 150 and 200 shackled individuals.

“The dungeons were filled with filth, and diseases spread rapidly,” he says. “Many died here; their bodies were thrown into the sea along with those who had not yet broken.”

Above the dungeons stood a small church. “They must have heard the cries of the slaves while singing hymns,” Mensah notes, pointing out that both slaves and their captors lived and prayed within the same walls.

American John Randolph Spears detailed the suffering aboard slave ships in his book “American Slavery: The History of Its Rise, Growth, and Abolition,” where slaves were shackled in pairs and forced to lie flat or on their sides in stifling conditions.

Poor living conditions and long voyages led to numerous deaths, with an average of 15 percent of slaves perishing on each ship. When resources ran low, traders would throw the weakest overboard and later claim insurance compensation for “lost cargo.”

Missouri Sherman-Peters, the permanent representative of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to the UN, notes that between 12 and 20 million Africans were enslaved over 400 years.

‘‘WORKING TO DEATH ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ATLANTIC’’

Approximately 450 kilometers east of Cape Coast Castle, on Benin’s beach, stands another chilling monument — the “Door of No Return.” It is dedicated to the Africans who were forcibly taken from the “Slave Coast” to America.

“One cannon could be exchanged for 15 enslaved men or 21 enslaved women,” says 20-year-old Beninese guide Espero de Souza, a descendant of the notorious slave trader Francisco Félix de Souza.

Slaves were auctioned in the Chacha Square — the center of the brutal trade overseen by the young guide’s ancestor.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to land in Brazil in the early 16th century, lured by the promise of wealth. They established sugar plantations, but the indigenous population, decimated by forced labor and disease, was insufficient. Plantation owners then turned to African slaves, believed to be more resistant to diseases and easier to control.

By 1630, around 170,000 African slaves had been transported to Brazil, making sugarcane a crop inextricably linked to slavery. As historian Wolfgang Leonhard noted, by 1638, enslaved Africans comprised 100 percent of the workforce on sugar plantations.

In her book “Captives as Commodities: The Transatlantic Slave Trade,” American researcher Lisa Lindsay describes the harsh realities of life on plantations. Owners calculated the cost of labor and found it more profitable to work slaves to death and then replace them rather than provide better living conditions.

By the 19th century, the Valongo Wharf, in the Rio de Janeiro port area, became the main entry point for African slaves into Brazil. Over twenty years, it received millions of enslaved people. The area around the port, known as “Little Africa,” became a center of Afro-Brazilian culture and the birthplace of samba dance.

Samba is a cultural symbol of Brazil. The name of the dance is believed to originate from the West African language Kimbundu, where “semba” means “energetic dance.” One version holds that slave traders forced enslaved Africans to dance on deck during voyages to maintain their agility and make them more desirable in the market upon arrival.

‘‘A SINISTER START TO CAPITALIST PRODUCTION’’

In 1814, a European traveler recorded his impressions of a city filled with towering factories, each with huge chimneys belching black smoke into the sky. This was British Manchester.

In the early 18th century, Manchester was a small town with a population of only 10,000. By the mid-19th century, it had become a vital center of Britain’s textile industry, with hundreds of cotton mills exporting products worldwide.

Historian Eric Williams, the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, articulated the profound influence of the slave trade on Western industrialization: “It was this immense dependency on triangular trade that created Manchester.” He described the British Empire as “an impressive structure built on American trade and naval power atop an African foundation.”

Liverpool, once a small fishing village, thrived as a major slave trade port and later became an industrial city. In October 1699, the first documented British slave ship set sail from Liverpool to the Caribbean, carrying 220 African captives. Over the 18th century, approximately 1.5 million Africans were transported on Liverpool slave ships.

Cities like London, Bristol, Nantes, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, and Zeeland also prospered from the brutal slave trade. Profits from this inhumane activity fueled the growth of manufacturing and transport industries throughout Europe.

Karl Marx, in his seminal work “Capital: Critique of Political Economy,” identified the enslavement and exploitation of indigenous peoples of America, the plundering of India, and the transformation of Africa into a site of commercial hunting for human lives as defining moments in the early stages of capitalist production. These events were crucial to the initial accumulation of capital.

Slave traders, often starting with modest capital, reaped incredible profits, sometimes tenfold. One captain recorded a net profit of over $40,000 for a single voyage in 1827, with initial costs under $4,000.

The slave trade also stimulated the growth of Europe’s financial and insurance sectors. Banks and insurance companies eagerly opened ventures related to slavery, and Western traders who amassed fortunes from enslavement became bankers, investing their “blood money” into new enterprises.

A study conducted as part of University College London’s “Legacy of British Slavery” project revealed that a significant portion of today’s wealth in the UK is linked to slavery. Institutions like Barclays Bank and Lloyds Bank built their fortunes on the slave trade, underscoring London’s transformation into a global financial center.

In the United States, plantation owners profited immensely from the forced labor of African slaves, especially in cotton production. As historian Sven Beckert noted in his book “Empire of Cotton,” by the mid-19th century, cotton from slave states accounted for more than half of all American exports. The four-century-long transatlantic slave trade brought vast riches to Western countries and played a crucial role in capital accumulation, reflecting the harsh reality of the globalization process dominated by these nations.

MOTIVATION FOR THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY

While studying at Oxford University in 1938, E. Williams made a revolutionary statement in his pamphlet "Capitalism and Slavery," arguing that the abolition of slavery in the West was driven not by moral awakening but by economic interests and strategic needs.

This argument sparked a stir in academic circles, challenging the prevailing belief that humanitarianism was the primary force behind the abolitionist movement. E. Williams’s manuscript was initially rejected by British publisher Frederick Warburg as "contradictory to English tradition."

E. Williams, who later became the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, demonstrated that the wealth generated by enslaved people fueled the Industrial Revolution and that, as capitalism developed, slavery became an impediment to free trade and further capitalist expansion.

Historian Yaw Anokye Frimpong from Ghana explained that the decline in demand for slave labor was primarily driven by technological progress. As machines in industrialized countries began to operate around the clock, the need for manual labor decreased, turning enslaved individuals, constrained in both efficiency and working hours, into an economic burden.

According to the historian, the end of slavery was not a sudden moral revelation but rather the result of various factors, including shifts in production structures, moral debates, and legal issues.

Furthermore, when slave traders and owners were compelled to relinquish their "property," they received substantial compensation. For example, the ancestors of former British Prime Minister David Cameron received a significant sum following the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.

However, millions of enslaved Africans received nothing for their centuries of suffering.

As the Industrial Revolution progressed, Western capitalists, gaining new opportunities, sought cheaper raw materials and expanded markets. Colonial plantations, relying on slave labor, monopolized raw material supplies. Prolonged forced labor and soil depletion led to decreased productivity and rising costs, prompting emerging capitalists to seek the dismantling of the plantation economy dependent on slavery.

At the same time, Africans continued to resist slavery. In the late 18th century, inspired by the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, large-scale uprisings erupted, particularly the Haitian Revolution. These revolts increased the costs of maintaining slavery.

In 1807, the British Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, followed by similar legislation in other European countries. However, the lucrative trade continued to exist "underground." To evade fines, slave traders sometimes tied stones to their captives and threw them overboard when pursued at sea. The transatlantic slave trade effectively ceased only by the late 19th century.

But the suffering in Africa was far from over. After the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, Western powers intensified their scramble for Africa, leading to the continent’s partition. This reckless division left Africa with a legacy of poverty and underdevelopment that persists today.

"Initially, we had our own writing and ways of communication. Slavery led to the loss of many young Africans and caused immense damage to Africa’s civilizational heritage and social development," emphasized Y. A. Frimpong.

He also noted that the establishment of artificial borders during colonization further fragmented African unity, a division that still exists in countries like Ghana.

"Africa MUST UNITE"

"I am an African not because I was born in Africa, but because Africa was born in me," reads the quote from pan-Africanism leader Kwame Nkrumah, displayed in a memorial park dedicated to him in Accra.

Ghana proclaimed its independence on March 6, 1957, becoming the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to free itself from Western colonial rule. "Our independence means nothing unless it is linked to the full liberation of the African continent," declared K. Nkrumah on that historic day.

K. Nkrumah, celebrated as the "Father of Ghana," was a fervent advocate of pan-Africanism. In his book "Africa Must Unite," he called for the unification of all African nations to achieve true independence and prosperity.

Pan-Africanism resonated with the descendants of enslaved Africans throughout the diaspora. The first Pan-African Conference, held in London in 1900, brought together delegates from the U.S., the West Indies, and Africa to discuss the global situation of Black people and demand self-governance for African and Caribbean colonies.

One year after Ghana’s independence, the first Conference of Independent African States took place in Accra in April 1958, laying the foundation for what would later become the Organization of African Unity (OAU).

"Ghana’s struggle for independence was not just the liberation of one country but the liberation of the entire continent from colonial domination and the restoration of African unity," noted Y. A. Frimpong. "Today, African countries strive to overcome the historical legacy and build a united, prosperous future."

Founded in 1963, the OAU embodied the pan-Africanist ideal, playing a crucial role in Africa’s decolonization and mediating interstate conflicts. In 2002, the African Union (AU) succeeded the OAU, marking a new chapter in Africa’s pursuit of self-determination and development.

On August 1, 1998, the remains of two enslaved Africans passed through the "Gates of No Return" at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, returning to their homeland. This symbolic act transformed the "Gates of No Return" into the "Gates of Return," ushering in a new era of remembrance, reconciliation, and solidarity.

At a joint meeting in Accra in November 2023, representatives of the AU and Caribbean Community (CARICOM) agreed to establish a global reparations fund. This initiative aims for official apologies and reparations from European countries for the atrocities of slavery.

Speaking at the conference, Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo emphasized that while no amount of money can restore the damage caused by the transatlantic slave trade, the issue of reparations is one that the world must address and can no longer ignore.

R. M. Mensah, a tour guide from Ghana, stressed that while people will move forward, they must never forget history. It is crucial to preserve culture and values and allow them to guide the future so that the tragedies of the past do not repeat, he added.

Indeed, the African people have never forgotten the atrocities of the past. As the Global South becomes increasingly active, the African people, as part of it, are becoming more confident and capable of fighting for the justice and rights they deserve.