Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route is a nonfiction work in which US literature scholar Saidiya Hartman journeys to Ghana to explore the history of slavery and her ancestry. The book is unique because it is an admission of failure as much as a description of her findings. She concludes that, as an African American, one cannot return to one’s roots because slavery has erased them.

Content Warning: The source text and study guide discuss slavery, racism, racist violence, and sexual violence.

Hartman emphasizes that the colonial trade in enslaved people began as a product of internal power dynamics combined with externally imposed colonialist imperatives. Powerful warrior groups within West Africa had been preying on weaker neighbors and enslaving many of them centuries before European colonists arrived. Under colonialism, slavery became a global economic activity: The Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British arrived in Africa and claimed indigenous lands and peoples for themselves. By the end of the 17th century, the Atlantic slave trade, the “seed” of European capitalism that provided free labor and ample wealth, was thriving—and it endured until the 19th century. Its legacy is the large population of descendants of enslaved Africans who live in the Americas and Europe today.

During the 1950s and 1960s, rebellions against European colonialism in Africa and elsewhere led many descendants of enslaved people to dream of returning to Africa to find the freedom denied them in the US and Europe. Initially, many found liberation in Ghana. Military despots killed that dream, however; a dictatorship friendly to a neocolonial economic system throttled the socialist aspiration for liberation and the equality proclaimed by Ghanaian leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah.

As a result, in Ghana, Hartman discovers a world of inequality and hardship where many people do not share her desire to explore the history of slavery. In Hartman’s view, many of today’s Ghanaians are focused on survival and have neither the time nor the inclination to think about the most painful aspects of their collective past. Ashamed of their ancestors’ role in selling other Africans to Europeans, some Ghanaians live in denial about their nation’s history. Hartman’s journey begins with hope, but people treat her as an outsider and a stranger; Hartman finds that many Africans simply have no fellow feeling for her as an African American. In many cases, they are descended from enslavers and proud of their ancestors, who were successful and wealthy. Hartman finds this attitude odd. Many Ghanaians, she argues, lament not their role in facilitating the slave trade but the fact that the wealth is now gone. Some even long for a return to colonialism, believing that life was better under European rule.

Meanwhile, Hartman’s fellow African American scholars are also skeptical about her desire to know the truth of slavery and to speak for those who were enslaved. They tell her that Ghana is still in many ways a slave society in that a few have the economic power to dominate others.

Physical places hold great significance for Hartman. For example, she ponders the meaning of a castle that once served as the Dutch slave depot and is now the seat of government; enslaved laborers were confined in its dungeons while they waited for ships to take them to the Americas. In the countryside, Hartman also finds abandoned settlements where once-vibrant communities died out when their inhabitants were captured and enslaved. Finally, she comes to a walled town that successfully defended itself against the enslavers.

It saddens Hartman that all the stories and songs she unearths celebrate the warrior class of enslavers rather than their victims. No one speaks for those who were enslaved, such as Hartman’s ancestors. She concludes that history encompasses both the reality of struggles endured and how that reality is remembered and reported.