Volume 54, Number 14 · September 27, 2007
What Was Africa to Them?
By Kwame Anthony Appiah
The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade
by William St Clair
BlueBridge, 282 pp., $24.95
Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005
by James T. Campbell
Penguin, 513 pp., $29.95; $17.00 (paper)
American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era
by Kevin K. Gaines
University of North Carolina Press, 342 pp., $34.95
Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in Africa and Beyond
by Ekow Eshun, with illustrations by Chris Ofili
Pantheon, 230 pp., $23.00
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
by Saidiya Hartman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 270 pp., $25.00
Fifty years ago, Britain's Gold Coast colony became the independent nation of Ghana. For the first time, a European colony in sub-Saharan Africa achieved full democratic self-government.[*] The moment was of special significance for the people of Africa's New World diaspora, as Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first prime minister and a graduate of Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania, knew very well. Four years earlier, in July 1953, speaking as prime minister in the colonial legislature to propose the 'Motion of Destiny' that set the terms for independence, Nkrumah had underlined the connection between African-Americans and his country's fate. 'Honourable Members,' he said.
Review, 5232 words
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