LOSE YOUR MOTHER is wider and deeper than Alex Haley's landmark ROOTS, much less sentimental and incredibly smart. But the quality of insight in this book (and perhaps the integrity as well, the commitment to refuse easy answers and excuses, to seek the true truth without sparing oneself in any way, is not only a personal quality of the author but something of the spirit of the field) to me seems pretty strongly validating to the whole institution of academia and studying stuff deeply. Saidiya Hartman's words and thinking are unflinching, true, and beautiful, and only she could have written this extraordinary book. They arrived with what Maya Angelou described as a "terrible yearning to be accepted," to pitch in their lot with Ghanaians, and to undertake the hard labor of nation building. When Nkrumah explained that he was very thirsty, the waiter pointed to a spittoon and said, "You can drink there.

A. Philip Randolph, and Horace Mann (at the request of Nkrumah and against the expressed wishes of the U. As far as I could tell, not one taxi driver in Accra could find his way to African Liberation Square, but almost all knew the location of the U. Saidiya Hartman’s book is about, in part, having a lack of that, a lack of sense, and a lack of belonging. Pan-Africanism had yielded to the dashed hopes of neocolonialism and postcolonialism and African socialism (which Nkrumah defined as the traditional spirit of African humanism and communalism refashioned for the modern world), had been ambushed by the West and bankrupted by African dictators and kleptocrats, all of whom had made a travesty of independence. What better illustration of the degradation of gold than its capacity to transform persons into things; what better example of its offensive character than the excremental conditions of the barracoon; what better sign of its mutability than the "black gold" of the slave trade.

They came from the United States, the Caribbean, Brazil, and the United Kingdom, as well as other countries in Africa still fighting against colonialism and apartheid. The brutality of the past had been exorcised with the demise of colonialism—at least this was the position espoused by the new statesmen.

No one wanted for the necessities of life, no one lived off the labor of others, and no one bared his head or bent his knee before another. Mercenary soldiers, thieves, refugees, prostitutes, broke soldiers, corrupt policemen, and the desperate hard-pressed enough to try anything are out there on Osu Road too," John said. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. Many of the streets of Accra were lined with open sewers, and poor neighborhoods were often without toilet facilities, but this was more intense than usual. An entire people, the petition stated, were "not only unprotected by their government but the object of government inspired violence.Nor did I know then that Swahili was a language steeped in mercantilism and slave trading and disseminated through commercial relations among Arab, African, and Portuguese merchants.

African Americans crossed the Atlantic in droves to do something momentous—to participate in an international movement for freedom and democracy and to build a black nation. It reads like a cross between Bruce Chatwin and Toni Morrison, top-notch travel-writing and scintillating prose and soul.The vision of an African continental family or a sable race standing shoulder to shoulder was born by captives, exiles, and orphans and in the aftermath of the Atlantic slave trade.