You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance - no matter how improved - as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children.

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor - it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape.

This seemed to be in direct conflict with the pride Ghanaians had in their own culture and precolonial history. I recall a song—my father’s favorite—by the great Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti called “Colonial Mentality.” Colonial mentality, as defined by Kuti, is the idea that people who have been colonized, marginalized, and enslaved feel themselves inferior to their colonizers based on the very fact of their colonization. He be say you be colonial man, Kuti sings in his beautifully rough voice, his Nigerian pidgin clear and defiant. You don be slave man before / Them don release you now / But you never release yourself.

It is difficult to speak in simple terms about Nkrumah’s legacy. He was freedom fighter and dictator; father of the nation and pillager in chief. He decried tribalism and jailed those who disagreed with him. He hated colonialism and loved the Queen of England—a photograph of himself with the Queen at her estate in Balmoral was one of his prized possessions. Those same tensions that existed in Nkrumah still shape the lives of many Ghanaians. The old way and new ways coexist. People pour libation to their ancestors and proudly sing the national anthem. Members of my family were jailed for opposing Kwame Nkrumah, but both my grandfather and father saw Nkrumah as the father of modern Africa.

I now interrupt myself with a small but crucial consideration, because now that I’ve said it several times, I realize that I am troubled by the title Slave Ship. It’s the word “slave”: a word which still strikes the ear like a lash. There are those who enslave others and there are those who are enslaved by others. But there’s no one whose essence or true description is “slave.” A person can be enslaved, can be trapped in the death-in-life known as slavery, but that is not who they are. It is something intolerable that is happening to them or that happened to them. For this reason I think that part of the original title is more accurate: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying.