Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route

The phrase “lose your mother” refers to the practice of instructing newly enslaved people to let go of the past, to forget who they are. “In every slave society, slave owners attempted to eradicate the slave’s memory, that is, to erase all the evidence of an existence before slavery” (155). The purpose was to render captives docile and to keep them from desiring escape or revenge:

A slave without a past had no life to revenge. No time was wasted yearning for home, no recollections of a distant country slowed her down as she tilled the soil, no image of her mother came to mind when she looked into the face of her child (155).

Donkor, the Ghanaian word for slave, itself implies valuelessness. In essence, enslaved people are “the living dead” (157). They have ceased to exist and have no past that provides them an identity, no link to ancestors or tribe. They might as well not exist. The word underscores the beliefs that allowed aristocratic elites to enslave fellow Africans of lower social status.

Even as modern Ghana wishes to ignore its slave past, it actively encourages African Americans to come “home” and spend their tourist dollars. The government promotes slavery tourism—but the need for money only highlights the fact that abolition and decolonization have not truly succeeded.