The slaves are in dungeons underneath the castle, awaiting transit to the Americas and the Caribbean via the Middle Passage. A young girl, Effia Otcher, is sold by her father to a British slavetrader named James – as a bride, not as a slave – and taken to live with him in Cape Coast Castle, a fort overlooking the sea. The tale begins in the late 18th century in an Asante village, part of the Gold Coast which eventually became Ghana. It is into the murky waters of this same well that first-time Ghanaian-American novelist Yaa Gyasi delved for the creation of Homegoing, a hugely empathic, unflinching portrayal of west Africa’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. What if, say, blacks had enslaved whites, asked Bernardine Evaristo in Blonde Roots. What of the slaves who killed their children in order to set them free, asked Toni Morrison in Beloved. What of the black slave owners of Virginia, asked Edward P Jones in The Known World. As such it has provided an endless reserve of material for storytellers, a bottomless well of tragic arcs, epic betrayals, unexpected dimensions and uncharted secrets. S lavery is an open wound: it will never heal.
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