Chapter 1
From the Middle Passage
to Middle Quarters, Jamaica
The Transformation of a Personal Journey
In southern Ghana along the stretch of land of the Atlantic
coast formerly known as the old Slave Coast, now known as
Eweland, on many a night the striking rhythms of the drums
can be heard from many miles away. They are so sure, so insistent
in telling their story. With the Ewe talking drum leading
the pack, stories of long ago are revealed one by one.
Yet we do not know the whole story. Here and on the other
side of the Atlantic, in fact wherever people of African descent
are to be found, there is a deafening silence on the subject of
slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. All that remains are fragments
which, like the scattered pieces of a broken vase, do not
represent the whole. Under the silence are palpable sighs of regret,
pain, sorrow, guilt, and shame.
Even before the publication in 1969 of Philip Curtins seminal
book, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, historians and others
have been engaged in debates and analyses of the eects of
the trade on African societies. In A Census, Curtin attempted
the first scientific study to determine the numbers of Africans
who were taken from the shores of Africa and brought to the
New World. W. E.B. DuBois was an early pioneer in this field, with The Negro in 1920 and later The Suppression of the African
Slave Trade, 16381870. More recently, other authors, including
the Nigerian Joseph Inikori in Forced Migration: The Impact of the
Export Slave Trade on African Societies (London, 1982), have also
participated in this debate. Also noteworthy are the works of
Paul Lovejoy, Patrick Manning, Michael Gomez, and Boubacar
Barry, who have made important contributions to the study of
slavery and the transatlantic trade.
The story of the trade, however, has rarely been told from
the perspective of those who suered the most. What remains to
be done is the placing of African voices of this era at the center
of any historical enterprise. No full and thorough analysis of African
recordsin particular oral recordshas been attempted.
Most historians have written about the trade using records of
European traders and American planters, with only marginal
references to oral history material. Yet European and American
records, while important and critical to the study of the slave
trade, do not su¤ciently illuminate the African view of the
trade as remembered by chiefs and others whose families were
profoundly aected.
One possible reason that such a project has not been undertaken
is because of the silence on the issue of slavery in Africa.
With the exception of slave narratives such as those from the
Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration
(WPA), over 2,300 accounts of history as told by former slaves
to mostly white interviewers from 1936 to 1938, this silence is
mirrored in African American, Caribbean, and South American
communities.2 This book focuses on the few stories that have
been remembered: the memories of the Anlo Ewe community,
residents of an area in southeastern Ghana once famously called
the old Slave Coast. Their memories of the slave tradein particular
of the nineteenth-century tradeare at the center of this
work. These oral histories are also a starting point for bridging
the gap between narratives in Africa and the Diaspora, in this way contributing to African Diaspora studies.3 In sum, the underlying
thesis of this project is the examination of the silence,
memory, and fragments of the history of slavery and the slave
trade as it pertains to both sides of the Atlantic.
Two key themes that emerge from this study are the questions
of agency in the Atlantic slave trade and the impact of the
trade on Anlo Ewe society and, by extension, other African societies.
Starting with the assertion that the two themes are interrelated,
I assess the impact of the trade in light of the various
roles played by both European and African traders. I closely
examine the transformations of the slave trade throughout the
centuries, culminating in its last phase, 185090.4 This period
coincides with the revival of the trade precipitated by the
tremendous demand of plantations in Cuba and Brazil. Moreover,
1850 marks the first serious attempt by the British, after
years of resistance from the Ewe community, to extend their
rule over Anlo territory by the purchase of slave forts from the
Danes. Finally, this last phase of trade was characterized by an
acute disruption in previous trading practices and operations
a change that had devastating eects on African social and political
institutions.
Integral to this study is my own personal history or position
vis-à-vis the silences in the history of slavery. As oral historian
Alessandro Portelli says, in oral history the narrator is now one
of the characters, and the telling of the story is part of the story
being told. 5 In other words, this kind of project requires a certain
amount of personal involvement. Growing up in Jamaica, I
was engulfed by this silence. Slavery and the slave trade were not
exactly taboo subjects, but they were not subjects that many Jamaicans
readily discussed. But in the midst of the prevailing
silence, there were intriguing whispers of the stories of our past.
In writing this book, I have been inspired by both personal and
professional stories that linger along the contours of my own
family history and our collective memory. Unlike Alex Haley in his groundbreaking Roots, however, I did not set out to trace
a linear history from Africa to the Caribbean. Though there
is great value in such research and much more of it needs to be
done, my primary aim was an academic enterprise that would
be a contribution to the study of the Atlantic slave trade much
like those of the authors mentioned above, with a concentration
on what could be learned from oral data.
At the same time, this enterprise admittedly comes from a
very personal motivation. I found that my positionas a native
of Jamaica, as a child of African descent whose history has been
profoundly aected by slavery and the slave tradewas not
something to hide under the false cover of objective research.
To explain why the oral stories of the Anlo Ewe community in
Ghana have consumed my eorts for almost fifteen years, I will
have to start with the story of my own family and my own origins
that which is known and that which I still wish to know.
My origins, as is the case with far too many people of African
descent in the Americas, are shrouded in mystery. Though
my ancestors were likely slaves, I do not know their names. I do
not know their port of embarkation in Africa, nor do I know
their port of entry in Jamaica. My family history does not begin
from the beginning as one would normally expect. Instead, it
largely centers around my grandfather, David Cowan Barnaby
(DCB) Ramsay. Born December 28, 1885, DCB Ramsay was a
teachers teacher and was said to have been a formidable man
in his day. Born to a visionary mother named Bethsheba and
David Sr., a farmer, in the rural village of Middle Quarters in
the parish of St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, DCB Ramsay was destined
from an early age to move beyond the confines of his little village.
When he was just a boyso the story goes in my family
Bethsheba looked beyond the small farms and the surrounding
hills of Middle Quarters to a school on the hill called Full
Neck and said, You see that school? You will teach there one
day.