A Monument of Return – Slave River

A Monument of Return – Slave River

There is a brook that babbles innocently through the town of Assin Manso that holds the dark secrets of three Centuries’ of cruelty, suffering and enslavement. Donkor Nsu, popularly known as Slave River, is the place where captured slaves from the Northern part of Ghana had their last bath before being sent to the Cape Coast and Elmina Slave Forts to be transported to the Americas.

During the 1500s the seemingly insatiable market and substantial profits to be gained from the slave trade attracted European slave merchants to travel to the New World of West Africa to rip Africans from their homes and send them on ships to be sold in the US. Today, the Slave River, or Donkor Nsu, is a relic of Ghana’s slave route that many displaced African’s from the Americans, Caribbean, Europe return to in pilgrimage to wash their hands in the place where their suffering ancestors, chained and bound, were allowed to bath for the last time on African soil.

History seems to flow down the steady trickle of water and reside of the very rocks and trees in the landscape surrounding the river. You can almost smell the stench of sweat and the steady clinking of chains as the European slave masters allowed a line of Ghanaians, their metal shackles cutting harshly into their wrists, to stagger weakly down, the sloping river banks, to wash their aching, bruised feet from the long arduous walk across the steaming hot earth in the mercifully cool and pure elixir of life that flows down the banks of the Donkor Nsu river.

On the gates leading down to the river are series of murals painted on the wall that vividly depict the acts, that can only be described as pure evil, by the colonial Europeans. The shock that these images create is amplified by the fact that you are standing in the very spot where these terrible acts took place. The images show the selling of African slaves at the market that you have just walked through and perhaps bought a souvenir, or an image of the inhumane packing of normal African people into boats that ruthlessly took them far from their homeland and family in the name of money, or black African’s chained, bound and miserable as they stand in the wreckage of their life caused by the greed of the white European.

The return of displaced African descendents to this river has special symbol significance. The sight of a black African-American retracing the last steps of their ancestors and washing in the place that was supposed to mark the last time that their flesh and blood came into contact with natural African water is redemptive, cathartic and defiant against the very concept of the transatlantic slave trade. It is an image of rising African power as through the healing powers of time that have come into play since the abolition of the slave trade in 1834 and things begin to return to their natural order. The river flows on as missing sons and daughters slowly trickle home but the deep currents of hurt still run as raw and powerful as ever, gently caressing the smooth muddy banks – never to be forgotten.

It is this that makes visiting the Donkor Nua Slave River such a powerful, sombre but yet fascinating place to visit as a tourist. If you want to experience a place where you can almost hear the thumping, suffering hearts of the slaves that is so present in Ghanaian history makes a visit to the river a must during your time in Ghana.