Funmi Olutoye

Africans fully participated in the slave trade at Elmina, Ghana. Trade records from the Dutch West India Company, Royal African Company, and Danish ledgers from Elmina, Cape Coast show African rulers and merchants negotiating prices, quantities, and terms with European factors. African brokers and rulers controlled who could trade and where. African-authored testimony, for example, Ottobah Cugoano, a Fante man enslaved around 1770, wrote that he was kidnapped by fellow Africans and sold into slavery. In fact the Asante expansion in modern-day Ghana involved conquering neighbours like Denkyira, Akyem, and Gonja. The prisoners taken in those wars- by Africans- supplied both the coastal trade and domestic labour. The fort archaeology from excavations at Elmina, Cape Coast, and inland Asante sites back all of this up. On your logic, the government of Ghana should be apologising for their involvement in slavery.