Aminah speaks Gurma but also learns a little Twi, the language of the Asante, from her first captor, Wofa Sarpong Wurche is Gonja. It was home to Mossis, Yorubas, Hausas, Dioulas, Dagombas.” Hausa was the lingua franca, the language of the caravans that wound their way across the desert. ![]() But to Wurche, Salaga was like the soups her grandmother often cooked, bubbling with meat and fish of all types. “ Everybody else was welcome to stay in Salaga. Salaga was multilingual and multicultural. One of the many things that makes this book fascinating for readers is the variety of languages and cultures. The relationship between the two women is complex and multifaceted, an exploration of bondage, their roles in the societies they live in, physical attraction and forgiveness. In my research, I kept coming across the word ‘benign’ used with respect to slavery in Africa.” Yet, Aminah’s family and her home village are destroyed by slavery, and although Wurche is troubled by the concept of owning another human being, other reasons prompt her to buy Aminah in the market at Salaga. A late uncle of mine guided me through its slave market, now turned into a lorry station we visited its ponds where slaves were washed before they were sent to be auctioned off in the market.” Internal slavery had begun “centuries before the first Europeans set foot on African shores and continues today.” By the late 1880s, “slavery – both internal and transatlantic – had been legally abolished however, as the book shows, it was still a thriving business. Even as a child in school in Ghana, I learned mostly about transatlantic slavery, less so about trans-Saharan slavery, but not a word on internal slavery.” Attah writes: “I first visited Salaga in 2012. Writing this book was a chance for her to finally speak through me.” The internal slave trade of Salaga is well documented, but it is “an aspect of African history that I think is not talked about enough. He only knew that she could have come from the region of Mali, Burkina Faso, or Niger, and that she was beautiful. ![]() ![]() It was a time that saw civil war between the three royal families of Salaga, a notorious slave-trading centre in Ghana, but also the growing influence of the British, French, and Germans colonisers, particularly after the British defeated the Asante and exiled the Asantehene in 1896.Īttah was inspired to write the story when her father mentioned that “his grandmother’s mother was called the slave. The Hundred Wells of Salaga (Other, 2019) by Ayesha Harruna Attah is a highly evocative novel set during the period immediately before and during the war in Salaga in 1892 and its subjugation to the German forces in 1897. The Gurma word “licabili” “ was the belief that whatever path you took in life, it would take you where it was supposed to take you.” Aminah and Wurche are from very different social backgrounds – the former a slave, the latter a royal princess – but both face challenges to find their path through life and their agency as women. Two women’s struggle for agency in precolonial Ghana An Uncomfortable Truth: Ayesha Harruna Attah’s The Hundred Wells of Salaga
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