; ; ; Ghana Leading Way in Righting Wrongs of Complicity in Slave Trade

As you hear the angry sound of the ocean heaving waves against the shore, Ghana’s`Project Joseph' campaign is hoping to attract more Black visitors with tours that show how Africans aided European slavers.As Ghana prepares for nextyear's 50th anniversary of gaining its independence— the first country in sub-Saharan colonial Africa to do so — it is launching a major tourism campaign aimed at blacks scattered across the globe by the slave trade.American slave merchants carried off millions of people,packed tightly in rickety ships.The West African countrywas as ‘guilty’ - for aiding and a betting.‘Project Joseph’ is an invitation to Black people who trace their history to the slave trade to reconnect with the land of their ancestors.

And it comes with an apology— not from the Western countries usually associated with slave masters, but from Ghanaians themselves.Of the project Emmanuel Hagan, Director of Research and Statistics at Ghana's Ministry of Tourism and Diasporean Relations says:"The reason we wanted to do some formal thing is that we want — even if it's just for the surface of it, for the cosmetic of it — to be seen to be saying,

`Sorry to those who feel very strongly, and who we believe have distorted history, because they get the impression that it was people here who just took them and sold them.'It's something we have to look straight in the face and try to address because it exists. So,we will want to say something went wrong, people made mistakes, but we are sorry for whatever happened."UNESCO, the United Nations'culture and education agency, estimates that 17million people were forced to leave western Africa in wooden ships bound for the Americas.

Millions more died anonymously, far from home and without proper burial,during the brutal overland march to reach the slave trading forts like Elmina Castle, where blacks were kept shackled in dungeons,then branded with hot iron rods before being packed like"pieces of ebony" into waiting ships.The fact that Africans complicit in the slave trade is mostly ignored, but Ghana has never shied away from it.