1. "For almost 150 years, Ghana, on Africa’s west coast, was the center of the British slave trade."

2. "Approximately 10 million enslaved people were transported in the transatlantic slave trade, at rates of up to 100,000 persons per year."

3. "The Atlantic Slave Trade was likely the most costly in human life of all long-distance global migrations."

4. "The Middle Passage was dangerous and horrific. The sexes were separated; men, women, and children were kept naked, packed close together; and the men were chained for long periods. About 12 percent of those who embarked did not survive the voyage."

5. "In an 1845 account of his visit to the Gold Coast, as Ghana was then known, U.S. Navy officer Horatio Bridge noted that “all of the Europeans have native wives,” meaning that interracial marriages between European men and African women were common."

6. “These marriages produced prominent trading families who were important to the economic and political history of the coastal areas,” Ray said. “But as of the late 1800s, when Britain finally decided to formally colonize the Gold Coast, these relationships were increasingly frowned upon.”

7. "itially Europe’s main interest in the country was as a source of gold, a commodity that was readily available on the coast in exchange for such European exports as cloth, hardware, beads, metals, spirits, arms, and ammunition."

8. "However, trade declined under the new regime, which was averse to assuming formal control over the territory influenced from the forts, and in the 1860s, as a result of this British reticence and of the growth, from the 1820s onward, of Christian missionary education, the Fante states attempted to organize a European-style confederacy independent of British and Asante control. "

9. "'Ghana'' means ''king of gold.'

10. "1800: Osei Bonsu ascends the Asante throne."

    
    

The slave trade had many important impacts on my character and their life as James' whole family profited off of it and he grew up around it. The slave trade caused James to isolate himself from his family and move away to a small village because of how terrible and inhumane the slaves were treated just below his feet. As well as this we can see that there were many interracial marriages throughout the story which relates to many of what the articles were saying.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Ghana/Contact-with-Europe-and-its-effects

https://now.fordham.edu/inside-fordham/scholar-studies-interracial-relationships-in-colonial-ghana/

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-resources/historical-context-facts-about-slave-trade-and-slavery

https://www.tracingcenter.org/resources/background/ghana-and-the-slave-trade/

The chapter shifts into about a year later where James is married unhappily to Amma and their relationship appears to be rocky. She wants to have kids, but James doesn't like her so his body refuses to giving her kids. She forces him to go to the apothecary to get herbs in an attempt to fix him. While there James realizes that this power isn't worth fighting for and that he'd rather live a happy life with Akosua. The universes final sign that James should go and live a life with Akosua is when his grandmother Effia tells him to go for it and be free. James travels to Efutu to pick up a job as a doctors assistant, and after his first month there, the Asante Army attacks causing James to nearly die from the fighting. One of the soldiers then finds him and recognizes him as the Asante Kings' grandson, and James pleads him to tell everyone that he is dead. The chapter ends with James seeing Aoksua still waiting for him to build their small and peaceful village like they'd always dreamed.