Homegoing

Two half-sisters born in the eighteenth-century Gold Coast never meet, and the novel follows their descendants down parallel lines for two hundred and fifty years. One line stays in the Fante and Asante country of what is now Ghana, anchored on Cape Coast and its slave castle; the other is shipped across the Atlantic into American slavery and, generations later, the Great Migration north. The map centres on the Cape Coast Castle, where the two lines split, and runs inland to the Asante capital at Kumasi.

Effia and her line

A Fante village on the coast

Part One

The novel opens in a Fante village near the coast, where the elder of two half-sisters comes of age and is married off to a British officer stationed at the nearby slave fort. Her line will stay on the Gold Coast for the rest of the book. The village stands in for the many real Fante communities strung along this stretch of shore in the eighteenth century.

Part One, Effia

inferred The village where the first half-sister grows up is not a mapped place; it is a Fante settlement on the Central Region coast a short way from the castle. This marks a representative point on that shoreline west of Cape Coast.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗

Esi and her line

Cape Coast Castle

Part One

The castle is the hinge of the whole book. One half-sister lives in the airy governor's quarters above; the other, unknown to her, is held in the women's dungeon beneath the same stone floor before being sold and shipped across the Atlantic. It is a real slave fort, a departure point of the transatlantic trade, and today a UNESCO World Heritage site and museum. Its dungeons and the door to the sea are preserved as they were.

Part One, Effia and Esi

explicit Cape Coast Castle is a real fortress on the Gulf of Guinea, named in the novel and central to it. The coordinates mark the castle on its rocky promontory.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗

Effia and her line

Kumasi, capital of Asante

Part One

As the Gold Coast line moves inland, the story enters Asante country and its capital, the seat of the Asantehene. Kumasi grounds the novel's account of the powerful inland kingdom, its wars and its own role in the slave trade, set against the coastal forts held by the British. The real city was founded in the late seventeenth century as the capital of the Asante state.

Part One, Quey and later chapters

explicit Kumasi is a real city, the historic Asante capital, named in the novel. It lies roughly 150 kilometres inland from Cape Coast; the wide Ghana bounding box holds both.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗