Kente and the Slave Masters

In order to represent their position in reference to George Floyd, Democrat leaders wore the kente cloth of African slave traders. Politifact has tried, and failed, to change the historical facts on this, facts which are quite, quite clear.

As the Ultimate History Project points out:

"While Kente cloth was a product of a global trade route which stretched from Asia through Europe to Africa, this cloth and the people also came to be associated with another global trade route---the slave trade. In fact, the history of the Ashanti people, who lived on the West Coast of Africa, is strongly tied to the history of the slave trade.

As was true of many pre-modern societies in Africa, Asia and Europe, the Ashanti practiced slavery. When Europeans, specifically the Portuguese, came into contact with the Ashanti during the sixteenth century, both Europeans and the Ashanti traded gold, ivory, and slaves."

The University of Pittsburgh agrees, but notes that it is a part of the area's history that no one wants to acknowledge. History professor Rebecca Shumway wrote The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (University of Rochester Press). The university's review of her work includes this:

"While at the University of Ghana, Shumway studied with a Fante professor, John Kofi Fynn, who earned his PhD in the United Kingdom and wrote about Fante state formation. He was a proud teacher, a man of noble birth who was unafraid to critique Ghanaian politics and who often held class in a local pub. He rarely, however, covered Fante history and never even whispered about the slave trade. It was almost as if the slave trade didn't exist, recalls Shumway. The silence only made her more curious about those unspoken years.... 

In documenting an era when it was either enslave or be enslaved, Shumway's own march across the archives and fields of Fanteland reveals the light and the dark sides of Africans' agency in the slave trade. Here, the elite Asante were among the most powerful and wealthiest in West Africa, but they were also the main slave traders in Ghana. In the 18th century, their brilliant Kente cloth was woven with threads of silk, cotton, and wool— textiles imported from abroad and often paid for in human lives."

In All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s, by Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, the author notes:

The slave trade... brought treasure to warrior tribes like the Ashanti of Ghana, who displayed riches from the slave trade in gold furniture and regal kente cloth, in which they wove silk from the Orient together with native cotton. Adinkra cloth, also made by the Ashanti and decorated with their ancient symbols, even had a special marking for the lucrative traffic in captives: two interlocking squares meaning "You are the slave of him whose handcuffs you wear."