1. Travel to Dakar, Senegal.

•  
• Upon arrival transfer to the Pullman Dakar Teranga.
• In 1444 the Portuguese arrived in Dakar as slave-raiders and the city would go on to serve as a critical stop for the Portuguese trade route to India throughout the 16th century. For the next 200 years, control of the slave port switched hands between the Portuguese and the Dutch several times, before falling into the hands of the French in 1677.  
• Meet with Kalidou Kasse, a prominent Senegalese artist known for his vibrant and expressive paintings that capture everyday life in Senegal. Kasse's art has gained global acclaim for its exploration of identity, tradition, and modernity in Senegalese society.
• Enjoy a welcome dinner with fellow travelers.

•  
• This morning meet with Chika Oduah  - an award-winning Nigerian-American reporter, writer and photojournalist. Chika’s reporting goes beyond the headlines to explore culture, security, human rights and development in sub-Saharan Africa. She is passionate about helping Africans document their history.
• Explore the city of Dakar. The beauty of Dakar, a city that sprawls across the Cap-Vert peninsula in a jumble of villages and former French colonial towns, comes not just from its architecture, but from its people and the atmosphere they create. Hot, dusty and derelict streets are brought to life by locals and brightly colored markets. The Médina was built as a township for the local population by the French during colonial days and we will spend some time discovering the neighborhood, a bustling quartier with tiny tailor's shops, bustling Tilène Market and streets brimming with life.
• Begin at the Museum of Black Civilizations which retraces cultural contributions of Africa up to present time. Pending availability,  meet with museum director, Hamady Bocoum. The museum opened its doors in 2019 amid a heated discussion about Africa reclaiming art that was looted during the colonial era. Up to 95 percent of Africa’s cultural heritage is held outside Africa by major museums. France alone holds 90,000 sub-Saharan African objects in its museums.
• Enjoy lunch at L'Institut Français, featuring lush gardens, it offers an airy escape from the heat and the thrum of the streets.
• Later visit the magnificent Massalikoul Djinane Mosque. The 10,000 square meter mosque is the largest in West Africa.
• Much of Dakar’s architecture reflects an incredible cultural wealth that exists when the country rejected western influences and forged a new African style full of triangular forms, rocket-shaped obelisks and rammed earth. Visit FIDAK, a sprawling exhibition center built in the capital of Senegal in 1975 to host the country’s biennial international trade fair – and trumpet the new nation state’s presence on the global stage. Designed by little-known French architects Jean-François Lamoureux and Jean-Louis Marin, their obsessive geometrical composition was an attempt to answer the call of Senegal’s first president, the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, for a national style that he curiously termed “asymmetrical parallelism”.
• Enjoy dinner this evening at Le Mokai.

•  
• After breakfast meet with a political historian to learn more about the country’s March 2024 election. Years of political turmoil have left the west African state’s democracy teetering on the brink of collapse, with deadly uprisings and the jailing of opposition figures commonplace. Bassirou Diomaye Faye, the country’s new president represents a new path for the country.
• Continue on to take a 30-minute boat ride to the 45-acre island of Gorée which lies off the coast of Dakar and was developed as a center of the expanding European slave trade.
• The first record of slave trading here dates back to 1536 and was conducted by the Portuguese. From the 15th to the 19th century, it was the largest slave-trading center on the African coast. Ruled in succession by the Portuguese, Dutch, English and French, its architecture is characterized by the contrast between the grim slave-quarters and the elegant houses of the slave traders. An estimated 20 million Africans passed through the island between the mid-1500s and the mid-1800s.
• Designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, Goree Island today retains and preserves all the traces of its terrible past. The main Slaves' House built in 1777 remains intact with cells and shackles, the Historical Museum, the Maritime Museum, residential homes and forts are still standing. It continues to serve as a powerful reminder of human exploitation and as a sanctuary for reconciliation.
• Return to the mainland for lunch at Bantyii, a traditional dibiteries, or barbecue. Marinated chunks of meat, usually from sheep but also including chicken and beef, is skewered and cooked up over charcoal on basic metal grills and served with baguettes, onions, and mustard. Many of Dakar dibiteries are run by foreigners, especially from the Hausa community in Niger. The customers are pretty diverse, from working people getting their day’s main meal to wealthy residents enjoying simple but tasty food.
• After lunch visit the Village of Arts, featuring artist’s ateliers and an art gallery and represents the best of Senegalese traditional and modern art, sculpture and installation.
• In preparation for the visit to Abomey and Ouidah in Benin, meet for a group discussion about how many African countries need to decide how they will tell the story of their role in the slave trade. Although the trade largely stopped by the end of the 19th century, Benin has only recently, in the last few years, begun to fully confront what has happened. The kingdoms that captured and sold slaves still exist today as tribal networks, and so do the groups that were raided. The descendants of slave merchants, like the de Souza family, remain among the nation's most influential people, with a large degree of control over how Benin's history is portrayed. This discussion is raised in political debates, downplayed by the descendants of slave traders and deplored by the descendants of slaves. Benin and other West African nations are struggling to resolve their own legacies of complicity in the trade.
• Benin's conflict over slavery is particularly intense. For over 200 years, powerful kings in what is now the country of Benin captured and sold slaves to Portuguese, French and British merchants. The slaves were usually men, women and children from rival tribes — gagged and jammed into boats bound for Brazil, Haiti and the United States.
• Tonight is at leisure for dinner.

•  
• Morning flight to Cotonou. Upon arrival meet with staff from the Agency for the Development of Art and Culture which was created in 2023. The government of Benin is turning to culture as part of a strategy to spur economic growth with the creation of four new museums. These kinds of publicly funded, government-led major museum projects Benin is undertaking has little precedent in Africa where most new museums are privately. Our meeting today will provide a chance to understand Benin’s decision to reconcile with its past.
• This afternoon head out to Ganvie Lake Village, a village of roughly 20,000 people that stands on stilts in the middle of Lake Nokoue.
• Dinner and overnight at the Maison Rouge Cotonou (or similiar).

• This morning head north to Abomey, capital of one of the great West African kingdoms in pre-colonial times. Abomey, the capital of the Dan-Homey Kingdom, has an extraordinary history and is an example of the internal tribal conflicts that are part of Africa’s history.  A UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985, Abomey is comprised of a honeycomb network of palaces built in the 300 years that the Dan-Homey Kingdom reigned.  Visit the museum here which house the 26 objects of art and cultural heritage looted from Abomey by French troops in 1894. In 2018 Emmanuel Macron pledged to return the 26 pieces which included a throne from the kingdom and a number of bronzes.
• Lunch at L'auberge d'Abomey.
• Visit the Musée des Rois et des Amazones du Danhomè  (Museum of the Epic of the Amazons and Kings of Dahomey), which is scheduled to open in 2025. Visitors will be able to explore the 300-year history of the kingdom of Dahomey.
• Enjoy a drumming performance before returning to Cotonou and enjoy a city orientation tour.
• Meet with a speaker from the School of African Heritage (EPA), an international postgraduate university in Porto-Novo, Benin, that specializes in the preservation and promotion of African cultural heritage.
• Dinner is at leisure. 

•  
• Continue on to Ouidah, once one of West Africa's biggest slave port. At its height – from the 1790s to the 1860s – Ouidah was controlled by the kingdom of Dahomey. Walk along the Slave Route, a trail that covers the last steps that more than one million people kidnapped in Africa to be enslaved had to take before boarding the ships that would take them to America. 
• The last few meters is the Door of No Return, located at the edge of the ocean it tells a story about the fate of those who stood at the spot centuries ago. Close by is the Memorial of the Great Jubilee of 2000. The structure is roughly the same size as the Door of No Return, and serves as its counterpart — welcoming back to the land of Dahomey the forgotten sons and daughters of the African diaspora. As a final stop on the Slave Route, this monument serves to celebrate the lost diasporas and traditions of the Transatlantic and beckon their return to Benin.
• Stop at Grand Popo. once a major port. With the demise of the slave trade, its importance declined more dramatically than the other towns and today even vestiges of the more recent colonial past have been washed away by the advancing ocean. Stop at a small fishing village where voodoo flourishes and the village snake pit, fetishes and temple remain important components of daily life.
• Visit the Maison de la Mémoire et de l’Esclavage (International Museum of Memory and Slavery), which is scheduled to open at the end of 2024. The museum aims to tell the history of slavery from African, American and Caribbean and European perspectives.
• Lunch at the café attached to the Zinsou Foundation, whose mission is to fight against the prejudices that still too often surround artistic and cultural initiatives in Africa.
• Cross the border into Togo. Visit the Maison des Esclaves, a UNESCO-protected slave trade historical site along the West African coast.
• Dinner and overnight at Le Patio.

•  
• Togo’s capital city of Lomé is the birthplace of the largest Voodoo market in the world  - the Akodessewa Fetish Market.  Vodoun is the official religion of neighboring Benin and is still the largest religion in the area.
• Cross the border into Ghana . Stop at the Nkyinkyim Museum, which is the inspiration of Ghanaian artist, Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, one of Bryan Stevenson’s favorite artists.
• Cross over the Adomi Bridge  - the largest cable-stayed bridge in west Africa. Check-in to the Royal Senchi Hotel and Resort, located on the banks of Lake Volta.
• Participate in a group discussion in preparation for tomorrow. Imperialism and slavery are not unique to white people. Throughout history, black people have willingly participated in both ventures. Discuss the history of imperialism and slavery in West Africa and were they passive actors in the pawn of European imperialism.
• Enjoy dinner at the hotel. 

• Depart the hotel early and continue north through the Ashanti region of Ghana. Due to its military prowess, by the mid-eighteenth century, the Ashanti Kingdom had become the most powerful state on the Gold Coast. Slave labor formed a significant component of the economy.
• Stop at the grounds of the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, where a legendary sword is buried in the ground. It is said to have belonged to Okomfo Anokye, a leader of the Ashanti people who plunged it into the earth hundreds of years ago and pronounced the sword to be immovable, and so it has remained.
• After lunch at Ike's Bar and Grill visit the Jubilee Prempeh II Museum. Located within the confines of the Center for National Culture, this museum offers up an excellent overview of the ceremonies, history, and lifestyle of the Ashanti people.
• Visit the Manhyia Palace Museum, which was built by the British in 1925 to receive Prempeh I when he returned from a quarter of a century of exile in the Seychelles to resume residence in Kumasi.
• Overnight at the newly opened Haven Hotel.

•  
• Close by to the hotel is the Besease Shrine, a traditional Ashante shrine and UNESCO World Heritage site.
• Before leaving Kumasi stop at Adanwomase to learn more about strip weaving. Strip weaving has existed in West Africa since the 11th century and Adanwomase has been weaving the cloth known today as kente since the 17th century.
• From here head south following the route that millions of slaves followed from deep inside Ghana. Captured by slavers, they were marched along dirt tracks for hundreds of kilometers to slave castles perched on the Atlantic Coast, where they boarded ships for North America.
• Visit the site of Assin Manso, one of the largest stopping points along the various routes used by slavers across the continent. Hundreds of thousands were auctioned here before they were taken on the final leg of their journey to the slave forts on the Atlantic like the Cape Coast and Elmina castles. Today, the site is a sacred place of remembrance.
• At the Assin Praso Heritage Village, examine artifacts related to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the early 19th century. It was here that enslaved people crossed the Pra River which played a strategic transit role in the transportation of slaves from the northern part of the country through the Ashanti Region to the Cape Coast and Elmina castles.
• Arrive at the Cape Coast and transfer to the Lemon Beach Resort for dinner and overnight.
•  

•  
• Visit Elmina, a fishing community that dates back to the 1300s. Our focus is the mammoth Elmina castle. The castle’s history of ownership reads as a history of the colonial exploitation of Africa by European powers. On average, captives spent two months chained in the dungeons of Elmina.
• Enjoy lunch at Bridge House.
• This afternoon drive north to experience the Kakum Canopy Walk, which consists of seven separate bridges that hang from the trees over 130 feet above the ground. Instead of a typical ground tour of the rain forest one gets to trek along the narrow rope bridges several stories above the forest floor and look at the breathtaking scenery from a bird’s point-of-view.
• Dinner at the hotel this evening. Later enjoy a powerful performance from the Akomapa Dance group.

• This morning drive east along the Cape Coast. No other stretch of African coastline carries the scars of history as this one does. Along a 156-mile span, more than 25 stone structures remain as testaments to the slave trade that reached across the Gulf of Guinea to the Americas from the mid-1500's to the late 1800's.
• Stop at the Cape Coast Castle, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Castle, just as Elmina, was originally built for the trade in timber and gold but later it was used in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
• Arrive in Accra check-in to the Villa Monticello Boutique Hotel.
• This afternoon visit the Artists Market, which is wonderful place to discover carvings, baskets, drums, bags, beads, fabrics, sandals, sculptures, stools, rugs and occasionally antiques.
• Late afternoon meet with Dr, Joseph Oduro-Frimpong, an African popular culture/media scholar and dedicated humanities teacher.
• Enjoy dinner at leisure.

•  
• This morning meet with Ivy Prosper to talk about the role of women today in Ghana. Ms. Prosper is the owner of her creative media company, Prosper Creative Group, which produces content, consults with clients and supports projects in the creative industries. 
• See the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park. Located in the heart of Accra, the monument that embodies the soul of a nation and the spirit of one of its greatest leaders who dared to dream of an independent Ghana. Opened in 1992, the memorial complex is nestled on what was once the British colonial polo grounds. This symbolic location is a striking reminder of Ghana's journey from a colonial outpost to a sovereign nation.
• Discover Black Star Square, also known as Independence Square. In 1957, Kwame Nkrumah led the Gold Coast, now Ghana, to its independence from Britain. Nkrumah became the first prime minister and president of Ghana, and to celebrate his nation’s newfound autonomy, he commissioned the construction of a huge public square.
• Enjoy lunch at Breakfast 2 Breakfast before meeting with some of the team at Global Mamas. Founded in 2003, the Global Mamas community works together with the mission of creating prosperity for African women and their families, which they achieve by creating and selling unique, handcrafted products of the highest quality.
• End the day at the workshop of one of the most well-known fantasy coffin carvers in the world squeezed between a barbershop and a clothing store. Eric Adjetey Anang and his carpenters are spearheading the creation of Ghana’s most fascinating and internationally renowned artistic product: abebuu adekai, or fantasy coffins. In Ghana, funerals have always been an occasion for both mourning and celebration.
• Enjoy some free time before our farewell dinner.

As noted in the itinerary, there will be a lot of overland travel on this program. We will be stopping frequently to break up the drive and to take advantage of sites along the way. Travel will be on a private and spacious deluxe coach with room to spread out.