However, in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring law enforcement and citizens in free states to capture and return runaway slaves. The brutality of the working and living conditions for slaves caused many to attempt to escape. This trade was outlawed in 1808, but slavery remained intact in the United States until the Civil War. In America, the novel touches on the slavery system that resulted from the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which transported the slaves from Ghana to Britain and the United States for forced labor, primarily in the American South. The end of the conflict resulted in the Asantes being annexed into the British Empire, but in practice they maintained their independence until Ghana as a whole gained independence in 1957. In 1896, as is described in the book, the British overthrew the Asante king, Prempeh I, and when the Asantes rebelled against British rule in 1900, the British demanded they turn over the Golden Stool-the soul of the Asante nation and a symbol of its sovereignty. In 1874, after the slave trade had largely been abolished, the British made Ghana a British Crown Colony, prompting wars between the British and the Asantes. During this time, the Fantes and the Asantes maintained varying alliances with the British and with each other.

The British subsequently took advantage of an already existing system of taking war prisoners as slaves by the nations and bought those slaves for use in the trans-Atlantic slave trade (also known as the triangular trade). The book then documents the region’s trade with the British, who were the primary traders with the Gold Coast by the late nineteenth century. Two of these states that the book includes are the Fante and the Asante nations. In Ghana, it begins in the mid-1700s, during a time in which Ghana (then known as the Gold Coast) was made up of several Akan nation-states that together made an empire. Homegoing takes place over several centuries and touches on many landmark events in both Ghana and America.

Homegoing sparknotes