Salaga Slave Cemetery

The Salaga Slave Cemetery is a burial ground in Salaga, in the East Gonja Municipality of Ghana's Savannah Region, for enslaved people who died during captivity or while being transported through the Salaga slave market. Salaga was the largest slave market in West Africa up to the late 19th century, and the cemetery is one of the town's slavery monuments, alongside the slave market, the slave warehouse and the drinking wells.

The site is a mass grave, and it is tended by a priestess, Mariama, who pours libation at a tree there. Her words, "even the dead eat," speak to the fact that the bodies were not given a rightful burial. A large tree stood at the site until 2014; when it fell, a new tree was planted in 2016. A rock placed near the tree is the sole marker of what occurred at the site.

For a visitor, the cemetery is a place of remembrance rather than a developed attraction. Its significance is carried by the libation practice and the tree and rock, not by interpretive infrastructure. Wreath-laying at the Salaga slave cemetery formed part of the 2025 PANAFEST and Emancipation Day launch activities at Salaga, and the East Gonja Municipal Chief Executive, Mr Yazid Rabiu Kassim, has cited the slave cemetery among the area's tourism sites.

Accounts indicate the site has been poorly maintained. A 2019 account described it as littered with trash and feces, and a 2016 Graphic Online report said the slave cemetery and other slavery relics had been abandoned and reduced to nothing worth seeing. Visitors should therefore expect a modest, unadorned site.

Practical details are limited. No source located provides site-specific coordinates, so the cemetery's precise position within Salaga remains unestablished, and no opening hours, fees or guided-tour arrangements are documented in the available evidence. Salaga is the administrative capital of East Gonja Municipality. Planning should be treated as open-ended until confirmed locally.