Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora 9781474256636, 9781474256667, 9781474256650

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Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora

Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora Edited by Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Paperback edition published 2019 © Rebecca Shumway, Trevor R. Getz and Contributors, 2017 Cover image courtesy of Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-5663-6 PB: 978-1-3501-0902-5 ePDF: 978-1-4742-5665-0 eBook: 978-1-4742-5664-3 A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations Introduction Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz Part 1

vii 1

The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery before Colonial Rule

1

Ghana and the Transatlantic Slave Trade Rebecca Shumway

29

2

“Tied Up”: Slave Relics in Traditional Political Leadership in Burugu, Northern Ghana Samuel Aniegye Ntewusu

46

“Earth from a Dead Negro’s Grave”: Ritual Technologies and Mortuary Realms in the Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast Diaspora Walter C. Rucker

62

Anti-Slavery in Nineteenth Century Fanteland Rebecca Shumway

85

3

4

Part 2

5

6

7

Slavery and Abolition Under British Colonial Rule (1874–1957)

The Claims Wives Made: Slavery and Marriage in the LateNineteenth-Century Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate Trevor R. Getz

107

Signs of an African Emancipation? Slavery and its Resolution in the Reports (1868–1900) of a Ghanaian Pastor—Kofi Theophilus Opoku Paul Jenkins

126

An African Abolitionist on the Gold Coast: The Case of Francis P. Fearon Steffen Runkel

156

vi

Contents

Part 3 Memory, Heritage, and the Legacy of Slavery

8

Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Shared History or Shared Heritage? Wilhelmina J. Donkoh

9 The Legacy of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana Akosua Adoma Perbi

181

202

10 Charged Memories: The Slave Trade in Contemporary Political Discourse Bayo Holsey

219

Afterword Ray A. Kea

238

Select Bibliography Index

249 261

List of Illustrations Figures Figure 1 Roadside sign directing heritage tourists to the Garden of Reverence, Assin Manso. Credit: Photograph by Rebecca Shumway, 2009. Figure 2 A message to U.S. President Barack Obama left inside Cape Coast Castle. Credit: Photograph by Rebecca Shumway, 2009. Figure 3 U.S. President Barack Obama and family visit Cape Coast Castle, July 2009. Credit: REUTERS / Alamy Stock Photo. Figure 4 Plaque inside Cape Coast Castle commemorating U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit. Credit: Photograph by Rebecca Shumway, 2009.

10

194 221

221

Maps Map 1 Important Slave Sites and Centers in Ghana. Credit: Redrawn from Perbi, Akosua Adoma. 2004. Map 2 Slave Markets and Slave Routes in Precolonial Ghana. Credit: Redrawn from Perbi, Akosua Adoma. 2004. Map 3 Administrative Divisions of Colonial Ghana. Credit: Redrawn from Perbi, Akosua Adoma. 2004. Map 4 Administrative Regions and Major Ethnic Groups of Modern Ghana. Credit: Redrawn from Perbi, Akosua Adoma. 2004.

22 23 24 25

Introduction Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz

This book brings together the dynamic scholarly fields of slavery studies and Ghana studies in order to broaden and deepen knowledge in both fields. Recent scholarship on the history of slavery has revealed the incalculable variations in systems of servitude over time and in every corner of the globe, while reaffirming and clarifying the monumental shared experience of the Middle Passage and the creation of the African diaspora. It has also moved beyond questioning the influence and survival of African cultures in the New World to filling in the rich details of how African ways of life were transplanted and renewed within innumerable societies across the Americas and beyond. And the study of slavery in Africa has progressed from broad studies seeking to quantify the scale of slavery or the changing nature of slavery over time to much more focused local studies that point to the entanglement between slavery and other social institutions and analyze the experiences of particular enslaved individuals through the study of oral sources, the arts, and memory. Meanwhile, scholars of Ghana have branched out from what was once a nearly exclusive concern with Asante history and culture to examine the complex relationships between various ethnic and cultural groups within Ghana over time, and to appreciate the profound and enduring connections between the people of Ghana and societies around the Atlantic World, particularly those of the African diaspora. Thanks largely to the pioneering work of Akosua Adoma Perbi on the history of slavery in Ghana, scholars of Ghana are increasingly treating slavery and servitude as important and embedded aspects of Ghanaian life, past and present. The recent growth of Ghana’s economy and the expansion of heritage tourism have also increased scholarly interest in the historical connections between Ghanaians and the descendants of enslaved Africans for whom Ghana is a homeland. This book brings together experts on slavery, African history, and the African diaspora to further these research agendas with a particular focus on Ghana.

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Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora

The authors are indebted to the organizers of an international conference entitled “Slavery in Africa: Past, Heritage, Present,” which was planned to take place in Nairobi, Kenya in October 2014. The conference organizers called for new scholarship that would redress the imbalance in scholarly work on parts of the world affected by slavery. They noted that scholars of African studies have produced far less scholarship centered on slavery than those of other world regions such as the Americas and Caribbean islands. They also sought to rectify the widespread neglect of the links between historical experiences of slavery in Africa and African nation-building. When Rebecca Shumway circulated a request for papers to comprise a panel for this conference that would deal specifically with Ghana, it became clear that scholars of Ghana had a keen interest in these topics. Eight paper proposals were submitted. Sadly, the terrorist attack on Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall in September 2013 and other problems in Kenya at that time disrupted plans for the conference and made it impossible for many scholars to travel to Kenya. The energy around the topic of slavery and its legacy in Ghana was channeled instead into plans for an edited collection, which has culminated in the present book. We organized a meeting of interested scholars, and a panel, at the 2014 African Studies Association Annual Conference. We then sponsored two panels and met again at the 2015 African Studies Association. At that meeting, we discussed many of the papers and identified key themes for the book. Some of our ideas built upon the themes proposed for the Nairobi conference, while others were unique to Ghana studies. We wholeheartedly embraced the importance of slavery as both a historical practice and a problem with ongoing impacts within Ghanaian society. One of the major contributions of this book is that it brings together experts on the history of Ghana and the diaspora with experts on contemporary Ghana. Having three contributors who are based in Ghana has also very much enriched our conversations and thinking about the legacy of slavery in Ghana. Not least among their contributions have been reminders that what we present in this book could potentially have legal ramifications for the authors and other Ghanaian citizens. This reminder in itself speaks to the continued importance of slavery’s legacy in Ghana and to the highly sensitive nature of the topic. This book broadens the geographic scope of analysis beyond that of the Nairobi conference, which focused almost exclusively on Africa, in order to treat Ghana and the vast African diaspora as a unitary realm of study. Each of the contributors to this book has defined her or his previous work, at least in part,

Introduction

3

as centered on Ghana. And of course like any other nation, Ghana deserves to be the subject of scholarly inquiry for its own sake. But it is now obvious that it would be both inaccurate and irresponsible for any historian to ignore the profound impacts of Ghana’s centuries-old relationship with Europe and the Americas on the country’s history and its contemporary conditions.1 Unfortunately, the historiography of Ghana has too often represented historical developments in Ghana as though they were unaffected by external forces—particularly the transatlantic slave trade.2 This book reverses this trend. Treating slavery and its legacy in Ghana as part of the broader history of the African diaspora, and vice versa, is not meant to give undue agency to European or other non-African actors. Rather, it is a means of demonstrating the broad geographical impact Ghanaian actors have had on world history and the innovative ways in which the people of Ghana have for centuries incorporated elements of European, American, and African American culture into their own. Several questions were central to this project. First, we asked what slavery means in the Ghanaian context. Can this European term be naturalized to historical institutions and experiences in the societies that now constitute Ghana? How did Ghanaian institutions of servitude and dependency vary across space and change over time? How were they experienced? Also, how were these institutions and experiences intertwined with the Atlantic slave trade, and how did this system change them? Similarly, how did Ghanaian understandings of the world survive or morph through the Atlantic slaving system and into the Americas? How did the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and the progressive criminalization of slavery in the nineteenth century affect these understandings and experiences? And how did Ghanaians shape and influence these changes, which are normally understood as “European” in origin? Finally, how and to what degree did abolition and emancipation transform the institutions and experiences of slavery in Ghana? And what is their ongoing legacy in Ghana today? Throughout, we have developed the project with the hope that it will serve as both a benchmark of the state of research on slavery and its legacy in Ghana and the diaspora and as a starting point for further research. We have endeavored to reference as much as possible the relevant works upon which we are building and to assess the strengths and shortcomings of the existing scholarship. We also try to point the way toward future projects that might engage areas of enquiry that still lack sufficient attention. The works presented here converge around three central themes: slavery in Africa, Ghana and the diaspora, and the legacy of slavery.

4

Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora

Slavery in Africa It is important at the start to acknowledge that the topic of slavery has different meanings to different readers, and that it is a sensitive and politically charged topic. Among scholars and students based in the United States, slavery is often envisioned as something that is fundamentally connected to Africa and Africans because of the tremendous impact the forced migration, known as the transatlantic slave trade, has had on American life. Meanwhile, for many scholars and students based in African countries, the notion of racially determined chattel slavery is entirely American and bears no relationship to forms of servitude in Africa’s history and cultures. Indeed, what non-African scholars have often referred to as slavery in Africa usually goes by another, local name in the African context and bears little comparison to American plantation slavery. For this reason and others, scholars have long debated whether the term slavery is even applicable to the forms of servitude found in African contexts.3 The lack of consensus on the meaning of the term slavery explains why an African scholar might respond to a scholarly presentation on the subject of “slavery in Ghana” by insisting that the presenter is mistaken, that there never was “slavery” in Ghana and that the presenter misunderstands, and misrepresents, African culture.4 The contention that slavery never existed in Ghana has its roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when colonial officials in what was then called the Gold Coast Colony faced the daunting task of enforcing abolition in societies that had long practiced various forms of servitude, including slavery. Since many forms of dependency and servitude existed in Ghanaian societies and many of them were based on real or fictive kinship, colonial officials frequently argued that so-called domestic slavery was not in fact slavery at all. One clear example of this comes from a 1927 report written by J. C. De GraftJohnson, an African civil servant in the colonial Native Affairs bureaucracy.5 Although the report was meant to establish the success of the administration’s efforts in eradicating slavery in the face of parliamentary enquiry, de GraftJohnson developed a chain of arguments that instead focused on the theme that servitude in the Gold Coast had never really been slavery, writing that “except in name,” it “cannot be called slavery by a long stretch.” De Graft-Johnson distinguished between a “European” and an “African” sense of slavery. Quoting both cultural nationalist John Mensah Sarbah and British medical officer W. Walton Claridge, he contrasted the European system of atrocities and conditions

Introduction

5

of perpetual service against the much more benign domestic slavery and pawning practices in Africa, which were wrapped up in systems of family obligations and chieftainship.6 “As a rule,” he wrote, “both male and female slaves were well treated” in the latter. Therefore they rarely liberated themselves even when given the opportunity to do so, but instead “remain attached to the house where they had been brought up.” Thus, he concluded, slavery in the European sense did not exist in the Gold Coast. Domestic slavery existed, but tended to be “in name only” and would, “entirely die out within a generation.” In the colonial period, this claim worked in officials’ own interests because it relieved them of the responsibility of actually dealing with slavery as a legal problem under British colonial rule. It has been taken up by later generations, however, for other reasons. Slavery is a blemish on the history of any society that has practiced it. Documents such as de Graft-Johnson’s have provided a sort of historical evidence for minimizing slavery or denying that slavery existed.7 The scholarship of a growing number of historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists simply proves otherwise.8 In this book, we seek to acknowledge the complexity and variability of forms of servitude in Ghana and the diaspora while nevertheless using the term slavery to refer to those instances where an individual is constrained by a lack of freedom in a way that is comparable to the unfree status of slaves in other global contexts. For our purposes, a person can be considered a slave if she or he is the property of another person (or persons), and can be sold or purchased. It should be taken as a starting point that all human societies exhibit inequality, and the most marginalized people often have little or no access to the highest status within the society. In Africa, as elsewhere across the globe, many forms of servitude have existed over the course of past millennia. In general, people who have occupied the lowest rungs of African society or entered into an African society as a captive or refugee could at least expect to be assimilated over time and to be “bound in a mutually obligatory relationship to some corporate group.”9 This social assimilation is perhaps the greatest difference between African and New World slavery. Unlike slaves in many of the slave societies of the Americas, slaves in Ghana were always regarded as human beings and entitled to certain rights as such, although these were perhaps not uniformly honored.10 Nevertheless, as Martin Klein and Claire Robertson have shown, it would be a mistake to see slavery in Africa as anything other than a type of servility and exploitation.11 As Perbi has explained, slavery in Ghana resembled Western forms of slavery in that a slave was regarded as a commodity that could be bought or sold, or

6

Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora

given away as a gift. In this respect, the status of a slave in precolonial Ghana was similar to that of slaves in ancient Mesopotamia, China, the Islamic world, and Europe.12 Any particular servile relationship is best understood within its local cultural and temporal context, and by the indigenous vocabulary used to name it. In Ghana, there are at least five separate terms, translatable into several Ghanaian languages, that relate to unfree people. In the Akan language, Twi, a servant was called akoa; a pawn was awowa; a slave was donko; a war captive was dommum; and a slave condemned to capital punishment was akyere.13 Servants could be people who served within a household, but the term was also used to distinguish a lesser chief from a superior one, in the sense that a subchief “serves” a paramount chief. Pawns were people held as security for a debt and were to be returned to the debtor’s family upon payment of the debt.14 A slave was someone who had been purchased or otherwise acquired by another person and usually had been physically removed from his or her family and homeland. War captives held a slightly different position from slaves in that they might be redeemed in the peacemaking process that followed war. A slave under capital punishment had been found guilty of an offense and awaited execution.15 This taxonomy marked differences within a broader dependency system of relationships between subordinates and superiors (akua-awora) that nevertheless provided a unified frame for all of them. While it is essential to distinguish among these local forms of slavery and servitude and to comprehend the broader social system and rules in which they existed, it is also important to understand how and why these forms changed over time.16 To do so requires looking beyond Ghana and Africa to the history of the Atlantic basin and, to a lesser extent, the globe. As Joseph Miller has argued, the general pattern of change in slaving in Africa was that slaving, “first . . . served as a strategy of creating and maintaining an ethos of community, and then, in the last few centuries, increasingly in ways that implemented the same militarizing strategies of Muslim and then European slavers, effectively outsourcing Asian and European militarization and violence to people in Africa.”17 Ghana and West Africa evolved over the past five hundred years as participants in what John K. Thornton has called “the making of the Atlantic world.”18 Societies along the western coast of Africa did not merely trade with passing ships from Europe and the Americas during the so-called age of sail. Like all major Atlantic ports in the early modern period, the coastal towns of West Africa also brought people from four continents together to share and exchange languages, culture, microbes, and genetic material.19

Introduction

7

The development of transatlantic trade affected West African political and commercial systems by creating new opportunities for powerful individuals to gain wealth and influence. And as the transatlantic slave trade wore on, many African societies that previously might have included only a few slaves began to use slaves extensively in production, political power, or domestic servitude, as Lovejoy and Manning have demonstrated.20 The buying and selling of enslaved people increased within Africa, and the percentage of enslaved people within African societies also increased. In other words, the growth of the transatlantic slave trade and the expansion of slavery within Africa happened simultaneously and symbiotically. That is not to suggest that the forms of slavery that existed in the Americas were the same as those in Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they were not. But practices of enslavement, slave owning, and slave trading on both sides of the Atlantic changed in tandem over the long course of the transatlantic slave trade. When abolitionists from Europe came to West Africa in the nineteenth century to stamp out what they viewed as barbaric “African” practices of slavery and slave trading, they were very much taking on a problem that they themselves had played a great part in making. Slavery in nineteenthcentury Africa would have looked very different had European colonization of the Americas, and thus the transatlantic slave trade, never occurred. In using the term “slavery” with regard to the history of Ghana, then, we seek to intentionally link the practice of slavery in Ghana with the history of slavery in the Atlantic World, even as we emphasize that it is an umbrella term encompassing many different individual experiences. Doing so will help to clarify the ways in which indigenous forms of servitude have persisted over time while identifying the ways in which they also have changed in response to external factors. The interconnectedness of indigenous slavery and the transatlantic slave system can perhaps best be understood from the point of view of someone taken captive in Ghana during the era of the slave trade (roughly 1650–1850). She or he might face several outcomes, including becoming a slave in Asante or another part of Ghana, or becoming a saltwater slave bound for the Americas. Manu Herbstein’s Ama tells a story of a young woman who experienced both.21 After the passage of the Abolition Act in Britain in 1807, the volume of the slave trade from the Ghana coast declined rapidly, but indigenous slavery did not revert to its prior state. Slavery in Ghana continued to be shaped by economic and ideological forces from across the Atlantic throughout the nineteenth century. The immediate change was the drop in the price of an enslaved person after 1807.

8

Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora

This enabled and perhaps encouraged Ghana’s elites to acquire greater numbers of slaves. Markets for palm oil developed in Europe in the early nineteenth century and created new incentives for the use of slave labor in Ghana, as slaves were used to produce and carry palm oil down footpaths to the coast. In a few regions in Ghana, European-owned, slave-worked plantations emerged that somewhat resembled those in the American colonies.22 The nature and scale of slavery in Ghana during the nineteenth century bore a greater resemblance to American slavery than ever before, as large numbers of slaves worked to grow, harvest, refine, and transport a cash crop to the coast for export.23 The ending and abolition of slavery in Ghana was also a story of indigenous practices changing in ways connected to Atlantic slavery. Emancipation was not a clear straightforward process anywhere, including West Africa. As several important studies of African slavery and emancipation have shown, even in societies where emancipation was declared by law, freedom was always relative.24 In societies where there was no clear act of emancipation, the distinction between people of slave origin and other members of society simply disappeared. When considering the history of Ghana, it becomes more difficult to determine who was a slave and who was free after 1807. Beginning with the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, the British government pursued a policy of criminalizing slave trading and slavery throughout the British Empire, essentially reversing their economic motives in West Africa. British traders and administrators on the coast of Ghana, who created most of the documentary evidence, increasingly used ambiguous language to describe the forms of servitude they witnessed and in which they participated. This was partly intentional because slavery and slave trading was illegal for them as British subjects, but many were still very much involved in the slave trade as direct participants and as creditors. Often, the ambiguous language regarding slavery that appears in nineteenth century documents reflects the fact that British personnel honestly did not know whether someone was a slave or a wife, a slave or a dependent child, a slave or a pawn, a slave or a client. These ambiguities are discussed in the chapters by Getz and Jenkins in this book. After the abolition of slavery in the Gold Coast Colony (by order of the British colonial government in 1874), slave owners sometimes redefined their slaves as wives or kin in order to avoid losing their property in British-administered courts. Enslaved people sought to use the laws to rewrite their status as full members of society and also to negotiate new rights and living situations. In

Introduction

9

other cases, they insisted on their slave status in order to gain freedom in the courts. The laws against slavery were based on a British definition of slavery that did not match the much more variable forms of servitude in Ghana. Thus the ending of slavery was conditioned in part by Ghana’s many ties to the Atlantic economy and particularly the British Empire.

Ghana and its Diaspora While slavery and its legacy in Ghana have been inextricably linked to social, political, and economic developments in the Atlantic world as a whole, there are particular ways in which Ghanaians are linked to the descendants of captives taken from Ghana who are now living in the Americas. Roughly one million people departed the coast of Ghana aboard slave ships.25 Many of them died at sea, and many more became unfree members of Caribbean, South American, and North American societies. Although it is, sadly, impossible to trace the precise African locations from which most of these captives and their descendants originated, the historical memory of Africa as a homeland remains a powerful and essential element of identity for millions of people in the African diaspora.26 In recent decades, scholarship focusing on this African diaspora has made a major contribution to refashioning the prevailing view of world history by undermining Eurocentric paradigms and better explaining the historical connections between Africa and the Americas, and indeed the global African diaspora.27 Two recent books about the Ghanaian diaspora, specifically, have launched Ghana studies into this field.28 Kwasi Konadu’s The Akan Diaspora in the Americas argues that Akan spiritual culture formed a solid core for social and cultural reconstruction of West African life among captives in the Americas.29 Meanwhile, in Gold Coast Diasporas, Walter C. Rucker develops the argument that slaves from the Gold Coast (and those grouped with them by Europeans) developed from Ghanaian roots a common set of weapons, including gendered ideas and performances, potions and charms, as well as a group ideology, as tools for resisting dehumanization and opposing systemic slavery in the EuroCaribbean model.30 The links between Ghanaians and the African diaspora only grew stronger after the end of transatlantic slaving, as nineteenth century Ghanaians developed plans for modern, self-governing states within an international political and economic climate that was infused with racism toward black people. By the

10

Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora

late nineteenth century, African or black identity—concepts originating among African-descended activists in the diaspora—was central to Ghana’s anticolonial nationalist movement.31

Slavery and its Legacy This book answers the call articulated by the organizers of the Nairobi conference for deeper examination and consideration of both slavery and its legacy in Africa. The chapters assembled here address both the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and the legacy of the practice of slavery within Ghana, sometimes referred to as domestic slavery.32 We are indebted to Professor Akosua Adoma Perbi for her bold initiative in laying the groundwork for this kind of research and analysis.33 It is well known in Ghana and among historians of Ghana that the laws of the land have prohibited anyone from even mentioning another person’s origins—including whether or not they had slave ancestry. This prohibition was apparently ordered by Asantehene Osei Tutu as far back as the late seventeenth century, in an effort to facilitate the incorporation of several newly conquered populations into a unitary Asante state.34 Slavery’s legacy has long been intentionally denied and/or obscured in Ghanaian society, creating tremendous hurdles for researchers interested in this topic. Nevertheless, Perbi

Figure 1 Roadside sign directing heritage tourists to the Garden of Reverence, Assin Manso. Credit: Photograph by Rebecca Shumway, 2009.

Introduction

11

as well as Ray Kea, Sandra Greene, Larry Yarak, Ray Dummett, Kofi Baku, and the many authors contributing to this collection have made important inroads.35 As noted above, the expansion of slavery within Ghana was itself part of the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the transatlantic slave trade directly affected the political climate as well as the economic systems within Ghana, as the work of Ray Kea, Kwame Daaku, Kwame Arhin, Margaret Priestley, and others showed decades ago.36 Market demand for enslaved Africans, represented on the coast of Ghana by a near-constant stream of slaving vessels, changed the meaning and value of wealth, property, and status in Ghana’s societies, as it did throughout Atlantic Africa.37 The emergence of organized slaving that resulted from European demand for captives was fundamental to the evolution and expansion of slaveholding and slaving in Ghana. Moreover, the increased violence, loss of family members, and longterm economic damage stemming from the transatlantic slave trade necessitated the rise of powerful militarized states like Asante and protective shrines like Nananom Mpow on the coast and Tongnaab in the northern savanna.38 These transformations in Ghanaian societies, as well as the expansion of indigenous slavery, set the stage for the particular kinds of relationships formed between the British and various groups within Ghana in the nineteenth century and beyond. In the nineteenth century, the expansion of slavery and slave trading within Ghana coincided with the development of anti-slavery ideology and the criminalization of slavery. Policy-makers in Great Britain justified progressive incursions on autonomous polities in Ghana, including colonial rule, in part by insisting that they were pursuing the moral cause of abolishing slavery. However transparent and hypocritical this claim may have been is evidence of the historical links between slavery and colonialism and the interconnected legacies of both. As some of the chapters in this collection demonstrate, the issue of slavery was often central to the negotiation of African rights in British colonial courts.39 Several studies have shown the particular ramifications of Britain’s declaration of emancipation for women, both as slaves and slaveholders. Claire Robertson suggests that enslaved women in post-emancipation Accra found new opportunities to liberate themselves only to then find new living and working situations especially limited.40 Kwabena Adu-Boahen, meanwhile, suggests that women played an increasing role as slaveholders in Ghana over the course of the nineteenth century.41 Trevor R. Getz and Lindsay Ehrisman have suggested that that British anti-slavery courts may have provided a forum for at least some women to contest or transform their social status and lifestyle.42

12

Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora

In contemporary Ghana, the legacy of slavery is most pronounced in the ways descendants of slaves experience limitations on their rights. Perbi’s extensive research within communities across Ghana confirms the ongoing discrimination confronting Ghanaians who are identified as having slave ancestry across the country. Drawing on some 375 interviews and discussions, and mobilizing proverbs and stories, Perbi’s research reveals a dynamic and assimilative system of servility and clientage within the context of kinship systems. She uses oral histories to depict the modes of acquisition, employment, and to some degree social experiences of the enslaved in Ghana’s recent history. Sandra Greene’s work has also begun to reveal more about the experiences of the enslaved and about African ideas of slavery and abolition.43 Another legacy is the common belief, particularly among Ghanaians in the south of the country, that historically, slaves were people from the northern part of Ghana. Even as historical research has increasingly demonstrated that Akan and other southern ethnic groups were enslaved in large numbers, particularly in the era of the transatlantic slave trade, the stereotype of northerners as slaves persists. This phenomenon has recently been examined by Susan Benson and Benjamin Kankpeyeng.44 The legacy of slavery is also a central issue in modern Ghana’s relationship with the African diaspora. Edward Bruner’s 1996 “Tourism in Ghana: The representation of slavery and the return of the black diaspora” was a landmark study in this field, depicting the contests and complementarities between the views of visitors and pilgrims and local understandings of the slave trade and its heritage around Cape Coast Castle.45 As Bayo Holsey has described, Ghanaians’ historical memory of the transatlantic slave trade is intricately intertwined with historical memory of local forms of slavery. As she and other researchers interested in the history of the transatlantic slave trade have found, when coastal Ghanaians are asked about the transatlantic slave trade they often respond by speaking about local slaveholding practices, or more likely by expressing an unwillingness to speak about local slaveholding practices.46 For visitors from the diaspora, the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade is of primary concern, and heritage tourists often encounter difficulty finding common ground with Ghanaians on the meaning of slavery and its repercussions.47 We hope that looking at slavery as a historical phenomenon and as a root cause of problems facing contemporary Ghana will open up and facilitate new conversations within Ghana and beyond, in scholarly and non-scholarly circles. As Wilhelmina Donkoh’s chapter implores, the history and legacy of slavery in

Introduction

13

Ghana and elsewhere should be viewed as a shared inheritance among all the inhabitants of the modern world.

The Book and its Authors This book brings together leading experts in Ghanaian and diaspora history and anthropology from three continents and six countries. The chapters are organized into three parts in roughly chronological order. Part One consists of chapters that focus on the precolonial period, including the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved people from Ghana living in the diaspora, and political ideology in the immediate post-abolition era. The chapters in Part Two primarily treat the colonial period, focusing particularly on Ghanaians’ struggle for freedom and the roles of European missions and colonial courts. Part Three includes chapters that examine contemporary Ghana with an emphasis on the legacy of slavery and the slave trade. Because our aim in this project was to intentionally cross boundaries that have previously limited scholarship on this complex topic, many of the chapters incorporate analyses of more than one of these chronological periods. They examine change over time but also the continuities over the past few centuries. They also intentionally consider matters related to the transatlantic slave trade and indigenous slavery in dynamic relation to one another. The first part of this book focuses on the era of the transatlantic slave trade and on what we know of institutions and experiences of slavery and slaving in precolonial Ghana. The first chapter, from Rebecca Shumway, surveys the trends and trajectories of scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade in this region. Through a historiographic lens, Shumway introduces core debates and findings of more than fifty years of scholarship. Chapter 2, from Samuel Aniegye Ntewusu, takes this analysis far into northern Ghana and deep into culture and politics. Like many chapters in this book, Ntewusu’s work connects the experiences and manifestations of the slave trading era with contemporary identity and political culture. The next chapter, from Walter C. Rucker, crosses the Atlantic to the eighteenth-century Americas. Rucker argues that Ghanaian culture formed the groundwork for technologies of resistance in the diasporic setting. The part concludes with a chapter focused on a different kind of resistance. Shumway turns our attention to southern Ghana in this period by analyzing abolitionism in Fanteland, a subject sorely neglected by histories of the abolition movement that emphasize only American and European actors.

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Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora

The second part shifts the focus to colonial rule following the Anglo–Asante War of 1874 (“the Sagrenti War”) and the formal establishment of the British Crown Colony and Protectorate of the Gold Coast. Questions of slavery were inextricably tied to this transformative event, for the new administration was explicitly abolitionist but also hesitated to undertake enforcement that would result in real transformations. In Chapter 5, Trevor R. Getz argues that this situation created a forum for women who were both slaves and wives to make claims for a higher status and better situation, both through official hearings in British anti-slavery courts and less formal processes. Getz argues that these opportunities represented a new arena for a renegotiation of status, but one based on a much older recognized process of amelioration. Paul Jenkins, too, sees a hidden history of renegotiation in the wake of the 1874 criminalization of slavery. In Chapter 6, Jenkins uses the reports of Theophilus Opoku as a frame for understanding the transformation of slave status into relationships of patronage and “wished-for dependency” outside of the official gaze. In the final chapter in this part, Steffen Runkel turns us to the case of Francis P. Fearon. Echoing Shumway’s chapter, Runkel identifies Fearon as an African (and diasporic) abolitionist and the key actor in a dramatic episode that forced the colonial authorities to turn their attention to the sub rosa continued existence of relationships of slavery after the acts of 1874. The final part of this book deals with the heritage, memory, and legacy of slavery in postcolonial Ghana. In Chapter 8, Wilhelmina Donkoh tackles the difficulties of reconciling Ghanaian and diasporic imperatives of commemorating the transatlantic slave trade. Her chapter raises issues around the representation and responsibilities of various stakeholders, but it also highlights successful commemorative collaborations. In Chapter 9, Akosua Adoma Perbi similarly addresses the long legacy of indigenous slavery in Ghana. Perbi identifies this legacy in conflicts over political institutions, tenure rights, and inheritance as well as everyday social interactions. In the final chapter (Chapter 10), Bayo Holsey turns the focus to political discourse, especially in terms of issues of development. Holsey argues that the impact of the transatlantic slave trade on Ghanaian society continues to be minimized. Western leaders, while acknowledging the system as a tragedy, have largely sought to defuse any history or acknowledgment that would serve as a critique of contemporary global power inequalities. Holsey also implicates Ghanaian politicians, including President John Kufuor, in this minimization. Together, these three chapters demonstrate the continued relevance of the study of slavery and its legacy in Ghana and the diaspora.

Introduction

15

Notes 1 In the 1960s and 1970s, when many of the classic works on Ghana history were written, there was a dire need for African history from an African point of view to counterbalance the Eurocentric colonial histories that shaped contemporary thinking about the African past. It was also important in those days to combat the pernicious Western view of precolonial Africa as nothing more than a source of enslaved people brought to the Americas. 2 An important exception is Falola, Toyin (ed.), 2003. Ghana in Africa and the World: Essays in Honor of Adu Boahen. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. 3 For a review of this debate and several case studies, see Beswick, Stephanie, and Jay Spaulding (eds.), 2010. African Systems of Slavery. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. 4 This is precisely what happened at one of the panels organized in preparation for this book at the African Studies Association meeting in 2014. 5 PRAAD ADM 11/975, “Memorandum on the Vestiges of Slavery in the Gold Coast,” J. C. de Graft-Johnson, Assistant Secretary for Native Affairs, Accra, October 1927. Not to be confused with John Coleman de Graft-Johnson, Jr., author of African Glory: The Story of Vanished Negro Civilizations. 6 Sarbah, John Mensah, 1897. Fanti Customary Laws: A Brief Introduction to the Principles of the Native Laws and Customs of the Fanti and Akan Sections of the Gold Coast. London: William Clowes, 6. Claridge, W. Walton, 1915. A History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti from the Earliest Times to the Commencement of the Twentieth Century. London: John Murray. 7 One legacy of the minimization of slavery in colonial-era sources has been to render research into slave use in production and the social dynamics of life for economic slaves relatively difficult. 8 Important works on slavery in Ghana to date include Adu-Boahen, Kwabena, 2011. Post-abolition Slaveholding in the Gold Coast: Slave Mistresses of Coastal Fante, 1807-1874. Saarbrücken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing; Venkatachalam, Meera, 2015. Slavery, Memory and Religion in Southeastern Ghana, c.1850–Present, The International African Library. New York: Cambridge University Press; Kea, Ray A., 2012. A Cultural and Social History of Ghana from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century: The Gold Coast in the Age of Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 2 vols. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen; Bailey, Anne C., 2005. African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame. Boston, MA: Beacon Press; Greene, Sandra E., 2011. West African Narratives of Slavery Texts from Late Nineteenthand Early Twentieth-Century Ghana. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; Akurang-Parry, Kwabena O., 2003. “To Wasse Fiase for Gold: Rethinking Colonial Rule, El Dorado, Antislavery, and Chieftaincy in the Gold Coast (Ghana), 1874– 1895.” History in Africa 30: 11–36; Getz, Trevor R., 2003. “Mechanisms of Slave

16

Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora

Acquisition and Exchange in Late Eighteenth Century Anomabu: Reconsidering a Cross-section of the Atlantic Slave Trade.” African Economic History 31: 75–89; Getz, Trevor R., 2004. Slavery and Reform in West Africa: Toward Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Senegal and the Gold Coast. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press; Akurang-Parry, Kwabena O., 2004. “We Shall Rejoice to see the Day when Slavery Shall Cease to Exist: The Gold Coast Times, the African Intelligentsia, and Abolition in the Gold Coast.” History in Africa 31: 19–42; Der, Benedict G., 1998. The Slave Trade in Northern Ghana. Accra, Ghana: Woeli Publishing Services; Haenger, Peter., 2000. Slaves and Slave Holders on the Gold Coast: Towards an Understanding of Social Bondage in West Africa. Basel, Switzerland: P. Schlettwein; Kwabena, Opare-Akurang, 1998. “The Administration of the Abolition Laws, African Responses, and Post-proclamation Slavery in the Gold Coast, 18741940.” Slavery and Abolition 19(2): 149–66. Saboro, Emmanuel, 2013. “Songs of Sorrow, Songs of Triumph: Memories of the Slave Trade among the Bulsa of Ghana.” In Martin Klein, Alice Bellagamba, and Sandra Greene (eds.), The Bitter Legacy: African Slavery Past and Present, 133–47. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener; Akyeampong, Emmanuel, 2001. “History, Memory, Slave-trade and Slavery in Anlo (Ghana).” Slavery and Abolition 22(3): 1–24; Johnson, Marion, 1986. “The Slaves of Salaga.” Journal of African History 27(2): 341–62; Jones, Adam, 1995. “Female Slave-owners on the Gold Coast: Just a Matter of Money?” In Stephan Palmié (ed.), Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery, 100–11. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press; Yarak, Larry W., 1989. “West African Coastal Slavery in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of the Afro-European Slaveowners of Elmina.” Ethnohistory 36(1): 44–60; Schramm, Katharina, 2011. “The Slaves of Pikworo: Local Histories, Transatlantic Perspectives.” History & Memory 23(1): 96–130. 9 Smallwood, Stephanie E., 2007. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 30. The classic work on this subject is Miers, Suzanne, and Igor Kopytoff, 1977. Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. During the period when foreign slave ships frequented the Ghana coast representing the Atlantic market for enslaved people, captives and other disenfranchised people were vulnerable to further involuntary displacement that severed all their social connections and physically removed them from the continent of their birth. On the difference between indigenous African slavery and American slavery, see Lovejoy, Paul, Igor Kopytoff, and Frederick Cooper, 1979. “Indigenous African Slavery.” In Michael Craton (ed.), Roots and Branches, 19–83. Toronto, Canada: Pergamon Press. 10 On the differences between African slavery and New World slavery, see Cooper Frederick, 1979. “The Problem of Slavery in Africa.” Journal of African History 20(1): 103–25.

Introduction

17

11 Robertson, Claire, and Martin Klein (eds.), 1997. Women and Slavery in Africa. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. 12 Ibid. 13 Perbi, Akosua Adoma, 2004. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Centuries. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 3. In Ewe, the corresponding terms are subövi/suböla, awubame, kluvi, avalélea, and kluvisi wotso kufiana. In Ga, they are abaawa (female) and tsulö (male), awoba, nyön, gboklefonyo, and nyön ni abaa gbe le. In Dagbani, they are tumo/bilchin, talima pabu, dabli, tuhugbaaii, and dabli kuba. 14 On pawnship in Ghana, see Austin, Gareth, 1994. “Human Pawning in Asante, 1800–1940: Markets and Coercion, Gender and Cocoa.” In Toyin Falola and Paul Lovejoy (eds.), Pawnship in Africa, 119–59. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; Allman, Jean Marie, and Victoria B. Tashjian, 2000. I Will Not Eat Stone: A Women’s History of Colonial Asante. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; Coe, Cati, 2012. “How Debt became Care: Child Pawning and its Transformations in Akuapem, the Gold Coast, 1874–1929.” Africa 82(02): 287–311; Adu-Boahen, Kwabena, 2013. “Friendly Assistance: Archetypal Pawnship in Pre-colonial Akan Society.” African Journal of History and Culture 5: 160–70. 15 Perbi, Akosua Adoma, 2004. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Centuries. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 3. 16 Joseph Miller has recently emphasized the importance of viewing slavery in a historical way, as something that changed over time according to local conditions around the globe. Miller, Joseph C., 2012. The Problem of Slavery As History: A Global Approach. Cumberland, RI: Yale University Press. Accessed June 3, 2016, ProQuest ebrary. 17 Miller, The Problem of Slavery As History, 73–74. See also Fage, J. D., 1969. “Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Context of West African History.” Journal of African History 10(3): 393–404; Van Dantzig, Albert, 1982. “Effects of the Atlantic Slave Trade on some West African Societies.” In Joseph Inikori (ed.), Forced Migration. New York: Africana Publishing Company. 18 Thornton, John Kelly, 1998. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. Second ed. New York: Cambridge. 19 On intermarriage and sexual relations between Europeans and Africans on the Gold Coast, see Ipsen, Pernille, 2015. Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press; Akyeampong, Emmanuel, 1997. “Sexuality and Prostitution among the Akan of the Gold Coast c.1650-1950.” Past and Present 156: 144–73; Priestley, Margaret, 1969. West African Trade and Coast Society: A Family Study. London: Oxford. 20 Lovejoy, Paul E., 2000. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge. Manning, Patrick, 1990. Slavery and African life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

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Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora

21 Herbstein, Manu. 2005. Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Johannesburg, South Africa: Picador Africa. 22 Bredwa-Mensah, Yaw, 2008. “Slavery and Resistance on Nineteenth Century Danish Plantations in Southeastern Gold Coast, Ghana.” African Study Monographs 29(3): 133–45; Kea, Ray A., 1995. “Plantations and Labour in the South-East Gold Coast from the Late Eighteenth to the Mid Nineteenth Century.” In Robin Law (ed.), From Slave Trade to “Legitimate” Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa, 119–43. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge; Haenger, Peter, 2000. Slaves and Slave Holders on the Gold Coast: Towards an Understanding of Social Bondage in West Africa. Basel, Switzerland: P. Schlettwein Publishing. 23 On slavery and the palm oil industry in nineteenth-century Ghana, see Kea, Ray A., 1995. “Plantations and Labour in the South-east Gold Coast from the Late Eighteenth to the Mid nineteenth Century.” In Robin Law (ed.), From Slave Trade to “Legitimate” Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa’, 119–43. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge; Reynolds, Edward, 1974. Trade and Economic Change on the Gold Coast, 1807–1874, 18–19. London: Longman. 24 Miers, Suzanne, and Richard L. Roberts, 1988. The End of Slavery in Africa. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. On Ghana, see Getz, Trevor R., 2000. “The case for Africans: The Role of Slaves and Masters in Emancipation on the Gold Coast, 1874–1900.” Slavery and Abolition 21(1): 128–45. 25 See www.slavevoyages.org 26 The notion of an African diaspora originated in North America, particularly with W. E. B. DuBois and Carter G. Woodson. Du Bois, W. E. B., 2007. The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois) at http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord. aspx?p=1657794; Woodson, Carter Godwin, and Rayford Whittingham Logan, 1916. The Journal of Negro History (internet resource). Washington Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Available at http://www.jstor.org/ journals/00222992.html 27 Major works include Barry, Boubacar, Elisee Soumonni, and Livio Sansone, 2008. Africa, Brazil, and the Construction of Trans-Atlantic Black Identities. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press; Falola, Toyin, and Matt D. Childs (eds.), 2004. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, Blacks in the diaspora. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; Gomez, Michael A., 2004. Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; Heywood, Linda, and John K. Thornton, 2007. Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660. New York: Cambridge; Heywood, Linda Marinda, ed. 2002. Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. New York: Cambridge; Law, Robin, and Kristin Mann, 1999. “West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast.” William and Mary Quarterly LVI(2): 307–34; Thornton, John Kelly, 1998. Africa and

Introduction

28

29 30 31

32

33

19

Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. Second ed. New York: Cambridge; Lovejoy, Paul E., 2000. “Identifying Enslaved Africans in the African Diaspora.” In Paul E. Lovejoy (ed.), Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, 1-29. New York: Continuum; Mann, Kristin, 2001. “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture.” In Kristin Mann and Edna G. Bay (eds.), Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil. Portland, OR: Cass; Manning, Patrick, 2009. The African Diaspora: A History through Culture. New York: Columbia University Press; Smallwood, Stephanie E., 2007. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University; Walker, Sheila S. (ed.), 2001. African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield; Thompson, Vincent Bakpetu, 1987. The Making of the African Diaspora in the Americas, 1441–1900. New York: Longman. Konadu, Kwasi, 2010. The Akan Diaspora in the Americas. New York: Oxford University Press; Rucker, Walter C., 2015. Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture, and Power. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Konadu, Kwasi, 2010. The Akan Diaspora in the Americas New York: Oxford University Press. Rucker, Walter C., 2015. Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture, and Power. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. On the eighteenth and nineteenth century roots of Pan-Africanism, see Geiss, Imanuel, 1974. The Pan-African Movement: A History of Pan-Africanism in America, Europe, and Africa. Uniform Title: Panafrikanismus. English. New York: Africana Publishing Company, 16–76; Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, 1978. The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925, 15–82. Hamden, CT: Archon Books; Langley, J. Ayodele, 1973. Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900–1945: A Study in Ideology and Social Classes. Oxford Studies in African affairs. Oxford: Clarendon Press. As Gerald McSheffrey has argued, the term domestic slavery should be used with caution because it has frequently been used to inaccurately suggest that slaves in Ghana were essentially members of the family, or in domestic sphere, when in fact slavery was often quite oppressive and exploitative. McSheffrey, Gerald M., 1983. “Slavery, Indentured Servitude, Legitimate Trade and the Impact of Abolition in the Gold Coast, 1874–1901: A Reappraisal.” The Journal of African History 24(3): 349–68. doi: 10.2307/181899. See especially Perbi, Akosua Adoma, 2002. “Slavery and Ghana’s Pre-colonial Social Structure.” In Per Hernaes and Tore Iversen (eds.), 2004, Slavery Across Time and Space, Trondheim, Norway: NTNU, 159–72; Perbi, Akosua Adoma, 2004. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Centuries. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers.

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34 Arhin, Kwame, 1983. “Rank and Class among the Asante and Fante in the Nineteenth Century.” Africa 53(1): 11–12. 35 Dumett, Raymond E., 1990. “Traditional Slavery in the Akan Region in the Nineteenth Century: Sources, Issues and Interpretations.” In D. Henige and T. McCaskie (eds.), West African Economic and Social History: Studies in Memory of Marion Johnson, 7–22. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin; Dumett, Raymond E., 2009. “The Work of Slaves in the Akan and Adangme Regions of Ghana in the Nineteenth Century.” In Stephanie Beswick and Jay Spaulding (eds.), African Systems of Slavery. 67–104. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press; Kea, Ray A., 1995. “Plantations and Labour in the South-east Gold Coast from the Late Eighteenth to the Mid Nineteenth Century.” In Robin Law (ed.), From Slave Trade to “Legitimate” Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa, 119–43. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge; Kea, Ray A., 2012. A Cultural and Social History of Ghana from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century: The Gold Coast in the Age of Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 2 vols. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen; Yarak, Larry W., 1989. “West African Coastal Slavery in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of the Afro-European Slaveowners of Elmina.” Ethnohistory 36 (1): 44–60; Greene, Sandra E., 2011. West African Narratives of Slavery: Texts from Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ghana. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 36 Boahen, A. Adu., 1973. “Fante Diplomacy in the Eighteenth Century.” In Proceedings of the Twentyfifth Symposium of the Colston Research Society. London. Daaku, Kwame Y., 1970. Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600–1720: A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade. London: Oxford. Kea, Ray A., 1982. Settlements, Trade and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University. Priestley, Margaret, 1969. West African Trade and Coast Society: A Family Study. London: Oxford. 37 John Thornton defines Atlantic Africa as the parts of Africa that have in common European contact and the Atlantic slave trade. Thornton, John Kelly, 1999. Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800. London: UCL Press. 38 Kea, Ray A., 1982. Settlements, Trade and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University; Sanders, James R., 1979. “The Expansion of the Fante and the Emergence of Asante in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of African History 20(3): 349–64; Allman, Jean, and John Parker, 2005. Tongnaab: The History of a West African God. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University; Shumway, Rebecca, 2011. “The Fante Shrine of Nananom Mpow and the Atlantic Slave Trade in Southern Ghana.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 44(1): 27–44. 39 See also Dumett, Raymond E., and Marion Johnson, 1988. “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery in the Gold Coast.” In Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts

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40 41

42

43

44

45 46 47

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(ed.), The End of Slavery in Africa, 71–116. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Robertson, Claire, 1988. Women and slavery in Africa, Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (eds.), Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997, 220–42. Kwabena Adu-Boahen, 2010. “Abolition, Economic, Transition, Gender and Slavery: The Expansion of Women’s Slaveholding in Ghana, 1807–1874.” Slavery and Abolition 31: 117–36. See also Jones, Adam, 1995. “Female Slave-owners on the Gold Coast: Just a Matter of Money?” In Stephan Palmié (ed.), Slave Cultures and Cultures of Slavery, 100–111, Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. Getz, Trevor R., and Lindsay Ehrisman, 2015. “The Marriages of Abina Mansah: Escaping the Boundaries of ‘Slavery’ as a Category in Historical Analysis.” The Journal of West African History 1: 93–117. Greene, Sandra E., 2017. Slave Owners of West Africa: Decision Making in the Age of Abolition. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; Greene, Sandra E., 2011. West African Narratives of Slavery: Texts from Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ghana. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press and Greene, Sandra, 2015. “Minority Voices: Abolitionism in West Africa.” Slavery & Abolition 36(4): 642–61. Benson, Susan, 2007/8. “‘They came from the North’: Historical Truths and the Duties of Memory along Ghana’s Slave Route.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 27: 90–101; Kankpeyeng, Benjamin, 2009. “The Slave Trade in Northern Ghana: Landmarks, Legacies and Connections.” Slavery and Abolition 30: 209–21. Bruner, Edward M., 1996 “Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the black Diaspora.” American Anthropologist 98: 290–304. Holsey, Bayo. 2008. Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana, 62–64. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. See for example, Hartman, Saidiya V., 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

3°

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A Keta CR AC R E ON T EA GI Old NingoAda GR RE Accra C E N T R A L R E G ION Senya beruku LEGENO Winnaba Apam Important slave sites and centres Capa Coast Elmina International Boundary Sakondi G U L F O F Regional Boundary Takaradi G U I N E A 0 20 40 60 80 100 Km 1°

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Map 1 Important Slave Sites and Centers in Ghana. Credit: Redrawn from Perbi, Akosua Adoma. 2004. A history of indigenous slavery in Ghana: from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, Map VI, p. xxiii.

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Map 2 Slave Markets and Slave Routes in Precolonial Ghana. Credit: Redrawn from Perbi, Akosua Adoma. 2004. A history of indigenous slavery in Ghana: from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, Map III, p. xx.

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Map 3 Administrative Divisions of Colonial Ghana. Credit: Redrawn from Perbi, Akosua Adoma. 2004. A history of indigenous slavery in Ghana: from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, Map I, p. xviii.

3°

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Map 4 Administrative Regions and Major Ethnic Groups of Modern Ghana. Credit: Redrawn from Perbi, Akosua Adoma. 2004. A history of indigenous slavery in Ghana: from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, Map II, p. xix.

Part One

The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery before Colonial Rule

1

Ghana and the Transatlantic Slave Trade Rebecca Shumway1

Any accurate and authentic study of slavery in Ghana must begin with the period prior to the nineteenth century and take into account the transatlantic slave trade. While slavery and other forms of coerced labor in Ghana almost certainly predated the transatlantic slave trade and continued long after it ceased, the period of time when Ghana was incorporated into the transatlantic system of human trafficking uniquely transformed social relations and forms of labor within Ghana and dramatically altered Ghana’s relationship with the broader world. The transatlantic slave trade from Ghana’s shores took place over a period of about two hundred years, roughly 1640–1840. This period witnessed the most brutal and inhumane system of slavery in Ghana’s history. The market demand for African captives in Europe’s American colonies between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries incentivized human trafficking across the African continent in entirely new ways and, over time, transformed the nature of slavery within societies all over Africa.2 The slave ships’ constant presence along the coastline of Ghana from the late 1600s to the early 1800s offered African elites new opportunities for economic, political, and military power if they were willing to participate in the trade in captive human beings. By tapping into this new source of wealth and military power, new leaders emerged and founded some of Ghana’s most important precolonial states, transforming the political landscape of the region. At the same time, many people relocated in response to new economic opportunities on the coast, or to escape the disruptive effects of expanding militarized states, resulting in many waves of migration within and across the borders of modern Ghana. These migrations transformed the social and cultural landscape. This chapter summarizes the present state of historical knowledge about the transatlantic slave trade from Ghana’s coastline and its impacts on political,

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economic, and cultural developments in the precolonial era. It is a synthesis of the works of many scholars and it attempts to reference the existing scholarship as completely as possible.3 Research on Ghana’s transatlantic slave trade is still in its infancy compared with the vast scholarship on other aspects of the history of the transatlantic slave trade, in part for reasons discussed elsewhere in this book.4 What follows here is a guide to the state of the scholarship today and, hopefully, a starting point for further research.

Chronology and Demographics First and foremost, the history of transatlantic slave trading is a story of human suffering. Statistical analyses of the trade run the risk of minimizing the importance of the victims’ lived experiences, the horrors of which must never be forgotten. Nevertheless, because the slave trade from Africa to the Americas took place over such a long span of time (more than three centuries) and relocated people throughout a vast geographical area (the entire basin of the Atlantic Ocean and beyond), it is difficult to grasp the totality of those millions of human experiences without referencing reliable statistical estimates of how many voyages carried people away, how many people were taken, the chronology of the trade, and the destinations where captives were disembarked. The most comprehensive and up-to-date source of this type of data is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which contains information on all known Atlantic slave voyages from Africa as well as estimates of voyages for which documentation is scarce or nonexistent.5 At present, most historians agree that transatlantic slaving carried approximately 12,500,000 people from Africa aboard slave ships between the late-sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.6 Of this number, roughly 1,209,000 embarked on their forced migration from the region then known as the Gold Coast, which consists of the coast of modern Ghana west of the Volta River.7 The men, women, and children taken from Ghana during the transatlantic slave trade represent about one-tenth of the total number of African victims involved in the overall trade; but given its relatively small size, Ghana constituted a major source of captives for the trade.8 There are 2,838 known slave ship voyages that departed from the coast of Ghana between the years 1619 and 1840.9 Because of the brutal nature of the trade, many of those who departed from Ghana aboard slave ships never reached the other side of the Atlantic. It is estimated that

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1,031,000 people from the Gold Coast disembarked from slave ships somewhere in the Americas, while approximately 178,000 men, women, and children died during the voyage.10 The transatlantic slave trade from the coast of Ghana mainly took place during the eighteenth century. Of the total number of captives embarking from the Gold Coast, 80 percent departed between 1690 and 1810. At the height of the trade, between the 1720s and 1790s, roughly 10,500 people were forced aboard slaving vessels on the Gold Coast every year. The transatlantic slave trade from Ghana differs from that of the rest of Western Africa in that the largescale traffic in captive human beings developed relatively late on the Gold Coast. For instance, 681,000 captives embarked from West Central Africa (modern Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC], and Angola) prior to 1650, compared with 2,500 from the Gold Coast in the same period. Ghana’s relatively late entry into the transatlantic slave trade can be explained by Ghana’s rich gold resources, which remained the primary interest of foreign traders throughout most of the seventeenth century. Only with the expansion of sugar plantations in the Caribbean and the much higher prices that planters there were willing to pay for captive African laborers did merchants from Europe and America find greater profits in the slave trade than in the gold trade in the late 1600s.11 Britain was by far the most active nation involved in the slave trade from the Gold Coast, carrying more than half of the captives taken in the trade (roughly 718,000 of the total 1,209,000). British dominance in the Gold Coast trade was consistent from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. Of the 178,000 estimated deaths that occurred en route from the Gold Coast to the Americas, 106,000 were on British ships. Three other nations’ merchants carried more than 100,000 captives each from the Gold Coast: the United States (126,300), France (115,600), and the Netherlands (103,400). Ships from Denmark and Portugal (or Brazil) each carried roughly 70,000 captives from the Gold Coast, mainly in the eighteenth century. And Spanish ships carried away 6,700 people (all between the years 1820 and 1840).12 Captives taken from Ghana most often lived the remainder of their lives someplace in the vicinity of the Caribbean Sea. Half of the captives who left the Gold Coast aboard slave ships disembarked in the British Caribbean, most commonly Jamaica (302,000) and Barbados (136,000). In Jamaica, captive people from the Gold Coast made up nearly one-third of the African-born population.13 Others from the Gold Coast disembarked all across the Americas, from the northern United States to southeastern Brazil. During the eighteenth

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and early nineteenth centuries, enslaved people from the Gold Coast made up a significant portion of the African-born populations of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti), the Dutch Guianas (modern Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana), and Pernambuco, Brazil—each of which received more than 70,000 captives from the Gold Coast. More than 30,000 captives disembarked in each of the following places: the United States (Carolinas and Georgia), Antigua, Cuba, and the Danish West Indies (the islands of Saint Thomas, Saint John, and Saint Croix). The development of communities of slaves and freedmen that were distinguished by a concentration of people from the Gold Coast and Akan cultural features has been an important recent topic of research, and it is the subject of Walter C. Rucker’s chapter in this book.14

The Business on the Coast The remains of dozens of stone forts along Ghana’s coastline, including most famously Cape Coast Castle, Elmina Castle, and Christiansborg Castle, remind residents and visitors today of the long presence of European traders in Ghana’s coastal communities during the precolonial era. European trade on the coast of Ghana began in the fifteenth century when Portuguese traders were attracted to this particular region of Africa by the gold that coastal people possessed.15 The gold trade set Ghana’s coastline apart from the rest of Africa in the minds of European traders, who initially looked elsewhere for captive Africans to purchase. Along the Upper Guinea coast (from Senegal to Liberia), the Slave Coast (Togo to Cameroun), and the coast of Congo and Angola, European trade was almost exclusively concerned with human captives from the fifteenth century onward. Most of the trading forts built on the Gold Coast, including the first Portuguese fort at Shama, were funded by European governments because of their interest in Ghana’s gold and not the slave trade.16 During the seventeenth century, competition between European nations for access to this gold trade was fierce, and the forts were built in large part to defend one European nation’s commercial interests against the others. During the first two hundred years of European trade on Ghana’s coast, while the principal export commodity was gold, the seaside towns developed into cosmopolitan centers of both commercial exchange and cultural interaction. Towns like Elmina (Edina) and Cape Coast (Oguaa) attracted traders and laborers from the hinterland. As the trade expanded, the towns grew into cosmopolitan

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cities and, eventually, rivaled inland towns as regional centers of political power.17 These changes marked an important shift in the region’s commercial orientation, which had previously centered on markets in the northern part of Ghana where merchants from the Western Sudan came to trade for products from the forest and the coast. From the thirteenth century, the inland states of Begho and Bono Manso had thousands of residents and large market centers.18 By the eighteenth century and throughout the era of the slave trade, the principal towns involved in the sale of captives to slave ships were Anomabo, Cape Coast, and Elmina.19 Britain administered all of its African slave trading operations from Cape Coast Castle, and the town of Cape Coast had a permanent but constantly rotating population of civil servants and soldiers from the British Isles.20 A short distance down the coast, the Elmina Castle housed the Dutch West Indies Company and served as headquarters for the Dutch slave trade from Africa.21 Anomabo was the site of a massive British fort, one of the few that was constructed explicitly for the transatlantic slave trade, but was known for its high-volume traffic with non-company traders, including interlopers and private merchants.22 It is important to note that many of the transactions in which captives were sold to slave ship captains did not involve the European forts at all. Of the 744,864 captives documented as having been sold from the Gold Coast in the slave trade database, 293,715 fall into the category of “port unspecified,” suggesting that much of the trade bypassed the towns altogether and took place aboard ships, with African merchants bringing their human cargo out by canoe.23 The daily business of trade between Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast followed a pattern established during the many decades of the Portuguese gold trade and adhered primarily to local African law.24 The prices of commodities, including captives, were determined each morning and applied along the coast at all of the main commercial centers. The coastal African merchants were middlemen, or brokers, in this trade. As Kwame Arhin wrote, “The Fante did not have their own gold and ivory for trade, and eked out a living from their services as middlemen between the inland purveyors of the staples and the European traders.”25 Likewise, when the trade in human captives surpassed the trade in gold, coastal merchants also became brokers in slaves. In the eighteenth century, the powerful and wealthy abirempon26 like Cudjo Caboceer (Birempong Kodwo) and John Currantee (Eno Baisie Kurentsi) profited from the trade in part by collecting fees and gifts from the British in exchange for diplomatic representation in negotiations with the rulers of inland states like Asante, and for

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keeping the trading paths open and secure.27 Individuals like these also gained the allegiance of local residents because of their ability to mobilize military forces in the form of the local asafo companies.28 Arhin speculated that, over time, coastal merchants’ economic relations with European traders led coastal residents to seek their patronage, “for protection and security in the uncertain periods of the slave trade.”29 Nevertheless according to at least one study, most of the captives sold to European and American buyers on the coast were supplied by a small number of professional African brokers who were not political elites.30 Less is known about the organization and conduct of trade in the hinterland, but it is clear that, from the Portuguese era until the end of the transatlantic slave trade, the coastal trade relied on the arrival of caravans, or coffles, from the interior.31 Akosua Adoma Perbi’s research has identified numerous inland markets that serviced the southward-bound slave coffles.32 Once they reached the coast, captives were sold again to coastal African merchants or to the European trading companies. The final sale on the African side of the Atlantic was to the captain of a slave ship.

State Formation Historians of Africa have engaged in a lengthy debate about the relationship between the transatlantic slave trade and the formation of African states.33 On one hand, it is argued, it cannot be mere coincidence that large, militarized states such as Asante, Dahomey, and Oyo developed at the same moment when millions of guns and barrels of gunpowder were being imported into West Africa and when millions of war captives were being taken away aboard the same ships. This line of reasoning suggests that one of the most significant impacts of the transatlantic slave trade on Africa was the stimulation of a particular kind of militarized state formation, which capitalized on turning war captives into commodities. The kingdom of Asante, which formed precisely at the time when the slave trade expanded on the Gold Coast, appears to be a prime example of this. On the other hand, a growing number of local studies have called attention to the fact that every state, kingdom, or empire develops as a result of numerous unique conditions rooted in local and regional events and traditions. This is of course as true in West Africa in the eighteenth century as it is anywhere else at any point in world history. In this view, it seems a gross oversimplification to suggest that European traders—who mostly remained aboard their ships—

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could directly cause African states to develop, regardless of how many guns they sold to African merchants. A growing number of local studies has also revealed that in many parts of western Africa, transatlantic slaving and the violence stimulated by it had the opposite effect on African political organization, causing political fragmentation and the collapse of preexisting states.34 Surely the best interpretations of the relationship between the transatlantic slave trade and the changing political map of Africa must take into account a variety of local, regional, and transcontinental factors. In particular, the expansion of the Asante kingdom in the early 1700s and its domination of the region for the next two centuries cannot be fully understood outside of the context of the broader transatlantic commercial network of which it was a part, but neither should it be reduced to a “reaction” to external pressures.35 The states that developed in southern Ghana during the seventeenth century— including Akwamu, Denkyira, Asante, and the coastal city-states—drew their political, economic, and military power in part from the competitive European gold trade on the coast.36 Their regional power often depended on the extent to which they could control and tax gold mining operations and the caravan trade between the interior and the coast.37 Asante asserted itself as the dominant power in the interior in 1701 by conquering Denkyira and taking over the rights to an exclusive diplomatic partnership with the Dutch West Indies Company at Elmina, just as the coastal trade was shifting from gold to human captives as the principal commodity.38 The degree to which slave labor and/or slave trading contributed to the development of Asante remains contested among historians of the kingdom.39 Osei Bonsu famously explained to a visitor in the early nineteenth century, “I cannot make war to catch slaves in the bush like a thief. My ancestors never did so.”40 But he also said that when Asante won a war, surely the king would acquire the vanquished party’s gold and slaves, “and the people are mine too,” acknowledging that warfare often resulted in his acquisition of prisoners who had not previously held the status of slaves.41 By the second half of the eighteenth century, when the sale of captives on the coast was at its height, Asante supplied an average of 5,000 to 8,000 captives annually to the transatlantic slave trade.42 However, as Arhin has shown, the role of slavery in the finances of the Asante kingdom during its expansion was complex. Slaves and other unfree people were integral to warfare, court life, tribute payments, royal burials, and labor, in addition to being valuable commodities of trade in southern markets.43 On the coast, a process of state formation happening on a smaller scale during the eighteenth century resulted in the development of a coalition of previously

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independent polities under the governance of Fante rulers (amanhen).44 This new Fante state faced the constant threat of invasion by Asante in the era of the transatlantic slave trade, but it also profited from the middleman trade between Asante and Europeans on the coast. The Fantes’ commercial partnerships and diplomatic ties with British administrators at Cape Coast in particular gave them access to the guns, gunpowder, and military support they needed to defend the Fante coalition against Asante.45

Social and Cultural Effects The inherently violent nature of both the transatlantic slave trade and the enslavement of free people had a tremendous impact on the everyday living conditions of people across the area of modern-day Ghana, and indeed across much of the African continent. During this time, wars occurred more frequently and on a larger scale; and other forms of violence, such as raiding, banditry, and kidnapping also became more common.46 The ways in which the transatlantic slave trade shaped Ghana’s social and cultural features in the precolonial period are more difficult to identify than political and economic ramifications, but several recent studies have begun to shed light on the matter.47 The northern part of Ghana remained unaffected by the transatlantic slave trade during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. The large-scale slave raiding and huge slave markets commonly associated with the northern regions developed later, in the nineteenth century, after the transatlantic slave trade had come to an end on Ghana’s coast.48 Nevertheless, the societies of northern Ghana were dramatically affected by the transatlantic slave trade for the halfcentury between roughly 1750 and 1800. After Asante’s conquest of Gonja and Dagomba in the 1740s, the latter made regular obligatory payments to Asante in the form of captives. Some of these slaves remained in Asante while others were sold to foreign markets.49 In order to make these obligatory payments, northern chiefs would raid their neighbors and sell the captives, setting in motion a long series of conflicts and small-scale wars between the societies of northern Ghana that created a widespread state of instability. While the ramifications on society and culture remain obscure, this instability has been convincingly tied to the development of at least one powerful religious shrine in the north—Tongnaab in Talensi territory.50 The shrine became well known for its powers to ensure stability, security, and collective and personal safety.

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The impact of the transatlantic slave trade on Asante society and culture can be seen in the forms of wealth, social organization, and military culture of the kingdom in the era of the slave trade and since. From its beginnings, Asante society was founded on the wealth and military prowess derived from a strong partnership with foreign traders on the coast—especially the Dutch.51 Asante’s regional dominance stemmed from its control of the supply of gold and slaves to the coastal markets, and from the military advantage and wealth it accumulated by importing firearms, ammunition, and luxury goods. The cultural significance of wealth and military prowess pervaded Asante culture in the precolonial era, particularly through the glorification of abirempon, or “big men.”52 As Arhin put it, power and authority were based on those things that the Asante defined as wealth—“hoards of gold dust and slaves, and the more substantial items of foreign trade,” while “the highest basis of honour in Asante was distinction in war.”53 Much has been written about the considerable changes in Ghana’s coastal societies as a result of their long-term interactions with Europeans occasioned by maritime trade.54 Certainly one important consequence of the trade was the development of a new creole culture among residents of the urban centers on the coast. Like other port towns involved in long-distance trade across oceans, Gold Coast towns became cosmopolitan centers of intercultural exchange.55 The language, food, material culture, military institutions, and biological makeup of urban populations on the coast reflected the distant influences of the Americas and Europe. By the early nineteenth century, a small but influential portion of the coastal population spoke English, Dutch, and/or Danish, could read and write in these languages, claimed a Christian identity, and traced one or more of their ancestors to Europe.56 In addition to the incorporation of European languages, religious ideas, and material culture by the coastal elite, the southern portion of Ghana experienced some more far-reaching changes as a result of the transatlantic slave trade. The Fante shrine of Nananom Mpow became particularly important during the eighteenth century as a spiritual power that could provide protection in war and offer guidance to coastal rulers.57 In addition, the need to create commercial and military alliances against Asante aggression compelled the coastal communities to organize a political coalition, which became the foundation of a new Fante state.58 The distinctive features of the coastal asafo (local militia) institution can also be traced to the era of the slave trade. The companies formed in part to offer greater protection to individual communities at a time when personal insecurity was constantly under threat.59

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End of the Atlantic Slave Trade in Ghana Overall, the ending of the transatlantic slave trade was a very gradual process marked by a general decline in the trade across the North Atlantic but an expansion of slave trading across the South Atlantic during certain periods in the nineteenth century. On the coast of Ghana, however, the transatlantic slave trade declined quite rapidly following the passage of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in Britain in 1807.60 The number of captives embarking from the Gold Coast aboard slave ships averaged more than 9,000 per year from the 1690s to 1810. After 1810, the annual average was closer to 300 captives.61 The last known ship to carry slaves from the Gold Coast into the transatlantic slave trade was the União, which departed the Gold Coast with 552 captives and disembarked the surviving 500 in Cuba on September 24, 1840.62 The disappearance of the slave ships and the foreign market for captives that they had represented for more than a century had important consequences for the history of Ghana, but the simultaneous eruption of warfare in southern Ghana had much more profound immediate consequences. By coincidence, Asante completed its first successful invasion of the major coastal Fante towns in 1807, the same year that the British Abolition Act was passed. For the next twenty years, southern Ghana was plagued by war and famine and its economy was upended as a result. It is therefore impossible to distinguish between the immediate impacts of the ending of the transatlantic slave trade and the numerous other changes and disruptions of the time. What is certain is that the price of slaves dropped dramatically, and that the relative glut of captives facilitated the expansion of slaveholding across the region.63 Slave trading and slavery continued within Ghana long after the end of the transatlantic slave trade, and the remainder of this book considers those aspects of slavery and its legacy.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Trevor R. Getz for feedback on this chapter. 2 Lovejoy, Paul E., 2000. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge; Manning, Patrick, 1990. Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades. Cambridge: Cambridge University. 3 With apologies for any omissions. 4 See chapters in this book by Donkoh and Perbi, in particular. See also Holsey, Bayo, 2008. Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

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5 See www.slavevoyages.org/about 6 For a different viewpoint, see Henige, David, 1986. “Measuring the Immeasurable: The Atlantic Slave Trade, West African Population and the pyrrhonian Critic.” Journal of African History 27: 295–313. 7 This is the estimate formulated by the scholars assembling the slave trade database. The number of captives leaving the Gold Coast, for which there is documentation, was 744,864. Estimates in the database are generally about 25 percent above the number of documented captives. The part of Ghana east of the Volta River is included in the region labeled “Slave Coast” in the database. 8 The region known as West Central Africa, for example, was the point of embarkation for an estimated 5,695,000 captives but is also several times larger than the Gold Coast region. 9 This number is based on the database’s organization of voyages according to principal region of slave purchases. Many other voyages included captives purchased on the Gold Coast but mostly carried captives from other places along the West African coast. 10 For information about mortality rates aboard slave ships in the transatlantic slave trade, see Klein, Herbert S., and Stanley L. Engerman, 2001. “Transoceanic Mortality: The Slave Trade in Comparative Perspective.” William and Mary Quarterly 58(1): 93. 11 On Ghana’s early maritime gold trade, see Daaku, Kwame Y., 1970. Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600–1720: A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade. London: Oxford. On the transition from gold to slaves, see Bean, Richard, 1974. “A note on the Relative Importance of Slaves and Gold in West African Exports.” Journal of African History 15(3): 351–6, and Shumway, Rebecca, 2011. The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 25–52. On slave prices over time in the Atlantic see Eltis, David, and David Richardson, 2004. “Prices of African Slaves Newly Arrived in the Americas, 1673– 1865: New Evidence of Long-run Trends and Regional Differentials.” In David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and Kenneth L. Sokoloff (eds.), Slavery in the Development of the Americas, 181–218. New York: Cambridge. For the British Atlantic, see Behrendt, Stephen, 2001. “Markets, Transaction Cycles, and Profits: Merchant Decision Making in the British Slave Trade.” William and Mary Quarterly 58(1): 171–204. 12 This was due to the nineteenth-century sugar boom in Cuba. 13 See Diptee, Audra, 2010. From Africa to Jamaica: The Making of an Atlantic Slave Society, 1775–1807. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. 14 Konadu, Kwasi, 2010. The Akan Diaspora in the Americas. New York: Oxford University Press; Rucker, Walter C., 2015. Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture, and Power. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. On Jamaica in particular, see Aborampah, Osei-Mensah, 2005. “Out of the Same Bowl: Religious Beliefs and Practices in Akan Communities in Ghana and Jamaica.”

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Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora In Patrick Bellegarde-Smith (ed.), Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World. 124–142, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois; Newman, Simon P., Michael L. Deason, Yannis P. Pitsiladis, Antonio Salas, and Vincent A. Macaulay, 2013. “The West African Ethnicity of the Enslaved in Jamaica.” Slavery & Abolition 34(3): 376–400; Stewart, Robert P., 2003. “Akan Ethnicity in Jamaica: A Re-examination of Jamaica’s Slave Imports from the Gold Coast, 1655-1807.” Maryland Historian 28(1/2): 69–107; Diptee, From Africa to Jamaica; Schuler, Monica, 1970. “Akan Slave Rebellions in the British Caribbean,” Savacou 1: 8–31. On the Portuguese trade, see Blake, John W., 1942. Europeans in West Africa 14501560. Vol. 1–2. London: The Hakluyt Society; Daaku, Trade and Politics. Van Dantzig, Albert, 1980. Forts and Castles of Ghana. Accra: Sedco Publishing; Ephson, Isaac, 1970. Ancient Forts and Castles of the Gold Coast (Ghana). Accra: Ghana Institute of Art and Culture; Daaku, Trade and Politics. On the growth of coastal towns and their regional influence, see Daaku, Trade and Politics; Kea, Ray A., 1982. Settlements, Trade and Polities in the SeventeenthCentury Gold Coast. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University; Kea, Ray A., 2000. “City-state Culture on the Gold Coast: Fante City-states in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Mogens Herman Hansen (ed.), A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures: An Investigation, 519–530. Copenhagen: Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab. Connah, Graham, 2001. African Civilizations: An Archaeological Perspective. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge; Anquandah, James, 1982. “The Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Akan civilisation.” Tarikh 7(2): 9–21; Anquandah, James, 1993. “Urbanization and State Formation in Ghana During the Iron Age.” In Thurstan Shaw (ed.), Archaeology of Africa: Foods, Metals, and Towns. 642–651. New York: Routledge; Wilks, Ivor, 1976. “The Mossi and Akan States to 1800.” In J. F. A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder (eds.), History of West Africa. 413–55. London: Longman. On Cape Coast and Elmina, see Arhin, Kwame, 1995. The Cape Coast and Elmina Handbook: Past, Present and Future. Legon: University of Ghana, Institute of African Studies. Feinberg, Harvey M., 1989. Africans and Europeans in West Africa: Elminans and Dutchmen on the Gold Coast during the Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society; Abaka, Edmund Kobina, 2012. “House of Slaves and ‘Door of No Return’”: Gold Coast/Ghana Slave Forts, Castles and Dungeons and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Trenton NJ: Africa World Press; St. Clair, William, 2007. The Door of No Return: the History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: BlueBridge. On Anomabo, see Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade; Sparks, Randy J., 2014. Where the Negroes are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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20 On the early British slave trade, see Davies, K. G., 1957. The Royal African Company. London: Longmans; Pettigrew, William A., 2013. Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press; Law, Robin, 2006. The English in West Africa (3 volumes). Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy. On later periods, see Morgan, Kenneth, 2001. Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Reese, Ty M., 2009. ““Eating’ Luxury: Fante Middlemen, British Goods, and Changing Dependencies on the Gold Coast, 17501821.” William and Mary Quarterly 66(4): 853–72. 21 Postma, Johannes Menne, 1990. The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600-1815. New York: Cambridge University; Feinberg, Africans and Europeans in West Africa; Van Dantzig, Albert, 1978. The Dutch and the Guinea Coast 1674-1742: A Collection of Documents from the General State Archive at The Hague. Translated by A. Van Dantzig. Accra: Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences; Yarak, Larry W., 1990. Asante and the Dutch 1744-1873. New York: Oxford. 22 Priestley, West African Trade, 36–113; Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 71–86. 23 On the canoemen and canoes in the slave trade, see Gutkind, Peter C. W., 1989. “The Canoemen of the Gold Coast (Ghana): A Survey and an Exploration in Precolonial African Labour History.” Cahiers d’études africaines 29(3): 339–376. 24 See Law, Robin, 1994. “‘Here is no Resisting the Country’: The Realities of Power in Afro-European Relations on the West African ‘Slave Coast.’” Itinerario 18(2): 50–64; Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 71–87; Henige, David, 1977. “John Kabes of Komenda: An Early African Entrepreneur and State Builder.” Journal of African History 18(1): 1–19; Henige, David, 1980. “‘Companies are always Ungrateful’: James Phipps of Cape Coast, a Victim of the African Trade.” African Economic History 9: 27–47; Richardson, David, 1979. “West African Consumption Patterns and their Influence on the Eighteenth-century English Slave Trade.” In H. A. Gemery and J. Hogendorn (eds.), The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 303–330. London: Academic Press. 25 Arhin, Kwame, 1983. “Rank and Class Among the Asante and Fante in the Nineteenth Century.” Africa 53(1): 15. 26 This term has various different spellings in the European sources, including abirempon (singular obirempon), brennipono, brenipono, and abrimpung. 27 On merchant princes and coastal entrepreneurs, see Deffontaine, Yann, 1999. “Pouvoir monarchique et création étatique sur la Côte de l'Or au XVIIIe siècle. Brempong Kojo et la création de l'Etat d'Oguaa (Cape Coast).” In Pierluigi Valsecchi (ed.), Akan Worlds, 187–214. Paris: L'Harmattan; Fynn, John Kofi, 1971.

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32 33

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Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora Asante and Its Neighbors. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press; Henige, David, 1977. “John Kabes of Komenda: An Early African Entrepreneur and State Builder.” Journal of African History 18(1): 1–19; Metcalf, George. 1987, “Gold, Assortments and the Trade Ounce: Fante Merchants and the Problem of Supply and Demand in the 1770s.” Journal of African History 28(1): 27–41. McCarthy, Mary, 1983. Social Change and the Growth of British Power in the Gold Coast: The Fante States, 1807-1874. New York: University Press of America; Priestley, Margaret, 1969. West African Trade and Coast Society: A Family Study. London: Oxford. On the asafo, see Addo-Fening, R., 1998. “The Akyem Abuakwa Asafo, 17001918.” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 2: 7–19. Chukwukere, B. I., 1970. “Cultural Resilience: The Asafo Company System of the Fanti”. Social Studies Project, Paper No. 3. Cape Coast, Ghana, University College of Cape Coast; Chukwukere, B. I., 1980.“Perspectives on the Asafo Institution in Southern Ghana.” Journal of African Studies 7(1): 38–47; Datta, Ansu K., and R. Porter, 1971. “The ‘Asafo’ System in Historical Perspective.” Journal of African History 12(2): 279–97; Hernæs, Per O., 1998. “Asafo History: An Introduction.” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 2: 1–5. Arhin, Kwame. 1966. “Diffuse Authority among the Coastal Fanti.” Ghana Notes and Queries 9: 68. Metcalf, “Gold, Assortments and the Trade Ounce.” On the gold caravans, see Van Dantzig, Albert. 1990. “The Akanists: A West African Hansa.” In David Henige and T. C. McCaskie (eds.), West African Economic and Social History: Studies in Memory of Marion Johnson. 205–16. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin. Perbi, Akosua Adoma, 2004. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Centuries. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, pp. 28–68. See for example Fage, J. D., 1969. “Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Context of West African History.” Journal of African History 10(3): 393–404; Wrigley, C. C., 1971. “Historicism in Africa: Slavery and state formation.” African Affairs 70: 113–124; Inikori, Joseph E., 1977. “The Import of Firearms into West Africa 1750-1807: A Quantitative Analysis.” Journal of African History 18(3): 339–68; Law, Robin, 1977. The Oyo Empire c.1600-1836: A West African Imperialism in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Oxford, UK: Oxford University. See for example Barry, Boubacar, 1998. Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Translated by Ayi Kwei Armah. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge; Thornton, John Kelly, 1983. The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641-1718. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press; Hawthorne, Walter, 2003. Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations Along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; Nwokeji, G. Ugo, 2010. The Slave Trade and

Ghana and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

35 36 37

38

39

40 41

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Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World. New York: Cambridge University Press; Mariana Candido, 2013. An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and Its Hinterland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.  See Sanders, James R., 1979. “The expansion of the Fante and the Emergence of Asante in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of African History 20(3): 349–64. The most thorough analysis of the development of seventeenth-century polities is Kea, Settlements, Trade and Polities. On the gold trade in particular, see Van Dantzig, “The Akanists: A West African Hansa.” Other important works include Daaku, Kwame Y., 1971. “Trade and Trading Patterns of the Akan in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Claude Meillassoux (ed.), The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa: Studies Presented and Discussed at the Tenth International African Seminar at Fourah Bay College, Freetown, December 1969, 168–181. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press; Kea, Settlements, Trade and Polities; Kea, Ray A., 1986. “‘I am here to Plunder on the General Road’: Bandits and Banditry in the Pre-nineteenth Century Gold Coast.” In Donald Crummey (ed.), Banditry, Rebellion and Social Protest in Africa, 109–132. London: J. Currey; Kea, Ray A., 1980. “Administration and Trade in the Akwamu Empire, 1681-1730.” In B. K. Swartz, Raymond E. Dumett and Walter de Gruyter (eds.), West African Culture Dynamics: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives. 371–392. New York: Mouton; Wilks, Ivor, 1957. “The Rise of the Akwamu Empire, 1650-1710.” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 3(2): 99–136. Kumah, J. K., 1966. “The Rise and Fall of the kingdom of Denkyira.” Ghana Notes and Queries 9: 33–35; McCaskie, T. C., 2007. “Denkyira in the Making of Asante c. 1660-1720.” Journal of African History 48(1): 1–25; Sanders, James R., 1979. “The Expansion of the Fante and the Emergence of Asante in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of African History 20(3): 349–64. McCaskie, “Denkyira in the Making of Asante”; Yarak, Larry W., 1986. “The ‘Elmina Note:’ Myth and Reality in Asante-Dutch Relations.” History in Africa 13: 363–382; Yarak, Asante and the Dutch; Feinberg, Africans and Europeans in West Africa; Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade. See for example Wilks, Ivor, 1993. Forests of Gold: Essays on the Akan and the kingdom of Asante. Athens: Ohio University Press; Klein, A. Norman, 1994. “Slavery and Akan Origins?” Ethnohistory 41(4): 627; Wilks, Ivor, 1994. “’Slavery and Akan Origins?’ A Reply,” Ethnohistory 41(4): 657–665; Arhin, Kwame, 1967. “The Financing of the Ashanti Expansion (1700-1820).” Africa XXXVII (3): 283–291. Dupuis, J., 1824. Journal of a Residence in Ashantee. 1966 ed. London: Cass. Ibid.

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42 Austin, Gareth, 1995. “Between Abolition and jihad: The Asante Response to the Ending of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1807-1896.” In Robin Law (ed.), From Slave Trade to “Legitimate” Commerce, 93–118. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 43 Arhin, “The Financing of the Ashanti Expansion.” 44 Fynn, Asante and Its Neighbors; Shumway, Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade; Sanders, “The Expansion of the Fante and the Emergence of Asante”; Law, Robin, 2013. “The Government of Fante in the Seventeenth Century.” Journal of African History 54(1): 31–51. 45 McCarthy, Social Change and the Growth of British Power, 33–70; Priestley, West African Trade, 38–47. 46 See for example Diouf, Sylviane A., 2003, Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press; Kea, Ray A., 1971. “Firearms and Warfare on the Gold and Slave Coasts from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries.” Journal of African History XII(2): 185–213; Kea, “‘I am here to Plunder on the General Road’”; Thornton, John Kelly, 1999. Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800. London: UCL Press. 47 One important contribution to research in this area is Ray Kea’s book, which analyzes culture and society in Ghana throughout the era of the transatlantic slave trade. Kea, Ray A., 2012. A Cultural and Social History of Ghana from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century: The Gold Coast in the Age of Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 2 vols. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. Sandra Greene has done extensive work on social and cultural change among the Anlo-Ewe. Greene, Sandra E., 1996. Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; Greene, Sandra E., 2011. West African Narratives of Slavery Texts from Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ghana. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 48 Der, Benedict G., 1998. The Slave Trade in Northern Ghana. Accra, Ghana: Woeli Publishing Services; Allman, Jean, and John Parker, 2005 Tongnaab: The History of a West African God, 23–37. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University. 49 Der, The slave trade in northern Ghana, 8–12. 50 Allman and Parker, Tongnaab: The History of a West African God. 51 McCaskie, “Denkyira in the Making of Asante.” 52 McCaskie, Tom C., 1995. State and Society in Pre-colonial Asante, 42–49. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wilks, Ivor, Forests of Gold, 127–59. 53 Arhin, “Rank and Class among the Asante and Fante.” 54 A few important works include Arhin, “Diffuse Authority among the Coastal Fanti”; McCarthy, Social Change and the Growth of British Power in the Gold Coast; Priestley, West African Trade and Coast Society. Ipsen, Pernille, 2015. Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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45

55 On the idea of an Atlantic creole culture, see Berlin, Ira, 1996. “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America.” William and Mary Quarterly LIII(2): 254. See also Priestley, West African Trade and Coast Society; Shumway, Rebecca, 2015. “From Atlantic Creoles to African Nationalists: Reflections on the Historiography of Nineteenth-Century Fanteland.” History in Africa 42: 139–64. On Atlantic creoles elsewhere in Africa and the Atlantic World, see Green, Tobias, 2009. “Building Creole Identity in the African Atlantic: Boundaries of Race and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Cabo Verde.” History in Africa: A Journal of Method 36: 103–25; Heywood, Linda, and John K. Thornton, 2007. Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660. New York: Cambridge; Landers, Jane, 2010. Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 56 McCarthy, Social Change and the Growth of British Power, 107–42; Gocking, Roger, 1999. Facing Two Ways: Ghana’s Coastal Communities Under Colonial Rule. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 53–62. 57 Shumway, Rebecca, 2011. “The Fante Shrine of Nananom Mpow and the Atlantic Slave Trade in Southern Ghana.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 44(1): 27–44. 58 Boahen, A. Adu, 1973. “Fante Diplomacy in the Eighteenth Century.” Proceedings of the Twentyfifth Symposium of the Colston Research Society. London; Priestley, Margaret, 1969. West African Trade and Coast Society: A Family Study. London: Oxford; Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Ch. 3. 59 Chukwukere, B. I., 1980. “Perspectives on the Asafo Institution in Southern Ghana.” Journal of African Studies 7(1): 38–47; Datta, Ansu K., and R. Porter, 1971. “The ‘Asafo’ System in Historical Perspective.” Journal of African History 12(2): 279–97; Hernæs, Per O., 1998. “Asafo History: An Introduction.” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 2: 1–5; Shumway, Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Ch. 4. 60 By contrast, the area to the east of the Volta River saw an increase in slaving. Greene, Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast. 61 See slavevoyages.org 62 See http://slavevoyages.org/voyage/2034/variables 63 In 1822, Asantehene Osei Bonsu reportedly ordered that subject people henceforth pay tribute in gold and other forms of payment, owing to “the great reduction in the value of human beings and the want of purchases for them of late years.” Chisholm to MacCarthy, September 30, 1822, in Metcalfe, George Edgar, 1994. Great Britain and Ghana: Documents of Ghana history, 1807-1957 (1964), 77–80. Aldershot, UK: Gregg Revivals.

2

“Tied Up”: Slave Relics in Traditional Political Leadership in Burugu, Northern Ghana Samuel Aniegye Ntewusu

In 1994, a most devastating ethnic conflict occurred in the northern part of Ghana. The war broke out as a result of the long-term effects of the slave trade, indirect rule, ownership of land, and chieftaincy, among other reasons. The more than ten ethnic groups involved in the conflict were and still are divided into two categories, the acephalous and the centralized. The acephalous comprise the Konkomba, Bassari, Kusasi, Nawuri, Bimoba, Nchumburu, Vagla, Mo, and Tampulma, and the centralized comprise the Dagomba, Mamprusi, Gonja, and Nanumba. After two weeks of fighting, an estimated 21,000 people were killed and 171,000 people were displaced.1 In an attempt to find a lasting solution to the conflict, traditional rulers in the country as well as other civil groups were consulted; among them was the Bu Naba, the chief of Burugu in the present-day Northern Region.2 The presence of the Bu Naba, a position that emerged as a consequence of the slave trade, was important in ensuring justice and lasting peace among the combatants. Interestingly, the strength, power, and position of the Bu Naba emanate from an interesting episode in slave history. His ancestors seized rope, bows, and arrows from a notorious slave raider called Bagao. The relics, which are still in the custody of the Bu Naba, are much treasured by the people of Burugu who rarely take them outside because of the relics’ role, particularly the rope, in traditional leadership and jurisprudence in Mamprugu.3 Historians have identified endless consequences of slavery in northern Ghana, the most striking aspects being the huge depopulation, retardation of development of artisanal activities, and migrations that arose due to a general sense of insecurity and suspicion.4 Using oral and archival accounts, this chapter shows a more nuanced interaction between the slave trade and the organization

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of local societies. It shows how slaves and “liberators of slaves” co-opted relics associated with the slave trade and used them to assume positions of significance within the context of the fairly negative consequences of the trade. I argue that slave relics are not just ordinary objects or articles of touristic value; they are also important lenses through which we can better understand the sociopolitical organization and internal workings of a people in a given society. By analyzing the meaning of slave relics, we will be able to better explain the role of slaves in Mamprugu and furthermore how chiefly positions originated in Mamprusi society. In so doing, an important addition is made to study of the history of slavery in Ghana, since there is no literature thus far on the use or impact of slave relics on traditional leadership in Ghana. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first is a brief discussion about relics. The second considers the nature of slavery in northern Ghana and the various forms of resistance to the slave trade in selected communities in the north. These sections serve as the foundation to discussions in the third and fourth sections, which present the main thrust of the chapter. In these sections the importance of slave relics in the establishment of Burugu and the role of the Bu Naba in Mamprugu traditional leadership is emphasized.

Methodology The methodology deployed in this chapter blends archival sources with interviews in addition to secondary sources. Regarding the archives, there were very important materials in the offices of the Public Records and Archival Administration Department (PRAAD), formerly the National Archives of Ghana (NAG) in Accra and Tamale. The following documents proved useful for the chapter: PRAAD, Tamale, NRG 8/2/204, Domestic Slavery, 1905 PRAAD, Accra, ADM 11, SNA 91/1910. Sheabutter, 1911 PRAAD, Accra, ADM 11, SNA 91/1910. Sheabutter, 1911 PRAAD, Tamale, NRG 8/2/113, Mamprusi Constitutional Affairs (including Mamprusi State Council), 1932–56 PRAAD, Tamale, NRG, 8/2/1, The History and Organisation of the “Kabonse” in Dagomba. Apart from research on these files, I also conducted interviews. The reason for this was that most of the archival material had gaps. I chose interviews as a way of addressing such limitations. The interviews were conducted in the chief ’s palace in Burugu. The chief, his wives, elders, and the youth responded to my questions. I cross-checked the information obtained from Burugu while also

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obtaining more information on the subject from informants in Paga, Tamale, and Kpandai. Paga has a slave camp, Tamale is the capital of the region where I conducted the research, and Kpandai was a perfect place to study the so-called majority and minority contestations. In Paga I interviewed a member of the Pele family, which exercises oversight responsibility over the Paga slave camp, and one of the tour guides in the camp. In Tamale I interviewed a member of Zambrama family who was engaged in slave raiding. In Kpandai, I interviewed a chief who has been a long-time advocate for traditional reforms; he feared that if such reforms did not come about, it would lead to conflict since aspects of traditional leadership had a direct link to slavery. The information gathered from the archives and during interviews was supplemented with published material, which enabled a contextual elaboration of slavery and its connection to traditional political power in northern Ghana.

Relics: A Brief Discussion Relics have always performed important roles in social, religious, and political rites and practices.5 Most religions allot specific role to relics, believing them to possess enormous power to sanctify, purify, and cure.6 Relics offer clues about the past and may be assembled to construct a coherent story about a given object or person.7 Relics are also important in legitimizing claims of aboriginality of ethnic groups in Ghana. For example, in protesting against Gonja “overlordship,” which was made possible by the British colonial policy of indirect rule in Ghana, the Nawuri, turned in metal chains as evidence of their aboriginality. Even though the chains had no bearing on slavery, they point to the traditional works of the aboriginal Nawuris, who are located in Balai and who have been working irons for several years. They have produced hunting and fishing gears out of metals and have equally produced farming implements for communities around. Turning in these metals was important because the Gonja admit in several of their historical narratives that they met the aboriginal Balai Nawuris descending on iron chains from the sky.8 The chains are brought out once every year during the celebration of the yam festival (Kajoji). In Mamprugu, a rope, bows, and arrows, which were seized from Bagao, a notorious slave raider in the 1800s, have become relics to be preserved. For the people of Mamprugu these relics ensured, and now symbolize, their victory over the raiders who came after Bagao, examples of which include Samori and Babatu.

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While the bow and arrow is generally only important during times of war, the rope has a role to play in daily life. It is strongly believed that the rope itself has the power to subdue people with strong spirits and those with evil intents; these traits are all considered rebellious. As the Bu Naba is responsible for keeping the rope, he is therefore considered as one of the most important figures in dispensing justice. Before going into a further detailed history of the position of Bu Naba vis-à-vis traditional leadership in Mamprugu, it is important to understand the nature of slavery and the slave trade in northern Ghana.

The Context of Slavery in northern Ghana The effects of slavery are everywhere and can be found in almost all societies in Ghana.9 In Ghana, evidence of slavery exists from the remains of the defense walls in Gwollu in the north to manacles found at Bui Park in the middle belt, to the castles and forts that dot the coastline of Ghana.10 Even though slavery has a complex history in Ghana, it could be said that slave trading reached its peak from the sixteenth to the late part of the nineteenth centuries; it was at its most devastating from 1650 to1810.11 Though the transatlantic slave trade existed along the coast of the then Gold Coast, the northern part of present-day Ghana was not drawn into the coast-bound trade until around the mid-eighteenth century.12 That is not to say that the north was completely isolated from the slave trade. At the local level communities in the north, either through warfare or market purchase, bought and incorporated slaves into families especially as a response to the loss of large groups from disease or infertility. Others, for purely economic reasons acquired slaves for purposes of agricultural production and trade.13 Besides the internal utilization of slaves, many of the slaves were acquired by Arab or Berber traders and sent further north via the Trans-Saharan trade route.14 Evidence of well-beaten paths by slaves from Salaga, Yendi, Walewale, and other parts of present-day northern Ghana show that they traveled as far as Timbuktu and North Africa. These slave caravans had a role in transporting kola nuts, gold, and shea butter further afield.15 However, by the mid-1700s, the northern part of Ghana was being gradually drawn into the coast-bound trade. Two important factors accounted for this. The first was the debts and tributes that had to be paid to the Ashanti Kingdom by northern ethnic groups, such as the Dagomba and Gonja.16 Second, a group

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of coastal Ada canoe traders had realized the instantaneous profits to be made through the sale of slaves at Kpong in the Eastern Region and in other coastal ports, such as Prampram, Akuse, Ada, Kpone, and Accra in the present-day Greater Accra Region.17 These canoemen had a monopoly over transport along the Volta River and sent salt from the coast to the northern markets of Kete Krachi, Salaga, Buipe, and Sabare and returned with shea butter, yams, and slaves.18 With the north being gradually drawn into the coastal trade and eventually into the Atlantic slave trade, further devastation ensued. Slave raiders in the north and others from present-day Sahelian regions, realized the potential for incredible economic gain from the traffic of human beings and they raided a number of communities in northern Ghana.19 It was in that era of slave raiding that Burugu emerged as a village now famed for its resistance to the slave trade. Burugu was not the only village to resist; before we consider the historical detail of Burugu in particular, it is useful to consider the examples of other settlements in the same geographical area and their tradition of resistance, through the relics found there. By drawing on other examples, we will be able to contextualize the uniqueness of Burugu and its history. Gwollu, located in the Upper West Region along the Burkina Faso boarder, was attacked during the time of the slave trade by the Zabrama of Mali, who attacked from the north. Inhabitants of Gwollu had their property stolen and citizens were sold into slavery. Babatu and Samori were known raiders in this area.20 In an attempt to resist the slave raiders the residents of Gwollu constructed defense walls.21 At first only one wall was constructed for protection, this became known as the inner wall. Another wall had to be built outside it to incorporate the farmlands and water supply systems in Gwollu in order to ensure its economic survival. Holes were made through the thick walls, which facilitated the deployment of arrows, discharged in turns and targeted at the enemy raiders. This innovation ensured the freedom of Gwollu from slave raiders. The walls have since become important relics and monuments for the inhabitants of Gwollu and they symbolize the proud heritage of the Sisala people. The inhabitants of Sakana, also of the Upper West Region, resisted slavery by occupying caves within their territory. A horn was usually blown to signal the approach of raiders and citizens would quickly run into caves to hide, carrying along food supplies. The caves contained chambers where gunpowder, bows, and arrows could be produced and deployed at critical times. Written accounts indicate that the Samorian army and those of Babatu suffered defeats in and

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around these caves as the people of Sakana could easily navigate their way through to the disadvantage of the raiders.22 Many of these caves were havens for wild animals such as snakes and lions. The presence of these predators within the caves served as an additional defense to the people as the raiders did not know which caves were habitable and which were not. As a result, the raiders would often approach the caves containing dangerous animals, which often led to their injury and sometimes to their death. These caves have since been transformed into important relics and shrines and are venerated in the Sakana area.23 The Upper East Region also was not free of raids. Pikworo in Paga is a prominent site in this respect as it was both an assembling point and a slave market.24 Here, it was the rocks that became important for both raiders and for their victims. Each would deploy the rocks for offensive and defensive purposes respectively. Should the raiders arrive early at the site of the rocks they were able to keep their booty within the rocks and stood on top of them to prevent any attack by members of the raided community. Should their raided victims escape, the escapees would head to the rocks, and seek refuge there. As a defensive tactic people who would otherwise have been raided pushed down smaller rocks, which came bounding down the bigger rocks, threatening unwary raiders with extinction.25 Further southeast of Paga is the kingdom of Mamprugu, which has its capital at Nalerigu. Burugu and its people are located an estimated two hour’s drive from Nalerigu, the traditional administrative capital, and about one and half hour’s drive from Gambaga, the spiritual capital of the Mamprusi people. Despite the distance, Burugu plays a very important role in the traditional history of Mamprugu. This emanated from the period of the slave trade and has remained so up until now.

In Search of Freedom: Burugu, its Relics, and Traditional Leadership Oral accounts indicate that the size of Burugu was about one square mile, but it shrank due to out-migrations into Tamale, the regional capital of the Northern Region and other districts within the region. The migrations were said to have begun in the 1950s and have continued until this day with some going as far as the southern cities of Kumasi and Accra. An on-the-spot census conducted in

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the course of research for this chapter indicates that there were about thirty-five compounds in the village. Each compound comprised a husband, a wife or wives, and children. In some cases one compound could house three families, as was the case in the chief 's own house. The inhabitants of Burugu are mixed between royals and descendants of ex-slaves, but each of these groups has contributed in a very unique way to the history of the Mamprugu Kingdom. Mamprugu itself suffered greatly from slavery. From oral accounts it was evident that raids were frequent events primarily carried out by Samori, Babatu, and other raiders from further north.26 As noted already, groups in the north defended themselves through various means, such as confronting the enemy, hiding in caves and on rocks, or seeking assistance from other ethnic groups. There is evidence that the Kusasi in northeast Ghana had on a number of occasions turned to the Mamprusi to assist them in fighting Chokosi and Zabrama raiders.27 It was in one of these desperate calls for help that Bagao, one of the leaders of the Zambrama raiders from Niger, was captured and killed by Yahaya, one of the sons of Nayiri in the 1870s. The rope Bagao used to tie slaves, including the slaves he captured, and the bows and arrows he used were brought to the Nayiri’s palace in Nalerigu. Following Prince Yahaya’s success over Bagao, the prince was enskinned as the Bu Naba (the Beating Chief).28 Furthermore he was given the title Dabarana, which means owner or protector of slaves.29 As the current Bu Naba rightly indicated in an interview: Burugu is one of the key sons of a Nayiri we are right from the Nayiris gate. The chief of Burugu is the protector of slaves. My ancestors defeated the raiders at Pusuga, Bawku and Worikambo. That was how this chieftaincy came about the rope that was used in tying the slaves is and has always been the symbol of our office.

Incidentally, the thickest and strongest rope that Bagao and other slave raiders always used to tie the strongest slaves was given to Bu Naba as his symbol of office. So, to what extent has this symbolic relic influenced Burugu’s history and traditional leadership in Mamprugu? In the first place, Yahaya moved from Nalerigu to found Burugu with his ex-slaves in the early part of the 1880s. His main intention was to stop all forms of raiding in and around the Mamprusi kingdom and to free all slaves captured by raiders who were bound south to important markets, such as Yendi, Salaga, and Bonno Mansu. Indeed this intent is reflected in the geographical location

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of Burugu itself. Burugu was sandwiched between three important trade routes that led to the important slave markets of Walewale, Yendi, and Salaga. Of greater significance was a stream, which flowed from Burugu further south. The stream was an important stopping point for slaves and their masters, who in most cases stopped there for fresh water. And it was here that Yahaya always attacked the raiders and freed the slaves. As the only place that was well watered and in order to continue, raiders had to risk losing their lives and slaves fighting for that allimportant resource—water—instead of avoiding Burugu since that could also mean losing slaves from thirst and starvation. The continuous attacks unleashed by Yahaya on slave raiders caused Babatu and Samori to direct their attack toward the capital, Nalerigu, in the 1880s. As indicated previously, Burugu was located further south and was about a 2-day journey by foot. Call for help from Yahaya and his band of warriors by the Nayiri did not always lead to quick results as he almost always arrived late. To ensure safety, a defense wall similar to that of Gwollu was erected at Nalerigu. This proved a helpful mechanism as it enabled Yahaya to concentrate on his main mission at Burugu: fighting and freeing more slaves. Despite the fact that the wall itself was of proven importance since it kept raiders at bay or rendered them impotent in their quest for victims in Nalerigu, the overwhelming perception still remains that it was the power of the seized rope that Yahaya kept that ensured their victory over the raiders. Keeping the rope in Burugu has great historical importance for a number of other reasons. The duty of protecting the territorial integrity of Mamprugu became the prime role of the Bu Naba and the ex-slaves. Protecting the territory is necessary whether in times of peace or war. In times of peace he assumed the role of a Tindana (earth priest, singular, Tindamba, plural), offering prayers to the land (tingbana) and offerings to the rope for agricultural abundance, fertility, and reproduction. In this regard, the specific image of the rope is transformed into a deity that assists or facilitates the attainment of worldly and spiritual goals as indicated above. In times of war, significantly, the Bu Naba became the commander of the army. As the current Bu Naba indicates: My title in war is Moyarana (controller or supplier of arrows). I fight and at the same time supply warriors with more bows and arrows. I supply the armoury. In times past slaves were important in war they carried these arms along with us and some of the brave slaves fought alongside. The arrows seized from Bagao are also part of the war effort but we do not fire them we keep them to motivate us.

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One significant fact that emerges from the statement above is that people of Burugu in particular and Mamprusis in general are unanimous in their views about the significance of slave relics and the authority that relics confer. The title Moyarana alludes to the seized bows and arrows from the slave raiders and before going to war informants indicate that ritual offerings are performed on the rope and the seized bows and arrows from the raiders as a way of facilitating victory and overcoming the enemy. More importantly by keeping the rope, the power to dispense justice was given to the Bu Naba. As the current chief narrates: Any time the Nayiri the King of Mamprusi calls me to Nalerigu then I know there is a problem or there is going to be a problem. So I do not go there empty handed I go there with a rope, a rope that could tie the strongest of the strong. Tradition demands that any time I reach the palace the Nayiri should ask as follows: Bu Naba are you prepared for this case? I will respond: Na (chief/King) yes I am prepared. He will ask me what shows that you are prepared? I will put my hand under my smock and pull out the rope and tell him, Na here is the rope in my hand this is sufficient evidence to show that I am prepared. If the person who is summoned or any other person for that matter brought to the chief proves stubborn, my duty is to subdue him and tie him with the rope. He is put in that position till we finish trying him.

When the Bu Naba was asked if he had the ability to also treat (tie up) other chiefs or royals, he replied: Everyone. Once you are brought to the Nayiri it is my duty to see to it that justice is brought and my input is very necessary.

Until now, any time there is any case to be adjudicated, the Nayiri always call upon the Bu Naba. From what has been presented thus far, it is evident that through the slave relics both Burugu and its chief, the Bu Naba, assumed a very important position in the traditional administrative and military set-up of Mamprugu. I argue, however, that there was one important local factor that also contributed to the importance of the Bu Naba besides the slave relics that he inherited, that is the close association between the ex-slaves and royals as reflected in the settlement of Burugu. With slaves and royals inhabiting the same community, successful intermarriages were formed. In fact royals often preferred marrying women slaves or descendants of slaves for some very obvious reasons; one prominent reason given in the course of my interviews was that such intermarriages

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reduced tension, especially during successions to higher office in Mamprugu. As the chief of Burugu indicated: Some wives of Mamprusi are not pure Mamprusi their great grandfathers were slaves. We all know that but now they are part of us, they are Mamprusi. We royals even prefer marrying them because of two reasons. The first is that when there is a succession crisis they easily talk to their children to consider each other. If we married from royal families, that will not be the case, their mothers will remind them of their entitlement and that whichever way they are more than qualified. We also prefer the slaves because the greatest taboo here is to have same blood relationship or marriage. To avoid that we prefer marrying from families of slave origin.

Even though the above opinion is a very recent one, the practice and preference for slaves in marriage has indeed been a long-term tradition in Ghana. As the provincial governor for the Northern Province observed: What in the Northern Territories is slavery particularly in relation to systems of chiefs rule is intimately connected. . . . Take away the vestiges of slavery and you will take away the last prop of what native authority there may be left in this country. . . . Indeed there is no family of any note in the whole country which did not have among its members one or more slaves. Each marrying from each other. To be sure the wealth and power of any family were measured not by the amount of gold in its coffers and the extent of its landed property or by sheer prestige but by the number of slaves it could muster.30

The statement from the Bu Naba and the observations by the colonial official go a long way in confirming the very important role that slaves play in everyday life in society. And in Burugu the mixed residential pattern ensured the symbiotic existence of both royals and ex-slaves; a factor, in addition to the relics, that aided Burugu’s prominence in Mamprugu.

Death of Yayaha, Emerging Issues, and the Position of the Bu Naba Yahaya died in 1900 and was succeeded by his brother Nasigiri.31 Nasigiri’s reign coincided with very serious events in the north in general, including Mamprugu. After the Yaa Asantewaa War of 1900 and 1901, there was a renewed British interest in the north. The British wanted to integrate the economy of

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the Northern Territories into the economy of the Gold Coast Colony, and a central part of this was the need for a sound administrative machinery in the North.32 The implementation of indirect rule became one of the administrative tools employed by the British in the north. Through indirect rule certain northern chiefs became more powerful as they had the backing of the colonial administration in all that they did in their areas. One important change, which affected the whole of the north following the introduction of indirect rule, was the political reorganization of ethnic groups. The Vagla, Nawuri, Tampulma, Nchumburu, and Mo were put under Gonja. The Kusasi, Frafra, Bissas, and Bimoba were put under Mamprusi. The Dargarti and Lobi were also put under the Wala, while the Konkomba, Bassare, and Chokosi were put under Dagomba authority. For purposes of administrative expediency, groups with centralized systems of administration, such as Dagomba, Gonja, Mamprusi, Wala, and Nanumba, were termed the majority. The rest, who were considered acephalous, were termed the minority.33 The minority were to serve the colonial administration through the majority ethnic groups. This arrangement sparked resentment usually from the minority against the majority. The resentment was informed by the lasting legacy of slavery in northern Ghana. While slavery was officially abolished by the British, in practice, historical conditions of slavery were often transformed into a status of “post-slavery” that prolonged status differences. Indicators of this condition of post-slavery include differences in ownership rights. But, while these could be the result of postslavery, they could also be a result of colonial administrative subordination, indirect rule. The latter could lead to a reinterpretation of the status of such subordinated communities, which assigns to their lack of rights a new meaning and adds the connotation of post-slavery. In this postcolonial discourse the majority have always regarded the minority as their slaves, a behavior that the colonial administration feared would lead to conflicts in the near future. In Mamprugu, during the first decade of the 1900s, there were many conflicts between the Kusasi and the Mamprusi. The then Bu Naba, called Nasigir, moved into Kusasi land this time not to fight off slave raiders but to maintain the territorial integrity and authority of Mamprugu. At the battles of Pusuga and Wurikambo, the Kusasi were defeated. A smaller detachment from Burugu was made to stay in Wurikambo to maintain the Nayiri’s power. Bu Naba Nasigiri died in 1925 and was succeeded by Daa. During Daa’s reign there were no wars fought but he nonetheless played the internal role demanded of him, that is, to see to it that justice prevailed at the Nayiri’s palace. He died in 1926 after

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only one year of rule. He was succeeded by Sulemana. Sulemana’s reign was not peaceful either. Under his reign, the Frafra rebelled against the Nayiri by refusing to pay taxes to the Mamprugu traditional council. A combined force of the Gold Coast Constabulary and Mamprusi warriors, some from Burugu, moved into Zuarungu and other Frafra settlements and subdued them.34 The series of encounters narrated above indicate that even though slavery had come to an end, the Bu Naba was still important in many respects. As indicated already. from the 1940s to the time of independence most minority groups under Mamprugu, on several occasions, protested against their “servile status” and either rebelled physically or protested through petitions requesting their independence from Mamprugu.35 The Bu Naba has always been brought to the palace to handle cases of such attempts at seceding by the minority ethnic groups. While these days he deals with conflict differently to his predecessors, through peaceful negotiations, his ritual importance has remained of paramount importance. Following Ghana’s independence in 1957, the independence of most of the ethnic groups that otherwise served under Mamprugu was recognized, but their ability to rule themselves through their own chiefs was not officially accepted, since the constitution recognized only the Mamprusi as rulers. But after the 1960s, most minority groups, especially the Kusasi and Frafra, succeeded in having their chiefs recognized by the modern state. Tension continued to build between groups, especially between the Kusasi and Mamprusi. Konkomba and Dagomba, and Nawuri and Gonja. The situation remained tense throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1994 these tensions broke out into a devastating conflict, which occurred within northern Ghana. With large numbers of people killed, the incident rendered the government of the day very unpopular especially among the centralized or majority groups who felt the government of Jerry John Rawlings, president of Ghana at the time, had a hand in encouraging such revolts. During the contestations, history was reenacted. Some commentators were of the view that the minority, as they were called, had no right to certain claims such as the need for their own traditional rulers. The majority argued that these were a conquered people who for all intents and purposes were raided as slaves. One can now understand why, among all chiefs in the north, the Bu Naba was considered hugely important during these 1994 contestations. It is the Bu Naba who has had a long historical association with slavery through the relics and, as informants indicated, most of his inputs in the past led to the successful

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resolution of problems that existed between the two groups—the minority and majority in the Northern Region. Incidentally the Bu Naba has always featured in these mediation exercises with his rope, which serves both as his symbol of office and as an object of justice.

Conclusion It is a fact that the various faces and institutions of slavery have had devastating impacts within Ghanaian societies. However, within specific communities at the local level, the processes associated with slavery and slave trading have also enabled or provided the opportunity to others to assume positions of importance. Here, the northern part of Ghana and particularly Mamprugu serves as a very important example. For in Mamprugu, whether one is a royal or an ordinary citizen, once one proves rebellious the individual is likened to a slave raider and is liable to receive the usual form of punishment: to be “tied up” and brought to the Nayiri’s palace for justice to be dispensed. The Bu Naba’s continuous attendance at all traditional court sessions is an indication that Mamprugu as a whole has recognized slave relics as an integral part of the broader traditional leadership structure.

Acknowledgment I would like to acknowledge the financial support from “Society and Change in northern Ghana,” an African Tiger Holding Ltd. funded project, Institute of African Studies/University of Ghana Research Fund, The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) Fellowship and a conference grant from the Harriet Tubman Institute. Financial support from the Harriet Tubman Institute enabled me to travel to Buea, Cameroon in December 2010 to attend a conference on Slavery and the Slave Trade in Africa. It was at this conference that ideas for this chapter developed. Funds from African Tiger Holding Ltd. made it possible for me to conduct the final archival work in Tamale. Financial support from the Institute of African Studies/University of Ghana enabled fieldwork in the north of Ghana; the KNAW award (2016/2017) enabled my travel to the Netherlands to complete writing this chapter at the African Studies Centre in Leiden.

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Notes 1 It is important to indicate that even though the war was mostly concentrated in the Northern Region of Ghana there was a spillover effect of the war in the Volta, Brong Ahafo, Upper East, and Upper West Regions. For more on the conflicts of the north see Brukum, N. J. K., 2006. “Chieftaincy and Ethnic Conflicts in northern Ghana, 1980-2002.” In I. K. Odotei and A. K. Awedoba (eds.), Chieftaincy in Ghana: Culture, Governance and Development, 434–35. Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers; Benjamin, A. Talton, 2003. “‘Food to Eat and pito to Drink’. Education, Local Politics and Selfhelp Initiatives in northern Ghana, 1945-1972.” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, New Series, 7: 205–6; Jonsson, J., February 2007. The Overwhelming Minority: Traditional Leadership and Ethnic Conflict in Ghana’s Northern Region. 27–33. Oxford: CRISE Working Paper No. 30, University of Oxford; Kirby, Jon P., 2006–07. “Ethnic Conflicts and Democratization, New Paths: Toward Equilibrium in northern Ghana.” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, New Series, 10: 70. 2 Bu means to beat and Naba means chief in Mampruli. Mampruli is a language spoken by the Mamprusi. The Mamprusi are part of the Mole-Dagbani ethnic group. They are mostly found in the Northern Region though a smaller section could be found in present-day Upper East Region. Mamprusis are boarded by the Dagomba to the South, the Kusasi to the North, the Bimoba to the East, and the Gonja, Bulsa, Sisala, and Frafra to the West. Their ruler/king is called the Nayiri. He resides at Nalerigu one of the district capitals in Northern Region of Ghana. The entire area under the Nayiri’s administrative jurisdiction is called Mamprugu. Burugu the village where the Bu Naba resides is part of Mamprugu. It is interesting to note that all over the years any occupant of the Burugu skin is referred to as the Bu Naba sometimes only their names and years of rule differentiates the occupants but in terms of chiefly title it has remained the same since its inception till now. 3 Information provided by the BuNaba, at Burugu on August 6, 2010. Bu Naba (a.k.a Issaka Chimsi) is the current chief of Burugu. He is a retired educationist. He inherited the skin (chiefship) from his late father in 1985 and has been chief till date. The rope is about 20 meters long and is made of nylon. In my first visit I was not made to see the rope. It is important to indicate that in my first visit in 2002, the chief had to determine whether I was a “good” or “bad” visitor by first giving the usual traditional drink for visitors, ground millet and chilli pepper mixed with water after which a white fowl was sacrificed. The position that the dying fowl took determined who or what I was. Fortunately the fowl fell on its back and not its belly which meant I was a good visitor. But that still did not allow me to see the rope at this first instance it only gave me the opportunity to have interviews. The second visit in 2010 opened the doors for me to see the rope but not without offering elaborate sacrifices including a sheep.

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4 For the impact see, Benedict, G. Der, 1998. The Slave Trade in northern Ghana. Accra: Woeli Publishing Services. 5 Martin, Dan, September 1994. “Pearls from Bones: Chortens, Tertons and Signs of Saintly Death in Tibet.” Numen 41(3): 294. 6 Martin, “Pearls from Bones,” 294. Catholic churches, for example, are sanctuaries for relics, and believers are able to access them through the church so that they can come, see, and worship them. 7 Hart, N., 1994. “John Goldthorp and the Relics of Sociology.” The British Journal of Sociology 45(1): 21. 8 PRAAD, Tamale, NRG 8/2/211, Enquiry regarding the claims of Nawuri and Nchumburu, 1955. For more insights into claims of aboriginality see. Kuma, J. E. K., 1969. Kete Krachi Traditions. Accra: Legon; Barker, P., 1986. People, Languages and Religion in northern Ghana. Accra: Asempa Publishers. 9 Howell, A., ed. 1998. The Slave Trade and Reconciliation: A northern Ghanaian Perspective, 31. Accra: The Bible Church of Africa and SIM Ghana. 10 Takala, B., 2003. A Survey of Sites and Relics on the Slave Trade in Ghana: A History Archaeology Perspective, 8. Accra: I.A.S, Legon, Project Work, SIT Graduate Institute/SIT Study Abroad Year. 11 Perbi, A. A., 2004. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana, From the 15th to the19th Century, 30. Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers. 12 Benedict, The Slave Trade in northern Ghana, 8–10. 13 Information provided by Nana Obimpe (a.k.a. J.K. Mbimadong). Interviewed on the August 20, 2010 at Balai-Kpandai. J. K. Mbimadong is a retired educations and a Member of Parliament in the 2nd Republic of Ghana. He is currently a chief at Balai in the Kpandai District of the Northern Region of Ghana. 14 Kankpeyeng, B. W., 2009. “The Slave Trade in northern Ghana: Landmarks, Legacies and Connections.” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 30(2): 211; Benedict, The Slave Trade in northern Ghana, 31. 15 Howell, The Slave Trade and Reconciliation, 37. 16 In about 1742, King Opoku of Asante invaded the country of Dagomba and took as prisoner the Dagomba King Ya Na Gariba. Gariba was carried from Yendi and was being carried southwards. On the way his carriers were dying in their numbers and the Ya Na himself had become infirmed. Ziblim a relation of the Na, suggested to the Ashanti warriors that the king be given back to him. The warriors agreed to release the King on condition that two thousand slaves be paid as recompense. Ziblim agreed to this. This culminated in a yearly shipment of between a hundred to two hundred northern slaves to Asante for payment. Gonja equally was subjugated around the same period and also had to pay tribute to Asante. For more on this see, Benedict, The Slave Trade in northern Ghana, 9–11.

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17 Public Records and Archival Administration Department (hereafter, PRAAD) Accra, ADM 11, SNA 91/1910.Sheabutter, 1911 18 PRAAD, Accra, ADM 11, SNA 91/1910. Sheabutter, 1911 19 Kankpeyeng, “Landmarks,” 212. 20 Ibid., 212. 21 Ibid. 22 Information provided by Edward Nabigne on September 2, 2010 at the Institute of African Studies, Legon, Accra. Nabigne is a Research Fellow in the Institute of African studies and a native of Sakana. 23 Howell, The Slave Trade and Reconciliation, 19. 24 Kankpenye, “Landmarks,” 214. 25 Interview with Issah Pele on September 9, 2010 at Paga, Upper East Region; Issah is an indigene of Paga but has been an unofficial guide at the Pikworo Slave camp. 26 Benedict, The Slave Trade in northern Ghana, 9–11, Perbi, Indigenous Slavery, 58. 27 Hilton, “Notes on History of Kusasi,” 82–84. 28 The process by which selected chiefs are given legitimacy in northern Ghana is referred to as enskinment. 29 In Mamprugu there is a fundamental difference between slaving and slavery. Dabarana, owner or protector of slaves, here does not imply that the Burugu Naba deals in slaves. Instead Dabarana refers to a kind of godfather figure where affairs of ex-slaves are brought to him to handle. Among Mole-Dagbani groups which includes the Mamprusi almost everything imaginable must have a leader or owner hence various positions are created for that purpose including the chief of trees— Tihirana. This arrangement is very important for the functioning of Mamprusi society because then one knows who exactly to consult on any particular issue at any given time. 30 PRAAD, Tamale, NRG 8/2/204, Domestic Slavery, 1905. 31 Information provided by Alhassan Musah at Tamale on August 23, 2010. Alhassan is a native of Burugu but currently is a teacher in Tamale. 32 Brukum, N. J. K., 2005. “Sir Gordon Guggisberg and Socio-Economic Development of northern Ghana, 1919-1927.” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, New Series, 9: 5. 33 For more on the categorization and its consequential impact on northern conflicts see; Brukum, Chieftaincy and Ethnic Conflicts, 429. 34 PRAAD, Tamale, NRG 8/2/113, Mamprusi Constitutional Affairs (including Mamprusi State Council), 1932–56. 35 PRAAD, Tamale, NRG 8/2/113, Mamprusi Constitutional Affairs (including Mamprusi State Council), 1932–56.

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“Earth from a Dead Negro’s Grave”: Ritual Technologies and Mortuary Realms in the Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast Diaspora Walter C. Rucker

Known variably as “Coromantees” or “Aminas” throughout the early modern Americas, enslaved Gold Coast Africans—a polyglottal mix of Akan, Ga, and Adanme speakers, among others—became a most troublesome property in Western Hemisphere plantation colonies. Among their countless number, one Sam Hector found himself as a member of multiple Gold Coast diasporic enclaves in his sojourn through the Black Atlantic. Listed as “Byam’s Quaw” (Yaw) in a 1736 inventory of captured insurgents slated for transport from Antigua in the aftermath of an island-wide Coromantee conspiracy, Sam Hector was banished to the Danish Virgin Islands in April 1737. Upon arrival, he joined a plantation owned by Pieter Heyliger of St. Croix—where he resided and toiled until his 1759 execution. In the course of the intervening years, he transformed from a Coromantee traitor in British Antigua to an Amina general in Danish St. Croix—in the paradoxical process of becoming an acculturated Atlantic creole.1 In this movement across linguistic and geographic frontiers and between political and cultural poles, Sam Hector witnessed a range of ritual technologies that spurred the rebellious designs of Coromantees and Aminas in the Americas. This chapter explores a range of ritual technologies in the Gold Coast diaspora that activated and framed revolutionary mortuary politics. Through access to the ancestral realm, symbolized by the use of grave dirt and unfaltering belief in spiritual transmigration, Sam Hector was joined by untold thousands of Coromantees and Aminas in the circum-Caribbean and beyond who used empowering ritual and mortuary concepts to articulate a unique, non-liberal, and non-Western brand of abolitionism.

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As a young man of about eighteen years, Sam Hector, then known as Quaw, turned King’s witness providing evidence against the Antigua Coromantee conspirators and his own father—(Captain Byram’s) “Old Cormante Tom.” During his December 1736 trial, Quaw confessed his guilt and from then on was “made use of as a Witness by the Present Justices” in providing details about the plot and implicating coconspirators. Quaw’s father, Tom, “had great Influence over the slaves” according to court officials and had a number of Coromantees who claimed to be under his command. Tom’s “great Influence” meant that his son, Quaw, had firsthand knowledge of the inner workings of, and motivations for, the 1736 conspiracy. Quaw’s understanding of the Coromantee language—an amalgam of Akan, Ga, and Adanme—granted him access to and insights about the plot very few had. In his testimony against (Warner’s) Johnno, Quaw described a planning feast organized by Secundi at Ned William’s plantation at which one of the co-leaders of the aborted plot—“Drank to Johnno in Wine that Looked Muddy” due to the fact that “the Oath Ingredients were in it.” This was the so-called damnation oath that conspirators used to protect the secrecy of the plan and to carry through with their war against the island’s slaveholders. The oathing ingredients contained a range of substances believed to be able to kill, damn, or confuse those who broke their vows. As Quaw clarified later in the trial against a fellow Thursday-born Akan-speaking slave, (Oliver’s) Quao, the oath drink that Johnno and others took on the night of the feast contained “Rum, with Grave Dirt in it”—a fact he could recall because he understood the discussions surrounding the oath between several men who spoke of it in Coromantee. For this particular feast, Johnno and Secundi “went Down to a Silk Cotton Tree to the Grave of Secundo’s Sister Cicile and talked at the Grave, about a Quarter of an hour, then they returned to Secundo’s house, Secundo bringing up some of the grave Dirt in his hand; he put some of it in a Glass, and then poured Rum on it out of a Bottle and Drank the Damnation Oath to Johnno.”2 Evoking a Coromantee ancestor—in this case Secundi’s sister—and securing dirt from her place of internment for use in an oath drink were key dimensions of the secrecy contracts forged between the Antigua conspirators. Quaw’s knowledge of the damnation oath and the ingredients of the oath drink became critical for him later during his time in Danish St. Croix. Quaw also bore witness to the powerful role of obeah as inspirational tool and ritual technology in the 1736 Antigua plot. He knew (Governor William Mathew’s) Caesar and Coromantee Quawcoo (Kwaku)—obeah men

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the Coromantee co-leader of the plot, Tackey Court, enlisted into the movement. Quawcoo orchestrated an elaborate ceremony in honor of Secundi in the weeks following betrayal of the plot and the executions of the conspiracy’s co-leaders— Tackey Court and Tomboy. Quaw may have been one of the participants who witnessed this loyalty oath ceremony in which the rebels appointed Secundi as their new commander. In his trial testimony, Colonel Frye’s Quamina (Kwamena) reveals, I saw this Obey Man at Secundi’s House. . . . Secundi gave him a [coin], a Bottle of Rum and a Dominique Cock and Quawcoo put Obey made of Sheeps Skin upon the ground, upon and about the bottle of Rum, and the [chicken] upon the bottle, Then took the Cock, cut open his Mouth, and one of his Toes, and so poured the Cocks blood Over all the Obey, and then Rub’d Secundi’s forehead with the Cocks bloody Toe, Then took the Bottle and poured Some Rum upon the Obey, Drank a Dram, and gave it to Secundi and made Secundi Sware not to Discover his Name. Secundi Pledged him and Swore not to Discover his name to anybody. Secundi then Asked him when he must begin to Rise. Quawcoo took a String ty’d knots in it, and told him not to be in a hurry, for that he would give him Notice when to Rise and all Should go well and that as he tyed those knots so the Bacararas [whites] should become Arrant fools and have their Mouths Stoped, and their hands tyed that they should not Discover the Negro’s Designs.3

As diviner, oracle, and military advisor to Secundi, Coromantee Quawcoo played a familiar set of roles for those living in Gold Coast diaspora communities. His example would not be forgotten by Quaw after his banishment to Danish St. Croix. In the time between his exile from Antigua to becoming the “drive wheel” of the 1759 Amina plot in the Danish St. Croix, Quaw—now Sam Hector—went through a series of radical transformations. According to various descriptions, Sam Hector “had a good deal of native ability, could both read and write, [had] ‘higher sentiments’ than are ordinarily found in a Negro, and an ambition that led him—as he has himself said and other Negroes in the plot have testified—to be ashamed to associate with others of his own color.” Furthermore, he may have been a practicing Christian by the time of the Amina plot and the apparent rejection of his Akan day-name by 1759 points toward a decided move away from connections to Gold Coast cultural geographies. Despite the assumed distance he may have had from the enslaved masses and his own Gold Coast past, Sam Hector grew into a natural leader and “was to have the direction and supreme command (during) the time of the rebellion.” After the war was over

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and the St. Croix Amina polity established, Sam Hector would share power over the island with Prince Quakoe (Kwaku) and a free black creole named William Davis.4 Sam Hector’s past as someone who “was always practiced in the art” of rebellion made him formidable to Danish colonial authorities. His memory and activation of the Coromantee and Amina resistive arts in St. Croix meant a life beyond his supposed social death—Sam Hector’s Atlantic journey punctuated, as it were, by more than one social resurrection. Like the Coromantees of Antigua, the St. Croix Aminas used an elaborate oathing ceremony as the basis for their conspiracy. Described in detail by Prince Quakoe in his trial confession, the oath began when conspirators cut their own fingers and then “mixed the blood with earth and water, and drank it with the assurance that they would not confess to the conspiracy no matter what pain they were subjected to.” Later, the wife of William Davis explained to court officials that the earth used for the oath drink had special properties as “the most binding oath that a Negro could take, was when he took earth from a dead Negro’s grave, mixed it with water, and drank it.”5 While the activation of the damnation oath, including the use of grave dirt, bound the Amina conspirators to their Gold Coast and diasporic ancestors, perhaps it was their faith in transplanted spiritual notions that allowed them to lay violent hands on themselves when the plans were revealed to authorities. After William Davis was arrested and interrogated on December 12, 1759, he violated the terms of the oath by divulging details about the plot and the names of fellow conspirators. By the next morning, he slashed his own throat with his fingernails despite the fact that his hands had been bound. Officials at the Danish fort where William was held found him in time to staunch the bleeding and dress his wound. By the following night, however, William tore through his bandages once again ripping open the gaping wound in his neck. On the morning of December 14, authorities discovered his lifeless body in a pool of blood. His suicide may have been testament to his faith in the Amina expression—summarized by a former governor of the Danish West Indies—“When I die, I shall return to my own land.” Links between suicide and transmigration became ubiquitous features in the resistive arts mastered by so many in the Gold Coast diaspora. However, as an island-born creole, William’s “own land” was St. Croix not a particular locale in Atlantic Africa. In his case, and perhaps others throughout the Americas, suicide held the potential of transformation into an ancestral spirit to be activated by the living in their designs against colonial regimes and slaveholders.

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Perhaps Sam Hector contemplated similar thoughts of spiritual ascension and empowerment. After being convicted of criminal conspiracy, he was sentenced to a slow death by gibbeting. Placed in an iron cage, elevated several feet off the ground, and denied water and food, Sam Hector lingered on death’s edge for forty-two hours. It may have been thoughts of a triumphant return to his Gold Coast home or his impending transformation into a wrathful ancestral spirit in St. Croix that provided Sam Hector with some measure of comfort as he awaited passage from this world to the next.6 Across the various spaces in which he found himself, Sam Hector (or Quaw) activated or witnessed the compelling powers of obeah, blood oaths, and transmigration. As ritual technologies and weapons in the Coromantee and Amina arsenals, they each represented aspects of an emerging set of ritual and political concerns that shaped much of the Gold Coast diaspora. In this chapter, I argue that obeah was the quintessential marker of a radical mortuary and political sphere as its Akan-speaking cognate form, bayi, lacked state sanction and was defined by the elites of many polities as antisocial and anti-state witchcraft. As a potentially dangerous and empowering concept, bayi was repressed and its practitioners became the targets of a range of statesanctioned reprisals including enslavement and transatlantic shipment. In this sense, bayi and its diasporic expression, obeah, were the natural purview of subordinated peoples on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, the very fact that obeah may have developed out of a generative fusion between Akan bayi, Igbo dibia, and other Atlantic African belief systems implies that like other spiritual and expressive forms in the Black Atlantic, this esoteric practice and resistive art formed a critical part of the “common tongue” spoken by the enslaved and dispossessed in the Western Hemisphere. Blood oaths, on the other hand, functioned as critical mechanisms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gold Coast polities as inviolable military and political pacts with ancestral spirits, state oracles, or deities. Their appropriation and invocation by enslaved commoners in the Gold Coast diaspora exemplify new sociopolitical formations and visions. While the form of the blood oath mirrors similar binding contracts in Gold Coast polities, grave dirt as a unique Western Hemisphere addition implies that Coromantees and Aminas consciously reformulated the meanings and metaphors associated with loyalty oaths. Grave dirt as a diasporic trope for the continuing role and power of the ancestors within the earthly realm would find a range of expressions in the practices of peoples across the Americas.

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Lastly, this chapter interprets suicide (or suicidal action), stoicism in the face of torture and death, and belief in transmigration as another set of weapons in the hands of enslaved Gold Coast commoners. While obeah and blood oaths embodied the activation of ritual, political, and martial powers, suicide gave the enslaved and dispossessed command over their very souls upon death’s approach. Embracing notions of spiritual immortality emboldened believers and may explain their pain tolerance, fearlessness, and seeming disregard for their mortality. The destruction of earthly bonds and the release of the spirit to its destiny may have been welcome thoughts to those facing a lifetime of bondage in a strange and hostile land. In the Americas, death, even by suicide, hastened transmigration and allowed those who believed to “reshuffle the deck” with the liberatory potential of being reborn free in Atlantic Africa. Another possibility is that enslaved rebels facing death did so with the firm belief that they would be transformed into empowered ancestors with the ability to continue the fight against slavery. Even in failing to create new Coromantee or Amina post-slave states, rebels could return to the land of their ancestors or become activated through grave dirt—as ancestors themselves—by the living as the ultimate act of resistance. Combined, obeah, loyalty oaths, and transmigration became weapons of the weak in the Americas and represented cultural (re)inventions by the many Coromantees and Aminas who deployed them.7 These ritual tools and technologies helped them make sense of the new worlds around them and enabled them to articulate a unique abolitionist consciousness. Moreover, their ubiquitous presence in the Gold Coast diaspora provides some of the best evidence that social death was simply a temporal phase or waypoint in the process of social resurrection. The ability of Coromantees and Aminas to fashion new lives in the Americas and to connect with forces energized and activated by ancestral spirit implies simultaneous disconnection from and connection to the Gold Coast past. At the very same time they were (re)inventing themselves and becoming new peoples, their new identities and concepts of a post-slave state were framed by the ancestral realm.

Obeah and Coromantee Oaths in the Americas Abrokyire bayi, or literally “foreign witchcraft” in Akan-Twi, became a persuasive force wielded by Coromantees and Aminas in their visions of freedom in the

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Americas. In the early modern Gold Coast, local bayi was suppressed by state actors and elites and, in some cases, became the basis upon which people were enslaved, sold to Europeans, and shipped to distant lands across the Atlantic horizon.8 At the core of witchcraft accusations in the seventeenthand eighteenth-century Gold Coast was the notion that local bayi represented destabilizing antisocial, anti-state, or even revolutionary forces.9 By its very nature, bayi democratized spiritual empowerment as commoner and noble alike could be born with the special connections to the ancestral and spirit realm that could lead one on the path to becoming an obayifo. They could be born with a caul or veil of skin covering their faces, misshapen, or deformed in some other distinctive way. Obayifo could also be an inheritable title, from father to son or mother to daughter.10 While the children of elites might be funneled into state-sanctioned and sponsored priest and priestesshoods—akomfo or abosomfo—commoners lacked this type of access and many rural hamlets and villages developed a range of ritual specialists, including healers, diviners, and midwives. Unlike their state-sanctioned counterparts, these local and non-elite ritualists did not operate from oracles or shrines and inhabited a nebulous social space. Collectively, these non-elite ritual specialists engaged in a type of spiritual banditry that channeled, redirected, or redistributed power for the benefit of the various have-nots in Gold Coast societies. By definition, abayifo mastered a form of spiritual and political malfeasance by claiming power beyond the watchful eye and control of state actors.11 Swept up into the many streams and tributaries that channeled the continuous outflow of peoples and cultural technologies across the Atlantic, this cast of ritual specialists became one of the most critical components in the development of Gold Coast diaspora peoples and cultures. Instead of being understood as an antisocial ritual practice in the Americas, obeah became a quotidian aspect of life for the enslaved. Indeed, enslaved rebels employed it frequently in their quests to create new political and social orders. Its centrality among Maroon political formations and its activation by Coromantee and Amina rebels in Suriname, Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados, and beyond helped further crystalize Gold Coast diaspora identities. At the same time, obeah compelled the continuing transformation of Gold Coast diasporic ethnicities into more inclusive formations in their political thrust and appeal.12 Beyond the realm of the resistive arts, obeah became embedded in the everyday lives of the enslaved in the British, Danish, and Dutch circum-Caribbean and mainland colonies. At times, it could be employed by the enslaved against one another. Obeah could be activated by colonial authorities and plantation owners

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as a mechanism of social control. Even with these exceptions in mind, obeah never lost its revolutionary potential. Like other African Atlantic religious and spiritual systems, it could be a catalyst for the enslaved masses in inspiring social revolution and war.13 Many Atlantic Africans carried memories of ritual specialists and their practices with them through the Middle Passage and this could facilitate the reemergence of associated practices in the Americas. Unlike akomfo and other state-sanctioned Gold Coast ritual specialists who relied on shrines, oracles, and deities, and a more systematized ritual structure to engage their craft and develop new initiates, bayi did not depend upon a pantheon of gods. Instead, this was a decentralized practice. Shrines, oracles, and other places of worship did not play critical roles in bayi; indeed, “worship” and other forms of public expression were virtually nonexistent in either Gold Coast bayi or Western Hemisphere obeah. Belief in the power of the obeah doctor to reach beyond the material plane in order to engage and activate the extraordinary was all that was needed for obeah to have any effect. In this case, obeah never relied upon conversion or the creation of large pools of adherents or congregants. Obeah doctors, similar to their obayifo counterparts in the Gold Coast, served in mercenary roles—employed only when there was need. Maintaining individual “clients” as opposed to masses of adherents may have helped to keep this practice clandestine, pushed to the physical margins, and into the shadows of diasporic communities where it could be safely harbored.14 Obeah, as manifested in the Americas, was not sustained solely as a result of the continued influx of Gold Coast Africans. Instead, it represented a confluence of Atlantic African peoples, cultures, and ritual technologies. Proof of this appears in a range of sources and recent historical interpretations. In a letter to James Petiver, Thomas Walduck provided details about obeah in Barbados. Among his most insightful statements was an observation in which he notes “No Negro that was born in Barbados can doe [obeah], only those that are brought from the Coast of Africa and Chiefly the Calarmale Negros.”15 “Calarmale,” a corruption of “Calabari,” refers to Igbo speakers and a range of others from Calabar and the Bight of Biafra. Given the domination of Gold Coast Africans in Barbadian import estimates in the first decade of the eighteenth century and the growing concerns about the Coromantees residing there since the discovery of a slave plot in 1675, the omission of any reference to the Gold Coast and its diaspora of peoples in this correspondence is more than curious.

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More recently, Douglas Chambers, Jerome Handler, and Kenneth Bilby have theorized either an Igbo origin to, or a significant Igbo dimension in, the ritual formulation that became obeah in the British Caribbean. In part, their evidentiary base includes the Walduck letter and an etymological assessment of the similarities between obia and a ritual practice centered around healing among twentieth-century speakers of Efik and Igbo—dibia.16 In this regard, obeah may have been the result of a cultural “negotiation” between the many cast out from Gold Coast and Bight of Biafra embarkation ports to meet and become part of communities in the British colonies in the Americas. Similar formulations and negotiations between multiple Atlantic African groups may have been behind Saint-Domingue Vodun, Brazilian Candomblé, and Cuban Regla de Ocha (or Santeria)—concepts that drew upon ritual technologies carried by Kongo Christians and devotees of Edo, Fon, and Yoruba pantheons, divination systems, and cosmologies. Like other diasporic cultural forms, obeah was particularly malleable and plastic and this may have been at the core of its ability to reach across lines of ethnic and linguistic divide. With this said, obeah may not have been simultaneously born in the Gold Coast and the Biafran interior—as argued by others. Nor was it simply a catchall term or a practice devoid of connections to specific Atlantic African cultural geographies.17 Instead, I contend that Gold Coast bayi served as a base around which a range of Atlantic African spiritual concepts became intertwined and entangled—resulting in different variants of obeah coming to fruition throughout the Americas. This allows, for example, obeah to exist in regions or colonies in which imports from the Bight of Biafra were few or relatively nonexistent. It also provides space for a range of Atlantic Africans to embrace and find resonances within obeah—despite its ostensibly Gold Coast origins. Though it may have had a wide variety of manifestations across both space and time, the enslaved—creole and Atlantic African alike— could interpret, use, and be empowered by obeah in similar fashion. While it may have had Gold Coast origins, its amorphous structure allowed many other Atlantic African groups to latch on to and activate obeah as its forms and basic principles would have been familiar to people from a wide range of backgrounds. This broader historical foundation—which decouples the growth or practice of obeah from a particular ethnolinguistic enclave in the Americas—may open new interpretive possibilities. In this sense, obeah had Gold Coast foundations but the continuation of the practice in the Americas did not rely solely upon the continual importation or even the presence of enslaved Gold Coast Africans.

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This reframing of obeah as part of a broader interpretation of cultural transformation is far from novel. In his 1903 anthology, The Negro Church, W. E. B. Du Bois includes a chapter entitled “Obeah Sorcery,” which he contends was one of many manifestations of African American religiosity in the Western Hemisphere. Echoing sentiments articulated the same year in Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois added that these religions survived slavery and “under the leadership of [the] priest or medicine man . . . the Church preserved in itself the remnants of African tribal life.”18 Referred to more obliquely in Souls of Black Folk as “the heathenism of the Gold Coast,” obeah and similar practices became embedded within the expressive cultures associated with the black church and determined, for Du Bois, the “pythian madness,” “demoniac possession,” and “frenzied shouting” at the core of “the most vital part of the history of the Negro in America.”19 Indeed, Du Bois had in mind the Jamaican obeah man when he claimed that the “Priest or Medicine-man” appeared early on plantations throughout the Americas and functioned as “the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment, and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people.”20 When this section of Souls of Black Folk is read through the optic of Du Bois’s discussions in The Negro Church, it becomes clear that much of his theoretic framing of the internal workings of black religion came out of his research on African Atlantic spiritual systems in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean. In fact, the principle source from which Du Bois derived his assessments about obeah and obeah doctors was Bryan Edwards, a Jamaican slave owner and sugar planter who penned a 1783 work entitled The History, Civil and Commercial of the British West Indies. Working through the details of Tacky’s 1760 Coromantee War in Jamaica, in which obeah played a central role, Edwards recorded information derived from the interrogation of a captured Coromantee obeah man.21 In the hands of Du Bois, the historical examples of obeah in the Caribbean become a way of theorizing the cultural transformations that undergird key institutions in African American life. The spiritual practices and concerns that gave rise to obeah in the eighteenthcentury circum-Caribbean formed part of a continuum of experiences for the enslaved that were coded and embedded with generative cultural and sociopolitical materials. More than simply representing “remnants” of a generic African “tribal life,” the origins of obeah point to specific Atlantic African language cohorts, cultural technologies, and sociopolitical spheres. From a Gold

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Coast foundation, the practice spread and became activated by many others in the Americas. As ritual technologies, they allowed for the activation and use of powerful forces in the hands of the dispossessed and enslaved who used them as the basis for social revolution and rebellion. The practice and activation of obeah—part of the Coromantee resistive arts in the Americas—represent far more than “degraded” and “exaggerated form[s] of witchcraft and medicine,” “heathen rites,” or “degenerated” African religious systems as articulated by Du Bois.22 As Du Bois himself hints at, but does not fully articulate, these resistive arts and cultural technologies were key in the processes of generating new social institutions, new cultural expressions, indeed new peoples in the Black Atlantic. While Gold Coast Africans were separated from family and familiar social structures in the process of commodification, they mobilized social and cultural scripts from their collective past as a means of social resurrection. Situated in a new set of geographies in the New World, this “rebirth” was both deeply rooted in the Gold Coast past and shaped by the American present. One example of this social resurrection or rebirth would be tied to the events surrounding the July 1685 revolt in Guanaboa, Jamaica. Led by a Coromantee named Cuffee (Kofi), some 150 rose on the estate of the widow Grey, stealing firearms and killing one man. During the early hours of the revolt, the Coromantee rebels were forced to retire and later retreat, “having lost one of their conjurors, on whom they chiefly depended.” Though no extant records link the unnamed conjuror specifically to obeah, his involvement in a Coromantee rebellion and their reliance on his abilities to aid them in the insurrection points in useful directions.23 British Jamaica quickly became a kind of cultural epicenter for obeah in the Americas by the first few decades of the eighteenth century. Given the continued circulations of peoples and ideas in the eighteenth-century Western Hemisphere, it is entirely likely that Barbados, Jamaica, and Antigua helped disseminate practices and ideas associated with obeah throughout the Caribbean and beyond. Indeed, banishments in the wake of rebellions and conspiracies provided a multitude of human vectors—like Antigua’s Sam Hector—who carried the concept (and the word) with them to their new homes. The shift in focus to Jamaica in the ritual geography of obeah was likely due to the presence and activities of the Leeward and Windward Maroons. Apparently, the practice of obeah was sheltered and given renewed life within these rebel communities. The types of entangled cultural practices that became characteristic of Jamaican Maroon enclaves served as the perfect climate for the growth and further elaboration of practices associated with obeah. During the course of the First

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Maroon War, a series of skirmishes between July and August 1735 resulted in the capture of a Maroon “who was discovered to be one of their Obia men or conjurers.” After he was taken, this obeah man had a quick trial and execution. Clearly his banishment to another colony would not put an end to the continuous threat represented by obeah.24 Despite his death, the Leewards continued to be inspired by obeah men, a fact that points to the presence of many others within their enclave who claimed control over spiritual and ancestral powers. A contemporary witness who visited the Leewards after the signing of the 1738 “Articles of Pacification” noted, “They have not the least idea of a Diety” and “They were very superstitious having during their State of Actual Rebellion, a Person whom they called Obea Man whom they greatly revered, his Words Carried the Force of an Oracle with them, being Consulted on every Occasion.” This observer goes on to note that the Leewards’ faith in their obeah man had waned in the handful of years before his visit. Apparently, this obeah man had prophesized that one of their previous towns could neither be detected nor attacked by whites yet they were proved “of the falseness of it” when—during the course of the First Maroon War—British forces assaulted this town and burned many houses to the ground.25 Even when the powers proclaimed by obeah doctors seemingly failed, this did not dislodge the masses of enslaved people from belief in a world beyond the material realm. On this note, Thomas Thistlewood, the notorious Jamaican overseer, recorded an entry on January 6, 1754 about a “noted Obia man” named Jinney Quashe (Kwasi) “pretending to pull bones, &c. out of several of our Negroes for which they was to give him money.” When he was “discovered by them to be a cheat,” they threatened him and chased him away from the plantation.26 As Douglas Hall states, even discovery of the ineffectiveness of obeah could be explained away. In this case, he notes that if an obeah doctor was set to protect a “charmed person from death, and if death should come it would signify the weakness or unworthiness of the charmed rather than of the charm.”27 While impostors may be discovered or weak leaders exposed due to their lack of faith, the one thing that remained constant was the potential and power of obeah. In the case of Antigua, both obeah and Coromantee loyalty oaths became organizing principles in the commission of the island-wide conspiracy in 1736. The Ga-speaking leader of the rebels, Tackey Court, experienced a Coromantee “apprenticeship” under one of the principal obeah men involved in the conspiracy—Coromantee Quawcoo. Feared and highly respected by fellow conspirators, Quawcoo’s very presence could cause “a great Consternation at the

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Sight of the Obey Man.” Though the records do not reveal whether the Coromantee obeah doctors created charms, poisons, or powders, we do know that Quawcoo created a ritual object—known in the records as an “Obey”—made of sheepskin and upon which he poured animal blood and other substances. This ritual object, resembling in all aspects a Gold Coast sumán, became the center of Quawcoo’s spiritual powers and his ability to consecrate oaths. In addition, both Quawcoo and John Obia orchestrated a series of oathing ceremonies over the course of several months leading up to and beyond the intended outbreak of violence.28 The fact that the Antiguan Coromantees and creoles chose funerals as the occasions for many of their oathing ceremonies is indicative of the power the ancestral realm represented in the minds of the enslaved. Funerals gave the conspirators a practical reason to gather and to have a feast; they also provided the enslaved with both a key substance for their loyalty draughts in grave dirt and an immediate connection to ancestral forces to help bind their oaths. It is clear from the very nature of the oath that the actual “damnation” would be caused by ancestral spirits. In the evidence presented against Mingo, the court noted that an oathing ceremony conducted at Secundi’s house included a “Creed Oath in a Glass of Rum and Dirt of a Grave, which Mingo and the Rest took; a Glass in one hand and the Other upon the Cock tyed upon the Table, the Oath in these Words—Damnation to the failers in the intended Insurrection.”29 Bryan Edwards of Jamaica explains further that oath takers or those forced to submit to an oath test must consume a concoction of human blood, grave dirt, and water do so “with an imprecation, that it may cause the belly to burst, and the bones to rot” upon violation of the terms of the oath or “if the truth be not spoken.”30 Charles Leslie of Barbados, reflecting on a visit to Jamaica in the 1730s, noted that after items were found to be stolen on a plantation, “they have a solemn kind of Oath, which the eldest Negro always administers, and which by them is accounted so sacred.” After arranging themselves at a gravesite, “one of them opens a Grave” and “the Priest, takes a little of the earth, and puts into every one of the Mouths; they say, that if any has been guilty, their Belly swells, and occasions their Death.”31 Whether damnation, confusion, or death resulted from breaking an oath or being dishonest, the spirits of departed friends or relatives would be the agents of vengeance and punishment. While similar oaths became important tools for Gold Coast polities, merchants, and militaries, grave dirt as an ingredient of an oath draught seems to be a unique New World adaptation and may have been borrowed from other Atlantic African cohorts.32 Above and beyond all other markers

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of political culture in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gold Coast, state and personal oaths and oathing ceremonies became central features and served, ideally, as inviolable contracts for states, state and commercial actors, or armies. In most cases, taking an oath was a sacred act and involved eating or drinking substances believed by adherents to contain sufficient spiritual potency to kill anyone taking the oath on false pretense or breaking the terms of a sworn agreement. The ubiquitous practice of eating or imbibing during an oathing ritual led to the European description of an Akan oath as “eating fetish.” In some descriptions, someone wishing to prove their innocence when accused of a criminal offense would be subjected to an oathing test or ordeal in which they would eat salt or bread on top of a ritual object—probably a personal sumán of the accuser or the fetisso or bossum of a town or larger polity. As noted by Wilhelm Müller, a Lutheran pastor residing at Fort Fredericksburg near Cape Coast from 1662 to 1669, “If he does, and for three days experiences no harm, he is recognised as innocent.” Sumán, bossum, and other ritual objects figure into the description of loyalty oaths offered by Carl Reindorf—a Ga-speaking Basel missionary who collected a number of Ga oral traditions in the early to mid-nineteenth century. He notes that “The powerful fetish of the country or town” is washed with water, producing a “potion” that is offered to an oath taker to imbibe during an elaborate and sacred ceremony. As in Reindorf ’s description, most accounts of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Gold Coast oathing ceremonies involve the creation of special drinks made from a variety of substances—green leaf juice, gunpowder, water, blood, ground millet, and rum or other spirits—to help seal commercial contracts, to consecrate peace treaties between nations, or to insure the loyalty of soldiers and their commanding officers to the war aims of a polity. In all these cases, drinking “fetish” or the oath drink accompanied severe sanctions for the dishonest or disloyal.33 Willem Bosman—chief factor of the Dutch West India Company during the 1690s—notes, “They oblige the Priest to swear first, and drink the Oath-Draught, with the Imprecation, that the Fetiche should punish him with Death, if he ever absolved any Person from their Oath without the unanimous Consent of all interested in that Contract.”34 According to Christian Whit, a Ga-speaking drum major stationed at Christiansborg Castle in 1708, each item in the oath drink signified a different form of death for those who violate the terms of a sacred contract: “Water means an unhappy death in the sea. . . . The blood means a violent death by gunshot or sword . . . the [millet] that all the blessings of the earth’s fertility will be denied him, if he breaks the oath.”35 Importantly, no

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extant record of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gold Coast oaths includes grave dirt as an ingredient in oath draughts. Whereas local or state deities, oracles, and bossum guaranteed oaths in the Gold Coast, Gold Coast diaspora loyalty oaths—shaped as they were by democratizing concerns—were secured by ancestral spirits—spiritual forces to which everyone had direct access or connection. Unlike deities, the power of the ancestors did not need to be mediated through oracles, priests, or priestesses and, as a result, their protective or harmful influences could be activated by a much wider range of specialists and practitioners. Within this interpretive frame, the spiritual and even social meaning of the graveyard and grave dirt, or “goopher dust,” as a component in diasporic oath drinks can be realized more fully.36 Tacky’s 1760 war in Jamaica mirrored many of the aspects of the 1736 Antigua conspiracy particularly in the employment of obeah and loyalty oaths. The use of these Coromantee spiritual technologies forged group unity during the planning phases and served as vectors of the collective wrath of the aggrieved and enslaved. Du Bois’s own theories about the transformation of black religion and the black church were undergirded by the testimony from an obeah man captured in St. Mary’s Parish during a routine security check. As described by Edward Long, this obeah doctor was “a famous obeiah man or priest, much respected among his countrymen.” Indeed, Long goes on to add that this man was an old Coromantin, who, with others of his profession, had been chief in counseling and instigating the credulous herd, to whom these priests administered a powder, which, being rubbed on their bodies, was to make them invulnerable: they persuaded them into a belief that Tacky, their generalissmo in the woods, could not possibly be hurt by the white men, for that he caught all the bullets fired at him in his hand, and hurled them back with destruction to his foes. This old impostor was caught whilst he was tricked up with all his feathers, teeth, and other implements of magic.37

For future purposes, it would be the “implements of magic” and claims of otherworldly communication by obeah doctors that concerned Jamaican authorities as much as anything else connected to the 1760 revolt. In the aftermath of Tacky’s War, the Assembly of Jamaica made obeah illegal and its practice a crime punishable by death or banishment from the colony by legislative act on December 18, 1760. They specifically banned the various implements associated with the practice, including “Blood, Feathers, Parrots Beaks, Dogs Teeth, Alligators Teeth, Broken Bottles, Grave Dirt, Rum, Eggshells.”38

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As weapons of the weak and Gold Coast diaspora ritual technologies, obeah and blood oaths became powerful inducements in attempts at social revolution and the construction of post-slave polities. In both the Gold Coast and the Americas, bayi and its cognate forms were commoner appropriations of power and means of empowerment. Blood oaths, on the other hand, were vehicles of state power in the Gold Coast and became the principal means by which economic, political, and military elites could consecrate contracts, make alliances, or guarantee arrangements across vast distances. In the hands of former commoners from the Gold Coast, oaths became essential and even signal markers of Coromantee resistance in the circum-Caribbean. By making a suppressed activity normative—in the case of obeah—and inverting Akan loyalty oaths—elite mechanisms—into tools and weapons of the oppressed, peoples who defined themselves as Coromantees and Aminas in the Americas laid the foundation for new social and political visions around which others could rally. The “mysterious Obi worship with its barbarous rites, spells, and blood-sacrifice,” to borrow Du Bois’s phrasing, served as one of many spurs to the cultural and political transformations that shaped the early modern Black Atlantic.39

Coromantee Fortitude, Self-Destruction, and Transmigration In his 1783 historical account about the British Caribbean, planter Bryan Edwards spent a considerable amount of attention on Coromantee behavioral traits— especially as they relate to the warrior-like disposition of so many Gold Coast diaspora men. Reflecting on the then long history of Coromantee rebelliousness and even contemporary examples of their general recalcitrance, he repeated what—by that time—had become standard fare in considerations of this difficult people. He noted, for example, “The courage or unconcern which the people of this country manifest at the approach of death” and how it results from “their national manners, wars and superstitions, which are all, in the highest degree, savage and sanguinary.”40 In this insightful passage, Edwards had his finger on the interpretive pulse of the foundation for Coromantee courage and perhaps pain tolerance. First, many Gold Coast men captured, enslaved, and transported to the Americas may have served in armies or asafo companies and this probably factors into their courage in the face of death. Second, Coromantee beliefs in transmigration, the immortality of the human soul, and the transformation of

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the deceased into ancestral spirits—the supposed Coromantee “superstitions”— led them to have less concern about their fleshly bonds to the material plane. The martial aptitude of Coromantees and Aminas alone, however, would not sufficiently explain the many examples of their pain tolerance and fearlessness. As Edwards adds, “This contempt of death, or indifference about life, they bring with them to the West Indies.” The fact that he noted the same traits among children brought from the Gold Coast, led Edwards to assume that it was a natural inclination. Their “evident superiority, both in hardiness of frame, and vigour of mind, over all the young people of the same age imported from other parts of Africa,” proved to him that Coromantees were quite different from other Atlantic African imports. To support this claim, he offered the story of the branding of “ten Kormantyn boys, and the like number of Eboes” no older than twelve or thirteen years of age. When the first youngster—a stout Eboe boy, received his “mark,” Edwards notes that “he screamed dreadfully, while his companions of the same nation manifested strong emotions of sympathetic terror.” In stark contrast, the “Koromantyn boys” laughed at the Eboes and “coming forward of their own accord, offered their bosoms undauntedly to the brand,” which they all took without flinching.41 Far grislier scenes than the one offered by Edwards occurred throughout the circum-Caribbean in connection to the executions and public torture of Coromantee or Amina rebels, runaways, and maroons. Their Spartan fortitude was to be tested far too often.42 In the aftermath of the 1760 Jamaica revolt, court justices tried and sentenced one Coromantee rebel to be burned alive as a part of a public spectacle to quash the spirit of insurrection. Chained to a stake and forced to sit on the ground, the rebel had a torch applied to his feet and legs. Neither flinching nor uttering a moan, “his legs reduced to ashes with the utmost firmness and composure.” When one of his arms managed to get lose, he threw a lit brand in the face of the executioner.43 John Gabriel Stedman’s five years in Dutch Suriname, beginning February 1773, left a remarkable impression on him and his reflections on this experience deepens our understandings of the links between Coromantee fortitude and their belief in transmigration. In the aftermath of pacification treaties signed by Maroon polities between 1760 and 1762, several new Maroon groups in the colony began assaulting plantations and colonists living near the Cottica and Commewijne rivers. This wave of attacks, including the destruction of plantations and the capture of colonial military outposts, led to an increasing number of military expeditions launched by the Dutch States-General and Governor Jan

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Nepveu after 1768. During this period, two of the larger rebellious maroon settlements—Boni’s Maroons and Kormantin Kodjo’s (Kwadwo) Maroons— conducted a multifront war against the Dutch that would last until 1777.44 Among a sizable contingent of European soldiers and mercenaries requested by Suriname’s governor, John Gabriel Stedman was involved in a handful of mostly uneventful campaigns against the Maroons during the later portion of the First Boni-Maroon War (1768–1777).45 His most compelling encounters with “Rebel Negroes” came as the result of watching the torture and execution of captured Maroons. Though “hurt by the cruelty” of the horrible burnings and dismemberments he witnessed, Stedman expressed a measure of surprise “at the intrepidity with which the Negroes bore their punishment.” On May 21, 1773 seven captured Maroons were tortured and executed at Fortress Zeelandia. Though we know little about their ethnic backgrounds, we can say for certain that many of Kodjo’s Maroons—including his brother Kwaw—were Coromantees mixed with a number of Atlantic Africans from Sierra Leone and Senegambia. Many other Maroons, including Boni, were classified as “bush creoles” or people born in Suriname within an existing Maroon enclave. Even in this case, Coromantee culture and norms shaped some of the core principles held dear by a wide range of Suriname’s rebel Maroon groups. In any event, the captured rebels Stedman wrote about performed Coromantee masculinity in ways repeated in the Americas since the late seventeenth century. One captive, broken on the rack, suffered “under the most excruciating torments, through which he manfully went without heaving a sigh or complaining.” Another, sentenced to death by hanging, “gave a hearty laugh of contempt at the magistrates who attended the execution.”46 Perhaps for men tortured and executed in such ways, death’s embrace was not to be feared. For those who believed in the transmigration of souls, death offered a renewed opportunity for not just escape but also revenge. The combination of recent training in the arts of war and belief in transmigration may explain the frequent involvement of enslaved Gold Coast Africans in dozens of conspiracies, revolts, and Maroon enclaves in the Western Hemisphere. Certainly, an outcome of this combination was a proclivity toward suicide—a trait normally associated with Eboes and others from the Bight of Biafra in the Americas. While Eboes had a reputation for being melancholy and timid and, thus, seen as prone to self-destruction by British Caribbean and Dutch mainland planters, as Orlando Patterson notes “the evidence suggests that the highly desired Gold Coast Slaves had an even greater record of suicide

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for the opposite reason, namely, their intractability and stubborn refusal to accept their status as slaves.”47 Several mass suicides involving Coromantees and Aminas throughout the Americas provide a body of evidence to undergird this conclusion. Six Coromantees committed suicide in the aftermath of the 1712 New York City revolt. Some 36 Aminas, including most of the leadership core, killed themselves when their polity was crushed in Danish St. John in May 1734. Mass suicides followed in the wake of the 1760 Jamaica revolt in the parishes of Westmoreland, St. James, and St. Mary—the latter including the suicide of 25 rebels in one instance. The suicides of prominent leaders marked the 1759 Danish St. Croix Amina rebellion and the 1763 Berbice Delmina revolt. Five Coromantees hanged themselves after a failed rebellion in the British Caribbean island of Tobago in 1770.48 While many studies have drawn links between transmigration and suicide, the examples assessed above—when placed within a broader context of the mortuary beliefs of Coromantees and Aminas—point in another generative direction.49 Instead of interpreting suicide as a means by which vanquished rebels, captured runaways, and defeated Maroons could “return home” to the lands of their forbearers, self-destruction may have been seen as acts of empowerment and as a means of further resistance in the here and now. Upon the approach of death, Coromantees and Aminas faced transformation from defeated slaves and Maroons into empowered ancestors who could provide further assistance in the fight against the forces of oppression. Their stoicism and even laughter in the face of excruciating tortures were not because they looked forward to a home coming back in the Gold Coast. Instead their intrepidity and courage—the famed Spartan fortitude of Coromantees and Aminas—along with their propensity to commit suicide when all seemed lost may have been due to an unfaltering faith in their abilities to continue fighting as wrathful ancestral spirits. A glimpse of this possibility is mentioned by Stedman who notes that enslaved people and Maroons he encountered in Suriname had a full and complete trust in their vision of the afterlife. In his words, they had no “fear of death, confident they will see some of their friends and relations again in another world, but not that if they die abroad they will rise in their own country.”50 Spiritual transmigration for them ended when they joined other friends and relatives in the ancestral realm. Released from their mortal bonds and activated by grave dirt taken from places of their interment, Coromantee and Amina ancestral spirits may have been understood by the living to be the most potent weapon in the arsenals of Gold Coast Africans and their diasporic descendants.

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Notes 1 A Genuine Narrative of the Intended Conspiracy of the Negros at Antigua, 22. New York: Arno Press, 1972; “Justices to W. Mathew, December 15, 1736,” CO 9/10 and “List of Forty-five Banishments with Eight Evidences, March 1737,” CO 9/11, The National Archives, Kew, UK; Westergaard, 1926. “Account of the Negro Rebellion on St. Croix.” Journal of Negro History 11: 55–56. 2 “Evidence against Warner’s Johnno, a Cooper belonging to Folly’s Plantation, January 21, 1737,” “Evidence against Colonel Luca’s Cesar, a Driver, January 20, 1737,” and “Evidence against Oliver’s Quao, January 21, 1737,” CO 9/11. 3 “Tryal of Quawcoo an Old Oby Man, Physician, and Cormantee belonging to Mr. William Hunt, December 9, 1736,” CO 9/10. 4 Westergaard, “Account of the Negro Rebellion,” 55–56, 58; Hall, Neville A.T., 1992. Slave Society in the Danish West Indies, 71. Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press; Oldendorp, C. G. A., 1987. History of the Mission of the Evangelical Brethren on the Caribbean Islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John, 508, 523. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers, Inc. 5 Westergaard, “Account of the Negro Rebellion,” 55, 57. 6 Ibid., 54–55, 57, 58, 59; Kea, Ray, 1996. “‘When I Die, I Shall Return to My Own Land’: An ‘Amina’ Slave Rebellion in the Danish West Indies, 1733-1734.” In John Hunwick and Nancy Lawler (eds.), The Cloth of Many Coloured Silks: Papers on History and Society Ghanaian and Islamic in Honor of Ivor Wilks, 159–60. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 7 Scott, James C., 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. 8 Greene, Sandra, 2002. Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana, 112. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press; Debrunner, H. W., 1959. Witchcraft in Ghana, 1. Kumasi: Presbyterian Book Depot. 9 Shaw, Rosalind, 2002. Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone, 221. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 10 Patterson, Orlando, 1967. The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica, 189. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; Oldendorp, A Caribbean Mission, 192. 11 Debrunner, Witchcraft in Ghana, 29–30. 12 For a parallel treatment of obeah, see Thornton, John, 1998. “The Coromantees: An African Cultural Group in Colonial North America and the Caribbean.” Journal of Caribbean History 32: 161–78. 13 Brown, Vincent, 2006. “Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority: The Power of the Supernatural in Jamaican Slave Society.” In Edward Baptist and Stephanie Camp (eds.), New Studies in the History of American Slavery, 182, 195–98. Athens:

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15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23

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Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora University of Georgia Press; Rucker, Walter C., 2001. “Conjure, Magic, and Power: The Influence of Afro-Atlantic Religious Practices on Slave Resistance and Rebellion.” Journal of Black Studies 32: 86–94. Fernández Olmos, Margarite, and Lizabeth Paravsini-Gebert, eds., 2000. Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, and the Caribbean, 6–8. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press; Hedrick, Basil C., and Jeanette E. Stephens, 1977. It’s a Natural Fact: Obeah in the Bahamas, 2, 5–9, 30. Greeley: University of Northern Colorado, Museum of Anthropology, Misc. Series No. 39; Poole, Robert, 1753. The Beneficent Bee or, Traveller’s Companion, II: 229–30. London: E. Duncomb and “Tales of Old Barbados,” 177–78, Obeah Folder, Barbados Museum and Historical Society, St. Michael, Barbados. “Walduck to Petiver, (no date),” Sloane MSS, 2302, British Library. Emphasis added. Chambers, Douglas, 1997. “‘My Own Nation’: Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora.” Slavery and Abolition 18: 82–83, 84, 88–90; Handler, Jerome S., and Kenneth M. Bilby, 2001. “On the Early Use and Origin of the Term ‘Obeah’ in Barbados and the Anglophone Caribbean.” Slavery and Abolition 22: 87–100; Williams, Joseph J., 1932. Voodoos and Obeahs: Phases of West India Witchcraft, 136. New York: Dial Press; Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, 185n6. Paton, Diana, 2012. “Witchcraft, Poison, Law, and Atlantic Slavery.” William and Mary Quarterly 69: 326n1; Brown, Vincent, 2008. The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery, 145. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B., ed., 1903. The Negro Church, 5–6. Atlanta: Atlanta University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B., 1997. Souls of Black Folk. Edited by David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams, 149–50. Boston: Bedford. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 152. Edwards, Bryan, 1819. History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, II: 306–07. London: G. and W. B. Whitaker. Du Bois, ed., The Negro Church, 6. “Molesworth to Blathwayt, August 29, 1685,” in Cecil Headlam, ed., 1910. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and the West Indies. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office (hereafter, CSPC), Volume 12, No. 339; “History of the Revolted Negroes in Jamaica,” Long Papers, Add. Manuscripts, 12431, British Library; “Minutes of a Council of War held at Jamaica, August 1, 1685,” CSPC, Volume 12, No. 299. “President Ayscough to the Duke of Newcastle, August 16, 1735,” CSPC, Volume 42, No. 73. “Lewis to Knight, December 20, 1743,” Long Papers, Add. Manuscripts, 12431, 99–100.

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26 Hall, Douglas, ed., 1999. In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750-1786, 61. Mona, Jamaica: The University of the West Indies Press. 27 Ibid., 93. 28 “Tryal of Quawcoo an Old Oby Man, Physician, and Cormantee belonging to Mr. William Hunt, December 9, 1736,” CO 9/10; “Report of the Justices,” 152/22, W94; A Genuine Narrative, 5–6, 12–13, 15, 19; Schuler, Monica, 1970. “Akan Slave Rebellions in the British Caribbean.” Savacou 1: 21. 29 “Governor William Mathew to [Assorted] People, May 11, 1737,” CSPC, Volume 43, No. 287; A Genuine Narrative, 13; “Tryal of Monk’s Mingo, November 15, 1736,” CO 9/10. 30 Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial of the British West Indies, II: 86. 31 Leslie, Charles, 1740. A New History of Jamaica, 308. London: J. Hodges. 32 “Müller’s Description of the Fetu Country, 1662-9,” in Jones, Adam, ed., 1983. German Sources for West African History, 1599-1669, 174–76. Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH; “Otto Friedrich von Der Groeben’s Account of His Voyage to Guinea, 1682-1683,” in Jones, Adam, ed., 1985. Brandenburg Sources for West African History, 1680-1700, 51. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag; Rask, Johannes, 2009. A Brief and Truthful Description of a Journey to and from Guinea, 1708-1713, 136. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers. 33 Müller’s Description of the Fetu Country, 1662-9,” in Jones, ed., German Sources, 174–76; “Otto Friedrich Von Der Groeben’s Account of His Voyage to Guinea, 1682-1683,” in Jones, ed., Brandenburg Sources, 51; “Treaty with Three Caboceers of Cape Three Points, 16 May 1681,” in Jones, ed., Brandenburg Sources, 18; “Treaty with 24 Caboceers of Akwida, 24 February 1684,” in Jones, ed., Brandenburg Sources, 84; Rask, A Brief and Truthful Description, 136; Reindorf, Carl C., 2007. History of the Gold Coasts and Asante, 116–17. Accra: Ghana Universities Press. 34 Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 125. 35 Rask, A Brief and Truthful Description, 136. 36 Whitten, Norman E., Jr., 1962. “Contemporary Patterns of Malign Occultism among Negroes in North Carolina.” Journal of American Folklore 75: 314; Anderson, Jeffrey E., 2005. Conjure in African American Society, 36–39, 101, 105. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press; Chireau, Yvonne P., 2003. Black Magic: Religion and African American Conjuring Tradition, 48, 62. Berkeley: University of California Press. 37 Long, Edward, 1970. The History of Jamaica: Reflections on Its Situations, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws and Government, II: 451–52. London: Frank Cass and Company Limited. 38 “An Act to Remedy the Evils Arising from Irregular Assemblies of Slaves . . . and for Preventing the Practice of Obeah . . . and to Prevent Any Captain, Master, or

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39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46

47

48

49

50

Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora Supercargo of Any Vessel Bringing back Slaves Transported off the Island, Jamaica, December 18, 1760,” CO 139/21. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 153; Craton, Michael, 1982. Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies, 46. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial of the British West Indies, II: 80. Ibid., II: 83. Phillips, U. B., 1966. American Negro Slavery, 42. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial of the British West Indies, II: 79. Price, Richard, and Sally Price, eds., 1992. Stedman’s Surinam: Life in an EighteenthCentury Slave Society, xix–xxii. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; Hoogbergen, Wim, 1990. The Boni Maroon Wars in Suriname, 52–104. Leiden: Brill. Hoogbergen, Maroon Wars in Suriname, 83. Price and Price, eds., Stedman’s Surinam, 50–51; Hoogbergen, Maroon Wars in Suriname, 70, 83, 91; Hoogbergen, Wim, 1989. “Aluku.” New West Indian Guide 63: 187, 190, 192. Other notable Coromantee and bush creole maroons during the First Boni-Maroon War include Kwamina Adjubi (leader of the Ndjuka Maroons), Kwami (leader of the Patamacca Maroons), and Kwasi (leader of the Meulwijk Maroons). Bush, Barbara, 1990. Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838, 46. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press; Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, 64. For assessments linking Eboes and others from Biafra to suicide, see Gomez, Michael, 1998. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South, 116–20, 127–28, 131. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Schuler, Akan Slave Rebellions, 15, 19, 23; Kea, “An Amina Slave Rebellion,” 187; Long, The History of Jamaica, II: 454–58, 461; Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, 264–65; Craton, Testing the Chains, 155. Mullin, Michael, 1992. Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831, 69. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Price and Price, eds., Stedman’s Surinam, 262.

4

Anti-Slavery in Nineteenth Century Fanteland Rebecca Shumway

The early nineteenth century was a time when transatlantic slave trading and the practice of slavery itself were being challenged by political leaders, merchants, activists, and humanitarians all around the Atlantic basin. The bestknown leaders of the abolitionist and anti-slavery movements were Britons and Americans, such as William Wilberforce and Frederick Douglass, and the voluminous scholarship on these movements has concentrated on British and US history. Yet recent scholarship has shown that the history of abolitionism cannot be fully understood without taking into account the vital contributions of a variety of actors located around the Atlantic basin, including those on the African continent.1 In the Caribbean, West Africa, and other parts of the British Empire, in particular, African and African-descended people pursued pragmatic political and commercial agendas that drew upon the ideals and rhetoric of abolitionism from the nineteenth century onward. These actors’ participation in the abolition movement is not as well documented in the historical record as that of abolitionists in Britain and the United States, but their contributions nevertheless shaped abolitionism over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in important and tangible ways. The widespread pieces of the anglophone world were interconnected by the constant movement of people, goods, texts, and ideas among them in the early nineteenth century, making the British Empire a vast “arena of moral discourse” from which abolitionism developed as a multifaceted ideology.2 And in some cases, as Derek Peterson argues, the language and rhetoric of abolitionism were invoked to add moral authority to political strategies that were not directly related to the alleviation of chattel slavery.3 The development of anti-slavery sentiments and activism among Africans in Africa has been sorely neglected by scholars of abolitionism and African history, as Kwabena Akurang-Parry has pointed out.4 Yet it is only logical that

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the ideologies of anti-slavery would have been growing in Africa during the nineteenth century as they were throughout the Atlantic World, especially in English-speaking regions such as the Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Nigeria, and Cape Colony. At the very least, the increasingly brutal and systemic nature of slavery in Africa in the nineteenth century must have provoked an equally pronounced opposition to slavery among the enslaved population, those vulnerable to enslavement, and others.5 By the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Africans living under European colonial rule certainly incorporated the abolitionist rhetoric of freedom, justice, and antiracism into their struggle for independence. But some African societies were integrated into transatlantic political, commercial, and familial networks much earlier, as scholars of Africa’s Atlantic history have shown.6 Africans in these coastal regions had access to information about important events and ideas developing around the Atlantic World throughout the era of the transatlantic slave trade, and likewise into the era of abolitionism. In the case of coastal Ghana, known then as the Gold Coast, the high degree of interaction between the coastal Fante population and British traders, government agents, and missionaries throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought the Fante elite into direct contact with the mounting wave of anti-slavery sentiment across the Atlantic World in the early and middle nineteenth century.7 This chapter assesses the political ideology of Fante elites during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century as it relates to the transatlantic moral discourse on abolitionism and anti-slavery. It contextualizes the development of Fante political ideology within the framework of changing economic, political, and cultural conditions on the Gold Coast, including the Asante conquest of Fanteland, the entrenchment of racist beliefs and behaviors among Europeans with whom Fante elites interacted, and the redevelopment of Fante government, economy, and society. Conceptualizing Fante political ideology in this period as part of the ongoing transatlantic discourse around abolitionism reveals the continuing importance of the Fante elites’ “Atlantic creole” worldview, including important influences from the African diaspora, in the development of Fante political ideology during the decades preceding the creation of the Fante Confederacy in 1868. The chapter traces the ideological origins of the Fante Confederacy back to the early 1800s, specifically the aftermath of Asante’s invasion of the coast in 1807–1816, highlighting the ways in which Fante strategies to rebuild their communities represented the application of abolitionist symbolism, rhetoric, and ideology,

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and their vision of a modern African state that conformed to their notions of “civilization.” Apart from Asante’s invasion of the coast and the subsequent military conflicts known colloquially as the Anglo–Ashanti Wars, the first three quarters of the nineteenth century is a period of coastal Ghana’s history that has not been adequately studied.8 The historiography emphasizes the power struggle between Asante and the British that was initiated by Asante’s conquest of the coast and claims of authority over the towns in which British forts were located.9 The social changes associated with the spread of Christianity, mission schools, and British involvement in Fante politics, trade, and jurisdiction have been portrayed as a gradual “Europeanization” of Fante culture and associated with what scholars have viewed as the weakening of indigenous traditions and power.10 The present work places greater emphasis on Fante agency in this period of Ghana’s history by focusing on developing political ideologies among the Fante elite. It will also show how these ideologies were informed by broader transatlantic currents, including some from the African diaspora. From the perspective of nineteenth-century abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, and according to the definition of slavery most often used today, Fante elites were far from the cutting edge of the anti-slavery movement in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Douglass’ view of coastal West African elites was succinctly expressed in a statement he made in 1859: The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia.11

The rampant practice of slavery in Fante society during the nineteenth century appears to support Douglass’ sense that the “moral and economical ideas” of West African elites were at odds with the anti-slavery movement led by free black people in the Americas. But this apparent contradiction should not obscure the important ways in which those same Fante elites were actively opposed to the transatlantic slave trade, racial slavery in the Americas, racist oppression, and the worst abuses against enslaved people in West Africa, particularly human sacrifice. While they may have conceived of “slavery” and “freedom” somewhat differently than did abolitionists like Douglass, the Fante elite were nevertheless advocating many of the same values with regard to justice, human dignity, and the value of black lives. To use Derek Peterson’s terms, they were

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“appropriating the discourse of abolitionism” in crafting their own social and political institutions.

Atlantic Creoles in the Nineteenth Century The Fante-speaking people of Ghana embody a cultural amalgam that combines numerous African cultural traditions—including Akan and others—as well as many cultural elements from around the Atlantic World.12 Between the fifteenth century and the nineteenth century, Fante history epitomizes Atlantic history in that the constant movement of people in and out of Fante coastal towns like Anomabo and Cape Coast literally brought the diverse cultures of the Atlantic into Fante communities.13 During the era of the transatlantic slave trade, the “Atlantic creole” identity of Fante elites enabled them to maximize profits from the transatlantic slave trade. The combined European and African elements of Fante culture were even more pronounced in the mid-nineteenth century, when Fante merchants—many of whom descended from a European ancestor—built large European-style houses in the coastal towns and filled them with European wares obtained through trade and travel to Britain.14 These Atlantic elements are exhibited in the language, dress, material culture, architecture, social structure, and political forms of the Fante today.15 In the nineteenth century, the commercial advantages of Atlantic cosmopolitanism continued to function in many of the same ways they had in the age of the transatlantic slave trade. Despite British abolition of the slave trade and the tremendous disruptions in Fante life caused by Asante’s conquest of the coast, literate anglophone Fantes prospered from their partnerships with British trading firms during the boom of the palm oil trade in the 1830s–1850s. The diverse influences on Fante culture were further expanded in the nineteenth century by the increasing contact between Fantes and other English-speaking Africans in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Britain, and by the growing numbers of European, Sierra Leonean, and American missionaries on the Gold Coast. It is therefore essential to contextualize the development of anti-slavery ideology on the Gold Coast within an already diverse, cosmopolitan process of cultural syncretism. The idea of abolishing slavery was neither a foreign import nor an indigenous impulse. Like nearly every other aspect of nineteenth-century Fante culture, it was a combination of many influences, of both local and transatlantic origins.

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Beginnings of Anti-Slavery in Southern Ghana The earliest anti-slavery ideologies and activities within southern Ghana must be attributed to those who were vulnerable to, or victims of, slavery themselves. The act of enslavement creates anti-slavery sentiment by definition, in that it violates an individual’s natural freedom.16 On an individual level, then, many people were opposed to slavery, at least for themselves and their family and friends, presumably from the beginning of slavery as an institution within southern Ghanaian societies. Unfortunately, the documentary evidence of this is extremely scarce.17 Anti-slavery as an ideology and/or activist agenda articulated by entire communities or institutions likely did not exist in southern Ghana prior to the 1780s. Probably the first Gold Coast-born people to write about slavery as a moral issue were young men who studied in European universities: Anton Wilhelm Amo, who defended a dissertation in 1729 at the University of Halle (Germany) that argued that the enslavement of Africans was illegal according to Roman precedent, and Jacobus Capitein, whose dissertation at the University of Leiden (Netherlands) in 1737 argued that slavery was not opposed to the Christian gospel.18 Capitein’s view was of course in sync with the morals of Europeans and Africans alike in the early eighteenth century. In the context of the increasingly profitable transatlantic slave trade on the Gold Coast during the eighteenth century—of which Fante elites were among the primary beneficiaries—opposition to slavery indeed seems as unlikely among the Fante as it was in the slave-based plantation societies of the Americas. Due to their numerous transatlantic connections, coastal Fante merchants and political elites would have learned of several landmark turning points in the evolution of slavery and abolition throughout the Atlantic World at the close of the eighteenth century and the dawn of the nineteenth century. These include the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the publication of Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on . . . the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and the Human Species (1787)19, and the founding of Sierra Leone (1792) as a settlement for Africans and African-descended people liberated from slavery. The specific details of how this news reached the Gold Coast and who it influenced remain unknown. But it is inconceivable that the same elites who had received news of the American Revolution and the Seven Years’ War, for example, would not also have known of similar events so crucial to Atlantic politics and trade occurring a few decades later.

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Fantes who traveled to or temporarily lived in Britain or Sierra Leone were the first anti-slavery activists per se within the Fante population. From the 1790s, young people from the Gold Coast began to study in schools in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where they lived and worked alongside former slaves and their descendants from North America and Britain.20 Sierra Leone’s free black settlers who traveled from Halifax in 1792 were already committed Christians as well as vocal opponents of slavery upon arrival in West Africa.21 And when the new Sierra Leone Colony was formally founded in 1808, slavery was legally forbidden there. The African chaplains on the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century, such as Philip Quaque, an ordained minister of the Church of England, trained other Fante men who later invited the Wesleyan Missionary Society to the Gold Coast. Quaque described slave trading as a “vicious practice” and considered slavery an impediment to his work of Christian conversion on the Gold Coast, calling it “iniquitous” and “cruel.”22 While his remarks referred specifically to racial slavery in the Americas rather than slavery in Africa, his intention was to point out the hypocrisy of owning slaves while claiming Christian identity. Another prominent figure from this period is Joseph Smith, a Sierra Leone African who came to the Gold Coast with Governor MacCarthy in 1823 and created a following of bible-reading students.23 At least superficially, the British personnel charged with administering British forts “and settlements” on the Gold Coast were a further source of anti-slavery influence. John Hope Smith, the top British official on the Gold Coast from 1817 to 1822, was ardently opposed to the transatlantic slave trade and ordered the arrest of a prominent Fante slave dealer named Sam Kanto Brew.24 Brew was the grandson of the Irishman Richard Brew, who had operated a successful slave trading business on the Gold Coast both as an employee of the British Company of Merchants and later as a private trader based at Anomabo from the 1740s to the 1770s.25 Smith’s successor, Sir Charles MacCarthy, “gave a general notification to the native inhabitants [of the Gold Coast settlements] with regard to their ancient usages, as to the state of slavery being contrary to law.”26 While British governors were required by their government to enforce laws related to the abolition of the slave trade and slavery and to condemn slavery, they had no power to enforce these orders.27 This was particularly true prior to 1874. Therefore, the slave trade continued and so-called domestic slavery became more prevalent in spite of British mandates against it. Whether by necessity or for their own advantage, many British administrators in this period consciously ignored the continuation of the slave trade and slavery.28

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The most significant factor limiting the development of anti-slavery ideology on the Gold Coast during the first three decades of the nineteenth century was the Asante kingdom’s invasion of Fanteland between 1807 and 1816 and the protracted warfare that engulfed the coastal communities in its wake. The Asante conquest completely dismantled the political and economic infrastructure of the coastal region and ushered in more than a decade of famine and poverty.29 Eyewitness accounts of this period portray the former towns and markets of Fanteland as devastated ruins, littered with corpses and wandering refugees. Warfare disrupted Fante life again in the 1820s, when the British “governor,” Sir Charles MacCarthy interpreted Asante claims to ruling the Gold Coast as a threat to British authority. He led British and Fante troops into what is known as the “First Asante War” in 1823, and the fighting continued until Asante forces conceded four years later in a battle in which MacCarthy lost his life. The Asantehene was forced to relinquish control of Fanteland in 1827, after suffering defeat by joint Fante-British forces. But the political coalition of Fante chiefs that had protected Fanteland from Asante’s military expansion during the eighteenth century, and had made possible the Fantes’ profitable middleman role in the slave trade, had to be entirely rebuilt.30 The collapse of Fante power in the region was exacerbated by British abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, which drastically diminished trade on the Fante coast in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.31 In this setting, concerns with survival and rebuilding—and liberation from Asante overrule—surely impeded the spread of anti-slavery ideology and certainly did not favor the expansion of literacy or foreign travel, both of which later proved instrumental in the development of anti-slavery ideology. Up to the 1820s then, slavery and slave trading remained widely accepted and normal features of Fante life, opposed only by the enslaved and the potentially enslaved, plus a handful of local people like Philip Quaque who had adopted anti-slavery views mostly as part of their close ties to Christian missions. Prominent Fantes like Sam Kanto Brew operated slave trading businesses that brought thousands of slaves to the coast annually, much as they had prior to the nineteenth century. Asantehene Osei Bonsu provided Brew with a regular supply of slaves in exchange for imported gunpowder and firearms—two of the main commodities that had fueled the eighteenth-century slave trade. And Osei Bonsu’s famous questioning of Joseph Dupuis in 1820 as to why the white man thought the slave trade was good before, but thought it was bad now, made perfect sense in the wake of two hundred years of slave trading on the Gold Coast.32

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From Osei Bonsu’s point of view, the Asante conquest of the coast in the first two decades of the nineteenth century made all of the Fante his “slaves.”33

Anti-Slavery in the 1830s–1850s: Economic Growth and Transatlantic Connections Changing conditions in Fanteland and in the Fantes’ foreign relations between the 1830s and 1850s simultaneously sowed the seeds of anti-slavery and further entrenched the practice of slavery in Fante society. In ways that resembled the development of anti-slavery ideology in Cuba and Brazil, a small minority of people began to embrace parts of the abolitionist movement at a time when economic forces were fueling the expansion of slavery in the region.34 The negotiation of the terms of peace between Asante and Fante in 1827 restored Fante political autonomy and brought economic stability to the region. This facilitated the rapid expansion of the Gold Coast’s export trade in palm oil, rubber, gold, and ivory, all of which entailed increased use of slave labor and more investment in slaves as a form of capital.35 As Edward Reynolds has explained in detail, this economic growth rested on business partnerships between Fante merchants and large British trading firms.36 The Fante merchants received goods, on credit from British firms, to conduct trade in the interior, and this extensive lending sometimes resulted in large debts owed to foreign firms. In this commercial environment, Fante merchants naturally sought ways to invest their profits that would offer protection from debt collectors if they filed for bankruptcy, as they often did.37 Investing in slaves was an ideal solution to this problem because British law prohibited British firms from owning slaves. Domestic slavery therefore expanded along with the growing commerce in palm oil and other commodities, both because slaves provided essential labor— particularly as porters—and because slaves were the only secure investment available to African merchants in a highly volatile and credit-laden market.38 The Fante merchants’ strategy of accumulating slaves as a form of capital confirms their conscious recognition of the difference between indigenous Fante law and British “colonial” law with regard to slavery and slave trading, and the continued widespread acceptance of slavery within Fante society. The Fante families who accumulated vast wealth from the palm oil trade were members of a new class of mission-educated, Christian Anglo-African merchants who were scattered around the Gulf of Guinea, Britain, North

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America, and the West Indies.39 Many of the male members of these Fante merchant families traveled to Britain and Sierra Leone for education and business, where they lived side by side with Africans recently freed from New World slavery. They shared a vision of the future that embraced the ideals of racial equality, worldwide commerce, and Christianity while remaining rooted in Fante families and African cultural norms. With no reason to believe that Britain or any other European nation would ever colonize vast African territories, these early-nineteenth-century elites saw themselves as the leaders of a new era of modern state building at a time when modernity was frequently associated with abolitionist values, such as anti-slavery, Christianity, and cosmopolitanism.40 As Tom McCaskie wrote, it was a time when “Fante society saw itself as being on the cusp of unpredictable transformations.”41 The Brew family represents a microcosm of the general shift away from transatlantic slave trading and toward “legitimate commerce” in this period. Sam Kanto Brew, noted previously, was infamous among British administrators for operating a large-scale trade in slaves between Asante and the coast during the early 1800s, and he was deported to Sierra Leone by British forces in 1823.42 His younger son, Samuel Collins Brew, followed in his father’s footsteps by building a robust trade with Asante suppliers in the hinterland from the 1830s to the 1850s, but he focused his business on gold and ivory rather than human captives.43 While economic developments encouraged slavery within Fanteland, the political and religious views of individuals whose education, occupation, and social circles involved significant engagement with the broader Atlantic World began to shift toward anti-slavery. Following the centuries-old pattern of Fante history, the growth of maritime trade on the coast was accompanied by more intensive interaction between Fante people and foreigners from around the Atlantic World. A major cause of this shift was a dramatic rise in Christian missionary activity following the peace negotiation with Asante.44 Members of the Basel mission arrived at Accra in 1828, and Methodist missionaries began their work at Cape Coast in 1835.45 It is important to note that, with a few exceptions, the activities of Christian missionaries did not lead to the wholesale adoption of European attitudes among their pupils and disciples. Like their secular counterparts who oversaw European commerce in the trade forts, the men (and occasionally women) who came to the Gold Coast on behalf of Christian missionary groups implicitly condoned slavery and slave trading by integrating themselves within a slave-owning

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society. Some missionaries directly participated in slavery or slave trading.46 The real impact of Christianity came as Africans and African-descended people took over leadership positions and created their own versions of Christian thought and practice. One of the most influential early Methodist missionaries was Thomas Birch Freeman, an Englishman of African descent who worked to spread Christianity and education on the Gold Coast from 1838 to 1873.47 There were nine Africans among the Methodist ministers proselytizing on the Gold Coast by 1858. These men embodied the combination of an African-centered worldview with aspirations for “civilization” and a commitment to Christianity that lay at the core of the Fante Confederation of 1868.48 Like the Saro communities of southwestern Nigeria, African Christians on the Gold Coast embraced many of the moral principles of Christianity while forging autonomous African communities quite distinct from the surrounding African population.49 In the mid-nineteenth century, they would mostly have been tolerant of “benevolent” forms of domestic servitude, but also probably would have opposed more brutal forms of slavery and human sacrifice, as did the European missionaries at that time.50 This growing community of African Christians may very well have gone on to chart their own path toward the suppression of slavery in Fanteland, were it not for the British colonial takeover in 1874.51 Probably the most important source of anti-slavery ideology in this period came through increased contact between Fantes and African-descended people from a variety of places around the Atlantic World where slavery had recently been abolished. In 1844, a company of the First West India Regiment arrived at Cape Coast to take up garrison duty, where they lived and worked alongside Fante employees and “servants” of the British fort.52 Men from the West India Regiment were originally slaves recruited and trained for military service in the British Empire beginning in the 1790s.53 By the 1840s, these men were legally free under British law and fluent in the language of oppression and resistance that permeated black life in the British Caribbean.54 After the ratification of the Fugitive Slave Law in the United States in 1850, vocal African American anti-slavery activists migrated in large numbers to Britain, Liberia, and other parts of the English-speaking world where they would have crossed paths with members of Fante merchant families studying abroad or conducting business.55 These contacts brought a distinctly racially conscious, and anti-racist, version of abolitionism to bear on the political ideology of the Fante elite. An additional factor affecting Fante attitudes toward slavery and its abolition in this period was an increase in racial discrimination by, and racist attitudes

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among, the European personnel on the Gold Coast. Racial conflict increased around the 1850s largely due to a change in British policy that brought a new cast of British officials to the Gold Coast. Concerns in Parliament about the continuation of transatlantic slave trading in the Gulf of Guinea caused the British government to recategorize the British Gold Coast forts as entities under the direct governance of the Crown in 1850, removing them from their status as dependencies of the Sierra Leone Colony. This administrative change required the placement of additional British colonial officials on the coast at a time when British society was embracing the idea that people could be classified into superior and inferior races.56 In many cases, these newly appointed officials replaced long-time residents of the Gold Coast and entirely lacked the latter’s investment in Gold Coast trade and knowledge of Fante politics, family life, and customs.57 Many of these men particularly despised Africans who had been educated in Christian schools and adopted aspects of European culture. As McCaskie writes, “Educated or westernized West Africans of whatever sort came to be widely viewed [by British commentators and officials] as mimic-men, legatees of a false, pre-colonial start in civilizing Africa,” prompting numerous Africans to complain of “the rise of patronizing, racist attitudes” and to yearn for “the more egalitarian ethos that had prevailed before mid-century.”58 For the first time in their two hundred-year-old commercial partnership with the British, the Fante elite’s authority as autonomous political rulers and equal trading partners was being called into question by the majority of British personnel on the Gold Coast. The hypocrisy of Britons who would claim moral authority with regard to the practice of slavery while diminishing the value of African humanity on the basis of racial superiority was not lost on the Fante elite.

Anti-Slavery in the 1860s–1870s: Aggery, Horton, and the Fante Confederacy The 1860s marked the end of the era of peace and prosperity on the Gold Coast that had prevailed since 1827. This historical moment might have been the beginning of a widespread anti-slavery movement among the Fante elite had it not been for a series of events that led to British colonization of the Gold Coast. Military conflict between Asante and the British resumed in 1863, and this time British losses convinced many leading figures in the British government that it was time to abandon the Gold Coast forts. A report made in Parliament by the

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Select Committee on British West African establishments in 1865 recommended that British “policy should be to encourage in the natives the exercise of those qualities which may render it possible for us more and more to transfer to them the administration of all the Governments, with a view to our ultimate withdrawal.”59 This policy shift, which was widely known among the Fante elite, prompted political rulers and merchants to begin to envision new configurations of political power in the absence of a British administration. But by 1873, British policy had changed again and their celebrated victory over Asante that year, in what is sometimes called the Sixth Ashanti War or the Sagrenti War, solidified Britain’s commitment to more formal “protection” of the coast as a British colony. Ironically, Great Britain’s declaration of colonial rule on the Gold Coast in 1874, while legally abolishing slavery, quashed the development of an indigenous antislavery movement on the Gold Coast by undermining the authority of Fante rulers. The development of anti-slavery ideology during the 1860s and 1870s is evident among both traditional rulers and members of the so-called Fante intelligentsia. In 1866, King Aggery of Cape Coast admonished British officials on the Gold Coast for their interference with chiefs’ courts.60 In a written indictment that enraged the British governor, Aggery compared the British treatment of Fante chiefs to the exploitation inherent in racial slavery in the Americas, and declared that Fanteland would therefore never accept British rule. Governor Pine believed Aggery was invoking the bloody uprising that had recently occurred among black laborers in Jamaica, known as the Morant Bay Rebellion.61 Far from a call to end slavery, Aggery’s rebuffing of British officials and their policies nevertheless condemned racial exploitation and, more importantly, expressed an awareness of the international anti-slavery movement, African nationalist sentiment and the power of African resistance to unsettle British authorities. The most outspoken political activist on the Gold Coast in this period was James Africanus Beale Horton, the son of enslaved Africans liberated in Sierra Leone. He was an English-trained physician employed on the Gold Coast by the British military.62 Horton arrived on the Gold Coast in 1859 and quickly became interested in the path to African self-government. His 1868 book, West African Countries and Peoples, is regarded as one of the first texts advocating Pan-Africanism, which is clear from the subtitle, . . . with a Vindication of the African Race.63 His anti-racist call to action and vision for the creation of modern African nations governed by Africans were incorporated into the Fante elite’s already growing consciousness of European racism and opposition to British

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incursions on Fante political autonomy. Horton is considered the principal ideological contributor to the Fante Confederacy and its first constitution. The high point of Fante political activism came with the creation of the Fante Confederation in 1868. This organization of Fante and other coastal traditional rulers and merchant elites was created as a formal declaration of their right to self-government.64 The group’s constitution emphasized the goals of developing education, medical care, and public works for the benefit of the community— articulating the vision of a modern African state that would incorporate many of the values and institutions cultivated by Christian missionaries over the previous decades. Had the Fante Confederation taken charge of the government of Fanteland in the 1870s, there would have been growing pressure to reduce slavery as economic growth and the expansion of literacy brought the Gold Coast further into the international community as an equal player. The practices of slave owning and slave trading almost certainly would have been repressed, if not abolished, as the spread of anti-slavery ideology continued on its now decades-long course. The development of an African-governed nation-state was of course put on hold for several decades when Britain claimed colonial rule on the Gold Coast in 1874. British Secretary of State Kimberley rejected the Fante Confederation scheme and ordered the arrest of its leaders.65 Under colonial law, slavery in the Gold Coast Colony became illegal, but it continued in practice for decades.66

Conclusion The development of Fante intellectual thought in the early- to mid-nineteenth century laid the groundwork for the Fante Confederation of 1868 and for Ghana’s early nationalist movement and subsequent Pan-African movement.67 The notion of a black or African people, spanning the Atlantic and sharing the experience of racial degradation by white landowners, colonists, and/or lawmakers, dawned in Fanteland during the early nineteenth century as a result of increased contacts across the Atlantic World, particularly those with members of the African diaspora. Through their numerous commercial, educational, religious, and personal connections with black anti-slavery proponents in Britain, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and the New World, Fante elites developed a sense of themselves as Africans. This forced them to grapple with the contradictions between their own practice of owning slaves as a form of capital and labor and their opposition to racially based slavery in the Americas.

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The greatest impediment to the end of slavery in the Gold Coast, as in most of the African continent, was the fact that unfree labor remained fundamental to the functions of the economy throughout the nineteenth century.68 Slavery was so widespread that British traders doing business on the Gold Coast had to walk a fine line between following orders from London that required them to abstain from any transactions involving slaves, and accommodating African business partners for whom slaves were a primary form of currency and credit.69 As colonial officials found in the wake of colonization in 1874, abolishing slavery in law was infinitely easier than stopping slavery and slave trading in practice. Nevertheless, ideological opposition to slavery was clearly developing among the African population of the Gold Coast over the course of the nineteenth century, and these early forms of anti-slavery ideology in southern Ghana should be recognized as tributaries to the flow of global anti-slavery activism in that era. As discussed throughout this book, the matter of slavery in Ghana and its similarity to, or difference from, racial slavery in the Americas remains highly contested. Is it accurate to use the same term, slavery, for the forms of dependency and unfreedom practiced in Ghana and for the horrific institution that enslaved millions of Africans on American plantations? Does it mean something different to be traded as a commodity in an African market, to an African buyer, than to be sold into the transatlantic slave trade? Can anyone who is the property of another person be considered free? These are the questions the slave-owning African elite faced in the nineteenth century, and they are still being debated today.

Notes 1 Peterson, Derek R., ed. 2010. Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, African Studies from Cambridge. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press; Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. 1999. Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Greene, Sandra E., 2015. “Minority Voices: Abolitionism in West Africa.” Slavery & Abolition 36(4): 642–61; Greene, Sandra E., and Oluwatoyin B. Oduntan., 2016. “African Intellectual Ideas in the Age of Legal Slavery and the Slave Trade.” In Alice Bellagamba, Sandra E. Greene and Martin A. Klein (eds), African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, 74–92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2 Peterson, Abolitionism, 5. 3 Ibid., 18.

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4 Akurang-Parry, Kwabena O., 2004. “We Shall Rejoice to See the Day When Slavery Shall Cease to Exist”: The “Gold Coast Times,” the African Intelligentsia, and Abolition in the Gold Coast.” History in Africa 31: 19–42. Recently, several scholars have begun to address this vacancy, including Sandra E. Greene, Peter Haenger, Trevor R. Getz, Derek Peterson, Martin A. Klein, Alice Bellagamba, Jonathon Glassman, and Sylviane Diouf. 5 On the expansion of slavery in Africa during the nineteenth century, see Manning, Patrick, 1990. Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades, 140–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University; Lovejoy, Paul E., 2000. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed., 140–64. New York: Cambridge. Regarding Ghana in particular, see Reynolds, Edward, 1974. Trade and Economic Change on the Gold Coast, 1807-1874, 82–83, 175. London: Longman; Cruickshank, Brodie, 1966. Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa . . . (1853), vol. ii, 244, 246. London: Cass & Co. 6 Many parts of the continent’s western coast constitute what has been dubbed “Atlantic Africa,” owing to their integration of transatlantic networks of trade, migration and cultural exchange during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Mann, Kristin, 2001. “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture.” In Kristin Mann and Edna G. Bay (eds.), Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil. Portland, OR: Cass; Thornton, John Kelly, 1998. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge; Thornton, John Kelly, 1999. Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800. London: UCL Press; Zachernuk, Philip S., 2000. Colonial Subjects; an African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 7 On Fante integration into transatlantic commercial, political, and familial networks in the eighteenth century, see Lever, J. T., 1970. “Mulatto Influence on the Gold Coast in the Early 19th Century: Jan Nieser of Elmina.” African Historical Studies 3(2): 253–61; Arhin, Kwame, 1983. “Rank and Class among the Asante and Fante in the Nineteenth Century.” Africa 53(1): 2–22; Feinberg, Harvey M., 1989. Africans and Europeans in West Africa: Elminans and Dutchmen on the Gold Coast During the Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society; Gocking, Roger, 1999. Facing Two Ways: Ghana’s Coastal Communities under Colonial Rule. Lanham, MD: University Press of America; Ipsen, Pernille, 2015. Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Shumway, Rebecca, 2011. The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. 8 Important exceptions include Greene, Sandra E., 1996. Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe. Portsmouth:

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Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora Heinemann. McCarthy, Mary, 1983. Social Change and the Growth of British Power in the Gold Coast: The Fante states, 1807-1874. New York: University Press of America. Parker, John, 2000. Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Reynolds, Edward, 1974. Trade and Economic Change on the Gold Coast, 1807-1874. London: Longman. This struggle is often referred to in shorthand as the Anglo–Asante Wars, or simply the Ashanti Wars. See Walton, Claridge, W., 1915. A History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti. 2 vols. London: John Murray. McCarthy, Mary, 1983. Social Change and the Growth of British Power in the Gold Coast: The Fante states, 1807-1874. New York: University Press of America; Priestley, Margaret, 1969. West African Trade and Coast Society: A Family Study. London: Oxford. “African Civilization Society,” Douglass’ Monthly, February 1859. Christensen, James Boyd, 1954. Double Descent among the Fanti. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files. Fynn, John Kofi, 1975. “The Pre-Borbor Fante States.” Sankofa 1: 20–30; Gocking, Roger, 1999. Facing Two Ways: Ghana’s Coastal Communities under Colonial Rule. Lanham, MD: University Press of America; Dolphyne, Florence Abena, 1982. “Akan Language Patterns and Development.” Tarikh 7(2): 35–45. Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade; Sparks, Randy J., 2014. Where the Negroes are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. A useful volume on the Fante merchant class in this era is Doortmont, Michel, and Charles Francis Hutchison, 2005. The Pen-pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities by Charles Francis Hutchison: A Collective Biography of Elite Society in the Gold Coast Colony. Leiden: Brill. See also Reynolds, Economic Change. On the Brew family, see Priestley, Margaret, 1969. West African Trade and Coast Society: A Family Study. London: Oxford. Arhin, “Diffuse Authority among the Coastal Fanti”; The literature on the asafo institution is also illustrative of these multiple cultural influences. See Adler and Barnard, Asafo!: African Flags of the Fante; Ross, Doran, 2007. “‘Come and Try’: Towards a History of Fante Military Shrines.” African Arts Autumn 12–35. See also Micots, Courtnay, 2010. “African Coastal Elite Architecture: Cultural Authentication during the Colonial Period in Anomabo, Ghana.” PhD, University of Florida; Christensen, Double Descent; Gocking, Roger, 1999. Facing two Ways: Ghana’s Coastal Communities under Colonial Rule. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Here I take the view of Paul Lovejoy that, “Slavery was virtually always initiated through violence that reduced the status of a person from a condition of freedom and citizenship to a condition of slavery.” Lovejoy, Paul E., 1983. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 3.

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17 See Greene, Sandra E., 2015. “Minority Voices: Abolitionism in West Africa.” Slavery & Abolition 36(4): 642–61. 18 Ofosu-Appiah, L. H., 1977. “Dictionary of African Biography.” In The Encyclopaedia Africana; Variation: Encyclopaedia Africana, 196–97, 224. New York: Reference Publications; Hastings, Church in Africa, 178; Prah, Kwesi Kwaa. 1992. Jacobus Eliza Johannes Capitein, 1717-1747: A Critical Study of an Eighteenth Century African. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. 19 Cugoano, Ottobah. 1999. Thoughts and sentiments on the evil and wicked traffic of the slavery and commerce of the human species (1787). New York: Penguin Books. 20 Kimble, David, 1963. A Political History of Ghana: The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism, 1850-1928, 64. London: Oxford University Press; Hastings, Adrian, 1994. The Church in Africa: 1450-1950. New York: Oxford University Press. 21 Hastings, The Church in Africa, 181. 22 Caretta, Life and Letters, 66, 161, 128. 23 Birtwhistle, N. Allen, 1950. Thomas Birch Freeman, West African Pioneer, 1. London: Cargate Press. 24 Priestley, West African Trade, 133, 136. 25 Priestley, West African Trade. 26 Metcalfe, p. 74, Sir C. MacCarthy to Bathurst, H.C.551, A & P (1842). 27 See for example, Pine to Labouchere, October 1, 1857, in Metcalfe, Great Britain and Ghana, 264. For broader discussion of the power relationship, see Shumway, Rebecca, 2014. “Palavers and Treaty-Making in the British Acquisition of the Gold Coast Colony (West Africa).” In Saliha Belmessous (ed.), Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600-1900, 161–85. New York: Oxford. 28 The ongoing slave trade and rampant slaveholding prompted Parliamentary inquiries into the state of affairs on the Gold Coast in 1842 and 1864. Crooks, Records Relating to the Gold Coast, 275, 366–71. 29 Cruickshank, vol. 1, 107–08; Meredith, Henry, 1812. An account of the Gold Coast of Africa, with a brief history of the African Company. 1967 ed. London: Cass. 30 Metcalfe, Great Britain and Ghana, Document #83, 114–15. 31 Reynolds, Edward, 1981. “Abolition and Economic Change on the Gold Coast.” In David Eltis and James Walvin (eds.), The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 141–51. Madison: University of Wisconsin; Rathbone, Richard, 1995. “The Gold Coast, the Closing of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and Africans of the Diaspora.” In Stephan Palmié (ed.), Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery, 55–66. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 32 Dupuis, J., 1824. Journal of a Residence in Asantee. 1966 ed: Cass., 162–64. 33 Priestley, West African Trade, 136; Hutchison to John Hope Smith 11 and 26 October 1817, T70/41 34 Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery.

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35 Doortmont, Pen Pictures; Reynolds, Trade and Economic Change, Chs. 3–4; McCarthy, Social Change and the Growth of British Power, Ch. 4. 36 Reynolds, Economic Change, 119. 37 Ibid., 150–53. 38 Ibid., 82. 39 Hastings, Adrian, 1994. The Church in Africa : 1450-1950, 187–88. New York: Oxford University Press; Lynn, Martin, 1992. “Technology, Trade and ‘a Race of Native Capitalists’: The Krio Diaspora of West Africa and The.” Journal of African History 33(3): 421–40; Ajayi, J. F. Ade., 1961. “Nineteenth Century Origins of Nigerian Nationalism.” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 2(2): 196–10; Blackett, R. J. M., 1983. Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press; Blyden, Nemata Amelia, 2000. West Indians in West Africa, 1808-1880: The African Diaspora in Reverse. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press; Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects. 40 On African optimism on the eve of colonial rule, see Boahen, A. Adu., 1987. African Perspectives on Colonialism, 1–26. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University. 41 McCaskie, Tom C., 1990. “Nananom Mpow of Mankessim: An Essay in Fante History.” In David Henige and T. C. McCaskie (eds.), West African Economic and Social History: Studies in Memory of Marion Johnson, 145. Madison: University of Wisconsin. 42 Priestley, West African Trade, 129–42. 43 McCarthy; Kimble. 44 Perhaps the best evidence of the influence of Christian missionaries is the conflict that developed around the Fante shrine of Nananom Mpow in the 1840s and its destruction in 1851. McCaskie, “Nananom Mpow of Mankessim: An Essay in Fante History.” 133–50; Beecham, John, 1968. Ashantee and the Gold Coast: Being a Sketch of the History, Social State, and Superstitions of the Inhabitants of those Countries (1841), 278–79. London: Dawsons; Birtwhistle, Thomas Birch Freeman, West African Pioneer. 45 Hastings, Adrian, 1994. The Church in Africa: 1450-1950. New York: Oxford University Press. 46 See, for example, Paul Jenkins’ essay in this book. 47 Birtwhistle, Thomas Birch Freeman, West African Pioneer. Freeman, Thomas Birch, 1968. Journals of Various Visits to the Kingdoms of Ashanti, Aku, and Dahomi in Western Africa. 3rd ed. London: Cass. 48 Hastings, The Church in Africa, 341–42. 49 On educated Christians in nineteenth-century Nigeria, see Ajayi, J. F. Ade, 1961. “Nineteenth Century Origins of Nigerian Nationalism.” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 2(2): 196–210.

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50 Greene, “Minority Voices: Abolitionism in West Africa”; Greene and Oduntan. “African Intellectual Ideas in the Age of Legal Slavery and the Slave Trade”; Freeman, Journals of various visits to the kingdoms of Ashanti, Aku, and Dahomi in Western Africa. 3d ed. with a new introduction by Harrison M. Wright, ed., Cass Library of African Studies, 132. London: Cass. 51 All of the founders of the Fante Confederacy (1868) were Methodists. Hastings, The Church in Africa, 342. 52 Crooks, Records Relating to the Gold Coast, 269. 53 Buckley, Roger Norman, 1979. Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795-1815. New Haven: Yale University Press; Buckley, Roger Norman, 1998. The British Army in the West Indies: Society and the Military in the Revolutionary Age. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Book. 54 Ukpabi, Samson. C., 1974. “West Indian Troops and the Defence of British West Africa in the Nineteenth Century.” African Studies Review 17(1): 133–50; Ukpabi, Samson C., 1975. “Military Recruitment and Social Mobility in NineteenthCentury British West Africa.” Journal of African Studies 2(1): 87–107. 55 The Fugitive Slave Law was passed to appease southern US states in their demands for the repatriation of slaves who fled to the northern US. In effect, it made all people of African descent in the United States vulnerable to enslavement in the south. 56 See for example, McCaskie, “Cultural Encounters,” 177–78. 57 McCarthy, Social Change, 150. 58 McCaskie, “Cultural Encounters,” 178. 59 Crooks, Records Relating to the Gold Coast, 369–70; Reynolds, Trade and Economic Change, 167. 60 Kimble, Political History, 217; Boahen, A. Adu., 1974. “Politics in Ghana, 18001874.” In J. F. A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder (eds.), History of West Africa, 240. London: Longman; Osei-Tutu, John K., 2003. “Contesting British Sovereignty in Cape Coast, Ghana: Insights from King John Aggery’s Correspondences, 186572.” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana (7): 231–51. 61 Kimble, Political History, 217–218. 62 Fyfe, Christopher, 1972. Africanus Horton, 1835-1883: West African Scientist and Patriot. New York: Oxford. Horton, James Africanus Beale, 1868. West African Countries and Peoples, British and Native . . . and a Vindication of the African Race. 1969 ed. London: Edinburgh at the University Press; Horton, James Africanus Beale, 1970. Letters on the Political Condition of the Gold Coast. London: Frank Cass. 63 James Africanus Beale,West African countries and peoples. 64 For more on the Fante Confederacy, see Kimble, Political History; Boahen, “Politics in Ghana, 1800-1874,” 167–261; Coombs, D., 1963. The Gold Coast, Britain and the Netherlands, 1850-1874. London: Oxford University Press. Danquah, J. B., 1957.

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Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora “The Historical Significance of the Bond of 1844.” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana III: 3–29; Limberg, Lennart, 1974. “The Fanti Confederation, 1868-1872.” diss., Göteborgs universitet. CO/96/104, Minute of February 22, 1873, as cited in Kimble, Political History, 260. Several scholars have shown how legal abolition of slavery nevertheless made an immediate difference in the lives of some enslaved people and their families. Bellagamba, Greene and Klein, African Voices; Getz, Abina and the Important Men. A recent study by Akurang-Parry has shown that there was a very vocal, if numerically small, group of Gold Coast Africans who explicitly opposed all forms of slavery in the post-1874 period. Akurang-Parry, “We Shall Rejoice.” The classic works on this include Kimble, Political History of Ghana, David Apter, 1955. The Gold Coast Transition. Princeton University Press; Kwame Nkrumah, 1957. The autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. New York: International Publishers. Reynolds, Economic Change, 18–19. The contradictions of these two systems are apparent in the accusations made against Governor George Maclean (r. 1830–1847), who was accused of facilitating the slave trade and slavery.

Part Two

Slavery and Abolition Under British Colonial Rule (1874–1957)

5

The Claims Wives Made: Slavery and Marriage in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate1 Trevor R. Getz

In November 1876, the family of a woman named Manu approached the brand new British District Commissioner of the Axim district of the Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate. The family members—probably adult males— requested his intervention in a dispute over Manu’s marriage, which had occurred prior to the 1874 criminalization of slavery in the colony.2 Their complaint was that Manu’s head fee, or brideprice, had been paid by her husband not to them, but rather to her master, for Manu had been a domestic slave (odonkɔ, plural nnɔnkofoɔ) at the time of her marriage. In fact, they alleged that the original payment had not been a head fee—properly payable to her father and male relatives—at all, but rather the purchase price that marked her transfer from one owner to another.3 As slavery was now illegal, they asserted, Manu’s husband now owed them the head fee payments he had never made, her purchase price notwithstanding. Manu’s case, described in just a few short documents, meaningfully captures the shifting authority and contests over meaning and identity that marked the introduction of formal colonial rule in the Gold Coast beginning in 1874. There is a dramatic significance to local families laying such intimate issues before a young British colonial official, rather than the family or state leaders (adehyeε— royals, ahenfo—chiefs, panin—lineage heads) to whom they might historically have turned for judgment or arbitration. Their willingness to do so in 1876 is indicative of the new landscape of power inaugurated in the southern Gold Coast two years earlier; one in which British authorities and colonial institutions vied with those of chiefly officeholders and extended families as venues for resolving disputes and making claims.4

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The district commissioner’s bewilderment in the face of a culturally complex issue is similarly emblematic of the challenges faced by British officials in taking up their new authority. Despite their new authority, magistrates and commissioners were frequently unable to discern the working and meaning of local institutions. Their confusion, moreover, helped to create opportunities for African men and women who laid claims before them, some of which might not have been honored by local authorities. Indeed, as we will see, the initiative for many precedent-making cases in this period rested entirely with locals, who sought to convince, manipulate, and attach British colonial officials to their causes. Probably the most important meaning that we might derive from this case, however, has to do with the underlying motivations of the litigants and supplicants who laid legal, political, and financial claims before British officials. In this case, the district commissioner of Axim missed key signs and stimuli that were, however, grasped by the more experienced officials whom he consulted: Judicial Assessor William Melton and Chief Magistrate Sir David Chalmers. These men, who had been in the area much longer, understood that the family’s assertion of financial rights was not the only—or even the most important— claim being advanced in this case. While recognizing that the male appellants might well be hoping for a retroactive payoff, Melton and Chalmers also realized that by acknowledging the family’s claim to a head fee, the colonial government would at the same time be recognizing Manu’s marriage as “hav[ing] the incidents [sic] of marriage between free persons.” Thus they identified Manu herself as a key actor in petitioning the district commissioner, and wrote that it was recognition as a wife, rather than the matter of the money itself, that “is apparently Manoo’s object to attain.”5 It is easy to miss the significance of Manu’s invocation of slave status as a rhetorical frame for achieving claims to be recognized as a wife. This substitution is indicative not only of the close connection between slavery and marriage in the late-nineteenth-century Gold Coast, but also of the place of “slavery” as a unique site of contestation within the new landscape of power. For reasons explained in this chapter, real or perceived questions of slavery had an exceptional power to compel the attention of administrators and magistrates. As a result, local men and women used charges of “slavery” and “slave-dealing” as a key to open colonial institutions and offices to their claims. Manu’s case was just the tip of a much larger trend, mostly hidden beneath the surface of the historical record, of women (many of whom might have been described

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as both slave and wife at the same time) using the opportunity of the British criminalization of slavery to change their marital situations. They did so not so much by seeking “freedom” as we understand it, but rather by struggling to transform the status of their marriages, and all that it represented, to escape marriages that were abusive or transgressed social norms, or to claim the agency to decide between potential partners.6 In the sections that follow, I will use court testimony and official documents to explore the ways that women used colonial laws regarding slavery to pursue goals related specifically to their marriages and their status as wives. My analysis begins with the argument that “slavery” as a criminal charge and as a discursive category in the courts of the nineteenth-century Gold Coast represented a particular colonial misunderstanding of the dependency, labor, and social relationships of the immediate precolonial period. In this understanding, the category “slave” was defined by British magistrates and administrators as being in binary opposition to legitimate relationships such as marriage, apprenticeship, and so on.7 However, as I show in the second section of this chapter, this definition of slavery bore little relationship to the reality experienced by most of the population of the Gold Coast, including women, whose actual experiences transcended, defied, and crossed categories over time. In particular, I will demonstrate ways in which marriage and the local subordinated statuses of nnɔnkofoɔ (domestic slaves) were deeply entangled in the lives of many women. In the three subsequent sections, I explore a series of cases that demonstrate ways in which the laws by which slavery—and pawning—were criminalized were tested by litigants seeking to use them to modify or escape their marital relationships. Earlier interpretations of emancipation in the Gold Coast, including much of my own previous work, have argued that local women were subordinated by these laws. Yet I will argue that these cases demonstrate that the very alien quality of the colonial binary between marriage and slavery also created opportunities for women to bring charges of “slaveholding” and “slaving,” to the colonial courts.8 They did so not necessarily because they felt that their experiences matched the colonial category of slave, but rather because the criminalization of slavery produced a new arena in which they could make claims about central issues in their lives, particularly marriage and its relationship to respectability, health, and material wellness. In analyzing their testimony, I seek to highlight their motives for doing so that were variously instrumental (seeking changes that could enhance their living conditions, including a choice of partners) and affective (pursuing the prospect of movement along an emotional

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and life-long continuum from shame to respectability). In the end, I argue that the claims women made to be wives or slaves reveals the way that domestic slavery was both entangled with, and stood distinct from, the wider network of social relationships in Gold Coast society prior to 1874, and the ways that Africans sought to control and take advantages of the changes to those networks wrought by the introduction of widespread formal colonialism in 1874.

“Repugnant to the Laws of England” The British colonial definitions of slavery and related institutions, and the way that they were constructed in binary opposition to “legitimate” relationships, shaped both the stage on which women’s legal claims regarding slavery were evaluated and the language in which they had to be made. The magistrates who judged the litigants’ claims and served as the arbiters of their fate were colonizers, and it was their emancipation and anti-slave trading ordinances that defined the crucial category of “slavery” against which all claims were judged. For that reason, it is important to understand both the process by which this category emerged and the way it operated in the Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate following the criminalization of slavery in 1874. The merchants and military men who had administered the scattered British forts and settlements on the Gold Coast before the Anglo–Asante War of 1873– 1874 had spared only fleeting thoughts for the issue of slavery. When they did write about slavery, they tended to depict it as a relatively benign institution that was an extension of family and community obligations. Governor Benjamin Pine in 1854 referred to domestic slavery as “a mild form of slavery scarcely deserving of the name.”9 Due in part to the public attention focused on the region because of the Anglo–Asante War, however, the administration of the newly expanded colony immediately outlawed slavery and slave trading throughout both the expanded colony and the surrounding client states of the protectorate following the successful conclusion of the conflict.10 The anti-slavery policy that resulted was developed through correspondence between the new governor and the Colonial Office, and it represented an attempt to forge a legal compromise that would satisfy both an abolitionist British public and local elites who relied upon stable dependency relationships for status and labor. While they thus decided that “slaving,” “slaveholding,” and the related crime of “pawning” were to be tried under English law in British courts, the operation of these laws was bent to serve

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local “customs” related to lineage and dependency relationships that acted to limit the extent of emancipation in the colony and protectorate.11 As a result, while the instructions of the secretary of state for the colonies to Governor George Strahan called for vigorous and unambiguous action to “remov[e]the dishonor and moral taint which is incurred by a toleration of slavery,” the ordinances that were passed by the Legislative Council of the Colony and promulgated by Governor Strahan in December created an exception in the case of so-called customs related to familial or spousal relationships.12 The operative emancipation ordinance, Number 2 of 1874, for example, contained the key phrase: Nothing herein contained shall be construed to diminish or derogate from the rights and obligations of parents and of children, or for other rights and obligations, not being repugnant to the laws of England, arising out of the family and tribal relations customarily used and observed in the Protected Territories.13

This point was reiterated even more strongly in the proclamation of December 17, 1874, in which Governor George Strahan clarified the binary opposition between legitimate “family” relationships and illegitimate “slavery” by declaring that “it is intended to permit the family and tribal relations to continue in all respects according as used and wont, except only that of slavery and such customs as arise therefrom and are thereon necessarily dependent.”14 This proviso was not meant, as Gerald McSheffrey has suggested, merely to opportunistically portray slavery in the region as a “benign institution” in order to cover up the administrations’ continued approbation of its existence.15 Rather, it was part of an effort to pragmatically and clearly draw the line between acceptable family obligations and unacceptable “slavery.” It was a discourse advised by Victorian notions of paternalism, but also one that was built out of an attempt to accommodate the realities on the ground and the views of local elites.16 Despite the attempts to draw a line between legitimate relationships and slavery, the leading magistrates of the day struggled with the distinction. Like Governor Strahan before them, they frequently turned to elderly males who were either western educated traders and professionals or chiefly officeholders for advice in specific cases.17 In one 1874 case, for example, the chiefly officeholders of Cape Coast were dragged into court to explain how family and marital obligations worked in Akan society.18 In other cases, such notables served in a consulting capacity as jurors or assessors. In the process, magistrates found that there were convenient overlaps between their own values and those of their consultants. For example, British magistrates brought with them a paternalism that assumed that women should generally be contained safely under the authority of a male,

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who nevertheless had the obligation to protect them and generally treat them honorably. They were quickly convinced that this was culturally normative to the Gold Coast as well. As male local notables came to understand and to manipulate this binary, many men charged under the anti-slavery ordinance for holding women in slavery began to claim in defense that the women in question were actually their wives. Magistrates often accepted these arguments at face value.19 By the same token, magistrates also came to believe that women who were enslaved could not be wives. The magistrates tried in some cases to separate the two categories by looking at whether purported slaves had been formally purchased, but quickly became confused by the difficulty of differentiating bridal fees from slave purchases, as in Manu’s appeal.20 The important point here is not so much that the colonial binary model could not successfully distinguish between slave and wife, but rather that it could not accommodate the notion that a woman could be both a slave and a wife at the same time. Magistrates found themselves dividing litigants into those who were illegitimate slaves and those who lived and labored under “customary . . . family and tribal obligations.” Thus they had a great deal of difficulty dealing with cases in which women claimed to have been enslaved, or sold, or held as slaves, or pawned for debt, but also to be married women. As a result, in their courtrooms, a woman was either a slave or a wife, but could not be both.

Being both Slave and Wife The principal problem with this binary formulation, of course, was that many of the women who brought charges of slavery against men were in fact both slaves and wives. Understanding why this was so requires that we begin with several core arguments about slavery in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast that have held up quite well when tested against multiple forms of evidence.21 Among these is the assertion that subordinate status in this region had been transformed over the course of the period of the Atlantic slave trade to more closely resemble the harsh, permanent, economic models of slavery normal to the capitalist Atlantic world.22 This modern form of slavery, however, was intertwined with a legacy system that was kinship based, assimilative, and more social than economic in orientation. The experiences of the group of people whom we now collectively label “slaves” therefore encompassed a range of disciplinary, labor, and social experiences.

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Moreover, slavery was just one form of dependency that coexisted with many others. In seeking to understand this complexity, we have at times been offered taxonomies of slavery, such as the one set down by the colonial anthropologist R. S. Rattray, purported to describe a hierarchy of dependency among the Akan majority of the region: ● ● ● ● ●

akoa, “servant” awowa, “debt pawn” donko [odonkɔ, plural nnɔnkofoɔ], “domestic slave” dommum, “war captive” akyere, “slave under capital punishment”23

However, Pierluigi Valsecchi and Kwasi Konadu, among others, have pushed us to stop thinking in terms of taxonomies and to instead think of a unified, broader network of consanguineal and fictive relationships that acknowledged status differences. In Akan societies, these relationships are lumped together as ako-awura (servant–owner, or client–patron), an umbrella term that covers the reciprocal but uneven obligations individuals might have to parents, to lineage heads, to fraternal society officers, and to chiefly officeholders, as well as those that pawns (awowa plural nwowa), domestic slaves (nnɔnkofoɔ), foster children, adopted children, and apprentices might have to their patrons.24 Similar (but not precisely the same) networks of dependency characterized Ewe and Ga-Adangme societies. These webs seem to be a more useful way to think about dependent relationships than Rattray’s hierarchical taxonomy. Yet, there’s a danger in lumping them together too enthusiastically. Despite being part of this system, for example, it is clear that the place of nnɔnkofoɔ within this continuum was not analogous to other clients or dependants. Some of the evidence for this distinctiveness comes from what we know about nnɔnkofoɔ and marriage.25 Marriage is a significant window through which to study the lived experiences, status, and aspirations of subordinated women because there were many nnɔnkofoɔ and nwowa whose relationships to their patrons also included forms of marriage.26 Before we can talk about this overlap, however, we should say a bit about local expectations of marriage more generally. First, marriage was constructed within the same matrix of relationships as was dependency status, one in which lineage affiliation was perhaps the most important association a man or woman might have. Such affiliations were organized predominantly along matrilineal lines among the Akan population, with some divergence to a patrilineal model among Ga-Adangme and Ewe communities and among

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Akanized polities like Winneba that had a strong Etsi/Guan background. Even for married couples, lineage continued to define group membership: for Akan communities, for example, a man belonged to one “family” (matrilineage— abusua, or plural mmusua) and his wife and children belonged to another.27 Thus at a certain level, marriage was a relationship contracted between families, and their decision to participate in a marriage was marked by variety of rituals that involved mutual investigation, the payment of goods and money by the groom’s family (sometimes called brideprice, “head fee” or “knocking fee”), and the sharing of meals.28 The transfer of goods or wealth that occurred within these rituals signified the husband’s matrilineage’s recognition of their immediate benefit in gaining a new laborer and contributor. It also established the status of the bride as a married woman with the attendant aura of respectability attached to her new status. Women married in this way were entitled to a public parade in which her family led her to her new residence, thus making her respectable position clear to the entire community.29 Once married, women also expected to be treated well and to profit from their husbands’ obligations to them in the form of the provision of meat, clothing, and food crops. In return, they engaged to provide domestic services and to contribute additional foodstuff to the family larder.30 Nor were these their only expectations, for there is evidence from at least one region that women believed that a wife benefited from the esoteric and physical protection of her husband’s spirit and his physical presence, and this seems likely to have been a more widely held expectation.31 Not all marriages worked out, of course, and there is evidence that divorces were relatively simple to obtain in most cases. For example, an Accra subchief reported that Ga communities normatively allowed women to divorce their husbands so long as they repaid their dowries.32 For Akan communities, administrator and amateur ethnographer Alfred Burdon Ellis observed that “should an adulterous wife prefer to live with her paramour, the latter can, if the husband consents, obtain her as his wife, on payment to the husband of the head-money which he paid for her, and all the expenses that have been incurred upon her account both before and after marriage. Under such an arrangement the wife is liable to the new husband for the sum she has cost him; and she cannot separate from him without making restitution.”33 Ellis also recounted that, “Separations are of frequent occurrence, and are governed by the following laws. If a husband grossly maltreats a wife, or neglects her for a considerable time in favour of a rival, she may leave him without making restitution of the

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head-money.”34 Finally, he reported that, “A woman who has not heard of her husband for three years may marry again; and the right of the second husband to her remains valid, even should the first return.”35 Yet while divorces were common, divorcées usually appear to have remarried rather quickly. Perhaps this was because of the aura of respectability that marriage gave to a woman, as demonstrated partly by the very public parade of the bride to her new home, and also in such widely known proverbs as A woman’s glory [what causes her to be respected] is her marriage. The condition of the isolated road: If a woman has no man, then we beat her and swagger.36

However, not all of the advantages that accrued to wives necessarily applied to female nnɔnkofoɔ in afona awadie (or slave–master) marriages. Lindsay Ehrisman and I have suggested that some spiritual and physical protections of marriage could to some degree extend even to female nnɔnkofoɔ, and that they may have enjoyed some recognition as married women.37 Yet other protections probably didn’t accrue to these women, as they entered their new households through a process that did not involve their lineages. Thus they lacked the continued connection to their matrilineage that was the key protection available to most wives. The financial transaction by which such women inaugurated their position as odonkɔ-wife also lacked the signification of respectability. Lacking both membership in a matrilineage and full status as wives, these women could not normally initiate a divorce, except by accumulating enough funds to repay their purchase price.38 Moreover, proverbs from the region seem to demonstrate a sense of shame attached to nnɔnkofoɔ. For example: A slave does not dress like his master.39 A slave taboos the best palm nuts.40 When your father’s slave cuts down a tree you say: “The wood is soft.”41 If a slave shows wisdom, we don’t take (any notice), but if we get into debt, it is he who has to work in order to pay it off.42 People are classified into three categories, but everyone has his own taboo: the chief, the royal, and the slave. The chief ’s taboo is argument, the royal’s is discrimination and the slave’s is the revealing of origins.43

For nnɔnkofoɔ, there was a real consciousness that certain behavior was out of bounds, foolish, or wrong—behavior that would be perfectly acceptable for other members of society.44 This in turn suggests that escaping from a life of

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shame was likely a motivating force for many nnɔnkofoɔ women. One way to make such an escape was to be formally acknowledged as being foremost a wife. Such a transition, although probably rarely complete and often done in stages, not only brought respectability to the wife but also probably afforded her some spiritual and physical protections and advantages.

Claiming “Wife” Individual female nnɔnkofoɔ’s struggles to gain some level of recognition as wives probably date to several centuries before the onset of formal British colonialism, as the Atlantic slave trade hardened their position in the years before 1874. Yet the formal abolition of slavery in that year created in British courts and antislavery laws a new venue in which women could claim to be “wives” rather than “slaves.” I do not mean by this argument to imply that magistrates became officially recognized as final arbiters of women’s status in local communities. Nevertheless, the courtroom was a public venue, its writ was enforceable, and its magistrates had social and political standing. Nnɔnkofoɔ, among others, recognized this. Thus, within months of the criminalization of slavery, women like Manu began to go to court or otherwise appeal to colonial authorities to certify their claims to be wives. Perhaps one of the best examples of these claims is the case of Abena Mensah, whose story I introduced in Abina and the Important Men.45 Abena was a young woman who had been a domestic servant in the border region between the protectorate and Asante. In the years following the 1873–1874 Anglo–Asante War, she was kidnapped by the deposted Asantehene Kofi Karikari, and then sold to a man named Yaw Awuah.46 Testimony from several witnesses suggests that Yaw married her at the same time that he purchased her. Yaw then brought Abena to the coast, where he left her with a business associate named Kwamina Adu.47 Testimony from another young woman who lived in Adu’s household suggests that Abena immediately knew she had been sold to Adu, and that she was unhappy with this fact. However, lacking another option, she stayed with Adu until, ten days later, he informed her that she had been purchased so as to be married to another of his dependants, a man named Tandoe.48 It is likely that Tandoe was a former odonkɔ himself, who had negotiated a wife as part of the price for staying with Adu following the proclamation of emancipation. This is evidenced by the fact that Kwamina Adu insisted that he, rather than Tandoe,

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give Abena ritual gifts of cloth (normally a husband’s obligation). Abena, however, was so opposed to the marriage that she instead fled to the British colonial capital at Cape Coast and leveled charges against Adu. In fact, three times in her testimony she cites this single event as precipitating her decision to leave. Abena’s motives in bringing this case to court have always been difficult to discern. She gained little material advantage from the case. She had already achieved her de facto freedom by seeking refuge in Cape Coast, and she was not making claims on Adu for payment or damages. Moreover, by admitting to having been enslaved she arguably exposed herself to public shame. By adding marriage into our analysis, however, we can begin to discern a set of motivations for her actions. Abena’s insistence on the recognition of her status as Yaw’s wife, her invocation of the forced marriage to Tandoe, and especially her testimony that Adu had insisted on giving her cloth (and refused to allow Tandoe to do so) are all evidence that she feared a regression back to servile status and the loss of her hard-won progress toward being seen primarily as Yaw’s wife. It is entirely possible, in this reading, to understand Abena’s decision to take Adu to court as a way of declaring her married status—and hence her respectability—in a public forum. A second illuminating case, from 1874, demonstrates similar motives that led other women to take their claims to be wives to British courts. This case was brought to the Cape Coast High Court by a young woman from Denkyira named Akua Fua.49 Akua testified that she had fallen in love with a man named Yaw Abuah.50 The two ran away together to his family in Wassa Fiase, where they lived as man and wife. The Denkyira authorities appealed to the paramount chief of Wassa Fiase to force her to return, but the lovers refused to separate. Gradually, however, their relationship deteriorated. Akua feuded with Yaw’s family and later claimed to have been abused. When, during the Anglo–Asante War, they had to flee to Denkyira along with many others, Akua used the opportunity to rejoin her own family. When Yaw demanded that Akua return with him, she refused. Nor could Yaw compel her to do so. Yet despite having made her escape, Akua then chose to take Yaw to court on the charge that he and his mother were spreading the rumor that she was his slave. In her testimony, Akua emphasized that it was this libel that led her to seek redress in British courts. Was Akua, in fact, so offended at being called a slave that she felt it worthwhile to take her former husband to court? Given the connection between slavery and shame in Akan society, this motive cannot be dismissed. Yet Akua also revealed

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a deeper motivation when she stated that she had a daughter by Yaw, over whom he retained custody. Akua therefore probably brought the case in the hopes of reclaiming her child. Because Yaw was a subject of the King of Wassa Fiase, and she a subject of the King of Denkyira, Akua likely had not been able to assert her claim through customary channels, and thus sought British assistance. Under normal circumstances, however, a civil case like this one would not have been accepted for trial in a colonial court. By connecting the case to slavery, however, she elevated its importance and managed to get a magistrate to hear it. Yet at the same time, she had to walk a very thin line in her testimony. On the one hand, in order to provoke the sympathy of the judge she had to keep slavery at center stage. Yet in order not to be shamed before her peers, she had to make it clear that she had never actually been odonkɔ. Akua achieved this balance by claiming to have been called a slave, while having in fact been properly Yaw’s wife, and in the end managed to achieve all of her goals. There is tempting evidence that the few cases like these that appeared in colonial courts were representative of a greater number of less visible struggles by women to assert their status as wives rather than slaves. Manu’s application to the district commissioner of Axim, with which this chapter began, is one example. Another can be found in a letter from Theophilus Opoku, a son of the King of Akuapem and a Basel Mission cleric. Opoku reported in 1885 on a woman who died in childbirth in Kukuruntumi. Explaining that the woman was a “domestic slave bought by the man, and she became his wife,” Opoku relates that around 1874 she had threatened to desert her husband and obtain a certificate of freedom if he continued to ill-treat her, but that the issue had been quickly settled by his recognition of her status as a wife.51 Additional evidence for the extent of this kind of negotiation in the wake of the anti-slavery laws comes from Chief Justice Chalmers, who reported in 1878 that “the sentiments attaching to free marriage are so much appreciated that persons who had been married as slaves . . . have subsequently [married] a second time as free persons.”52

A Woman Who Claimed “Slave” The instances laid out above represent evidence that the coming of British colonialism with its anti-slavery laws and binary definitions of “slave” and “wife” provided a new arena for nnɔnkofoɔ and other women in subordinated positions to seek the protections, respectability, and advantages of being recognized as wives rather than slaves. Some women who came to British courts, however,

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sought not recognition as wives but rather release from their marriages. They put forward the argument that they were in fact slaves, rather than wives, and hence should be liberated from their “masters” rather than being forced to remain with their “husbands.” In this section, I argue that such counter-examples do not contradict, but rather contribute to, the interpretation that women who were at the same time slaves and wives used British laws and courts to negotiate a better position for themselves. Fatima v. Al Hassan is one case in which a woman claiming to be enslaved to her husband sought to be allowed to leave him, rather than to have her status as wife confirmed.53 This trial was held in the Accra District Court in 1889, fifteen years after the implementation of the anti-slavery ordinances. Fatima was a young woman who had been brought from the north three years prior.54 Witnesses indicated that Al Hassan paid for her, although in his own testimony he argued that this payment was a bridal fee, while Fatima said that she had been “bought.” It was on this issue that the Accra district commissioner focused in the single question he asked Fatima. Yet despite the formal charge that she had been purchased as a slave, Fatima’s testimony in court did not focus on either the transaction or her status. Rather, like Abena and Akua, she spoke at length about her experiences as a married woman. To begin with, Fatima reported that Al Hassan “used to flog me,” physical abuse that was then confirmed by a witness. She also alleged that he had confiscated her property. An additional motivation might have been Al Hassan’s decision to take two further wives. These were issues that were clearly more closely related to marital relations and living conditions than Fatima’s status as a slave. Thus it appears that the charge of enslavement—whether true or not in the British legal sense of the term—may have been a means by which Fatima could pursue her objective of leaving her husband and living independently with the sanction and support of the state. In this way, Fatima successfully used the British laws surrounding slavery not to elevate her status in her marriage, but rather to escape it.

Conclusions The starting point for this chapter was evidence that many women who appear as plaintiffs or witnesses in cases involving slavery do not fit neatly into either the colonial category of “slave” or that of “wife,” one of its legitimate binaries. Nor, in many cases, were their motives to “escape enslavement” in the sense that we traditionally regard it. Rather, these women seemed to have been seeking both instrumental changes that could enhance their living conditions, and

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the prospect of movement along an emotional and life-long continuum from shame to respectability. In some cases, their strategies centered upon gaining formal recognition of their status as wives. In other cases, their goal was to leave unhappy or unsatisfactory marriages. In both cases, they recognized anti-slavery laws and colonial courts as a useful pathway toward achieving their objectives. Other women denied having been illegally pawned in order to remain with partners whom they preferred. Additional evidence—in the form of Manu’s correspondence, Opoku’s notes, and Chalmer’s report—suggests that a larger group of women who did not approach the courts may have used the mere existence of the anti-slavery laws to try to improve their situation. In all of these cases, women understood that the shifting landscape of power and the significance of “slavery” in colonial discourse made claims (or denials) of slave status a powerful tool for engaging the support of colonial authorities. Reading “slavery” in these sources as a signifier rather than a status allows us to sink into the testimony and draw out evidence about important social institutions and affective relationships within Gold Coast society in this period. This kind of reading brings to light the entanglement of slavery with other kinds of relationships in the precolonial period. It also demonstrates some of the changes that colonialism brought to these relationships and the way that individuals sought to take advantage of this new landscape of power. To fully exploit this evidence will, in the long term, require a deeper investigation into the social, economic, and cultural transformations wrought by the intensification of colonialism in the Gold Coast of the late nineteenth century. We will need to understand whether capitalist modes of production opened new opportunities for women to leave their husbands, or if colonial paternalism closed them down, and whether the authority of chiefly courts leaked away, allowing women to choose colonial courts with impunity, or if instead British sponsorship of chiefly officeholders reinforced their authority. We will have to better understand how the expansion of capitalism and colonialism transformed the household. It is my hope that this study and others like it will contribute to building a more detailed picture of a society in flux with the coming of colonialism, the strategies employed by its population, and their motives and worldviews.

Notes 1 Versions of this chapter have been presented at the African Studies Association annual Conference, Indianapolis, 2014; the American Historical Association Annual Conference, New York, 2015; the “After Slavery: Comparing the Caribbean

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and Africa” conference at Leibnitz University, Hanover, 2013; the Ghana Studies Association Annual Conference, Kumasi, Ghana, 2013; at the Center for African Studies, University of Wisconsin, 2014; and at the History Seminar at San Francisco State University, 2015 and at the Social History of Africa Seminar at Standford University, 2016. My special thanks to Thomas Spear, Kwasi Konadu, James Sweet, Lindsay Ehrisman, Mohammad Salama, Neil Kodesh, Emily Callaci, Mary Owusu, Akosua Adoma Perbi, Wilhelmina Donko, Kofi Baku, Rebecca Shumway, Sarah Curtis, Rebecca Shumway, Steffen Runkel, Marc Stein and Richard Roberts for their comments and assistance. PRAAD (National Archives of Ghana) SCT 5/1/13, Acting Chief Magistrate Melton to District Commissioner Axim, November 9, 1876. The District commissioner labeled her “a slave woman.” In my understanding of “landscapes of power” and sites of contestation, I adapt the very useful framing built by Roberts, Richard, 2012. Litigants and Households: African Disputes and Colonial Courts: African Disputes and Colonial Courts in the French Soudan, 1895-1912, 2–3. Portsmouth: Heinemann. SCT 5/1/13, Letter Book, W. Melton to District Commissioner Axim, January 8, 1877. Men also made use of these opportunities, but their actions and claims were quite different from those of the women explored in this chapter. I intend to address them in other publications. In this argument, I build on a vast body of work, such as Dummett, Raymond, and Marion Johnson, 1988. “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery in the Gold Coast Colony, Ashanti, and the Northern Territories.” In Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts (eds.), The End of Slavery in Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; McSheffrey, Gerald, 1983. “Slavery, Indentured Servitude, Legitimate Trade, and the Impact of Abolition in the Gold Coast, 1874–1910: A Reappraisal.” Journal of African History 24: 349–68; Akurang-Parry, Kwabena Opare, 1998. “The Administration of the Abolition Laws, African Response, and Post-proclamation Slavery in the Gold Coast, 1874–1940.” Slavery and Abolition 19: 149–66; Haenger, Peter, 2000. Slaves and Slave Holders on the Gold Coast: Towards an Understanding of Social Bondage in West Africa, edited by J. J. Shaffer and Paul Lovejoy. Basel, Switzerland: P. Schlettwein; Perbi, Akosua Adoma, 2004. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Century. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan. Getz, Trevor R., 2004. Slavery and Reform in West Africa: Towards Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Senegal and the Gold Coast. Athens: Ohio University Press; and Getz, Trevor R., 2000. “A ‘Somewhat Firm Policy’: The Role of the Gold Coast Judiciary in Implementing Slave Emancipation, 1874–1900.” Ghana Studies Journal 2: 97–117. It is incumbent upon me to note that the specific opportunities discussed in this chapter appear to have ended or at least become substantially muted within fifteen

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Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora years or so, as women came to be increasingly disadvantaged by the concretization of the colonial state after the 1890s. This is an argument laid out for Northern Ghana by Hawkins in, Sean, 2002. “‘The Woman in Question’: Marriage and Identity in the Colonial Courts of Northern Ghana, 1907-1954.” In Jean Allman, Susan Geiger and Nakanyike Musisi (eds.), Women in African Colonial Histories, 116–43. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Public Records Office (UK), CO 96/41, Pine to Labouclere, October 1, 1857, Sierra Leone. Dumett, Raymond, 1981. “Pressure groups, Bureaucracy, and the Decision-Making Process: The case of slavery, abolition, and colonial expansion in the Gold Coast, 1874.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 9: 193–215. The perspectives of male notables on this matter were directly recorded only rarely. Exceptions include petitions responding abolition from 1874 to 1875 recorded, referenced, and discussed in Parliamentary Papers LII, 1875, for example letters from Strahan to Carnarvon, November 3, 1874, November 5, 1874, January 3, 1875, and January 8, 1875. Consider also Akurang-Parry, Kwabena O., 2000. “‘A Smattering of Education’ and Petitions as Sources: A Study of African Slaveholders’ Responses to Abolition in the Gold Coast Colony, 1874-1875. ” History in Africa 27: 39–60. Other evidence of their views appears in records from some cases and in reports from administrators. Parliamentary Papers, 1874, House of Commons, 94: The Earl of Carnarvon to the Officer Administering the Government of the Gold Coast, August 21, 1874, Downing Street. PRAAD ADM 11/1, Ordinance Number 2 of 1874, An Ordinance to provide for the Emancipation of persons holden in Slavery, December 17, 1874, section III. Parliamentary Papers 1875, LII , 196: Proclamation by his Excellency George Cumine Strahan, December 17, 1874. McSheffrey, “Slavery, Indentured Servitude, Legitimate Trade,” 350. Getz, Trevor R., 2000. “The Case for Africans: The Role of Slaves and Masters in Emancipation on the Gold Coast, 1874–2000.” Slavery and Abolition 21: 128–45. Getz, Trevor R., 2011. “British Courts, Slave-owners, and Child Slaves in PostProclamation Gold Coast, 1874-1899.” In Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C. Miller (eds.), Child Slaves in the Modern World. Athens: Ohio University Press. This was a paternity case. SCT 5/4/14, John David Neizer of Elmina vs. E. P. Dontoh of Chama, March 5, 1874, Judicial Assessor’s Court, Cape Coast. A particularly interesting example is SCT 2/5/10, Regina v. Gotfred Kaduya, Accra Supreme/Divisional Court, July 16, 1894; but see also the case of Abena Mensah cited in this chapter.

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20 A common attitude of colonial officials is summed up by one official who wrote, “The Fanti purchases his wife – for conceal it how one might; it is a purchase and held to be so.” PRAAD ADM 1/12/5, Sanitary Report on the Station of Elmina, 1883. 21 The Ga language borrowed the term odonko (pl. donkofoi) from Twi to describe imported slaves; in Ewe the term ameflefle describes people who have been enslaved. Variations notwithstanding, we should not focus over-much on ethnicity or try to establish an ethnicized or tribalized typology of slavery. The Gold Coast was quite a cosmopolitan society in 1874, especially the littoral claimed as Colony and Protectorate. The large coastal towns had experienced waves of immigrants from the interior, as well mobile populations moving back and forth to Europe, the Americas, and other parts of Africa. Moreover, even brief or seasonal visits and short stays by sailors, merchants, and administrators had shifted discourse and reality in cities like Cape Coast and Accra and in towns like Anomabu and Ho. Finally, even rural areas were more cosmopolitan than we have tended to understand. Hegemonically matrilineal Akan-speaking communities often overlaid older patrilineal Etsi and Guan-speaking communities, and overlapped with states that had Ga-speaking leaderships but often large Akan minorities. Booming trade tied these areas closely to major metropolises of Accra and Cape Coast and from there to the Atlantic world. One result of this mixing was that both the language and the reality of slavery and marriage were broadly shared across this region. 22 One magisterial work on this topic is Lovejoy, Paul, 1983. Transformations in Slavery, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 23 Rattray, R. S., 1929. Ashanti Law and Constitution. London. 24 Konadu, Kwasi, 2009. “Euro-African Commerce and Social Chaos: Akan Societies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” History in Africa 36: 265–92. 1 Valsecchi, Pierluigi, 2005. “Formation des etats et alliances intercommunautaires dans la Côte d’Or (XVII e-XVIIIe siècles).” Journal des Africanistes 75(1): 77–100. 25 The scholarship on marriage in precolonial societies for this region is much thinner. Thus while my analysis of slavery in this chapter is something of a rejoinder to a rich historiography my approach to marriage is admittedly more preliminary. Of some use here is the critical theory discussion in the first pages of McCaskie, T. C., 1981. “State and Society, Marriage and Adultery: Some Considerations Towards a Social History of Pre-Colonial Asante.” The Journal of African History 22: 477–94. 26 Kwabena Adu-Boahen has demonstrated that there was also significant female slave-owning in the Gold Coast during the nineteenth century. Adu-Boahen, Kwabena, 2011. Post-Abolition Slaveholding in the Gold Coast: Slave Mistresses of Coastal Fante, 1807-1874. Lambert: Saarbrücken. However, both oral and written

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Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora sources point to male ako to female awura/awowa/odonkɔ relationships being far more prevalent. Osei, E. K., 1998. Social Structure and Traditional Organization of the Akans of Ghana, Vol. 1: Clanship Systems and Marriage, 22. Accra: Tell Africa. John Kofi Fynn for example. . . . Fynn, John K., 1974. Oral Traditions of the Fante States. Legon: Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, four volumes. Oral Traditions 4: Edina, Brenu Akyinimu, 33, Oral Traditions 2: Eguafo, Agyeikrom, 19. On Ga practices, see SCT 2/4/11, March 29, 1875. On Akan practices, see Osei, Social Structure and Traditional Organization, 22. Allman, Jean, and Victoria B. Tashjian, 2000. I Will Not Eat Stone: A Women’s History of Colonial Asante, 61–63. New York: Heinemann. Allman and Tashjian, I Will Not Eat Stone, 38. It is important to note that there might be several levels or models of marriage within a single community. For example, in 1875 a Ga chiefly officeholder testified to two levels of marriage, one involving the payment of two cloths, the other of six. PRAAD SCT 2/4/11, March 29, 1875. See also Rattray’s taxonomy of marriage types in Ashanti Law, 22–23. Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian go into greater detail for early-twentieth-century Asante society in I Will Not Eat Stone. Also, I wish I could talk about love and affection here, but I cannot stretch my sources that far and I don’t wish to speculate. PRAAD SCT 2/4/11, March 29, 1875. Ellis, J. B., 1887. The Tshi-Speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast of West Africa: Their Religion, Manners, Customs, Laws, Language, etc. London: Chapman and Hall. While Ellis’ observations cannot be taken at face value, he apparently received much of his information from local interlocutors, including men serving in the units he commanded. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples, 284. Ibid., 285. Appiah, Peggy, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Ivor Agyeman-Duah, 2007. Bu Me Bɛ : Proverbs of the Akans, #70, 16; #6663, 296. UK: Ayebia Clark Publishing Limited. Getz, Trevor R., and Lindsay Ehrisman, 2015. “The Marriages of Abina Mansah: Escaping the Boundaries of ‘Slavery’ as a Category in Historical Analysis.” Journal of West African History 1: 93–117. That this was contemporary to the period is implied but not explicitly stated by Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast, 283–84; and was confirmed verbally by Mary Owusu. Appiah, Bu Me Bɛ , #2004, 97. Idem, #2002, 97. Idem, #2452, 116.

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42 Idem, #3161, 146. 43 Idem, #4520, 204. 44 In a few of these cases, the Twi term used in the collected piece is actually akoa. Given the content and the modern context of collection, however, I believe this may be a case of a modern transposition of signifiers reflecting the formal abolition of odonkɔ status. 45 Abena is an Akan day-name. Mensah usually means the fifth daughter in a family. In the transcript: Abina Mansah. 46 Yaw is an Akan day-name. I am speculating that his last name was Awuah, related to a village near Saltpond, but I could be wrong. In the transcript: Yowawhah. 47 Kwamina is a Fante variation of an Akan day-name. Adu is a common family name in the region. 48 This name is common in Ivory Coast but not in Ghana. 49 SCT 5/4/18, Eccoah Fawah v. Yaw Abboah, December 28, 1874. Akua is an Akan day-name. In the testimony: Eccoah Fawah. 50 In the testimony: Yaw Abboah. 51 Basel Mission Society Archive d-1.41.061, Theophilus Opoku, Annual Report for 1884, March 5, 1885. 52 PP LV, 1878, (c.2148), Report . . . on the Effects of the Steps Taken by the Colonial Government, Chalmers. 53 SCT 17/5/8, Fatima v. Al Hassan, June 7, 1889. Both names indicate an origin in the Muslim north. Al Hassan testified that they were married “Houssa fashion,” but this was a by-word for many northern groups within the Protectorate, and other witnesses named in the case are clearly of Fulani (Peul) origin. There is a great deal of literature on Islam and slavery in West Africa, not all of which is relevant here. There is plenty of evidence that Muslims in the coastal towns, many of whom were single, male constables or soldiers, frequently purchased (or sometimes rescued) young women brought in from the north as slaves. As with Akan-speakers, these communities similarly had a bride payment (mahr) that was difficult for British magistrates to disentangle from the direct purchase of women to be placed as wives. 54 Al Hassan stated that it was four years.

6

Signs of an African Emancipation? Slavery and its Resolution in the Reports (1868–1900) of a Ghanaian Pastor—Kofi Theophilus Opoku Paul Jenkins

Introduction This chapter starts by noticing an anomaly. After a journey beyond the inland boundary of the British Gold Coast Colony in 1877, a Ghanaian pastor reported on his distress at seeing the slave trade in action. But in his regular reports from his parish work in small towns and villages in the interior of the southeastern Gold Coast, from the time of the colonial Emancipation Decree of 1875 and up to 1900, his reports on slavery and emancipation are concrete and interesting, but relatively few in number and mild in tone. The attempt in this chapter to account for this anomaly involves making a quantitative assessment of what the literature offers as a qualitative distinction between, on the one side, the harsh treatment of slaves as being completely “other,” and on the other, the model of the “house-” or “family-slave,” who was in time absorbed into the family community. It would appear from Kofi Theophilus Opoku’s (b. 1842, d. 1913) reports on his parish work, that the latter must have been the predominant form of “slavery” in his local environment. The value of presenting this documentation and developing a sociohistorical analysis along these lines is partly justified by the lack of immediate sources for the grassroots conditions in the interior of the Gold Coast Colony in the final decades of the nineteenth century, before the elaboration of the colonial codification of southern Ghanaian culture as a framework for indirect rule. And a broader look at the body of materials among which the pastor’s reports have been filed indicates that the Basel Mission archive, though opaque and difficult to use, provides unusual sources on life as it was actually lived in the second half of

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the nineteenth century, given that Basel Mission staff were expected to operate using an indigenous language, often were in intimate touch with quite large numbers of people, and were required to report regularly to their superiors in Europe.

Pastor Opoku’s Distress in Distant Slave Markets, 1877 In January 1877, Theophilus Opoku, the pastor of the Basel Mission congregation in Larteh, in southeastern Ghana, set out on an 800-kilometer, 4-month trek to Salaga and back. Salaga was an almost legendary entrepôt, where long-distance trade from the savanna met merchants from the rain forest. His motive for leaving home, work, and children, he wrote, was to get away from the sadness following his wife’s recent death. But Salaga was the goal of a number of other travelers in the second half of the 1870s, including several Basel Mission colleagues. Up to the sacking of Kumase by British and African allied forces in 1874, Asante had had a monopoly on north–south movement in what has become the state of Ghana. Now, this monopoly had been broken (though neither Asante nor the territories to the north, east, or west of the Gold Coast had been brought under colonial control). So, curiosity and the hope of gain motivated much of the interest in Salaga among Europeans and Africans in the British protectorate. Opoku and several other Basel Mission colleagues sought conversation with Muslims in Salaga. Other colleagues bought horses and cattle, which they hoped in vain would survive in their mission stations in the forest. In the 1870s it became routine in the Basel Mission in Ghana to add annual reports written in English by indigenous pastors to the flow of German documentation sent by the European missionaries to Basel, for evaluation, action, and filing. Opoku was one of the two or three pastors who regularly sent in long, readable, and detailed reports.1 Three-quarters of his forty-page manuscript report for 1877 was concerned with this journey.2 Substantial paragraphs reported on the trade in slaves, still being carried out in a quite unrestrained way outside the borders of the British Gold Coast. Opoku met it first while passing through Kete Krachi, where he got into an argument with a woman trader who wanted to sell him a small girl in her possession. In Salaga, where he stayed for about a month, he saw two slave caravans arrive, each with about 400 slaves, divided into groups of about a dozen people, each group, he wrote, the property of an individual trader.

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He expressed himself appalled at what he saw. Those slaves were clearly marked by the trauma of violent separation from their homes, and forced marches over long distances. But many of his observations could have been made by European travelers, indeed more than once he referred to the “civilised emotions” that motivated the world’s horror at slavery and the slave trade and that were quite absent in the woman trader, for instance, with the small girl for sale. So, the question must be asked: are his reports on slavery and the slave trade on this journey more than his version of the genre of Christian activist anti-slavery writing, by 1877 nearly a century old? His own emotions certainly seem genuine. There is, for example, his empathy with mothers who “ . . . consider themselves indescribably happy as one possessing a kingdom if their young children are not separated from them” in the sale which followed their arrival in Salaga. And there is the expression of his own distress when he felt bound to refuse to purchase the slave girl in Kete Krachi.3 But there are also, additionally, in this text, signs of an indigenous intellect at work, seeing and reporting things, which might well not have been perceived by a European observer. Opoku was angry at the way the slave owners punished slaves who were not sold quickly and advantageously. He wrote that they, the slaves, were blamed for a “bad fate,” which was disadvantaging their owners—a reference, surely, to the belief in this region that the individual life was influenced by its individual external fate; that is, we have here the perception of an indigenous person aware of a belief, of which most Europeans would have been ignorant. And, in a particularly intensive passage—marked in his text as a change from an eyewitness report to his own inner emotional exploration of what it meant to be a slave in a slave market, he wrote: Poor unfortunate man. To come out from the hands of [the] cruel master [who brought him here] to the hands of another master, he calls a “setting at liberty. ” . . . The tyranny of this monster he would avoid! Though naturally the new master he comes to . . . [he] does not know, nor are his [the new master’s] thoughts about him disclosed. The wish of some are realised! They come to new masters and are well off; whilst the same misery awaits others. For some meet a better fate in the house of kind masters, while others avoid one misery to make a way for another! The new master to increase his fortune, sells him again! To a country far or near! Where at the custom [i.e. funeral] of a monarch he is doomed to the butcher-knife of the executioner who bids him farewell adieu. Go to the other world and attend a king unknown to him.

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It might be argued that this reference to “kind masters” disqualifies Opoku, as being some kind of socially romantic conservative, from being taken as a serious source on the reality of inner-African slavery. But it will be argued here that this voice from the interior grassroots of the Gold Coast Colony carries a different perspective on social subordination and social cohesion than that of abolitionists in Britain, or indeed in the towns on the coast. And as a “rare bird” in the accessible indigenous sources on inner-African slavery in this region, Opoku deserves enhanced attention. His writing about slavery deserves attention in general, but it will be suggested here that the reference to “kind masters” is a particularly pivotal passage for our qualitative and quantitative perception of inner-African slavery and emancipation in inland parts of the British Gold Coast in the 1870s.4

Slavery and Emancipation in Theophilus Opoku’s Annual Reports on His Work as Catechist and Pastor in the Southeastern Interior of the Gold Coast Colony, 1868–1900 From 1868 to 1900, Opoku was first catechist, and then from 1872 he was an ordained member of the Basel Mission staff in a series of second or third order towns—following their position in the hierarchy of the traditional states—in the interior of the Gold Coast Colony: Mamfe, Larteh, Kukurantumi, Adukrom, and Mamfe again. With the exception of Kukurantumi, a town in Akyem Abuakwa, all these places were part of his native kingdom of Akuapem. Opoku continued to work as a pastor until 1909, but from 1900 he was in charge of the congregation in the Akuapem capital, Akropong. Slavery is not part of the palette of topics on which he reported there, rather his reports become an important source on relations between the Basel Mission and its church on the one side, and an active king and court and the politics of this African kingdom, on the other.5 To turn now to Opoku’s references to slavery and emancipation in reports on his congregational and local mission work, they are presented partly in quotation, partly in paraphrase, in thematic rather than chronological order, and in some cases with an immediate commentary preparing for the broader and more general interpretations that follow. I have chosen to start with a report, which corresponds with what we would expect to read after the Emancipation Decree of 1875. It is from the town of Mamfe in 1897, partly referring back to an experience in Opoku’s previous place of work, Adukrom, in the 1880s.6

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Hanna Tiriyeme . . . [had been] a slave woman, belonging to an Asanti woman who resided at Adukrom. This woman, on the death of her mistress . . . was ill-treated by some of [the mistress’] countrymen . . . who even threatened to deprive her of her only child she had and to cast her away to her own fate, as she was then indescribably ill and too miserable and poorly to look at. This . . . caused her to come under my roof for shelter and [she] was protected by me as much as I could. . . . I was obliged to secure for her and her child their freedom from the Government. . . . In my home I naturally attended to her bodily wants . . . and by proper care [she] was after some time much improved in health.

When we were transferred from Adukrom [to Mamfe, in 1890] she was not willing to part from us, and so accompanied us hither . . . . From last August she became ill and lingered till 3rd October when she departed this life. In the morning of her decease she ordered the basket which contained her little belongings to be brought to her. She then selected some which she wished to be buried with and the remaining to be kept for her son she is leaving to our charge. Opoku adds a mild version of the kind of nineteenth-century Christian deathbed report and it includes Hanna Tiriyeme’s classic witness obiter dictu: Then [after talking about the contents of her basket] I asked her, this is all for your body, but what have you got for your soul? She looked intently at me and with great emotion replied: I was before a poor slave, but I thank the Lord God that I am now his child.

This is in fact one of the two longest of Opoku’s texts on slavery from his work in the confines of the Gold Coast Colony. It can be taken as a classic example of the kind of report we would expect to read. It indicates that being a slave could, after 1875, continue to be a troubling fate in the British protectorate . . . (her mistress had evidently been a member of the group of Juaben refugees from Asante in the area where Opoku worked, among whom, one could surmise, customs remained harsher longer than they did in the indigenous population around them). But the Basel Mission, in the person of Reverend Opoku, acted to obtain the government backing she needed to ensure her freedom. In this story, then, the government is a factor—but on the whole, the government is absent from Opoku’s writing as it is from reports from these years that I have read by other pastors (except during the big crisis in Kyebi in 1887–1888).7 But Hanna Tiriyeme’s story is very suggestive, if we are looking for sources on changes at the grassroots level following the emancipation decree. We can let the agency shown by Opoku and the Christian congregations

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in Adukrom and Mamfe stand as symbols for the way that under the distant umbrella of the colonial government, the situation of individuals could be resolved in a way that took account of their wishes. And note how the key moves are taken locally, and in this case include her integration in a local family, that is, Opoku’s, which we can see as a form of patronage/clientage, mediated in this case by the vocation of a Christian pastor, but that could, clearly, also have been offered by any family head prepared to offer protection for mother and child. We must also not forget to include in this attempt at Ghanaian social history, the declaration of human equality, which in Opoku’s account, Hanna Tiriyeme regarded as having come to apply to her in the course of this new relationship. Most of Opoku’s references to slavery in his reports from southeastern Ghana are much shorter. In the Mamfe report for 1891 there are brief references to what individual Christians were doing, as it were, on the wild side, outside the boundary of the colony:8 [paraphrase]A husband and wife had left to go trading to the northeast on the Volta beyond the boundaries of the Colony, and it was rumoured were trading in slaves. [paraphrase]An Asante Christian from Mamfe had also been on a trading journey and brought a girl back who it turned out was a slave.

Opoku does not approve. These cases, however, were still to be dealt with at the congregational level when he wrote his report, and as far as I know, there is no further paper trail about them. In the same year, also from Mamfe, Opoku remarks that outsiders were marrying local women and becoming what he called “citizens.” That sounds like former slaves integrating themselves into the local community by entering full marriage as principals. And being accepted as such by the family of their wives. Moving now to a somewhat longer reference from Mamfe, but from much earlier—from 1868—(along with a reference back to that particular place and time in a later report, written when he returned to Mamfe in 1890 as pastor of the congregation there) first of all, Opoku reports: “God’s Water [i.e. baptism], [they say] turns you into a slave who will be separated from familiar people on death, taken away and forced to serve the white King.”9 To appreciate this comment, we need to understand that one elderly woman and her children were being severely ostracized in Mamfe after relatives had been accused of sorcery and witchcraft, and three of them were forced to commit

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suicide. Opoku took the Christian message to her, with the offer of acceptance in the Christian congregation, so she and her children were considering conversion. When this became known, the “traditionalists” argued against conversion, according to Opoku in the terms quoted above. It appears here that the international slave trade had seeded itself as trauma into discourse in this language, in a projection of the life hereafter as dominated by distant authorities and cruel mechanisms, which generations before had been known in real life. But notice how incidental this reference to slavery is to Opoku’s main concern with social problems arising from what were probably witchcraft beliefs, and his efforts to bring people to conversion. And there is a fascinating contrast in a sentence in Opoku’s report for 1890, looking back to something else, which happened in Mamfe in 1868–1869:10 Wilhelmina Kade [was] telling [the traditional authorities in Mamfe] that if she were sold into slavery people would ask her why [she was a slave], since she spoke Twi and had no marks on her face—and she would tell them [i.e. that she had been sold into slavery because she had converted]. (My emphasis)

This is not an elderly traditionalist speaking, but a very young woman who, with a female friend of the same age, had converted at a time when the people of Mamfe had tried to forbid conversion. Somehow her secret baptism became known. She had been seized, chained to a log, debaptized—head shaven and washed—and threatened with being sold into slavery. But in Opoku’s memory she was defiant.11 The traditionalists may have tried to conjure up the ghosts of the old slave trade. But she—note this is seven years before emancipation—appears to have seen no especial terrors in being classed as a slave. She was a nubile young woman fluent in Twi and not disfigured with scarification. Her assumption, of course, in these decades after the effective prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade on what is now the Ghanaian coast, was evidently that her slavery would leave her in the southern Gold Coast among people, many of whom would speak Twi, for whom she would have the very special value common to fertile young women. To my mind this is a neat and graphic indication of the contrast between the historic image of the slave trade and the realities as perceived by a young woman around 1870—a shift of the realities, as she saw them, of what we outsiders could well continue to call, in applying Meyers’ and Kopytoff ’s brilliant formula, the “slave to wife—or slave to kin—continuum.”12 Finally, turning to the other comparatively long reference to slavery from Opoku’s reports on congregations in the colony—in 1882 he was sent to be

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pastor in Kukurantumi, a small town in the state of Akyem Abuakwa. In Kyebi, the capital of the Kingdom of Abuakwa, the emancipation of slaves and their recruitment into the Christian congregation caused persistent and sometimes severe trouble right up to the 1890s.13 Simeon Koranteng, Opoku’s predecessor as pastor in Kukurantumi, comments on the situation Opoku inherited: In 1878, while seventeen of the newly baptized in that year were indigenous people, fifteen were freed slaves from the interior (including children). The latter were joining what Koranteng called “the visible church of the redeemer,” “some one, some two and three years after [the beginning of] their stay within the reach of the gospel.” Judging by Koranteng’s earlier reports, they were the first odonko (slaves with a “foreign” origin) to have been baptized there.14 For Opoku, however, the freed slaves from the interior in his congregation did not mean he was involved in trouble with their former masters as was the case in Kyebi. In Kukurantumi there was trouble incorporating the ex-slaves into the congregation. Opoku even wrote in terms of there being two “nations” in the congregation in Kukurantumi, the “natives” and the freedmen from the Interior . . . who have obtained their freedom by taking refuge on our Christian village here. [They should strive for the] better freedom which Christ has worked out through his holy blood for us. . . . [But] there is much want of obedience . . . as their nature is, [the freedmen] possess ‘hot blood’ . . . and give much trouble by their savageness and quarrelsomeness. They are to be trained up as children.

Opoku’s attitude is clearly not free of a certain feeling of superiority and even racism toward the “freedmen” from far away. But he records that he took an important step toward their integration: The idea of choosing the “Natives” alone as members of the Presbytery [i.e. the group of Church Elders] was not a good one. It brought some discord . . . and distrust and misunderstanding on the part of [the freedmen] towards the Presbytery. It became my duty . . . to have one [freedman] elected by the members of the congregation to form a member of the Presbytery; and one Jonas Onyame, an intelligent man, was elected to the delight of his brethren.”15

Opoku stayed in Kukurantumi two more years, but this is the only reference to slavery in his reports from that town—with the exception of a short reference in a long and tragic story of a couple, where the wife died in childbirth. It comes out rather en passant that she had been a “domestic slave,” and had previously threatened to leave her husband if he did not treat her better—a

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short reference, but, as we shall see, highly suggestive: It confirms my suggestion that there were post-emancipation negotiations going on in families inland on the Gold Coast.16 But even here, where you can talk about the ex-slaves as a serious grouping in his congregation, Opoku does not report on them as a continuing problem or theme. . . . His emphasis in all his reports in Kukurantumi is on his dialectic with the leaders of traditional religion in the town and the competition to be the decisive figure in interpreting the events happening around them, right down to arguments about the cause of a grave shortage of edible snails.17 It might be, of course, that the ex-slaves were using the Christian congregation briefly as a staging post before migrating further south—to settlements on the Accra Plains, nearer than Kukurantumi to effective colonial protection.18 But about the developments involving freedmen in Kukurantumi after 1882 Opoku is silent. In summary, Opoku’s references to slavery and emancipation in his parish work are unexpectedly few. Not only their number, however, but also their content and tone present us with a problem of interpretation. He writes about slavery mildly, and it is apparently incidental to the main themes of his life and work. When he does include slavery and emancipation in his reports, however, what he writes is not banal but circumstantial and unusually concrete. Skeptical readers have every right to ask, of course, whether Akan discretion and reticence, the inhibition about reference to a person’s lowly origins, which Opoku had shown in 1872 in relation to his own life history, was perhaps influencing his reporting on slavery “at home,” in contrast to his reports on faraway Salaga.19 But the real personal insights he records and his evident personal distress at the sight of slaves, old and young, in Kete Krachi and Salaga, warn us of a possible alternative explanation: that the slaves and ex-slaves around him in the settlements where he worked in the Gold Coast Colony were mostly involved in a mild form of social subordination, which did not stir up his emotions or claim his attention as much as what he had seen on his long journey in 1877. In this reading, Opoku’s reference in his Salaga report to “good masters” and the following depiction by Haenger of the missionaries’ stress in 1860 on the relatively benign rule of patriarchs in the families they knew, could be taken to reflect a social reality with significant dimensions.20 If this alternative explanation can be shown to be plausible, Opoku will have contributed to finding a general answer to the central question about the nature of the widespread relations called “slavery” that existed in the Gold

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Coast Colony and, which were, at least in Westminster’s intentions, addressed by the Emancipation Decree of 1875. There is a consensus that qualitatively this “slavery,” as we have seen, covered a whole range of realities. On the one hand there was a tradition of undoubtedly harsh subordination with roots in the Atlantic slave trade—and with, in the background, the consciousness of slaves being marked out as victims for human sacrifice. But on the other hand, “slavery” could be seen primarily as a mechanism for extending the family beyond the restricted number of blood relatives. The central problem for present-day scholarship seems to me to be the quantitative balance between these two poles. Was slavery in the Gold Coast Colony in the second half of the nineteenth century really, for most slaves, harsh and brutal subjection? Or was it mostly a matter of extending families, a situation in which most “slaves” came to be treated in most respects as family members, if subordinate ones?21 What sort of a general reputation do the communities of Southern Ghana deserve to have, in respect to inner-African slavery in the second half of the nineteenth century? Opoku’s reports—a sustained series covering thirty years from half a dozen inland communities—are, with their relatively few references to slavery, a negative argument in favor of the “family” postulate. But they present that notorious English problem of explaining why the dog did not bark in the night.22 This chapter proceeds now to point to the weakness of the colonial government, which had decreed emancipation, indicating that emancipatory acts must have begun among Africans, rather having been initiated by the colonial authorities. It then moves on to use Basel Mission material to make some suggestions about the culture and social relations closely woven, in the indigenous context, with what was being called slavery in the British protectorate in the second half of the nineteenth century. I argue that the situation of many of the “slaves” in extended families in the Gold Coast under British protection, both before and after the emancipation of 1875, was characterized by a degree of economic realism, personal flexibility, and familial emotions, which meant that the terrible curses of violent discipline related to the danger of being sold with no warning, which had accompanied the large-scale long-distance slave trading from the Atlantic coast, were, by the time Opoku was writing his reports, a weak shadow of what they had been a century before. And I also argue that we have to be careful about seeing “slavery” as a set, unchangeable status. The flexibility in the handling of status implied by Meiers and Kopytoff ’s “slavery-to-kinship continuum” could be, and was, I argue, a real feature of society within the protected borders of the British Gold Coast.

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Rebalancing Our History of Emancipation in the Gold Coast Colony Fifty years ago in the University of Ghana, as a young academic dogsbody— teaching world history and handing back a couple of dozen marked student essays each week in term—I was nevertheless touched by the hem of the intensive research that was going on there into the history of African communities, states, and cultures in Ghana and its neighboring regions. This was, of course, an action, in the context of new independence, to create an African history, an attempt to rebalance the history of Africa and bring an organic indigenous history out from under the shadow of a Eurocentric colonial history. So, this presentation of Opoku’s reports follows up those memories of Legon in the 1960s, in looking at the way a reflective reading of what he wrote, and what he did not write, can rebalance our history of slavery and emancipation in Ghana in the years before and after 1875. I am defining the power of the colonial government in terms of its weakness—and trying to see what happens if we attempt to think about the way that processes to which we give the Western term “emancipation” could be embedded in continuities in the social history of African communities. Looking at the governmental history of the Gold Coast Colony in order to create space for this rebalancing is not a difficult task. Still in the 1890s, the Gold Coast government was simply not in a position to administer or enforce social reform in detail. Slaves within the territory of the Gold Coast Colony were emancipated by decree in 1875. But I regard that emancipation as more of a “nudge” than anything else in its impact on the grassroots social history in the kind of places where Opoku worked. It was a change in a distant framework, which could influence the way people in the Colony organized their social relations. But it required the actions of the people involved to have an effect, and indeed needed no recourse to government to be effective, providing it was known that such recourse was possible. And even as a nudge to reframe the social relationships subsumed under the word “slavery,” the emancipation of 1875 wasn’t the first one—there were three important nudges, altogether, in the course of the nineteenth century. There was, first of all, from 1807, the reduction of the transatlantic slave trade from West Africa. This was a measure enforced with increasing success on the coast and at sea, but inland it was a weak nudge. It went far, however, with time, to weaken and gradually destroy the link between indigenous society and the huge international trading side of slavery. Thinking about the impact of this uncoupling on the way indigenous communities conducted their lives is an

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eminent task for nineteenth century Ghanaian social history. Here I am arguing that people who had previously been vulnerable to being sold and sent away across the ocean were more and more likely to live their lives post-1807 in the region they had grown up knowing—or to which they had been brought—and where their children were most likely growing up. Secondly, human sacrifice was prohibited in the kingdoms that came under British protection in the Gold Coast Colony. The prohibition was not of course 100  percent effective, but effective enough to help damp down a culture of violence, the old permanent existential threat to the lives of slaves. Finally, emancipation in 1874–1875—or the provision that possession amounting to slavery was no longer a status that would be recognized by the colonial courts—was effective, in the inland areas of the Gold Coast, only as providing a means of last resort for subordinates who wanted to get away from a deeply unpleasant subordination. And again, until the development at the turn of the century of an effective, industry-based colonialism with adequate revenues for a true administration, it was a nudge, rather than a measure the government was capable of actively carrying out. Rebalancing Ghanaian history away from a chronology of colonial acts and their imagined impact, seen from a metropolitan perspective, has a clear message for discussions of inner-African slavery in the Gold Coast of the final quarter of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, cocoa and gold had started to generate the kind of revenue that could support a real colonial administration, spreading north from the coast to what is now the border with Burkina Faso. But in preceding decades, although single police actions were possible in the interior of the colony (as with the Kyebi crisis of 1888), and although a major punishment expedition could be put together, as was the case with the rapid drive to sack Kumase in 1874, a stable colonial administration away from the coastal towns was simply inexistent, well into the 1890s. It is quite plausible to argue, therefore, that compliance with the emancipation edict of 1874 in the interior of the colony was initiated and carried through mainly at the grassroots.

Slavery and Associated Relationships as Mirrored in the Basel Mission Archive The Basel Mission archive, reflecting the organizationally consistent control that the Basel headquarters attempted to maintain over its missionaries in the

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field, is an important resource for Ghanaian social history in the second half of the nineteenth century.23 Since the year 2000 several innovative dissertations, largely based on research in Basel, have shown new dimensions, which need to be built into the social history of the southeastern Gold Coast, and aspects of the construction of Ghanaian societies, which had to be perceived and understood and taken into account by the missionaries in their work. The most recent of these is Ulrike Sill’s analysis of encounters involving girls and women in and around the Basel Mission in the decades up to 1885. This shows quite clearly, for example, that in Akuapem, the indigenous population saw the missionaries and their followers in terms of the organization of the extended family, which was their own basic social unit, and the missionaries understood this and learned to play up to it.24 It is, however, Peter Haenger’s thesis on slaves and slaveholders on the Gold Coast, a study of the attempt in the 1860s by the Basel Mission’s Basel leadership to emancipate slaves in its congregations on the Gold Coast, which is of central relevance to this chapter and needs special exposition in relation to Opoku’s reports.25 Haenger’s study covers the vehement opposition of the experienced missionaries to the idea that people designated as “slaves” in their congregations could be regarded as “slaves” in the sense that this term was used in the Caribbean or the American South—they were, argued the missionaries, trusted and respected members of the extended families to which they were attached.26 He then followed the administrative means by which the Basel Committee enforced its decision on unwilling missionaries, and the decision’s middle-term results, which were by no means clear-cut. Haenger’s analysis is based primarily on a body of materials, which gets at times close to providing “thick documentation” on process in indigenous social history, generated by the mission’s own Slave Emancipation Commission, recorded in German MSS using the Sütterlin (“old German”) script. Indeed, one of Haenger’s greatest gifts to those of us thinking about the realities of slavery in what became the Gold Coast Colony in the second half of the nineteenth century is the way he presents and evaluates, in case studies of varying lengths, the detailed investigations and discussions minuted and reported by the mission’s own Slave Emancipation Commission or its individual members, formed on the Gold Coast on the instructions of the Basel Committee and to some degree active into the early 1870s.27 The impact of these case studies on this author—and the longer they are, the more striking the impact—is to suggest that there was a whole complex and little-known world of social relations “out there,”

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relativizing, in this time and place, the simple Western definition of a slave as an other-directed servant, subject to draconian punishment if he or she stepped out of line.28 And this “other world” needs to be factored in as a constant possibility when considering the background to Opoku’s modest sum of references to slavery in reports on his parish work. It emerges, for instance, from the Commission’s investigation of one of the slave owners—Thomas Svanikier, a Basel Mission catechist, who was also head of his Afro-Danish family—that a family with a (relatively) large number of “slaves” had to play its cards rather carefully in “administering” them.29 Svanikier’s rival for the position as male head of the family used a barrel of brandy as a means to bring slaves onto his side in the inner-family struggle for leadership, as the mission leadership tried to prise their catechist away from his traditional role. This was a possibility not open to an employee of a puritan protestant missionary society. Haenger portrays the whole complicated story of the Basel Mission’s attempt to free Svanikier from his family responsibilities as evidence of what he calls the collapse of the traditional institution of slavery on the Accra Plains in the years before 1875. But clearly one factor in the situation was that slaves, while being interested in “bread” (and liable to go in search of more bread, if their existing master’s supply was inadequate), could also demand “circuses,” and make this interest felt.30 (Haenger also interviewed the lawyer Koranteng Ata-Caesar about his great-grandfather, who was a “Big Man” in Ada with many slaves, many of whom—according to family memory—made up his sponsored troop performing Ewe music and dance on great festivals and who apparently enjoyed not just the activity as such, but the rewards and status it gave them generally).31 So, there may have been slaves in Southern Ghana at this time who were downtrodden—but these two groups are examples of slaves who were evidently not. Another case study of a different shading is concerned with Awoye, a woman slave of the parents, or an uncle, of C.C. Reindorf.32 Reindorf was almost exactly Opoku’s contemporary in the Basel Mission’s ordained staff and is now also well known as the author of the first in-depth history written by an African about a region of Africa. Awoye seems to have become Reindorf ’s responsibility when she became too much of a handful for the older generation in his family. She passed through his hands like a comet, refusing to marry a Christian young man on the coast as the Reindorf family suggested and moved inland, in an attempt— it seems—to marry, or cohabit with a chief in Aburi, on whom she apparently had her eye. The paper trail ends with Reindorf selling her to recompense

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himself for the expenses she had caused him by initiating a case before a chief ’s court—and thereby setting himself among the nettles in his relations with the Basel Mission.33 It may be that the way she was breaking loose was inspired by the Committee’s wish in 1860 to emancipate the slaves connected with its congregations. But she had apparently been difficult to handle before this move. And we should be open, in any case, to the suggestion that a woman determined to seek out the sexual partner with whom she could and wished to have children, might be able to demand a degree of flexibility of choice—against compensation for the family that was “losing” her—which our common usage of the word “slave” does not imply. Haenger’s longest and richest case study concerns Rosine Opo, a resident of the Akuapem capital Akropong.34 Her story does link on to that of Awoye, in that she assaulted and deserted an elderly—and perhaps no longer virile— husband for a Christian young man who certainly was potent. But the protocols concerned with her case, and Haenger’s sensitive analysis, allow us to see a woman zigzagging for several years between the various groups who had claims over her, clearly with broader aims than those I have assumed with Awoye. Haenger writes about the “complex geometry of family organisation” in which she lived. “Caught up in this geometry, Rosine was, on the one hand, a female slave, the daughter of a man bound to the mighty Kurontihene [Town Chief of Akropong] and on the other [serially married to] two free men and the mother of a whole host of children.”35 She had been born a slave. Her first husband, in marrying her, had given her the status of a full (i.e., not slave-) wife. He was later the first senior head of family in Akropong to convert, was accepted into the Basel Mission congregation as the polygamist Abraham, and this wife was baptized Rosine. As Haenger writes, “By marriage she expanded her previous scope of action somewhat; she then expanded it further by manoeuvring between the authorities surrounding her.”36 In the background, on the one hand, stood the mission station, and on the other the traditional power structure of Akropong, which in the late 1860s seems to have felt it had been provoked enough, and was trying to reassert the historic social order against the intervention of the mission, pushed onward by people who had a claim on Rosine as slave. But in the foreground was Rosine and her strategies. In the end the king and elders in Akropong lost patience with her. The missionaries’ attempt to gain official protection for her was turned aside by the governor during a visit to Akropong. The traditional community sold her as a slave—and she was then rescued by an Akropong church elder who was given the task of secretly pursuing the party in

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which slave traders were taking her away, and secretly purchasing her to be free to live in the Christian community. At this point she disappears from the written record, and Haenger himself cannot resolve the question of what happened to her after this. Presumably she had become, as it were, a “plain Jane” member of the Basel Mission congregation, the various claims on her in the traditional community having been satisfied by the proceeds of that double purchase. Assessing the short story of Awoye and the much longer one of Rosine Opo, we are, of course, faced with the question: Do they correspond to courant normale in these traditional social contexts—a decade before the emancipation decree? Or were these women primarily exploiting the presence of a Basel Mission in their environment, with its new features and characteristics? A parallel pair of questions would be: Are these unusually detailed stories unusual simply because a Basel Mission, for a time at least, was following their cases and creating a paper trail? Or are they unusual not only because of the protocols we can read, but also because a new would-be emancipatory agency was breaking into traditional communities? Haenger writes, “The [present-day] reader of [these] report[s] should not overlook the fact that Rosine was by no means the helpless ‘victim’ of diverse social forces and interests driving the dramatic events around her. Rather she played a thoroughly active role in manoeuvring between the two alternative clientage systems; in other words she tried to use the full scope of action available to her.”37 But I would add that if, in the end, her case reached its climax in a struggle between the traditionally powerful and the mission, its early stages offer an impressive indication of her skill in making her point to different parties on the traditional side. In other words her maneuvers may have been much closer to courant normale than we would perceive, if we were to insist that hers is a case study only on the impact of a missionary society on social tensions in an African culture. Additionally very suggestive, in this connection, in the Basel Mission’s nineteenth-century documents—though largely unmentioned in the materials Haenger studied—are indications that people took the initiative in signaling a readiness to convert, if the mission would take over their debts, or indeed that working out what to do about debts seems to have been a frequent issue in the pastoral administration of the Basel Mission’s congregations.38 This suggests that patronage—a concept that is rarely used in analyses of Ghanaian social history—was a real force, as was its complement, the search for advantageous subordination. In relation to a potential slave owner who had his or her eye on someone else’s dependent, this would be a mechanism with which he or she

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could work to take over the person involved on financial terms mutually agreed with the existing “owner.” In relation to a slave who saw, in someone else, a much more attractive point of dependency, especially if he or she was trying to escape from a situation that was very distasteful, the concept of patronage points to initiatives that could be taken to push the idea of a change of patron, knowing that the existing owner would be involved in bargaining over the compensation to be paid. This simple statement may be, of course, overly simple (and the Basel missionaries, it has to be said, were usually willing to enter into this kind of bargaining only in exceptional cases). But the basic pattern of patronage can be applied to explain what might happen with many kinds of indebtedness and dependency that undoubtedly existed, if beneath the academic radar of the present day. The point of these last few paragraphs has been, not least, to overcome the crass asymmetry that exists between plentiful Western sources and very scarce indigenous ones, not least, firsthand sources from the interior area of the British Gold Coast in the second half of the nineteenth century, and to allow outsiders—a category that must include Ghanaians looking back into a society far removed from the present day—the opportunity to develop a model for enhanced insight into a distant world. The suggestion that the Basel Mission could enter inland society in the southeast Gold Coast without bringing new impulses is, of course, an exaggeration formulated for the sake of argument. But Ulrike Sill’s analyses do show that, as we have seen, indigenous concepts could turn out to be a framework for social relations which the missionaries had to respect and maneuver around, if they were to begin to achieve their social reform objectives. This brings us back to Theophilus Opoku. A report, which we have not brought into this chapter’s train of thought until now, poses, for us if not for him, the question of the boundary of what we regard as being relevant to the issue of “slavery” and offers us a direct stimulus from his pen to realize something of the complexity of the indigenous social and cultural context of slavery, crossed with issues of debt and credit. [paraphrase] In 1885 in Adukrom a man—the son of a traditional priest—who had been a pawn successively to three Christian families, had converted to Christianity himself.39

Is this a case that can be put under the more general rubric of “slavery”? Pawning involved a family who accepted a loan—and therefore became indebted—“giving”

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a family member to the creditor as surety for the debt. And a pawn remained with the creditor, with no element of wage payment, though living as part of the creditor’s family, until the debt was repaid. By some definitions this could be called slavery, but evidently, for Opoku, it was a normal family mechanism to raise money or respond to a demand for the repayment of an existing debt. And there is no indication at all that the Christian families who had accepted the pawn were under censure. We appear to have to understand that, for Opoku, this was a negotiated arrangement between families to do—with debt and credit (and it seems possible that a pawn did not necessarily have to be the same person for the whole period of the indebtedness).40 If this is the case, we can accept that Opoku’s attitude to people prepared to loan capital was positive. But equally it was not passive. His reports from Adukrom indicate that there were several members of the congregation active as moneylenders. And he records two conversations about this. A few weeks after my arrival, a heathen man meeting me asked me: “Sir, are you the man appointed to have an oversight of these Christians here?” “Yes” was my reply. “But I am sorry to tell you that you have come here to have an oversight of police-men instead of Christians!” “How is that, I asked?” “How! You will observe it yourself by and by, that they have the character of police-men than of Christians: for their extortion [and] oppression of the poor who received loans of them, in depriving them of their lands and property . . . etc have characterised them with the nature of police.”

[The policemen referred to were clearly members of the colonial police or people impersonating them.] This man, seeing me some weeks ago said to me: “Sir, there is now coming a change in the conduct of your Christians” “Is it?” I asked, “and how do you know it?” “Since you came here, I do no more see them doing crimes as they had done here-to-fore.” This man is no friend to the Christians: therefore . . . I was highly glad.41

The question this segment of Adukrom congregational history poses here is not so much the narrow one of whether a “pawn” was a kind of “slave,” however. The question is again how far relations of debt and credit—which shade over into relations of patronage and sought-for dependence—can be regarded as a flexible

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and qualitatively less astringent “neighbour,” as it were, to what is described as “slavery” in our sources and the relevant literature. We can, in fact, very well imagine, as with the discussion of “patronage” above, that someone with capital to lend would be more interested in lending money to a family, one of whose dependents he or she wished to have in their immediate vicinity as part of their own family community.42 And one can imagine a situation in which a dependent aware of his or her family’s financial situation and with an eye to wealthy people he or she knew, might take discreet steps to become a pawn. So, although the ice has been thin in places in these last paragraphs, it seems to me that the complementary meta-mechanisms of patronage and sought-for dependence were indeed strategies, which can be regarded as mental shape-changers for us, trying to make sense of reports on slavery, taking the edge off what we tend to feel, in our deepest emotions, slavery must have been like, and offering us instead at least a foggy view of complex relationships and the dynamics involved in changing them.

An African Emancipation? This, then, has been an attempt, inspired by a contemplation of Theophilus Opoku’s reports, to rebalance the history of change with respect to slavery and emancipation in the inland parts of the Gold Coast in the second half of the nineteenth century toward indigenous agency and initiative. It involves, in my opinion, as an essential step, recognizing that Miers and Kopytoff ’s famous “slavery-to-kinship continuum” can be applied to the Gold Coast Colony right through the nineteenth century, matched by a continuum between harsh bondage and the kind of patriarchal interest in, and care for, subordinates the experienced Basel missionaries asserted, in 1860, were characteristic of the extended families with “slaves” that they knew.43 And having said that, we can go on to argue that individuals could move and be moved along those continua. Further, nudged by the changes of the distant framework on the part of the colonial government, the volume of humaneness on those continua can be thought to have increased, calling up a potential, which was always there on the “kinship” side, but giving cause for it to be applied to a much-enhanced degree. Why would “masters/mistresses” and “slaves” have reacted in this way? What were the advantages for both sides in not breaking off their relations? For the slaves, evidently, the journey back was long and uncertain—many probably

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had no illusions about the dangers of being re-enslaved if they set off for home. Moreover, the relations they had developed there, where they were living, could well, on balance, have spoken for staying put, especially if they had had children who were there and still alive. And for the masters/mistresses, the families who had held these individuals as slaves? These were essentially subsistence cultures. They may have been involved in some trade and production linked to trading.44 But their fundamental survival depended on their ability to work with their detailed knowledge of the natural resources around them, continually under threat of demographic catastrophe, and—with the lack of beasts of burden due to forest diseases—acutely dependent on human labor. So, after 1875, with the change of the colonial handling of cases involving slaves, the leading circles of extended families would have realized that the adhesion of an important part of their human resources had to be newly negotiated or was in danger of being lost. And we must remember that while the question of labor was important, all human gifts were of value. These were cultures. The gifts included observation and memory plus the knowledge and preparation of the raw materials used for different tasks, including healing; verbal eloquence, of excellent musical or dancing performance; handwork skills of a high order; a good and reliable subordinate bargaining in a big market; strength and health to cope with long journeys as carriers, or heavy work in agriculture, strength and agility in fighting—all these were desirable to enhance the survival and operational strength of an extended family. And there were gifts for which one had to look to women—cooking and gardening perhaps, but especially that central gift of fertility. Any of these desirable capacities and abilities might be lost to a family by someone walking away to find somewhere they felt more at home—or being tempted away by a more desirable dependency. So, my suggestion is that Opoku’s lack of reporting on slavery and emancipation in Mamfe, Larteh, Kukurantumi, and Adukrom reflects a context in which the interior of the Gold Coast Colony was seething with the renegotiation of what had been slave statuses into what we may see as relations of patronage and wished-for dependency; relations, which more and more, became absorbed into the basic interrelationships of the extended family. Opoku’s context, I suggest, was a wave of African emancipations, made possible by the end of the Atlantic slave trade and the way even a weak colonial government could “hold the ring” and allow a considerable degree of independent local and regional evolution in the area under its protection. I also suggest that this situation allowed African communities to reassert, gradually, their old communitarian values.

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Emancipation in this sense was triggered off in Opoku’s immediate world in the final decades of the nineteenth century by the well-understood potential impact of the colonial emancipation edict of 1875. But for him it was something selfevident, not something acute requiring his major attention, but a background, only, to his task as pastor to promote his cult and its authority. Some important limitations on the validity of this thesis have to be stated. My line of thought has concentrated on families rather than king’s courts with their social paraphernalia, which in the case of the tensions in Kyebi may, or may not, turn out to be typical of all southern Ghanaian kingdoms.45 I am also evidently not arguing that there was nothing like slavery in this period over the whole territory of what is now Ghana. Right up to the end of the nineteenth century and the assertion of colonial control over the savanna regions, people were suffering the trauma of violent separation from their homes and the indignities of traditional slavery. Some of these freshly enslaved were evidently being traded south into the Gold Coast Colony, at least as late as 1900.46 And whatever the general change in the context of slavery, first-generation slaves on the territory of the Colony, especially those who proved unable to integrate, linguistically or socially, in their new environment, will have continued to suffer. But for slaves of the first generation who had managed to put down roots, and for slaves of the second generation generally, the logic of this chapter is clear. Quantitatively, the majority of slaves lived in family environments in which movement along the continuum from “slave” to “family” was characteristic of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. An African emancipation was being carried out in indigenous terms.

Envoi My personal concern with questions of slavery and emancipation in Ghanaian history dates back half a century to the time I was on the staff of the University of Ghana. My British family of origin was well aware of the political role played by Christian (in this case Baptist) activists in late-eighteenth and nineteenthcentury Britain in the campaign against slavery. So when I joined the staff in Legon, I was interested in researching the impact of those metropolitan energies at the grassroots in that West African country. My dissatisfaction with the quality of sources—both written and oral—used for studies of this topic in the 1960s, was one of the reasons that led to my becoming the Basel Mission

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archivist in 1972. I had spent half a sabbatical in Basel in 1970, building up a body of translated abstracts of nineteenth-century reports on the mission’s then northern frontier for the use of Ghanaian colleagues, and it became clear that there was high-quality material on slavery and emancipation to be found there.47 When I became archivist, however, I had to be more involved in enabling other peoples’ research than doing my own, though this did, however, eventually get to the point where I acted as co-supervisor for innovative theses on nineteenthcentury Ghanaian social history using Basel material, not least those by Peter Haenger and Ulrike Sill discussed here. When I was invited to give a paper at Dr. Katja Füllberg-Stolberg’s conference in Hanover in 2013, whose topic was “After Slavery: Comparing the Caribbean and Africa,” I had hoped that this would be, for me, an experience of closure, the formulation of my final thoughts on slavery, emancipation, and the churches in Ghanaian history. But instead I found that the broad parameters of the topic were just as much dominated by the problem of exceptionally tendentious source materials as they had been in earlier decades. On the one side there was the systematic silence of southern Ghanaian oral tradition on slavery, guided by the traditional prohibition on pointing to an individual’s lowly origins.48 On the other side there was the unwillingness, in colonial sources, to give the anti-slavery lobby in Westminster grounds for attempting radical interventions in social arrangements in what was becoming, step-bystep, the British colony of the Gold Coast.49 I was, indeed, forcibly reminded—as I prepared my paper for that conference— of the humiliating experience of trying to tap oral sources in the 1960s, through a translator, to research the relationship between slavery, emancipation, and the growth of Anglican congregations in Ghana in the early twentieth century. My naïve questions inevitably provoked a lapidary, uncommented, and negative answer among the church elders I was interviewing. People gave the impression that they found my question extraordinary, and wondered how I could possibly have come to think of it. And when at last I went somewhere where I had corroborative evidence of the importance of ex-slaves in the founding of a congregation—talking now to the elders of the Presbyterian congregation in Bompata—their first response was the same. And only thanks to the advocacy of a pastor—who was actually proud of his own father’s status as a slave traded south into Asante and handed over by colonial officials to those iconic missionaries, the Ramseyers, in Kumase—did the elders reveal to me the names of the people responsible for the founding of the congregation. They identified

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them for me, more or less half-and-half, as ex-slaves on the one side, and adehyeε (Adehye are people qualified by ancestry to be elected to a hereditary stool and chiefship) on the other.50 This experience was the last straw, sending me off to look for evidence of a quite different quality in Basel, whose materials, I hoped, would turn out to match my particular abilities with the language and script used by most of the missionaries. Reading the Basel archive introduced me to Theophilus Opoku, who seemed to me to be one of the people who largely stood aside from the problem of tendentiousness in his reporting on slavery. And so, my train of thought with him has ended with the suggestion that slavery and emancipation were a subordinate issue for him precisely because slave statuses were being resolved by the people involved, both slaves and slaveholders demonstrating agency in this process. I started to formulate this idea in fear and trembling, since the universal condemnation of slavery has come to extend to the expectation, among historians and anthropologists in Southern Ghana too, that the grassroots reality of slavery in the Gold Coast in the second half of the nineteenth century had been harsh, and “real” emancipation only came with social developments connected with modernization, and with the major strengthening of colonial administration after 1900.51 Was I suffering from historical romanticism, from the Merrie Africa syndrome? But I then realized that the conclusion I was formulating could be read as a blow against afro-pessimism. True, terrible things do happen in Africa when social and cultural breakdown reaches crisis point—as also happens in Europe, of course. But learning to identify, and then communicate, the effective values lying at the heart of an African culture, and which have stood in constructive dialectic against the varying entropies that threaten it, is an important task for the historian or anthropologist. Jan Vansina’s ambition to declare the “special lesson to be learned from equatorial Africa in the world’s panoply of political institutions” is perhaps an octave or so higher than what I am proposing here.52 But the value of traditional integrative leadership in the framework of the extended family can be pointed to as the creative element, which meant that, when “slavery” was, after 1875, no longer supported by legal sanction in the British Gold Coast, slaveholders and slaves adjusted their relationships even without someone like Theophilus Opoku being heavily involved as a point of rescue or arbitrator. As the trauma of the transatlantic slave trade receded on the Gold Coast, a traditional value was being reestablished. It was, indeed, in this hypothesis, an African emancipation.

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If this can be taken as a valid, Afro-optimistic hypothesis for processes for which historical evidence is weak, then I can count this as a kind of closure for my long concern with this field—and can do so even if my original question about the impact of Christian activist involvement in the anti-slavery movement on the ground in one African country is still not easily answered. But that leads to perhaps the shortest and most valid summary of the anti-slavery movement and its Christian activist supporters. They were brilliant at British politics both sides of 1800. Without their battering-ram function, increasingly effective even in a deeply corrupt political system, slavery would have continued much longer in British territories. But they were not so good at understanding what ex-slaves needed and wanted when they became emancipated, and this applies both to ex-slaves alienated from traditional African structures, and ex-slaves still rooted in them.53 Metropolitan energies were obviously part of the complex of forces involved in the changes discussed here. But the logic of this chapter is that missionary work, too, was more of a nudge toward reform, looked at generally, than a decisive intervention against inner-African slavery. There may have been situations in which missions and churches were directly active in cases involving slavery. But basically the hard work of pressing for change, and formulating the changes, which in each individual case could satisfy the needs of former slaves and former slaveholders, was done in the family, remobilizing the basic value of the integrative leadership of chiefs, family heads, and elders.

Notes 1 My colleague Michelle Gilbert and I will be publishing a critical edition of these reports—the project has been accepted as a future volume in the UNESCO series Fontes africanae historiae. One existing publication (Gilbert, Michelle, and Paul Jenkins, 2008. “The King, his Soul and the Pastor: Three views of a Conflict in Akropong 1906–7.” Journal of Religion in Africa 359–415) is intended partly as a taster, giving an impression of the quality of Opoku’s writing. Other indigenous Basel Mission employees who wrote long and interesting reports in the nineteenth century were C. C. Reindorf and Peter Hall. 2 Basel Mission Archive (from here: BMA) D-10.3.14. 3 Unlike the Bremen Mission, which, in the 1860s, on the other bank of the Volta, was systematically buying slave children free, so they could be brought up as the future generation of Christians, the Basel Mission seems to have had a policy of

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Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora only buying slaves free in exceptional situations, when the missionaries knew the whole situation, and the person was of strategic importance for them—see the reference to Rosina Opo on pp. 136–137. For the Bremen policy and its results see Ustorf, Werner, 1986. “Norddeutsche Mission und Wirklichkeitsbewältigung: Bremen, Afrika und der Sclavenfreikauf.” In Werner Ustorf (ed.), Mission in Kontext. Beiträge zur Sozialgeschichte der Norddeutschen Missionsgesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, 121–236. Bremen, Germany; Jenkins, Paul, 1994. “The Earliest Generation of Missionary Photographers in West Africa: The Portrayal of Indigenous People and Culture.” Visual Anthropology 115–45 and Jenkins, Paul, 2012. “Extended review of Kokou Azamede, Transkulturationen? Ewe-Christen zwischen Deutschand und Westafrika 1884–1939.” In Interkulturelle Theologie/ Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft, 343–347. Opoku’s report in fn. 2 only covers about half his return journey. A German version translated from a Twi original was published some years later covering the final part of the journey, but we regard this German text as being too distant from Opoku to be published in the current effort to make his English reports generally available. On slavery, however, it does record that in Tewobabi in the presentday Volta Region of Ghana he met people returning home northwards after their release from slavery. And in Tepa and Ntomda he had had difficulty recruiting carriers for the journey to Bator . . . people suspected him of being like a recent visitor from the Akuapem town of Amanokrom, who had pretended to recruit carriers and then taken them off into slavery. Opoku’s difficulties were overcome when an Ewe man appeared who could vouch that he knew Opoku from his time in Mamfe (BMA D-12.2, pp. 89 and 91). I should add that for this chapter I have not sourced possible writings by Opoku in Twi (e.g., in the periodical Christian Messenger or in the Twi MS collection in BMA) Gilbert and Jenkins, “The King, his Soul and the Pastor.” BMA D-1.67.084. There is a lot of literature on tensions between the Basel Mission and the kingdom of Akyem Abuakwa (capital: Kyebi): McSheffrey, Gerald, 1983. “Slavery, Indentured Servitude, Legitimate Trade and the Impact of Abolition in the Gold Coast 1874-1901: a Reappraisal,” Journal of African History 349–68; Haenger, Peter, 2000. “Reindorf and the Basel Mission in the 1860s: A Young Man Stands up to Mission Pressure.” In Paul Jenkins (ed.), The Recovery of the West African Past. Basel, Switzerland: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 132–40; Abun-Nasr, Sonia, 2003. Afrikaner Und Missionar Die Lebensgeschichte Von David Asante. Basel, Switzerland: P Schlettwein, 198–205; and writing by Addo-Fening, Robert, 1985.“Church and State: A Historical Review of Interaction between the Presbyterian Church and Traditional Authority,” Institute of African Studies Research Review 129–52; Addo-Fening, R., 1997, Akyem Abuakwa 1700–1943:

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12 13 14 15 16 17

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From Ofori Panin to Sir Ofori Atta, Trondheim, Norway (1980) and Simensen, Jarle, 2002. “Christian Church and ‘Native State.’ The Presbyterian Mission in Akyem Abuakwa, Ghana.” In Holger B. Hansen and Michael Twaddle (eds.), Christian-Missionaries and the State in the Third World, Oxford, UK: James Currey (1975). One of the important open questions about Ghanaian social and cultural history in the period covered by this paper is how typical or exceptional developments in Kyebi were. Note Opoku’s report on slavery in the Abuakwa town of Kukurantumi on pp. 132–33. BMA: D-1.55.083. BMA : D-1.20b.Akropong.21. BMA D-1.53.097. Wilhelmina Kade became a pastor’s wife, so Opoku is likely to have remained in frequent contact with her. She was one of the people in Kyebi when the troubles there broke out at the end of the 1880s, see fn. 7. Miers Suzanne, and Igor Kopytoff, 1977. Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, 22. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. See fn. 7. BMA D-1.30.226, Koranteng’s annual report for 1878. BMA D-1.35.072 D-1.41.061—a report from Adukrom for 1884, from the part of the report looking back to his time in Kukurantumi. D-1.37.074 . See also Jenkins. “A Conflict of Faiths at Kukurantumi”—Introduction by P. J. (pp. 245–48) and slightly shortened transcript of Theophilus Opoku’s Annual Report for 1883 (pp. 248–55), in Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana vol XIII (ii) (1972). Perbi, Akosua A., A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana from the 15th to the 19th Century, 177. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004, revised 2007; Dumett, Raymond E., and Marion Johnson, 1988. “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery in the Gold Coast Colony, Ashanti, and the Northern Territories.” In Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts (eds.), The End of Slavery in Africa, 89–91. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Jenkins, Paul, 2013. “Catalysts of concealed change: Channappa Uttangi and Theophilus Opoku.” In Sebastian Jobs and Gesa Mackenthun (eds.), Agents of Transculturation, 206–10. It was a Legon lecturer in English Literature, Dr. Victoria Osei-Bonsu, who after a presentation of the material in this paper in Basel suggested that Salaga was outside the area in which this inhibition would have been operative for Opoku, but his congregations in southern Ghana would have been within it. Holsey, Bayo, 2008. Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana. Chicago: University of Chicago Press derives much of its

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Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora dynamism from the author’s awareness that the inhibition about talking about slave ancestries still lames discourse about slavery in southern Ghana. It is only as I write a revised version of this paper that it occurs to me that, if we take the remark about “good masters” in Opoku’s Salaga report at its face value, this means that stories about “good masters” in the forest areas to which slaves were being sold were widespread enough in the savanna to be part of the slaves’ view of their possible future as they stood in Salaga market. And an additional thought about these encounters: Opoku, it seems, was wearing European clothes (including a hat he refused to doff before a priestess). Had news of the anti-slavery movement reached Salaga and the communities from which people had been captured? Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana from the 15th to the 19th Century, 197–205. Dr. Perbi’s “Final Judgement” does stress the importance of the absorption of slaves into the families of their owners after 1875 without, perhaps, helping her readers enough to come to a view of the balance between those who remained with the families where they had been living, and those who left that place and its attendant subordination. “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes. Miller, Jon, 2003. Missionary Zeal and Institutional Control: Organized Contradictions in the Basel Mission on the Gold Coast, 1828–1917, 258. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. Sill, Ulrike, 2010. Encounters in Quest of Christian Womanhood, Brill, Leiden, especially looking at (a) the way money was initially paid by missionaries to girls’ parents so that they would be allowed to live with missionaries’ families in Akropong and attend what was effectively the girls’ boarding school there. The missionaries understood these payments as compensation to the families of origin for the loss of the girls’ labor. (b) Significant, too, is the way in these early decades payment could be organized from the mission to the mother of a 6-finger child to breast-feed her baby. It had been rescued by the mission community from being drowned at birth, and thus formally, in indigenous eyes belonged to the mission and was no longer part of its family of origin. The mission had to pay a wet nurse if the baby was to survive. Haenger, Peter, 2000. Slaves and Slave Holders on the Gold Coast: Towards an Understanding of Social Bondage in West Africa, Basel, 215 [English version of his German thesis published in 1997]. Unfortunately links between Basel and the University of Ghana in the 1990s were weak, and so Haenger wrote his dissertation without detailed knowledge of Dr Perbi’s then coming monograph on slavery (see fn. 18 above) , and vice versa. I should add that my references here are really

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28 29

30 31 32

33

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only an abstract of an abstract compared with the often astonishing and very stimulating density of the part of Haenger’s text to which I refer. Haenger, Slaves and Slave Holders pp. 19–24, 56. As we have seen, many missionaries opposed this proposal when it was first mooted, but the Basel Mission’s own Slavery Emancipation Commission on the Gold Coast nevertheless started work to refuse to serve on this body if “Basel” nominated you was, the directorate in Basel wrote, tantamount to resigning from the organization. Haenger himself writes about the “extreme complexity and variety of . . . dependency relations” (Haenger, Slaves and Slave Holders p. 34). The Svanikiers were an Afro-Danish trading family, so here as elsewhere Haenger is contributing to our understanding of mulatto families in nineteenth-century Accra. His discussion of the position of Thomas Svanikier corresponds very closely with Parker’s depiction of Afro-Danish extended families as social units with occasional imports of Danish chromosomes but organized on traditional lines by the key leading women/wives (Parker, John, 2000. Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann). Haenger, Slaves and Slave Holders p. 88 for the reference to a barrel of brandy, pp. 82–91 for the whole convoluted story. Haenger, Slaves and Slave Holders pp. 182–91, interview with Koranteng AtaCaesar, 1993. The slight ambiguity which crops up in the documents—had she been the slave of Reindorf ’s parents or his uncle?—can be resolved when one remembers that often, in southern Ghanaian usages, siblings of a biological mother or father were and are also referred to with the indigenous word for “mother” or ”father.” Awoye’s case is the subject of two texts by Haenger, both published in 2000: in Slaves and Slave Holders, pp. 75–82; and “Reindorf and the Basel Mission in the 1860s – a young man stands up to mission pressure” in (ed) Jenkins, 2000. The Recovery of the West African Past, African Pastors and African History…., pp. 19–29. Haenger, Slaves and Holders pp. 32–59—an extraordinarily detailed and sensitive interpretation and analysis of the sources on Rosine Opo, interspersed with a number of other references to cases and events relevant to her story. Haenger, Slaves and Slave Holders p. 51. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 51. Example references in BMA D-12.2 pp. 72 and 96–7 (the latter refers to an attempt by using indebtedness to separate a key new Christian in Abetifi, John Atta, from the Basel Mission congregation). The translated abstracts in BMA D-12.1 and D-12.2 are in my circle of knowledge the key indication so far of the importance of debt and credit in personal relations in the interior areas of the Gold Coast in

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Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora the nineteenth century. See also the case of Gottlieb Martey in Haenger, Slaves and Slave Holders p. 54. BMA D-1.43.070. As I write it is not clear to me what the Basel Mission regulations about pawning were, nor how they were implemented, though it seems unlikely that the Mission Committee in Basel would have approved of it. Putschert (2002) has made the important suggestion that Opoku, in a later report, deliberately wrote in a dispassionate way about matters which controverted mission regulations, in order to acquaint the Committee with realities in his world, about which they needed to know, and this could apply here in his lapidary sentence on pawning (Purtschert, Patricia, 2002. “Looking for Traces of Hybridity: Two Basel Mission Reports and a Queen Mother: Philosophical Remarks on the Interpretation of a Political Deed,” Journal of Literary Studies [Cape Town] pp. 284–94). BMA D-1.41.061. (The first two-thirds of this report for 1884 are about the end of his time in Kukurantumi, material about his early weeks in Adukrom comes at the end.) The euphemism here is intended. Gilbert and Jenkins, “The King, his Soul and the Pastor,” is partly concerned with a situation which involved a young woman pawn who had been married by the creditor, since he had been warned that if he slept with her without marrying, the debt would be regarded as having been repaid. Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, 22. For the mid-century Basel missionaries’ approach to domestic “slavery” see the reference to Haenger in fn. 26 above. Haenger regards the “slavery-to-kinship continuum” as ahistorical, but underestimates, I think, the tenacity with which kinship groups tried to hold together and ensure their continuation (Haenger, Slaves and Slave Holders p. 9). And the tendency to segmentation (which Haenger is referring to in this comment) will presumably have placed a high value at the center of a family on maintaining the cohesion of marginal members of a kinship group. For confirmation of this approach see also Dumett, Raymond E, 2013. Imperialism, Economic Development and Social Change in West Africa. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, c. 3 esp. p. 76. For Kyebi, see fn. 7 and Dumett, Imperialism, Economic Development and Social Change in West Africa, 179–80. The Basel Mission in Basel was approached in 1977 by a family in Abokobi who were caring for a centenarian ex-slave. According to their oral history she had been born near Sandema, had been captured and brought down the Volta, but released, the family thought, in 1875, when the slaver involved was arrested by a British official acting on the basis of the Emancipation edict. The British official had handed her over to a Basel missionary to be looked after. In 1977 her family were

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48 49 50

51 52 53

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asking for assistance with the costs of caring for her. At the time of her enslavement she was, they claimed, already adult. All the external indications were, however, that she had ended up in Basel Mission hands in the late 1890s—but that would still have meant she was very old when the approach to Basel was made. The translated abstracts in English of material in BMA archive series D-l which I made in that part-sabbatical is available under the BMA reference D-12.2. I was using a format first developed by Hans Debrunner. His translated abstracts are filed under the BMA reference D-12.1. It is interesting that Ray Dumett (Imperialism, Economic Development and Social Change in West Africa, 154–5) in a text written before Haenger, Slaves and Slave Holders was published, attests that the Basel reports about slavery show an unusual pragmatism and a close knowledge of actual situations. Holsey, Bayo, 2008. Routes of remembrance: Refashioning the slave trade in Ghana, Chicago, 280. Dumett, Imperialism, Economic Development and Social Change in West Africa, c.12, especially 302–4. When I first heard these names I assumed that they were being offered me neutrally as information that I was asking for from a less public layer of church oral history. Since hearing from Kofi Baku about the problems which can arise in a traditional setting (electability to a chief ’s stool, for example) because of knowledge of a present-day person’s slave ancestry, I am wondering again what the primary function of this list of names was. Were the people really remembered as being important for local church history? Or were they remembered so that their descendants could be blocked from traditional office? See Paul Jenkins. “A Comment on M.P. Frempong’s ‘History of the Presbyterian Church at Bompata’,” Ghana Notes and Queries June 1972 pp. 23–27. Frempong's History was translated from Twi into English for me, the author agreed it could be published, and it appeared in the same number of Ghana Notes and Queries pp. 20–23. I owe a great deal here to discussion of the fieldwork experiences of Michelle Gilbert and John Middleton. Vansina, Jan, 1990. Paths in the Rainforests—Towards a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa, here p. 253. This super-brief assessment of the British anti-slavery movement is based on reading Hochschild, Adam, 2005. Bury the Chains, the British Struggle to Abolish Slavery, London and Boston, 488; and Schama, Simon, Rough Crossings. Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution, London 2005, 447.

7

An African Abolitionist on the Gold Coast: The Case of Francis P. Fearon Steffen Runkel

Introduction Research on the topic of slavery and abolition on the Gold Coast in the last decades has tended to chronologically focus on the formal abolition of slavery in 1874 and its aftermath.1 Areas of research are the impact of the emancipation ordinances and the extent to which slaves and masters were affected by these formal acts as well as how they changed and redefined their mutual relationships.2 Additionally, there is an elaborate debate not only about the use of colonial courts by slaves but also by masters, both of whom took advantage of the new legal opportunities after 1874.3 All this has widely enhanced our knowledge about slavery and abolition on the Gold Coast and has inter alia shown the striking incompetence and unwillingness of the colonial authorities to attack slavery on a large scale. However, there are only sporadic attempts to systematically focus on local protagonists’ participation in framing and shaping the colonial emancipation policy on the Gold Coast as well as in Whitehall on a social and political scale.4 Kwabena Opare Akurang-Parry is the first scholar who mentions the existence of local abolitionists on the Gold Coast. Likewise, John Parker acknowledges that “by the mid-1860s . . . the legal status of slavery in Accra was becoming increasingly contentious.”5 But generally Akurang-Parry rightfully complains about “the Eurocentric grip that has prevented scholars from raising, even if at the theoretical level, the question of African ideologies of anti-slavery and the possibility of African ‘collaboration’ with the European agents of abolition.”6 Thus, abolition on the Gold Coast is still widely regarded as a project introduced and enforced by European interest groups, such as colonial agencies and

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missionary societies, while local protagonists are seen as more or less passive bystanders of these developments.7 Actually, there were not only sporadic signs of protest.8 Slavery, its moral legitimacy, and its abolition regularly fueled highly controversial debates among members of the local educated community.9 Moreover, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, there was a vital involvement of local protagonists from the Gold Coast’s educated community in the process of emancipation and in framing the respective British policy on the Gold Coast not only in 1874 or the 1860s, but beginning at least in 1841, and not ending at the turn of the century.10 From the beginning, local discourses showed an increased awareness of the necessity to distinguish between internal debates about the moral implications of slavery on the one hand—which existed—and the attempts of British colonial authorities to abuse the emancipation question for political reasons on the other—which were strongly rejected. This conflict was rooted in the question of British citizenship for the members of the educated community. While this transcultural group of people—in most cases direct descendants of British parentage—in the first decades of nineteenth century understood themselves as British subjects, this claim was increasingly rejected by colonial authorities.11 The focal point of this political dispute on the Gold Coast was indeed the emancipation question. As early as 1833, several slaveholders from the educated community responded to the British “Bill for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies” by investigating “whether the Act would affect their interests.”12 Although their inquiries were answered to the negative, the compensation of the British slaveholders in the West Indies at the same time became the archetype of how the British government dealt with slave ownership among its subjects.

The Emancipation Question and the Educated Community Between 1841 and 1874, colonial officials attempted to abolish slavery for “educated natives” only in the then Gold Coast Protectorate. While the reasons for these attempts were mainly economic, the legal foundation to justify these proceedings was never given, as neither the term British subject nor the extent of British territory had ever been properly defined.13 But additionally, at no time compensation was offered to the local slaveholders in exchange for the requested

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surrender of their slaves. So, when local protests against this degrading policy occurred, their focus was the offer to accept any regulation of slavery, when at the same time the educated elite’s claim for equal rights as British subjects would also be accepted—which meant the payment of compensation.14 In literature, however, such protests are often reduced to selfish acts of slaveholders, who only wanted “to manipulate their ambivalent social status to preserve the advantage.”15 Looking at the local initiatives as a whole, such a viewpoint misses out how the emancipation question became inextricably linked with the political question of equal rights for “Africans” from 1841 onward.16 Furthermore, the local debates traceable in newspapers, such as the African Times and the West African Herald or in the context of missionary societies are full of attempts to rationalize the emancipation question. On the one hand, belittling adjectives were used to defend so-called slavery as mild. The purchase of slaves from the northern kingdom of Asante was justified as philanthropy and an act of Christian charity. Thereby local protagonists managed to establish a topos of mild “Gold Coast slavery” whose supposed characteristics are, even today, widely accepted.17 On the other hand, there were lots of considerations among members of the educated community discussing the social problems of implementing emancipation and searching for solutions. This applied to the question of compensation for the owners, but also to the provision for ex-slaves, as well as to active measures to prevent them from falling back into slavery.18 All this demonstrates a much greater awareness for the local situation than colonial and missionary emancipation decrees ever showed. Indeed, the British colonial authorities (as well as missionaries) were always very willing to accept the topos of Gold Coast slavery and to foster it, but they never accepted the educated community’s demand for equal rights, which was closely linked with it, too. It is in this context that James Hutton Brew, the local lawyer, editor, and political activist from Cape Coast discussed the emancipation question in his Gold Coast Times in 1874, leading Akurang-Parry to his assumption that “the Gold Coast African intelligentsia . . . were avid abolitionists.”19 However, a closer look at Brew’s arguments reveals that they were not revolutionary in an abolitionist sense. Brew’s pragmatic acceptance of the inevitability of emancipation was by no means unconditional and his demands for social measures for the slaves very much repeated the well-known arguments. His argumentation clearly centered around the old claim for equal political rights. In relation to the emancipation

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question that meant the payment of compensation for slave owners in exchange for the abandonment of their slaves. As a local subscriber expressed it: I have slaves and I do not yet see what is to prevent me from selling any of them. Let the government pay us for our slaves, and let employment be found for them, and I am convinced very few of us will grumble. I believe in compensation as the only remedy for this evil, and so does every other sensible person.20

Brew and others tried hard in 1874 to regain control of the emancipation debates which were occurring at that time in London. In this respect, the emancipation ordinances proclaimed by Governor Strahan in December 1874 came as a severe shock because they clearly showed that prospective demands for equality in the newly founded Gold Coast Crown Colony and Protectorate were definitively rejected. Strahan’s approach of emancipation without compensation indeed took away the foundation for any compromise. Instead, it proved colonial arrogance, verified by the circumstance that Strahan by no means adopted a coherent emancipation policy. Realizing this fact abruptly changed the local debates. While before—under the assumption of the topos of mild Gold Coast slavery— there was a willingness to discuss the moral and social implications of slavery, now the discourse became restricted to the legitimacy of this mischief. Thereby the subject of the emancipation question, the fate of the slaves, slipped from the general focus.21 The somewhat abstruse consequence was that of all things the de jure abolition stopped the local emancipation debates at once. The following years were affected by the various responses to emancipation by slaves and owners as well as by the incompetence and unwillingness of colonial authorities to implement the ordinances. On a political scale there were increasing conflicts between the administration and a group of politically involved members of the educated community.22 These were local lawyers, editors, and merchants like Brew, Edmund Bannerman, Robert J. Hansen, and F. C. Grant, who were later joined by the second generation of politically interested Gold Coasters like Timothy Laing, Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford, and John Mensah Sarbah, many of whom studied law at London’s Inns of Court. The most significant initiative was the so-called deputation scheme of 1885– 1887, an attempt to gain the support of the whole local population—the educated community as well as indigenous rulers and the mass of people—for sending a deputation to the Colonial Office to express their grievances. The matter was heavily supported by articles in Brew’s second newspaper, the Western Echo, and public meetings in support of the scheme were held in every major city of the colony.23 In that context, the emancipation question resurfaced again, as well. Parker remarks

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that there are only “rare African perspective[s] on the aftermath of abolition.”24 But indeed the deputation scheme shows that the emancipation question was still a major issue in Gold Coast politics. On the contrary, Rowand, arguing that “in the best political tradition, [Brew tried] to have something for everyone,”25 misses the fact that for political leaders such as Brew and Bannerman the emancipation question was still inextricably linked to their political agenda of protest against colonial degradation of “Africans.” Therefore, they mentioned it again and again in newspaper articles, pamphlets, and then in the deputation scheme.26 Nevertheless in 1887 the scheme was finally rejected by the Colonial Office under the pretext that it aimed at reintroducing slavery—a cynical misinterpretation of the actual demands, affected by the reports of Governor Griffith.27 Thus, the political movement of Brew, Bannerman, and others, which according to David Kimble was “ahead of their time,”28 came to an end—another blow to the demands for equal rights and self-representation of the local population on the Gold Coast. Not even the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) or newspapers in London, in previous years supportive of their political claims, answered the scheme. The injustice of such treatment became even more prevalent when in the following year District Commissioner (DC) Firminger left the Gold Coast for a recruitment mission to Salaga.29 From the local African perspective, this was no more than another form of slave-dealing to complement the Hausa Police Force. Accordingly a reader of the Western Echo bristled at least as much about this mission as about the fact that the same was strictly prohibited to the local population: “Slavery is forbidden to us under heavy penalties but white officers can indulge in it with impunity.”30 All that created the impression that for the British abolition was nothing more than an excuse for political reprisal. And such was the situation on the Gold Coast when in 1890 the events of the Fearon– MacMunn Affair suddenly changed the political situation dramatically.

The Fearon–MacMunn Affair On August 20, 1890 the London-based APS sent a letter to the colonial secretary, stating that there are now in the [Gold Coast] Colony . . . a great number of boys and girls, estimated at 5,000 or more, who are bought and retained as slaves, and that the practice of procuring these children from Salaga and other districts in the interior for sale at Accra and other places on the coast still continues and

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has of late considerably increased, owing to the apathy and connivance of the representatives of Her Majesty’s Government.31

This letter caused a scandal and made it widely known that since 1874 the British authorities actually did not advance pressure against slavery, but instead accepted to a great extent what they defended as a mild form of “so-called slavery.” Additionally, the letter revealed that British colonial officials on the Gold Coast were generally unable to detect forms of slavery that were camouflaged under labels like traditional marriage practices, adoption, or apprenticeship. So, the Colonial Office started a vigorous investigation into the practices of slavery and the slave trade on the Gold Coast, Parliament inquired into the affair and newspapers worldwide covered it.32 Additionally, it imposed the strictest enforcement of the emancipation ordinances since 1874.33 On the Gold Coast, Governor Griffith was furious about the allegations, especially so since in previous years, the Firminger Report and subsequent dispatches of British officials had already pointed at the continuing existence of slave trade and slavery within the protectorate.34 But the renewed accusations were even more urgent as they proved the direct involvement of the governor into the concealment and toleration of slavery—proved by quoted court files and eyewitnesses. In this respect Griffith was under immense pressure to clarify the accusations, and he soon identified the Accra DC Edward MacMunn—a qualified barrister—as the alleged informant of the APS. In the course of the affair, he dismissed MacMunn on the basis of allegations of supposedly being unfit for his post, allegations of disaffection, and because of rumors of alcohol abuse—but not for his alleged work as informant of the APS.35 Indeed, MacMunn during his term as DC of Accra was famous for his proactive approach against slave dealers and owners and he heard the comparatively enormous number of thirty-six cases of slave-dealing and slaveholding, which was a clear break from the existing laissez-faire policy regarding slavery.36 From the viewpoint of the governor and also the Colonial Office, it was obvious that MacMunn had given this information to the APS and hence, that he had initiated the whole scandal. To this day, this explanation is commonly used in literature when referring to the affair, resulting in an Eurocentric interpretation of the occasion.37

The Fearon–MacMunn Affair Reviewed But there is another course of events which makes it clear that at the center of this affair was by no means an idealistic British officer, who instigated the

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scandal, but rather an African merchant and former schoolteacher living at Accra. His newly discovered correspondence, together with other sources thus far undisclosed, enables us to review the affair from a local perspective. It also allows for new interpretations about the way the emancipation question was used as a political tool of local protagonists and about the role local abolitionists took in this matter. Hence, as the letters show, it is actually June 24 rather than of August 20, 1890 that should be labeled as the beginning of the affair. Likewise, it was not started from London, but in the middle of Accra, at a place called the “French Factory,” the home of Francis Pompeianus Fearon. In June 1890 Fearon wrote a sixty-three-page treatise, which comprised a long and angry accusation of the “pragmatic” administration of emancipation laws by Governor Griffith. In dramatic words, he describes how the emancipation ordinances of 1874 for all practical purpose, [had] gone into complete neglect. . . . And although it explicitly declares slave-dealing to be unlawful, and absolutely prohibits it, yet the trade in slaves, consisting chiefly of little boys and girls, has systematically been carried on ever since . . . and has now increased to a very great extent, with the connivance of the Government, to a very great degree.38

He adds that there are several other cases as I have mentioned above in which these poor and helpless children were brought into this town in a state of prostration, and many of them died a few days or weeks after their arrival; but they being slaves no notice was ever taken of it. It is, indeed a great pity to see some of them on their arrival here with their heads, faces, bellies and legs considerably swollen and scarcely able to move themselves, while others were mere skeletons.39

Fearon accused Griffith of being directly responsible for this course of action and he explicitly states that “although . . . slave dealing had not ceased during the time of previous Governors . . . it had never been carried on in so public and shameless a manner as it has been since Governor Griffith has been placed at the head of this Government.”40 As the only exception to this rule, he mentions the legal work of DC MacMunn, whose energetic conduct brought to justice an unusual number of slave dealers. Lastly, he documents some court cases in which influential members of the educated community, for example, Fanny Hagan, Ellen Quartey, and George Owoo, were prosecuted for slave-dealing, but their punishment was mild and even their respective slave children were restored to them by order of the governor himself. So, he concludes his letter

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with the question “whether it is not a sufficient proof that the Governor himself is guilty of slave-dealing?”41 Explicitly he asks to submit his information to Parliament, “for its favourable consideration, in order that due inquiries may be made into all the matters to which they relate.”42 That is exactly what happened when the APS finally submitted a very shortened and comprehensive version of his information in the known letter to the Colonial Office. However, Fearon’s participation did not end at that point, he remained an APS informant for at least eighteen months afterward. He supplied the APS with detailed information about the local proceedings in this case and enabled them to disclose Griffith’s attempts to defend his policy as mere sophistry.43 It is obvious that this course of events reveals the affair in a new light, which centers and stresses African initiatives to emancipation. Actually, the common stereotypes of emancipation as a colonial or European idea become inverted, as in this case an African abolitionist accused a British governor of having acted as a slave dealer. In Fearon’s letters we find proof that the initiator of one of the fiercest attempts to fight slavery on the Gold Coast was a local protagonist, who wanted to put an end to colonial lethargy as well as to his countrymen’s continued slave-dealing. In doing so he revealed the excuses of all the defenders of the “so-called Gold Coast slavery” in all its cynicism.

African Perspectives It was Fearon who initiated the affair, but he was by no means the only local protagonist involved in it and responding to the allegations. On September 1, 1890 the London Times published the APS’s letter to the Colonial Office and Fearon’s accusations became public. It only lasted a steamer’s journey from England to the Gold Coast until information reached the Gold Coast public, too. First the Gold Coast Chronicle, a local newspaper founded in Accra in 1890 by members of the local educated community and edited at that time by Timothy Laing, reprinted the letter and published several editorials on the accusations. A first comment in the issue of October 14, 1890 under the headline “A Grave Error” stated: Five thousand Slaves!!! Where are they, and whoever heard of them? . . . The whole matter appears a fabrication from beginning to end, and as there is no colony in the empire where slavery is more vigorously put down than it is on the Gold Coast, we are sorry to find that the members of the Aborigines Protection Society should for once be made the victims of such gross deception; . . . and

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this is the opinion of every native in the colony. That the local officials have been upholding slavery is a statement which is just as amusing as it is false.44

A month later, in another editorial on the matter, the author wrote: As we stated in a previous issue, there is no such thing as slavery here. Whenever a person has been found guilty of the offence, he has been, invariably, very severely dealt with. . . . There is nothing which would be more calculated to arouse the indignation of an official than a case of slave-dealing.45

At the same time the local lawyer Edmund Bannerman also commented on the affair. On October 7, 1890 he wrote to Acting Queen’s Advocate Turton concerning the Times’ article: “This letter contains, throughout, gross inaccuracies, exaggerations, and many absolute inventions.”46 A few days later he stated in another letter to Turton that “slavery as such has completely died out of the Colony owing to the efforts made to that . . . by the different administrators.”47 For several reasons this reaction is remarkable and in an irony of fate, Fearon received much of his information about it—of all people—from his friend Bannerman, who became one of the most vehement Griffith defenders in this affair. As Fearon reported, Mr Bannerman and some of the other slave-dealers here and some of the Government officials as well, who are the Governor’s Creatures, are cursing and swearing most vehemently at Mr Mac Munn [sic!] who they believe is the person who reported the matter to the Aborigines Protection Society . . . . I am glad of this mistake on their part and I am determined to let them remain under their delusion on this head as long as possible.48

The readiness of local protagonists such as Bannerman, Laing, and others to defend Governor Griffith, whose double standards they all too often experienced themselves—only recently during the deputation scheme—is highly surprising. But now Griffith directly begged for their help in responding to the allegations. This was a sudden recognition of their claim for equal treatment and so they agreed to support him.49 Clearly, much of the campaign in the Chronicle was intended to convince not a local readership, but overseas readers. Indeed, Fearon directly responded to this campaign and remarked that the articles which appear in them [the Gold Coast Chronicle] on the subject of slavery and slave-dealing in this Colony . . . will, no doubt, be amusing to you and the other members of the society; as they amount to nothing else but attempt to deceive without the possibility of success; and which none but men

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of such a stamp as the Editor and the Proprietors of that paper could venture to write or publish.

With the publisher of the Chronicle in mind he added: Each of them owns at present from three to five slaves, if not more, and two of them have been convicted of smuggling; as they are slave-dealers themselves no dependence therefore can be placed in any of the contradictory statements which are made in the articles which appear in the issues of their newspaper on the said question (of the prevalence of slavery in this Colony).50

It is not provable whether these specific allegations were true or not, although another important motivation becomes apparent. Bannerman, Laing, and others were by no means passive bystanders in the affair, they all were directly involved. From a local perspective, Fanny Hagan, Ellen Quartey, and George Owoo were well-known members of the educated community; they were kin; and in some cases, Bannerman acting as their lawyer, even negotiated the mild terms of their punishment with the governor. So, their willingness to cooperate with the colonial administration was due to a mix of reasons. Then again, Fearon’s engagement is remarkable: He not only risked his personal fortune on the Gold Coast, but he also breached local consensus not to publicly discuss the emancipation question on a moral basis. Apparently his opinion on slavery was not known on the Gold Coast at all. Fearon mentions a remarkable meeting between Bannerman, MacMunn, and himself on July 22, 1890, during which he put to MacMunn the opinion that slavery is “a very barbarous practice and one of the worst evils that could befall any human being.” His friend Bannerman’s reaction was to be “greatly displeased at these observations.”51

Contextualizing Francis P. Fearon Searching for the reasons why Fearon’s approach differed substantially from the practice of other local protagonists leads to his social and family background. Unfortunately, there is a lack of information about Fearon and his family.52 He shares this fate with contemporaries like Robert Hansen, son of the merchant and one-time commandant of Accra John William Hansen (1835–1840), whose widespread political activism is also largely unknown.53 Part of the problem may be a wholesale neglect of local protagonist’s initiatives in framing colonial policy

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on the Gold Coast, especially in relation to the emancipation question. But there is also a methodological problem resulting from the lack of sources. Fearon was not born on the Gold Coast, but in Sierra Leone, the date of his birth being unknown. He was married to Gillian Matilda Fearon, née Coker, from the same place.54 He can first be traced in the birth record of his eldest son Francis Henry, who was born on October 4, 1865 in Freetown.55 Besides this son, he fathered at least three more children: David George Lionel,56 Christiana A., and Miss. M. Fearon.57 He presumably had two siblings, as well: Mary Anne Seymor, née Fearon, who gave birth to a girl in Freetown in 1864,58 and F. O. Fearon, who reared a family at Lagos and whose death at Freetown was reported in 1909.59 In said birth register, Fearon’s occupation is given as “Schoolmaster” at Murray Town. That links him closely to the Freetown Grammar School of the Church Missionary Society (CMS); the school his son Francis Henry later attended.60 Despite these strong roots in Sierra Leone, there is a long-lasting ignorance of the family in contemporary Sierra Leonian newspapers, indicating the relatively low social status of the family in its homeland. Actually, the first time the name Fearon appears in a newspaper is in 1893, on the occasion of the appointment of Francis Henry as member of the Gold Coast Board of Education.61 Elder records reporting about Fearon family members are to be found in the colonial files, where a David Fearon, assistant teacher of the Liberated African Department in the settlement of Kent, is mentioned in 1845.62 Furthermore, a D. Fearon emerges in a CMS document of 1821, issued by Adam Jones, listing the names of liberated slave children, “named after benefactors.”63 This is strong evidence that the Fearon family originates from a liberated slave, a fate which would have been quite common at that time.64 Additionally, regarding chronology, it is a feasible assumption that D[avid] Fearon was the father of Francis Pompeianus. In the late 1860s the family moved from Freetown to Accra and Francis P. became a wealthy merchant, trading inter alia spirits and powder. He stayed there until he died on October 12, 1897, rumor has it by poison.65 Although the motives for this change of his location are unknown, we do know that it led to a change in status; as he soon established himself as a successful merchant and as a well-reputed member of society. In 1873 he appeared as a subscriber of a petition against the increase of duties for spirits in Accra, together with local rulers, traders, and native inhabitants of the town.66 A year later he caused a controversy about the local jurisdiction of the Ga mantse Tackie Tawia, to whom he delivered an encumbered employee for punishment.67 In 1879 he was among the founders of the Accra Anglican Church, together with Bannerman and others.68 In 1887

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he was even appointed as a member of a commission for the development of the colony’s resources, together which such eminent representatives of the educated community as George Frank Cleland, Thomas Francis Bruce, Francis Chapman Grant, and John Sarbah.69 At the same time he belonged to the Ga mantse’s entourage in a meeting at the Government House in Christiansborg. The minutes of that meeting refer to him as the colonial administrator’s most vigorous respondent.70 Another matter made Fearon known not only at a local, but at a transatlantic, level. This was his outstanding role as jury foreman in the lawsuit against the suspected plotters of the murder of Assistant Inspector Dalrymple in Tavieve in 1888. Instead of reaching the politically desired outcome, the jury under his leadership refused to convict the defendants.71 Moreover, Fearon informed the APS about a massacre of colonial troops in the aftermath, resulting in the death of some hundred Tavieves. Already at that time his courage led to a parliamentary investigation.72 Fearon proved to be a valuable correspondent of the APS, whose secretaries were in constant need of reliable information about colonial misgovernment to live up the expectations of APS members.73

The Aftermath of the Affair—Implications and Interpretations So, when Fearon wrote his treatise in 1890, he was not only an influential figure in Gold Coast politics, he was also well aware of the political exploitation of the emancipation question and of its political relevance for local protagonists since the 1860s. He obviously shared their demands for equal rights and political participation. He even shared their view to equalize colonialism with slavery, as he remarked of Griffith that his “bad policy would lead one to believe that he thinks the negroes are only fit to be made slaves of.”74 But he was by no means prepared to trivialize and to exploit the suffering of slaves to achieve his political goals—as it had become common practice on the Gold Coast, for various reasons. Evelyn Rowand points to the fact that “the Liberated Africans of Sierra Leone and their descendants . . . [knew] the horrors of slavery at first hand,” while “the literate class there [on the Gold Coast, S.R.] was not descended from slaves.”75 Fearon’s biography indicates that the same was true for himself. Additionally, he was not a member of a local abusua (Akan matrilineal group) and therefore he was free from family obligations on the Gold Coast. That enabled him to express his criticism without any reservation.

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Actually, when later referring to his motives for petitioning the APS, he explained his actions with reference to his close family ties and his family’s fate: I think it necessary to mention this in order that it may not be supposed by any one for a single moment that I am prompted by motive of self interest to take the part I am now acting in the matter; but being a father of children and a brother as well in a family, and knowing how dear and tender the ties between parents and children are, as well as, between brothers and sisters and other relatives, and the painfulness of separation between them, I am naturally moved from compassion for these unfortunate and helpless children in particular, and for the men and women also to address this petition to the society on their behalf.76

Nevertheless, besides his personal experience, it is also instructive to place his initiative within the background of overall Sierra Leonian perspectives on the emancipation question on the Gold Coast. Interestingly, already in 1874 and afterwards, there was an elaborate debate in Freetown newspapers which differed sharply from the newspaper coverage on the Gold Coast and criticized it heavily: “These reasons are generally more remarkable for the lameness of their argument . . . than for their intrinsic value or any fundamental principle they contain in support of the belief in the doctrine of domestic slavery.”77 Even before, in the 1860s, a local surgeon from Sierra Leone, James Africanus Horton, himself of slave parentage, attacked the local slave owners on the Gold Coast. From personal experience there, he stated in his famous book, West African Countries, that “so long as the educated population support domestic slavery, so long will Cape Coast . . . occupy an inferior position as regards progressive civilization.”78 Slavery, he added “destroys the doctrine of man’s equality, [and] demoralizes their social condition.”79 One could argue, as the countercampaign of the Chronicle and of Bannerman wanted to make the public believe, that Fearon’s initiative was a repetition of an old argument and only rooted in a misconception of “Gold Coast slavery.” But Fearon clearly demonstrated that their picture of mild domestic slavery was a utopia for most of the slaves and especially for the newly acquired women and children.80 Nevertheless, their heavy criticism of colonialism was a connecting element between the two: Horton and Fearon were vehement fighters for equal rights and against racist discrimination, but they also pointed to the striking antagonism between political demands for equality and participation, and the refusal of the very same rights for slaves. It was only in the run of the Fearon–MacMunn Affair that this example led to a general readjustment of African political strategies. The affair had enabled

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local protagonists to act at eye level even with Governor Griffith, although as political experienced people, they clearly understood that this was only a temporary cooperation.81 For them, too, the whole situation was obviously abstruse because they had to defend Griffith’s emancipation policy in public— the same man they had blamed for treating them as slaves in a political sense and who only recently used the emancipation question to destroy their deputation scheme. So, they were not prepared to give up their political demands or their fundamental criticism of his racist policy for a one-time success.82 In contrast, they realized during the affair that the real local influence on colonial policy was from Fearon. Of course, he acted anonymously. But even Griffith had suspected him at one time to be the APS’s informant—before becoming convinced of MacMunn’s guilt again. As the APS reprinted some of Fearon’s letters verbatim, at least Bannerman must have identified him at some point as the informant.83 The awareness of Fearon’s huge and repeated influence in London, which considerably contrasted their own failure to do the same thing since 1874, began to change their viewpoint. When before, the emancipation question was fundamentally linked to their political agenda, they now began to follow Fearon’s lead. They realized that for them, as Africans on the political stage, there was no space for a relativist position on slavery or for any struggle over different conceptions of slavery—as reasonable as that seemed to be at the local level. Instead, there was a need to unite as Africans and to fight with the help of influential philanthropic societies in Britain for equal rights and against colonial injustice and racism. This awareness was encouraged by the decision of the APS in 1891 to send their secretary, Fox Bourne, for a visit to West Africa “with a view of seeing for himself the actual condition of the Negro and . . . to inquire into the domestic slavery question.”84 His letter asking for the support of the educated community—which was forwarded on the Gold Coast by Fearon—was answered with euphoria.85 As the Chronicle put it: “The responsibility for our future as a race has been transferred, to all appearances, into our own hands. What more do we expect surely from the philanthropists of Great Britain than what is already being achieved by Mr. Fox-Bourne and his Society?”86 Actually, at the same time, Fox Bourne’s plans were also announced in Lagos and Sierra Leone. The reactions there made it clear that the visit was interpreted not as a local, but as an African concern and that working together was the only way to remain influential at the colonial level.87

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Additionally, there was a considerable group of Gold Coasters in London, attending APS meetings and therefore witnessing the political debates directly. They all were closely related to the opinion leaders on the Gold Coast. The group included Fearon’s son Francis Henry, Bannerman’s son Charles James, his nephew Thomas Hutton Mills, as well as Brew, who even acted as a speaker at APS meetings—and now did not mention slavery at all.88 They witnessed how serious the APS took Fearon’s allegations, but they also saw that the public attention on the Gold Coast could be used to enforce political claims. Again, the basic requirement for this purpose was unity as Africans and—their London perspective revealed that even more—not allowing themselves to be divided by disagreements about the emancipation question.

Conclusion To summarize, the example of Fearon is extraordinary in many respects, as it clearly values local initiatives and illustrates the need to focus on them to truly understand political processes on the Gold Coast in the nineteenth century. It also highlights the inextricable link that local protagonists saw between the emancipation question and the fight for equality and political participation, but also the limits of that connection when it clashed with colonial and racist imaginations of Africa. Fearon demonstrated a new and promising awareness that unity as Africans was essential for political success in a colonial environment. He showed that Africans then could influence colonial policy on a supraregional scale. In that way, he heralded a new chapter of interaction, local awareness, and protest against colonial injustice. Nevertheless, his lead didn’t result in a change in local attitudes toward slavery. Actually, he is one of only a handful of local abolitionists on the Gold Coast who can be identified by name. So, “Gold Coast slavery” was still defended as mild and harmless—although not at a political level. When local political leaders such as John Mensah Sarbah, Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford, and Thomas Hutton Mills adopted Fearon’s strategies after 1892, they used the emancipation question as a tactical tool to achieve political ends. Thereby the fate of slaves was diminished to emphasize their own “enslavement” by the degrading colonial system. But Fearon’s claim to fight not only for political rights for Africans but also for equal rights for every man and woman remained unrealized. Therefore, broader studies of the instrumentalization of the emancipation question by

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political movements on the Gold Coast in the years following Fearon—such as the Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society—are advisable. They not only show how Fearon set a precedent, but they also reveal another reason why the fight against slavery on the Gold Coast lasted even longer than the fight for equal rights for Africans.

Notes 1 In 1874 the Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate was created and slavery and the slave trade were legally abolished by two Ordinances. For the decision-making process see Dumett, Raymond E., 1981. “Pressure Groups, Bureaucracy, and the Decision-making Process: The Case of Slavery Abolition and Colonial Expansion in the Gold Coast, 1874.” JICH 9: 2. 2 Cf. McSheffrey, Gerald M., 1983. “Slavery, Indentured Servitude, Legitimate Trade and the Impact of Abolition in the Gold Coast, 1874-1901: A Reappraisal.” JAH 24: 3; Dumett, Raymond E., and Marion Johnson, 1988. “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery in the Gold Coast Colony, Ashanti, and the Northern Territories.” In Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts (eds.), The End of Slavery in Africa. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press; Haenger, Peter, 2000. Slaves and Slave Holders on the Gold Coast: Towards an Understanding of Social Bondage in West Africa. Basel: Schlettwein; Getz, Trevor R., 2004. Slavery and Reform in West Africa. Toward Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Senegal and the Gold Coast. Athens and Oxford: Ohio University Press; Getz, Trevor 2000. “The Case for Africans: The Role of Slaves and Masters in Emancipation on the Gold Coast, 1874-1900.” S&A 21: 1; Akurang-Parry, Kwabena Opare, 1998. “Slavery and Abolition in the Gold Coast: Colonial Modes of Emancipation and African Initiatives.” GS 1. 3 Cf. Getz, Trevor R., 1999. “A ‘Somewhat Firm Policy’: The Role of the Gold Coast Judiciary in Implementing Slave Emancipation, 1874-1900.” GS 2; Getz, Trevor, 2011. “British Magistrates and Unfree Children in Early Colonial Gold Coast, 1874-1899.” In Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller (eds.), Child Slaves in the Modern World. Athens: Ohio University Press; Akurang-Parry, Kwabena Opare, 1998. “The Administration of the Abolition Laws, African Responses, and Post-Proclamation Slavery in the Gold Coast, 1874-1940.” S&A 19: 2; Penningroth, Dylan C., 2007. “The Claims of Slaves and Ex-Slaves to Family and Property: A Transatlantic Comparison.” American Historical Review 112: 4. 4 For punctual exemptions see Akurang-Parry, Kwabena Opare, 2000. “‘A Smattering of Education’ and Petitions as Sources: A Study of African Slaveholders’ Responses to Abolition in the Gold Coast Colony, 1874-1875.” HA 27; Adu-Boahen,

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5 6

7

8 9

10 11

12 13 14

15

16

Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora Kwabena, 2009. “A Worthwhile Possession. A Reading of Women’s Valuation of Slaveholding in the 1875 Gold Coast Ladies’ Anti-abolition Petition.” Itinerario 33: 3. See also Greene, Sandra E., 2015. “Minority Voices: Abolitionism in West Africa.” S&A 36: 4. Parker, John, 1995. “Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra, 1860s-1920s,” 123. PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Akurang-Parry, Kwabena Opare, 2004. “‘We Shall Rejoice to See the Day When Slavery Shall Cease to Exist’: The Gold Coast Times, the African Intelligentsia, and Abolition in the Gold Coast.” HA 31: 41f. The term local protagonists refers to politically active people, who were by their West African origins assigned to the group of colonized subjects. For a broader discussion of the term cf. Runkel, Steffen, 2016. “Afrikanische Initiativen zur Abolition an der Goldküste, 1841-1897: Die Einstellung lokaler Akteure zu Sklaverei und Sklavenhandel.” PhD diss., Leibniz Universität Hannover. Cf. Parliamentary Papers (PP) 1875 (C. 1159). See Runkel, Steffen, 2013. “The Perspectives of African Elites on Slavery and Abolition on the Gold Coast (1860-1900)—Newspapers as Sources.” In Jana Gohrisch and Ellen Grünkemeier (eds.), Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines (ASNEL Papers 18). Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. For a conceptual definition of the educated community, elsewhere referred to as educated elite or intelligentsia, cf. Runkel, “Afrikanische Initiativen;” David Kimble, 1963 [NP 1971]. A Political History of Ghana. The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism 1850-1928. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Nadel, S. F., 1956. “The Concept of Social Elites.” International Social Science Bulletin 8; Akurang-Parry, Kwabena Opare, 2004. “Aspects of Elite Women’s Activism in the Gold Coast, 1874-1890.” IJAHS 37: 3. Runkel, “Afrikanische Initiativen.” See for this development in general Zachernuk, Philip S., 2000. Colonial Subjects. An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. PP 1842 (551), Appendix No. 3, No. 21, Maclean to Madden, May 15, 1841, answer to question 12. For the bill see PP 1833 (593). Cf. Haenger, Slaves, 115. See PP 1842 (551), Appendix No. 4, No. 18, April 13, 1841, Enclosure No. 3, Petition, March 29, 1841. The National Archives, Kew (TNA), CO 96/25, No. 29 Colonial, May 13, 1852, Enclosure 2, undersigned Native Traders and others of this Town [Cape Coast] to Hill, December 15, 1851. PP 1875 (C. 1159). Kaplow, Susan B., 1978. “Primitive Accumulation and Traditional Social Relations on the Nineteenth Century Gold Coast.” CJAS 12: 1, 30. Cf. affirmative Haenger, Slaves, 67f. For an elaborate discussion of this argument see Runkel, “Afrikanische Initiativen.”

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17 For an example from a local missionary context see Basel Mission Archives, Basel (BMA), D-1,13b, Akropong No. 6a, Reindorf to Josenhans, March 5, 1862. For the “Invention” of this topos cf. Runkel, “Afrikanische Initiativen,” chapter 4. Cf. Ranger, Terence, 1983 [NP 1996]. “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 18 See, for example, African Times, April 1867, 122f. There is indeed a methodological problem due to the fact that most local discussants were (before 1874) slave owners. 19 Akurang-Parry, “Gold Coast Times,” 38. For an elaborate discussion of his assumption see Runkel, “Perspectives,” 253–56. 20 Gold Coast Times, November 30, 1874, 54, reader’s letter, Accra, November 7, 1874. 21 See for an early evidence the satirical poem “A Plea From the Gold Coast,” Gold Coast Times, February 23, 1875, 67. 22 Particularly the tenure of Governor Griffith (vice-governor 1880–1886; governor 1886–1895) was effected by these conflicts. Cf. the local newspaper coverage and Griffith's respective correspondence, TNA, CO 96-series. 23 For the deputation scheme see Kimble, Political History, 412–18 and Rowand, Evelyn, 1972. “Press and Opinion in British West Africa, 1855-1900. The Development of a Sense of Identity Among Educated British West Africans of the later Nineteenth Century,” 592–96. PhD diss., University of Birmingham. 24 Parker, “Ga State,” 149, note 126. Some more perspectives are mentioned in Akurang-Parry, “Slavery,” 30, note 111. 25 Rowand, “Press,” 592. Cf. Kimble, Political History, 413 and Parker, “Ga State,” 213. Governor Griffith used the same argument to disavow the scheme. TNA, CO 96/179, No. 24, Griffith to Stanhope, January 20, 1887. 26 Besides several articles in Gold Coast Times, Western Echo and Gold Coast Chronicle, in particular an extensive—so far unpublished—pamphlet by Robert J. Hansen, intended for circulation among British MP, gives proof of that. See Runkel, “Afrikanische Initiativen,” chapter 4. 27 Cf. TNA, CO 96/180, No. 121, Griffith to Holland, April 7, 1887, Enclosure. 28 Kimble, Political History, 413. 29 His mission was to recruit volunteers for the Gold Coast Hausa Police Force at Salaga. However, Salaga was a notorious slave-dealing place where many slaves for the Gold Coast were purchased. For the role of Salaga see Johnson, Marion, 1986. “The Slaves of Salaga.” JAH 27: 2 and Akurang-Parry, Kwabena Opare, 2002. “Rethinking the ‘Slaves of Salaga’: Post-Proclamation Slavery in the Gold Coast (Colonial Southern Ghana), 1874-1899.” Left History 8: 1. 30 Western Echo, December 16–31, 1887, Supplement, letter of A Fanti. 31 PP 1890-91 (C. 6354), No. 1, Fox Bourne to Knutsford, August 20, 1890. For more information about the APS as well as other British philanthropic societies which were critical on colonial rule see Dumett, “Pressure Groups,” 204f.

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32 Cf. Hansard, HC Deb. December 1, 1890, vol. 349, cc 234–5 and February 12, 1891, vol. 350, cc 487. For newspaper coverage cf. Times, September 1, 1890, 4; Transactions of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, 1890–1896, Aborigines’ Friend, New Series, Vol. IV, No. III, September 1890, 114–17; African Times, October 1890, 149; Gold Coast Chronicle, October 14, 1890, 3; Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), October 2, 1890, 4. 33 Akurang-Parry, “Administration,” 150 calls this episode one of only three “periods of vigorous enforcement [of the abolition laws, S.R.]” on the Gold Coast. For the intensification of the laws after the scandal cf. Getz, “Policy,” 103. 34 For Griffith’s reaction see PP 1890–91 (C. 6354). For Firminger’s report see TNA, CO 96/207, Firminger to CO, April 30, 1889. It is an irony that Firminger, who was remembered on the Gold Coast as a slave dealer, became famous in Europe for his attack on slavery. 35 TNA, CO 96/211, Confidential, Griffith to Knutsford, September 12, 1890. 36 See Getz, “Policy,” 109. Cf. also PP 1890–91 (C. 6354), No. 1, APS to CO, August 20, 1890. 37 Cf. Getz, Slavery, 176; Akurang-Parry, “Rethinking,” 38; Grace, John, 1975. Domestic Slavery in West Africa. With Particular Reference to the Sierra Leone Protectorate, 1896-1927, 38. London: Frederick Muller; Haenger, Slaves, 148f. 38 Rhodes House Library, Oxford (RH), MSS Brit. Emp. s. 22, G. 17, vol. 2, No. 3, Fearon to Fox Bourne, June 24, 1890, 2. 39 RH, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 22, G. 17, vol. 2, No. 3, Fearon to Fox Bourne, June 24, 1890, 7. 40 RH, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 22, G. 17, vol. 2, No. 3, Fearon to Fox Bourne, June 24, 1890, 9. 41 RH, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 22, G. 17, vol. 2, No. 3, Fearon to Fox Bourne, June 24, 1890, 15. 42 RH, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 22, G. 17, vol. 2, No. 3, Fearon to Fox Bourne, June 24, 1890, 1. 43 For the whole correspondence between APS and Colonial Office see PP 1890–91 (C. 6354) and TNA, CO 96/220 and 228. 44 Gold Coast Chronicle, October 14, 1890, 3. 45 Gold Coast Chronicle, November 15, 1890, 2. 46 TNA, CO 96/215, Confidential, January 26, 1891, Enclosure Bannerman to Turton, October 7, 1890. 47 Bannerman to Turton, October 28, 1890, cited in Public Records and Archives Administration Department, Accra (PRAAD), ADM 15/7, Confidential, Turton to Colonial Secretary, December 29, 1890. 48 RH, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 22, G. 17, vol. 2, No. 14, Fearon to Fox Bourne, October 10, 1890, 8f. 49 RH, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 22, G. 17, vol. 2, No. 14, Fearon to Fox Bourne, October 10, 1890, 22. 50 RH, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 22, G. 17, vol. 3, No. 8, Fearon to Fox Bourne, January 31, 1891, 28f.

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51 RH, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 22, G. 17, vol. 2, No. 14, Fearon to Fox Bourne, October 10, 1890, 5. 52 Jones-Quartey, K. A. B., 1958. “Sierra Leone’s Role in the Development of Ghana, 1820-1930.” Sierra Leone Studies (New Series) 10 is not referring to him. There is also no reference to the Fearon family in Christopher Fyfe, 1962. A History of Sierra Leone. London et al.: Oxford University Press; Parker, “Ga State,” 129 mentions Fearon’s name incidentally. Likewise Kimble, Political History, 423 and 428 refers to his son Francis Henry. 53 For Hansen cf. Runkel, “Afrikanische Initiativen,” passim. However, AkurangParry, “Slavery,” 30f. mentions him without being aware of his political influence. Doortmont, Michel R., 2005 The Pen-Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities by Charles Francis Hutchison. A Collective Biography of Elite Society in the Gold Coast Colony, 445. Leiden and Boston: Brill, refers to him as “Unidentified.” 54 For connections between Gillian Matilda and tufuhene William Zacheus Coker of Cape Coast cf. Gold Coast Express, October 21, 1897, 2. Her biographical data is also dubious. 55 Sierra Leone Public Archive (SLPA), EAP443/1/3/10: Births; District Freetown [December 7, 1864 to February 1, 1866], page 73, entry No. 365 [http://eap.bl.uk/ database/overview_item.a4d?catId=189226;r=11538]. Francis Henry attended the Freetown Grammar School before studying law at Cambridge. He was called to the Bar at London’s Middle Temple. Married to Lilie Ethiopia Fearon, née Cole, he died at Accra May 22, 1906 by an apologetic strike. Cf. Sandy Papers, St. John’s College, Cambridge. African Times, July 1891, 99. Sierra Leone Weekly News, June 2, 1906, 8. 56 Born October 9, 1867 in Freetown, he died by an accident in Accra February 24, 1895. Sierra Leone Weekly News, March 30, 1895, 8. 57 Sierra Leone Weekly News, March 14, 1903, 8. Christiana, who married J. P. Bimshire Davies of Freetown in February 1903, died soon afterwards in November of the same year. Cf. Gold Coast Leader, November 14, 1903, 2. 58 SLPA, EAP443/1/3/9: Births; Vol 5; District Freetown [October 9, 1863 to December 4, 1864], page 106, entry No. 472. [http://eap.bl.uk/database/overview_ item.a4d?catId=189225;r=14771]. 59 Lagos Standard, September 22, 1909, 6. For connections cf. Lagos Weekly Record, April 14, 1894, 3. 60 Unfortunately, the names of local teachers are seldom mentioned in the CMS documents. Cf. Proceedings of the CMS, 1865–1866, 48 and Tuboku-Metzger, A. E., 1935. Historical Sketch of the Sierra Leone Grammar School 1845-1935. Freetown: Sierra Leone Grammar School. However, the Gold Coast Times of September 24, 1881, 2f. mentions Fearon as member of an examination board of

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61 62 63

64

65 66 67

68 69 70

71 72

73

Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora the CMS Accra High School. It also features a Clarissa Fearon, probably another daughter or granddaughter of him. Sierra Leone Weekly News, September 23, 1893, 3. PP 1845 (520), Appendix No. 5, Civil Establishment Liberated African Villages, 602. Jones, Adam, 1990. “New Light on the Liberated Africans and Their Origins: A List of Children Named after Benefactors, 1821-4.” In Adam Jones, Peter K. Mitchell, and Margaret Peil (eds.), Sierra Leone Studies at Birmingham 1988. Proceedings of the Fifth Birmingham Sierra Leone Studies Symposium 15th-17th July 1988, Fircroft College. Birmingham: University of Birmingham. D. Fearon appeared in 1821 as a ten year old boy, living in the liberated slave village Gloucester, attending a CMS school. His origins are mentioned as “Corscoo” respectively “Caracoo.” Cf. already Sumner, D. L., 1963. Education in Sierra Leone. London and Freetown: Government of Sierra Leone, Appendix I, giving the name as Devey Fearon. For the benefactor Reverend Devey Fearon cf. Hole, Charles, 1896. The Early History of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East to the end of A.D. 1814, 627. London: Church Missionary Society. The Sierra Leone census of Population and liberated Africans of 1831 and 1832– 1834 at TNA, CO 267/111 and 267/127 could give certainty. I thank Suzanne Schwarz for this information! For similar biographies see Fyfe, History. For problems in reconstructing them see Schwarz, Suzanne, 2012. “Reconstructing the Life Histories of Liberated Africans: Sierra Leone in the Early Nineteenth Century.” HA 39. Gold Coast Chronicle, October 16, 1897, 4. PP 1874 (C. 890), Sub-Enclosure in No. 85, May 8, 1873. As the employee was locked at King Tackie's prison under disgraceful conditions, Fearon was charged by the colonial authorities as “a native of Sierra Leone, and therefore a British subject” 10l. PP 1875 (C. 1140), No. 6, Enclosure No. 2, Marshall to Johnston, April 9, 1874. Cf. Pobee, John S., 2009. The Anglican Story in Ghana. From Mission beginnings to Province of Ghana, 133. Accra: Amanza. Gold Coast Chronicle, November 27, 1890, 2. PRAAD, ADM 11/1/1770, King Tackie asking for Permission to celebrate Yam custom, August 23, 1887. Other members of the group were Thomas F. and Alexander Bruce, Chief John Quartey and Chief N. F. Owoo. Cf. TNA, CO 96/201, No. 123, Griffith to Knutsford, May 8, 1889 with enclosures. Cf. RH, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 18, C. 151/25, Fearon to Fox Bourne, June 28, 1889. For the parliamentary debate cf. Hansard, HC Deb. May 3, 1889, vol. 335, cc 1095–143. Cf. also PP 1888 (C. 5615). Indeed, it was a time-honored practice of local protagonists from the Gold Coast to appeal the APS, the Anti-Slavery Society, or other philanthropic societies in

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74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88

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London for help. Likewise, the vast majority of submissions to these societies, at least regarding the Gold Coast, were forwarded by locals. Cf. Runkel, “Afrikanische Initiativen.” It is unknown whether Fearon personally met the APS's secretary Fox Bourne. Nevertheless his son Francis Henry met Fox Bourne at London during his studies and afterwards stayed in contact with him. Cf. RH, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 18, C. 151/19, Francis Henry Fearon to Fox Bourne, March 16, 1895. RH, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 18, C. 151/28, Fearon to Fox Bourne, June 4, 1891, 1. Rowand, “Press,” 67. RH, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 22, G. 17, vol. 2, No. 3, Fearon to Fox Bourne, June 24, 1890, 12. West African Reporter, December 12, 1877, 4. Cf. ibid., October 24, 1876, 2f.; Independent, February 11, 1875, 2; ibid., May 27, 1875, 3. Horton, James Africanus, 1868 [NP 1969]. West African Countries and Peoples. With an Introduction by George Shepperson, 109. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Horton, West African Countries, 107. See beside his previous letters RH, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 18, C. 151/28, Fearon to Fox Bourne, June 4, 1891. See already Gold Coast Chronicle, October 14, 1890, 2. Cf. for example RH, Brit. Emp. s. 18, C. 158/52, Hansen to Fox Bourne, May 1892. TNA, CO 96/223, Confidential, Griffith to Knutsford, April 2, 1892. At one time Bannerman remarked that he knew the informant. See ibid., No. 69, April 1, 1892, Enclosure Bannerman to Turton, March 19, 1892. African Times, October 1891, 154. Gold Coast Chronicle, December 21, 1891, 3. Cf. Kimble, Political History, 330f. Gold Coast Chronicle, December 28, 1891, 2. See Sierra Leone Weekly News, October 24, 1891, 4 and ibid., December 5, 1891, 4. Lagos Weekly Record, October 31, 1891, 2. See Transactions of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, 1890–1896, Aborigines’ Friend, New Series, Vol. IV, No. VII, June 1892, 302f. Brew migrated to London in 1888 and lived there until his death in 1915.

Part Three

Memory, Heritage, and the Legacy of Slavery

8

Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Shared History or Shared Heritage? Wilhelmina J. Donkoh

Without the African connection, we [Diaspora Africans] are disjointed people . . . begging for entry into somebody’s home.1

Introduction This chapter focuses on the transatlantic slave trade or the forced transportation of Africans to European colonies in the New World from the fifteenth century. It investigates the possibilities of how a human experience that evokes so much passion could be re-enacted to promote development while at the same time providing healing opportunities for the descendants of those who were tragically uprooted from their families and homes and were emotionally and spiritually scarred. It also investigates how this shared heritage should be identified and managed in a way that will be beneficial to all. The chapter further examines how slavery and the transatlantic slave trade could be presented as heritage, who qualifies as stakeholders in this shared history, and what should be the responsibilities of stakeholders in relation to this shared heritage of history.

History and Heritage: Toward a Definition The term history defies the simple definition of studying the past. If one understands the word history from its Greek derivative, historia, which means “inquiry,” then history is “knowledge” acquired by investigation or inquiry; it is “the knowledge of objects determined by space and time” or “knowledge provided by memory” in contrast to knowledge attained from science-based

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reasoning.2 History could further be defined as a record of past events.3 By implication history could be defined as an interpretation of the past expressed through the medium of prevailing current or dominant ideas and within the context of the time of writing or documentation of that past.4 It usually incorporates both narrative and analytical presentation of past events related to human beings, arranged sequentially. To allow for ease of organization of ideas and classification of generalizations, historians tend to arrange their work in various ways that include presentation of information about events and developments in chronological blocks of time, focusing on cultural and geographical locations as well as on thematic categorizations. In terms of usage, these categorizations that focus on cultural, geographical location, and thematic approach are not mutually exclusive. It is in this all-encompassing sense that the term history is being applied in the present context. A historical record is derived from past events that are remembered and preserved in a form that could be authenticated. Thus a critical evaluation of historical information is essential to avoid the problem of systematic bias. E. H. Carr distinguished thus between prehistoric and historic times: “History begins with the handing down of tradition; and tradition means the carrying of the habits and lessons of the past into the future. Records of the past begin to be kept for the benefit of future generations”5 [Emphasis is mine]. Carr draws attention to the close link between history and whatever is transmitted down the generation for their benefit (heritage). Having thus established the link between history and heritage, it is important to proceed to examine what constitutes the latter. The term heritage, as shown by writers like Yahaya Ahmad, is quite complex and difficult to define.6 It has evolved over time as practitioners, specialists, and such international actors as the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Council on Monuments and Sties (ICOMOS) have played a key role in these exercises. Since 1945 the definition has broadened from a focus on physical heritage to encompass such intangible attributes as sites, landscapes, values, and aesthetics (Yahaya 2006, 295).7 Currently UNESCO defines heritage as The practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills—as well as the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated therewith—that communities, groups and in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. 8

This definition incorporates oral traditions and expressions, language, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, traditional craftsmanship,

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ancient sacred groves, burial sites, artifacts, beliefs, music, and group memory. In discussing heritage therefore one cannot overlook such concepts as inheritance, legacy, and tradition. Heritage could also refer to groups of people or communities and everything else that they transmit to succeeding generations, which could include the place they live in, the environment, books, documents, local knowledge, unique culture, and artifacts.9 This definition therefore clearly incorporates both the tangible and intangible assets of a people (Davidson 1996, 2). Heritage usually entails how people lived and acted in the past, and this body of knowledge could be developed for educational purposes, studied and/ or packaged for enjoyment as a leisure activity, or to teach important lessons to present and future generations. Carr acknowledges the link between history and heritage.10 However, some scholars like Trevor R. Getz attempt to distance history from heritage by defining the latter as an “[uncritical] celebration of identity that draws on past suffering or glories for its legitimacy.”11 Implicitly, whichever way one looks at it, there is a very strong link between heritage and history. The reason is that whatever is being considered as heritage must first be created or have occurred in the past to qualify for such categorization. Arguably too, since history could be positive or negative, pleasant or bitter, or may encompass all, it stands to reason that these characteristics could all permeate heritage. It could therefore be strongly inferred that heritage is that aspect of history that is commemorated and/or celebrated. Focusing on the principal import of history, which incorporates the transmission of tradition, it is also essential that the historical record is kept in such a proper manner that makes transmission beneficial. But has this been done regarding the transatlantic slave trade and its mediators on the African side of the Atlantic including Ghana? In the Americas and the Caribbean, the voices of enslaved Africans and their descendants have been captured in what is popularly referred to as slave narratives. These accounts include the numerous biographies and autobiographies of runaway and freed slaves dating from the eighteenth century, and the relatively more recent, Federal Writers’ Project that collected over 2,200 narratives of slaves freed between 1936 and 1938.12 Such an endeavor has not been replicated on the African side, although there were people on the African side, including Ghana, who lost relatives to the trade. Have the stories and pain of such people been captured in mainstream historical discourse? There were, for example, those who were captured, enslaved, and prepared for the outward journey to the New World but narrowly escaped the ordeal of the Middle Passage due to such circumstances as gaining the special

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favor of a slave dealer, being physically unfit to travel, or being reprieved due to administrative and legal changes.13 Often such people became permanently detached from their blood relations. Should such people and their stories be incorporated into the historical discourse of the transatlantic trade?

Slavery and the Slave Trade as History Slavery has featured in the societies of virtually all major past civilizations, and been employed by practitioners of all major religions. Enslaved peoples have not been restricted by race and color.14 Enslaved people with special skills and abilities are known to have enjoyed privileged positions. An example of such slaves of African descent was Aesop whose famed fables are still read and or recounted today. Slaveholding in most African communities tended to be used as a social engineering device to increase the population for military and economic purposes.15 Persons of unfree origin could accumulate wealth in their own right, and in certain cases, assume leadership positions. Examples include Jaja of Opobo in present-day Nigeria and Opoku Frefre, the nineteenth-century Asante war general.16 It was also usual for both master and slave to share common or similar economic, political, and social practices and beliefs because often they all came from the same region or a similar culture. The arrival of Europeans in Africa in the fifteenth century and their subsequent focus on commerce caused a shift in the African and Ghanaian socioeconomic arena regarding enslavement. The desire to participate in European trade with Africa and to gain access to the sea routes that had been “newly discovered” by Europeans became a dominant factor in the relations of African leaders with each other.17 Along the coast of modern Ghana, the Europeans initially exchanged such commodities as textiles, alcoholic beverages, beads, iron bars, and brassware for gold, ivory, and malagueta peppers. By the mid seventeenth century, however, slaves had become the principal commodity of trade. Ancillary commodities like maize and oil palm, which constituted staple foods for slaves on their journey across the Middle Passage, also became important. The inference here is that the complexity of the trade drew in several individuals and communities that had no direct link to the trade in humans itself. Some writers object to the intercourse that transpired between Africans and Europeans in that period being termed trade and consider that characterization to be a euphemism to cover up what was actually “an intense violence and

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mass murder inflicted on African peoples”18 that resulted in “the complete appropriation of their lands and undermined their societies.” For such writers, if it was a trade at all, then it was at best “a commercial dilemma” if not a “moral atrocity.”19 Such commentary fails to take note of the fact that due to the complexities of the trade, Europeans did not operate consistently in the same way everywhere. Thus, while some operated as slave traders in one area, the same group took stringent measures to prevent such trade in another. This was characteristic of Portuguese operations in the region of modern Ghana where they focused on the gold trade and kept the area free of export slave trade. In fact, the region was then a net importer of slaves, exchanging gold for slaves who were needed to expand the population base for the purposes of clearing the forest for agriculture, gold mining, and contributing to the numbers of the military.20 The policy started by the Portuguese was continued by the Dutch when they took over as the dominant power in Ghana in the sixteenth century. The structural shift in commerce between Africans and Europeans in the region of modern Ghana from the seventeenth century was, to a great extent, engineered by the introduction of guns and ammunition as trade commodities.21 African rulers and people who could acquire guns or had access to and control over the resources most demanded by the Europeans became stronger and more powerful. A major feature of the ensuing competition was frequent wars and occasional raids to establish deference and to acquire slaves, most of who were later sold off as merchandise in the transatlantic trade.22 The complex network that resulted by the seventeenth century manifested in the triangular trade with the Dutch, for example, selling slaves, bought from West Africa, plantation stores and capital procured in Europe to English, French, and Spanish planters in the West Indies and the American mainland, and in return, procured from New World settlers such products as sugar, rum, and tobacco, which they in turn sold in Europe. Slaveholders in the transatlantic system, who usually assumed superiority in the context of personal relationships, were of a different race from the enslaved who were regarded as inferior. It is important to point out that, initially, African captives sent to North America, did not go there for perpetual servitude.23 Rather, like indentured Caucasian slaves, they served for specified periods and were then freed. This meant the constant importation of Africans to replenish their labor stocks, and this perpetuated the inhuman trade for so long. This was to change over time as the African population increased naturally and there were fears that Africans would take over.

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A Divided History or Divisions and Connections? Memories and oral traditions about the slave trade by Africans on the continent and in the diaspora tend to be subjective. The reasons include the fact that subsequent generations approach the subject from the distance of time and also with differing interests. The two groups of people have had different experiences in different environments, and these considerations influence their understanding and perceptions of such a sensitive topic as the slave trade. Writers like Oostindie have observed that “the content of these accounts often diverge radically from the data found in contemporaneous records (as well as from accepted notions of plausibility).”24 Issues of scholarship regarding the transatlantic slave trade often become entangled in complex debates of memory and views on race. Despite the historic link traced above, relations between Africans and African Americans/Caribbeans were often fraught with tensions and misunderstandings resulting in the ambivalence that has characterized their dealings with each other.25 Writers such as Makikagile opine that this development is attributable to Eurocentric stereotyping that regards Africans as primitive savages and diaspora Africans as advanced savages because of their contact with civilized white society.26 Others, including Marimba Ani, who refer to the trade as the “African holocaust,” suggest that the period 1444–1865 represents a unique African experience of persecution through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization, and exploitation, and they therefore attempt to appropriate it for study by Africans.27 Should the transatlantic slave trade be recognized and studied as a shared experience within the category of African history or as part of world history? Clearly it falls within the realm of PanAfricanism and therefore constitutes an important aspect of African history that deals with fundamental issues that have affected Africa and peoples of African descent globally. Thus the history and legacy associated with the trade defies a single categorization and could be classified as both world and African history. Africans on the continent and in the diaspora have gone through different experiences. For those in the diaspora, there are the sensitive issues of determining the precise geographical area on the continent that their ancestors came from, the loss of their original languages and names, and the fact that many have become racially mixed over the long stay in the diaspora. On the African side, there are such problems as underdevelopment and endemic poverty resulting partly from the legacy of colonial rule and an unfair global economic order that is skewed against African interests.

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Admittedly, the different experiences have resulted in cultural differences. Rather than create a disconnect between Africans on the home continent and those in the diaspora, the two groups should be working together, by learning more about each other and recognizing that Africa is actually characterized by considerable diversity and differences that need not be a divisive factor but serve as a basis for unity. Even more outstanding, the genes that diaspora Africans carry and the blood that courses through their veins is that of Africans whether or not they themselves admit to being African. Significantly, most enslaved Africans who left the mother continent with little or no tangible assets took with them intangible cultural resources inscribed in their minds and in their hearts.

Slavery and the Slave Trade as Heritage The transatlantic slave trade has contributed to shaping world history. It has been the avenue through which large numbers of people of African descent have found themselves outside the motherland. It is an undeniable fact that through cultural or genetic memory and knowledge the spirit of Africa continues to live on in the minds and hearts of the descendants of most enslaved Africans whose ancestors were forced to leave the continent. It should be noted that if culture is broadly defined as the means by which a people protect themselves, then in general, cultural heritage landscapes, both tangible and intangible, could shift due to ongoing social transformations. Indeed, they shifted as enslaved Africans found themselves in new environments and usually totally unprepared for the situations that confronted them. Thus they had to go through social and economic reformulations that had a direct and concrete impact on what constituted and could be legitimized as “cultural heritage” within their new environment and the related shifting ethical and political contexts. Enslaved Africans left the motherland with hardly any tangible of their indigenous life pathways, but they took with them the intangible— including their intellectual capacity, value systems, sense of aesthetics, beliefs, and spirituality. The moving of people of one culture into a different cultural medium definitely generated significant exchanges and legacies. The totality that constitutes this heritage should be identified and celebrated rather than allowed to become a divisive force. Often what has been projected from the Africans’ transatlantic experience is the negative consequences of the forced migrations of large numbers of people from the African continent into the New World, which probably cannot be

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overemphasized. Among the major negative legacies of forced migration is the large number of able-bodied Africans who contributed toward the development of Western economies to the detriment of Africa. Another negative legacy is the development of bigotry and racial discrimination. Much too has been written about how Europe underdeveloped Africa by taking an invaluable part of its human stock, one that could have contributed to the African continent’s own development.28 Apart from being a source of wealth creation for their European and American masters, enslaved Africans provided physical labor in construction work, agriculture, mining, and as domestics that allowed the European slave holding community to have more leisure time and to develop a sense of their own superiority. Racism that developed as an intellectual positioning held the African/black man in an inferior and subordinate position vis-à-vis the superior European/white man. This thinking was subsequently used as a basis for colonizing Africa, which was presented as needing the superior patronage of Europe to ensure its enlightenment and development. Africans, who like their European counterparts, were transported into the New World initially under conditions of indentured servitude, lost this right over time mainly through legislation and practice. In its place developed a system that attached inferiority and servitude based on color and race. It is argued that the trade in humans yielded profits to participants and that the employment of most enslaved African sent to the New World in productive activities yielded tidy returns. The cumulative profits were reinvested and later used to capitalize development in Europe and the Americas. Evidence of the direct tangible benefits of the transatlantic slave trade for Europe and the Americas abounds. For example, Thomas Leyland, the Liverpool-based merchant, whose slave ship the Enterprize, took a cargo of 412 slaves from Bonny in present-day Eastern Nigeria and landed 392 in Havana, Cuba, in 1804, made a great fortune, which was reinvested.29 Available records indicate that between 1783 and 1793, 878 slave ships owned by merchants who were residents of Liverpool made a profit of 15 million pounds from transporting 304,000 enslaved Africans to the New World.30 What is least commented on are the skills, including agricultural techniques, that enslaved Africans introduced into their new environments. Writers like Serena Walsh have suggested that the success in cultivation of tobacco in Virginia between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was due possibly to new skills introduced by imported Africans.31 A similar case has also been made for rice and indigo cultivation in South Carolina.32 Another, but highly contested legacy associated with the transatlantic slave trade are the forts and castles along the entire coastline of West Africa that have

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been acknowledged as the last place on the mother continent where enslaved Africans stayed before the traumatic journey across the Middle Passage. Africans in the diaspora are ambivalent about these structures, perceiving them to be spiritual centers as well as dens of incarceration and evil.33 D. N. Cheeves, for example, passionately wrote about the “Dungeons and Castles of Ghana” depicting the Elmina castle as the largest “slave trading post” in the world and where African women were raped in female dungeons.34 She may have paid too much attention to the tour guides and not verified their interpretation using other sources. Others like Max Moxon see in the fortifications like the Cape Coast Castle, a grandeur of a distant era and the ingenuity of man that genuinely deserves the accolade “World Heritage,” that places the fortification within a context of world heritage without reference to the slave trade.35 A more critical study of these fortifications should reveal the layered and conflicting history that they entail. It can be inferred that the fortifications constitute records of history and heritage. Admittedly, the fact that at a point in time human beings were classified alongside traded goods and stored there is totally unacceptable by any standard. Yet history has to be presented in a true and objective, but sensitive manner. It is important to get a sense of the complexity that the fortifications represent. The objective truth is that through the transatlantic trade network African/ Ghanaian society and economy was drawn into the international system and this has in turn deeply influenced and shaped Ghanaian cultural heritage.36 But will this be acceptable to or offensive to the sensibilities of the diaspora “kinsmen”? Should the full story be told, and the entirety of the legacy associated with the commerce that went on in the fortifications be claimed thereby incurring the displeasure of the “kinsmen” who prefer that only the negative association with these structures be retained and projected? In Ghana there are other very important issues of cultural association with these fortifications. They include the Ghanaian linguistic and architectural heritage that is discussed in another chapter. By the same token, enslaved Africans in the diaspora have exercised considerable influence on the entire spectrum of life in their new countries. As cooks they introduced new food sources and new ways of preparing existing food.37 Their influence and contribution as artisans and construction workers could not be denied. They invented new devices to find solutions for the drudgery of tasks that confronted them. Among such stalwart African inventors are Granville T. Woods (1856–1910), the electrical inventor; Jan Matzeliger (1852–189), who invented the shoemaking machine; the medical researcher and

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scientist, Dr. Percy Lavon Julian (1899–1975); and the Arctic explorer Matthew Alexander Henson (1866–1955). Admittedly, sometimes they were denied the glory associated with their achievements because of discriminatory laws and practices that negated their rights as human beings and citizens. Should not the full story of how the indomitable African spirit strived in these difficult circumstances to adopt, adapt, develop, and contribute to human endeavors on both sides of the Atlantic be fully told? Efforts have been made, particularly since the 1950s to bridge the gap through migration and tourist visits. Some Africans from the diaspora have come to Ghana quietly to lay claim to their intangible heritage through such experiences as the Pan-African festival (Panafest) and Emancipation Day celebrations. Such occasions have been used by them to go through such rites of passage as naming ceremonies and readmission into African lineages.38 Others have made donations and contributed to development projects and in exchange have been given titled offices often referred to as “development chiefs.” Some have also decided to relocate and settle permanently in Africa. Individuals like Rita Marley, wife of the late reggae musician, Bob Marley, have acquired landed property in serene areas of Ghana where they live, at least for part of the year, and effectively involved themselves in local communities.

Stakeholders in Shared History Who are the stakeholders in the shared history surrounding the transatlantic trade? Simplistically one could enumerate several of them including such maritime European nationals as Brandenburg-Prussians or Germans, Brazilians, Danes, Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedes who could be classified as “perpetrators,” and Africans on both sides of the Atlantic who are perceived to be “victims.” Realistically, the question posed above, is seriously vexed and has no simple answer. For example, should the stakeholders in this shared history include all those who participated in the trade either as victims or merchants as well as adjunct participants who sold innocuous merchandise that serviced the trade? Superficially, an answer to this question is plausible. But would such an answer be acceptable to all parties? For example, would the descendants of “victims” of the trade accept descendants of perpetrators as equal heirs to a tragic history for which, they believe, the ancestors of the latter group should be held accountable? Would such African American slaveholders like

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(April) William Ellison (c.1790–1861) be classified as a “perpetrator” or both “victim” and “perpetrator”? This position often comes out very strongly when tourist groups comprising descendants of “victims” and “perpetrators” are taken around sites associated with slavery and the slave trade in Ghana. One senses resentment on the part of the “victims” when they have had to share what they consider to be a sacred and spiritual experience with those responsible for their predicament. This position seems to be in consonance with the argument of some African and African American writers who attempt to personalize or lay claim to the transatlantic slave trade, describing it as a horrific experience of 500 years of African suffering through slavery, and therefore consider it appropriate to Africanize it.39 They thus seize the opportunity to present themselves as the aggrieved who have to be pacified. In a sense, they are right, in spite of accusations of African culpability. Indigenous Africans controlled certain aspects of the slave trade. Such centralized African polities and peoples such as the Akwamu, Asante, Dahomey, Oyo, and the Imbangala of Angola participated in the trade. Through this trade large numbers of Africans were exchanged as a dominant commercial commodity by Africans for guns, ammunition, and alcoholic beverage, while some even enriched themselves considerably. The true position is that Africans participated in the slave trade both as victims and perpetrators. On a balance, it was an unequal exchange, and if one believes in “fair trade,” then that is the light in which the European–Ghanaian/African interaction should be viewed. Is it therefore appropriate to refer to all Africans as victims of the trade? In response to this question, one could posit that the development of racism as a philosophy that held all people of African descent as inferior and subordinate was entrenched because of the transatlantic slave trade.40 Eurocentric reasoning resulted in the European assumption of a moral superiority that underpinned their self-conferred mandate to carry out a civilizing mission to benighted Africans, hence the subsequent colonization of Africa. The conclusion is that ultimately Africans have generally suffered as a result of the generalized perception of all Africans as victims. Although people of so many different nationalities participated in the gruesome trade and could be classified as stakeholders, the extent and capacity of involvement differed considerably at different times. European nationals who participated as actors in the transatlantic trade directly and indirectly, transmitted their respective cultures to the local Ghanaian system. Could this

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fact of history be used as a basis for negating this aspect of Ghanaian history and heritage? Besides, the development of intense competition between the European trading powers so changed the commercial environment that the English trade became the most dominant, and it ultimately spawned colonization. Should this situation necessarily lessen the culpability of any of the other European trading nations or deny their role as stakeholders? The problem does not stop there. What should be the relationship between all peoples who have African ancestry and the continent in this context? What should be the relationship between Africans on the continent and those from the diaspora? Most Africans from the diaspora see the continent as part of their natural heritage and therefore believe that they must be welcomed in all senses of the word whenever they return there, but some are highly disappointed by the experience. This position is borne out by Greg Pascal Zachary’s article on the quest for roots by African Americans in the motherland.41 Such publications are bound to inflame passions and excite negative comment because they present a view that diaspora Africans have been betrayed. Africans on the continent also have the view that diaspora Africans have too high and sometimes unreasonable expectations. Among other things, diaspora Africans expect that they are entitled to and should be given land grants in Africa without going through any legal processes. In the view of many of them, it should not be necessary for them to have passports and visas to enter Africa but should be given immediate nationality rights because, after all, they were forcefully uprooted from Africa and were only returning home. Therefore they should be able to take up from where they left off. Besides, the perceptions and presentations of many Africans in the diaspora, especially those born outside the continent, often tend to be mythic and conflicting. Some of their commentaries present Africa with considerable pride. Many of them have notions about themselves and Africa that are romantic and present their ancestors as Nubian princes and princesses who were either stolen or kidnapped and sent out of Africa. It is true that there were some royals among them like Prince William Ansa Sasrakoo of Anomabo (The Gentlemen’s Magazine, 1750) and also some who were kidnapped or stolen.42 Those with romantic perceptions tend to be disappointed when their expectations are not met. Related to the category of diaspora Africans with erroneous ideas about the continent are those who imagine that Africa is one country with a homogenous culture. Such individuals seem to be totally ignorant of, or are unaware of, the vast geographical, cultural, ethnic, social, and political diversity that characterizes Africa. There are other diaspora Africans, including Maya Angelou, Dionne

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Warwick, Louis Armstrong, and Michelle Obama, who have claimed Ghanaian ancestry but are just appreciative to have the knowledge without insisting on any privileged rights.43 Others come to Africa looking down on anything African and ready to criticize virtually every aspect of life while projecting their experiences and whatever contacts they have made in the West as being the best. Some diaspora Africans with such views have been known to make such comments as, “Thank God for the slave trade.” The sense being that had it not been for the slave trade their lot would have been the same as primitive Africans who were left behind. Clearly, Africans of this persuasion come to Africa not to claim their roots and heritage but possibly to wreak revenge on their “kith and kin” who betrayed them by selling them into slavery. But should that be the case? Can the African, either from the continent or the diaspora, ever deny his/her heritage?

Responsibilities of Stakeholders in a Shared Heritage Notwithstanding the fact that some “enslaved Africans distinguished themselves” in the diaspora, because of the inordinate baggage slavery carries as a global heritage, responsibilities have to be assigned.44 The preceding discussion has shown that who constitute the primary actors in the slave trade is contested, with some opinion insisting on categorizing them into “victims” and “perpetrators” with no middle ground. It has been shown that some benefitted far more than others, while others suffered permanent loss and or damage. Some, because of harsh economic circumstances, have resorted to undue exploitation of their perceived suffering in the slave trade.45 Some scholars too argue that as a form of racial persecution, the transatlantic slave trade has promoted a Eurocentric historiography that tends to be anti-Africa and prejudicial in the presentation of African societies and cultures.46 They argued that African voices were ignored because of slavery and colonialism and that until about the 1960s Africans and people of African descent were largely denied agency in the production and telling of their own past.47 It is generally admitted that the transatlantic slave trade has left undisputed harmful legacies. The psychological and physical trauma of being captured, shackled, and crowded onto a ship for forty to fifty days, destined for an unknown place and future, and never seeing family, friends, or home again, was immeasurably devastating.48 The positive contributions that Africa has made to world development has been deliberately covered up and credited to other racial groups.49

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Figure 2 A message to U.S. President Barack Obama left inside Cape Coast Castle. Credit: Photograph by Rebecca Shumway, 2009.

The matter does not end there. All must acknowledge their respective responsibilities. Those who were traumatized by the experience must be given the opportunity to heal. Those who were the net beneficiaries must be prepared to, not simply acknowledge and apologize for their role, but to reinvest profits made from the enterprise in areas and the lives of people who suffered from those activities. This calls for the payment of some reparations. The principal maritime nations and some of the major corporate bodies in this category are known or are still operating in one form or the other. A few of them have taken some steps in this direction, but it does not go far enough.50 Reparations must not be paid to individuals but be invested in central bodies with clear directives as to how it should be expended. The primary beneficiaries should be the descendants of those who were forced to migrate. Their share should be invested in such schemes as scholarships and empowerment endowments. The second group of beneficiaries should be the sending regions. The slave sending regions are known. They included the states along the entire West African coastline from the Sene-Gambian region in the north to Angola in the south. From the nineteenth century, when Britain and other European powers decided to abolish the trade, for various reasons that did not form part of the present subject, those who continued with it turned their attention to East Africa and relied on supplies from Central Africa. This second phase was shorter and the numbers

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involved were fewer. On the continent, the funds should be entrusted to such an organization as UNESCO to be applied to the development of a cultural heritage that benefits Africans on the continent and in the diaspora as well as others from the global community who desire to know more about this terrible and uncomfortable past.

Developing and Managing a Shared Heritage for Development in Ghana If slavery and the slave trade constitute a shared heritage, then it is important that it should be properly managed in the interest of all stakeholders. However, in most discussions on the transatlantic slave trade in Ghana, the focus has often been on the European coastal fortifications instead of viewing the unfortunate episode within a global context. In Ghana, some efforts have been made to develop and manage the slave trade heritage. Important among such ventures is the UNESCO Ghana Slave Route Project, set up in the 1990s to investigate and develop the routes via which enslaved Africans marched southward to the coast. It was also to find out what further steps could be taken to identify and preserve these shared heritage assets. Admittedly, one could immediately refer to the European fortifications at the coast as being among the last places enslaved Africans stayed on the continent before embarking on the journey across the Atlantic. It has been observed that thousands of tourists visit Ghana to share in a legacy of a horrific global heritage— to ponder a time when such (sale of human beings) was possible.51 Frequently these visitors enquire where “the slaves actually came from and how to visit those locations.” Major slave sites including Salaga, one of the largest slave markets in West Africa, and such southern entrepôts as Asen Fosu and Asen Manso have been identified. Although these centers have been developed as tourist sites, whatever has been done there is minimal. Sometimes, stakeholders bicker and compete among themselves as to whose claim is authentic. For example, Asen Manso claims superiority over Asen Fosu as a center of slave history, and it claims to be the domicile of a large population of people of unfree ancestry, a residue of transatlantic traffic that was left behind for various reasons. It also claims that the ritual river, Nnokosuo (slaves’ river), where the slaves stopped to have their last spiritual bath before proceeding to the coast, passed through their territory. For these attributes, the town and its citizens claim entitlement to a special place in Ghanaian slave history.

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Research in southeastern Asante has revealed that there is more than one Nnokosuo in Ghana.52 In Ofoase, a quiet backwater area on the southeastern border of Asante, the people vividly tell the simple history of the area as being on the major trade route to the coast. There is a slaves’ river there, locally known as Nnokosuo, where the tired captives stopped to rest and refresh themselves in the stream. The remnants of a hut exist where the females among them could rest while an elderly woman attended to them by massaging them with herbal preparations that relieved their aching bodies. They also have stories about the local school playground that used to be a slave cemetery where as late as the 1960s sometimes children at play could stumble on human remains. They were also very certain of the direction through which the slave route passed and mentioned specific towns where slave markets were located. Some of these stories have been corroborated in other communities where the author had researched this. It has not always been easy to tease out the information. More work is required but it requires enormous resources and time, as suggested by L. A. Dei and K. Boakye.53 “When dealing with . . . a tourism product which reminds people of their unfortunate ancestors (that) challenge their dignity . . . presents a tall . . . order.” To tackle the problem, it is important to identify more of these authentic sites, develop them as living-history locations where people who suffered injuries in the course of the slave trading era could turn to as part of their healing process. However, the development of such facilities has to be done sensitively guided by Opoku-Agyemang’s admonition that, “Sometimes tourists’ activities have been carried out with little regard to the life that existed prior to this transformation.”54 It is possible to do this. Already some stakeholder collaborations have been initiated. For example, through the efforts of such Ghanaian archaeologists as the late Yaw Bredwa-Mensah, funded by the Danish government, some slave plantations established in Ghana by Danes in the nineteenth century have been restored and made accessible to local and international audiences as public history sites. Significantly, descendants of slaves who worked on these plantations constitute the predominant group in the community. Through this initiative, such fundamental amenities as potable water have been provided for them. Some community members have also secured employment at the site and earn an income that is used to support their families. This is an example of good practice that could be emulated by other stakeholders. Other such examples of good practice include such individual initiatives as that started by Dr. Thaddeus P. Manus Ulzin, a Ghanaian medical practitioner

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based in Canada who has set up the Elmina–Java Museum in honor of 3,080 Africans, some of whom were enslaved and were sent through Elmina to presentday Indonesia as soldiers by the Dutch. Attached to the museum is a guest house. Revenue from the entire venture is expected to be used for philanthropic purposes to benefit the Elmina community.

Conclusion This chapter touches broadly on the transatlantic trade and its stakeholders, with its closer focus on Ghana and African Americans/Caribbean. The transatlantic slave trade did considerable harm to Africans in general in terms of causing social and economic alienation. Additionally, it brought about sociopolitical changes within African communities that were involved in the trade. Enslaved Africans who were torn from their roots suffered considerable psychological damage and irreparable loss. Directly or indirectly, Europeans and Americans played a role in this saga. The origins and presence of descendants of enslaved Africans in the New World can never be blacked out. In addition are the trails along which the enslaved traveled to their unknown destination and other related landmarks that have been left behind as a painful legacy from the past. Is it possible therefore to effectively package the unpleasant as a tourist product with museums, guided tours, and interpretations of the past that also bring out the varied layers involved? Would such presentation of history necessarily satisfy all stakeholders? Would it offend the sensibilities of some stakeholders, such as the descendants of enslaved Africans, who focused attention almost exclusively on the fortifications as a symbol of a painful past that should not be shared with perpetrators of the tragedy? Could the history of the transatlantic slave trade ever be accepted as a shared heritage? Some initiatives such as the Java–Elmina museum and the Danish slave plantation projects have blazed the trail. The memory of the slave trade as an intangible shared global cultural heritage, as presented in such cultural heritage examples as the Brer Rabbit and Anancy stories from the Caribbean, constitutes a positive legacy and heritage that has to be shared by transmission over generations, as a constant reminder of a shared bond to teach important lessons and to promote respect for cultural diversity, while affected communities on either side of the Atlantic develop a new sense of identity.

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Notes 1 Clarke, J. H., 1991. Notes for an African World Revolution, 148. Trenton: Africa World Press. 2 Bacon, F., 1664. Sylva Sylvarum: Or a Natural History in Ten Centuries. London: William Rawley (Posthumously published). 3 Bacon, F., 1664. Sylva Sylvarum: Or a Natural History in Ten Centuries. London: William Rawley. (Posthumously published); op. cit. Spelding, J., R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath, eds., 1865. The Works of Francis Bacon. London: Longmans. 4 Tosh, J., 2010. The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History. 5th ed., 52. New York: Longman/Pearson. 5 Carr, E. H., 2001. What is History? With a New Introduction by Richard J. Evans, 17. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 6 Ahmad, Y., 2006. “The Scope of Definitions of Heritage: From Tangible to Intangible.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 12(3): 292–300. 7 Ahmad, Y., 2006. “The Scope of Definitions of Heritage: From Tangible to Intangible.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 12(3): 292–300, 295. 8 UNESCO, 2007. Convention for the safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Paris: Article 2.2003. 9 Lowenthal, D., 2000. Knowing, Teaching and Learning History, National and International Perspectives, 63. New York: University Press. 10 Carr, E. H., 2001. What is History? With a New Introduction by Richard J. Evans Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 11 Getz, T. R., and L. Clarke, 2012. Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History, 134–36; 177. Oxford: University Press. 12 The Work Projects Administration. Records, c.1933-1942. Richmond, Va. The Library of Virginia. 13 Donkoh, W. J., 2007. “Legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Ghana: Definitions, Understanding and Perceptions.” In J. K. Anquandah (ed.), The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Landmarks, Legacies, Expectations, 305–25. Accra: SubSahara Publishers; Bailey, A. C., 2005. African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and Shame. Boston, MA: Beacon Press; Greene, S. E., 2011. West African Narratives of Slavery: Texts from Late Nineteenth and Early TwentiethCenturies Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 14 Thomas, H., 1997. The Story of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870, 13. New York: Simon and Schuster. 15 Douglass, M., 1964. “Matriliny and Pawnship in Central Africa.” Africa 34: 301–13, 303. 16 Oriji, J., 2007. “The End of Sacred Authority and the Genesis of Amorality and Disorder in Lgbo Mini States.” Dialectical Anthropology 31(1–3): 236–88, 275;

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18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28

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Wilks, I., 1966. “Aspects of Bureaucratization in Ashanti in the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of African History 7(2): 215–32, 217. Daaku, K. Y., 1970. Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast1600-1720: A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade. Oxford: Clarendon Press; Kea, R., 1982. Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast. Baltimore: John Hopkins University. Diouf, S. A., ed., 2003. Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies, xi. Athens: Ohio University Press. Diouf, S.A., 2014. Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. New York: NYU Press. Wilks, I., 1978. “Land, Labor and Capital in the Forest Kingdom of Asante: A Model of Early Change.” In J. Friedman and M. Rowlands (eds.), The Evolution of Social Systems, 487–534. London: Duckworth; Wilks, I., 1993. Forest of Gold: Essays on the Akan and the Kingdom of Asante, 72–78. Athens: Ohio University Press; Kea, Settlements, Trade, and Polities, 85–94. Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast. Curtin, P. D., 1969. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: Wisconsin University Press. Walsh, Serena S., 1997. From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community. Charlottesville, NC: University Press of Virginia. Oostindie, G., 2005. “The Slippery Paths of Commemoration and Heritage Tourism: The Netherlands, Ghana, and the Rediscovery of Atlantic Slavery.” NWIG: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 79(1/2): 55–77, 55. Hartman, S., 2007. Lose your Mother Disappointment Felt by Africans from the Diaspora on their Return, 19. Farrar: Straus and Giroux. Makikagile, G., 2007. Relations between Africans and African Americans: Misconceptions, Myths and Realities, 7. New Africa Press. Richards, D., and M. Ani, 1994. Let the Circle be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora, 1. Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press; Cheeves, D. N., 2004. Legacy. Crewe, 1. UK: Trafford Publishing. Williams, E., 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; Rodney, W., 1973. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Boggle L’Ouverture Publications. Thomas, The Story of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 810. Ibid, 811. Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove. Edelson, S. M., 2006. Plantation Enterprise in South Carolina, 3–4, 8. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Shulze, R., 2005. Carolina Gold Rice: The Ebb and Flow History of a Low Country Cash Crop. Charleston: History Press.

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33 Davies, O. I., 1997. “The Door of No Return: Reclaiming the Past through the Rhetoric of Pilgrimage.” Western Journal of Black Studies 21, 23: 156–61; Ebron, P. A., 1999. “Tourists as Pilgrims: Commercial Fashioning of Transatlantic Politics.” American Ethnologist 26(4): 910–32, 923. 34 Cheeves, Legacy, 7. 35 Moxon, M. Mark, 2010. Moxon’s Travel Writing. Ghana: Cape Coast, http://www.moxon.net/ghana/capecoast.html (Accessed June 9, 2010). 36 Anquandah, K. J., 1999. Castles & Forts of Ghana, 14. Paris: Atlante. 37 La Fleur, J. D., 2012. Fusion Foodways of Africa’s Gold Coast in the Atlantic Era. 6–7. Leiden: Brill. 38 Osei-Tutu, B., 2007. “Transformations and Disjunctures in the Homeland: African American Experiences in Ghana.” In Kwesi Anquandah James (ed.), The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Landmarks, Legacies and Expectations, 326–42. Accra: Sub-Sahara Press. 39 Boyd-Franklin, N., 2006. Black Families in Therapy: Understanding the American Experience, 9. New York: Guildford; Harp, O. J., 2007. Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx, 247. Coral Springs, FL: Lumina Press. 40 Evans, W. M., February 1980. “From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham.” American Historical Review 85: 15–43; Braided, B., January 1997. “The Sons of Noah and Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods.” William and Mary Quarterly LIV: 103–42. Genesis 9:27. Some scholars argue that these ideas go much further back and predate the fifteenth century as ideas that characterized both early Christian and Islamic thinking. Edith R. Sanders, 1969. “The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origin and Function in Time Perspective.’’ Journal of African History 10: 521–32. Evans, W. M., February 1980. “‘From the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham.” American Historical Review 85: 15–43. Benjamin, Braided, January 1997. “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods.” William and Mary Quarterly LIV: 103–42. 41 Zachary, J. P., 2001. “Tangled Roots for African Americans in Ghana, the Grass isn’t always any Greener: Seeking the ‘Motherland’, They Find Echoes of History and a Chilly Welcome.” The Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2001. 42 Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade; Greene, West African Narratives of Slavery. 43 In 2000, I chaired a committee that organized an international conference at KNUST, Kumase on Yaa Asantewaa to commemorate the centenary of the last Anglo–Asante War. The appeal and popularity of Yaa Asantewaa among Diaspora Africans as role model and inspiration of African resistance drew in a large crowd from this group. A number of them were agitated that they had not received the

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44 45

46

47 48 49 50

51

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welcome they had anticipated but were rather treated as tourists. They were coming home and asked where were the lands that their ancestors left behind which they had come back to claim. Anquandah, Castles & Forts, 14. Opoku-Agyemang, N. J., 2007. “The Living Experience of the Slave Trade in Sankana and Gwollu: Implications for Tourism.” In Kwesi Anquandah James (ed.), The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Landmarks, Legacies and Expectations, 210–24, 211. Accra: Sub-Sahara Press. Frederickson, G., 1988. The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspective on Slavery, Racism and Social Inequality, 113. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press; Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Ibid. Cheeves, Legacy, 13. Bernal, M., 1987. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol 1. New York: Rutgers University Press. The Danish Government had supported the activities of Dr. Yaw Bredwa-Mensah in recreating Danish slave plantations in Ghana. Foundations in Bristol in the UK have also sponsored students to carry out development projects at Fete in the Central Region of Ghana. Mason, J. J., and M. Odonkor, 2007. “Historic Slave Routes: Potential for Tourism Development in Ghana and the West Africa Sub-region.” In J. K. Anquandah (ed.), The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Landmarks, Legacies, Expectations, 358–62, 360. Accra: Sub-Sahara Publishers. Donkoh, “Legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Ghana,” 320. Dei, L. A., and K. Boakye, 2007. “Developing the Slave Route for TourismCommunity Dynamics, Policy Implications and Strategies for Root Tourism Product.” In J. K. Anquandah (ed.), The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Landmarks, Legacies, Expectation, 348. Accra: Sub-Sahara Publishers. Opoku-Agyemang, “The Living Experience of the Slave Trade,” 210.

9

The Legacy of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana Akosua Adoma Perbi

Introduction This chapter analyzes how indigenous slavery is regarded in Ghana’s postcolonial documentary and oral traditions as an institution that existed in precolonial Ghana. As a member of the United Nations, Ghana like all member states has signed the relevant treaties that prohibit slavery and the slave trade. The 1969, 1979, and 1992 constitutions of Ghana emphasize human rights, protection from slavery and forced labor. What I find intriguing though is that the historical fact of the institution of indigenous slavery and all that it stood for have left traits in Ghana’s traditional political, economic, social, and cultural institutions. This chapter seeks to address these traits by gleaning through chieftaincy reports, oral traditions, court records, and archival material from all the ten administrative regions of present-day Ghana; from newspapers, as well as from personal observations and interviews. In my research on indigenous slavery in Ghana over the past forty-four years, it has become increasingly clear to me that the legacy of indigenous slavery manifests itself in four major traditional areas, namely, traditional political office, land tenure, issues of inheritance, and in social affairs. In this chapter, I shall present a historical review of the ambivalent attitudes toward indigenous slavery that have continued to influence interpersonal relations, as well as legal and constitutional decisions, since slavery’s formal abolition by the British colonial government in 1874 in the Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate and in Asante and the Northern Territories in 1908. I am particularly interested in how the issue of indigenous slavery has been brought up, affirmed, or challenged since its abolition; in the decisions taken by courts; and in the lingering effect of attitudinal problems that come to the surface in certain critical situations even among literate, educated, and high-profile Ghanaians.

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Traditional Political Office The 1992 Constitution of Ghana, by which the country is ruled, recognizes common law and customary law. Common law is a legacy of a British colonial experience that left the country with common law courts, judges, magistrates, and lawyers. Customary law is administered by the traditional authorities consisting of kings, chiefs, queens, and other office holders. Cases that are traditional in nature are taken to the traditional authorities who also hold courts in the palaces. In the southern part of Ghana, the traditional authorities use the “stool” as the symbol of office because the surrounding vegetation is mainly forest and the stool is made from the tree. In the northern part of Ghana the vegetation is grassland and there are a lot of animals who feed on the grass and therefore using their skins as mats is a common practice. Thus the traditional rulers sit on the “skin.” The constitution also provides for a National House of Chiefs and a Regional House of Chiefs where matters affecting chieftaincy are determined. Every ethnic group in Ghana has its set of rules and requirements so far as eligibility to traditional political office is concerned. The issue that often crops up when there are several candidates vying for a particular traditional political office is the pedigree of the contesting candidates. A basic requirement adopted by all the ethnic groups from north to south and from east to West is that the person must be of “pure, real or proper blood.” Chieftaincy records in all the current ten administrative regions of Ghana use these words interchangeably. The crux of the whole matter is that there are some people who can be referred to as “royals” and therefore eligible for succession to traditional office but cannot do so because of their “slave ancestry.” Such people are often associated with places and royal households because they were born in these places, lived there all their lives, and even intermarried with “pure, real, or proper” royals. To an “outsider” all of such people are part of the royal group, but to an “insider” there is a clear line of distinction when it comes to “enstoolment” or “enskinment,” between the “freeborn” and one born of slave ancestry that has been incorporated into the royal family or associated with the royal family. In one of the chieftaincy records in the Public Records Archives and Administration Department (PRAAD) in Koforidua in the Eastern Region, for example, some family members from Begoro stated that “the stool is not for the whole family but rather for he/she who has the right to occupy it.”1 In another chieftaincy report in Sunyani, in the Brong Ahafo Region, the Asonson stool is

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described as follows: “It belongs to only a section of the royal family, although we share common funeral expenses and debts with the other section.”2 The Brong Ahafo chieftaincy records relate the following: The Stool Royals are the only people eligible to occupy the stool, but if the royals are extinct or there is physical deformity or any other reasonable cause . . . the Oman (the traditional area) in consultation with the Ohemaa (the queen) can elect a member from a collateral family. In the absence of that, a stool son or grandson can be appointed to occupy the stool. Any such appointed chief should give an undertaking in writing that no member of his family should lay claim to the stool. The stool of such a chief should also not be blackened.3

By traditional customary law, stool sons or grandsons are regarded as the immediate members of the king or chief ’s family and household. In the Cape Coast chieftaincy records, such people are described as “either free born commoners or people of slave ancestry.”4 Oral traditions I have collected in all the ten administrative regions of Ghana from 1990 to the present, indicate that in the Upper West Region 92 percent of respondents stated that it was impossible for a person of slave ancestry to be “enskinned.” In the Upper East Region, 60 percent of respondents attested to the unsuitability of a person of slave ancestry to sit on the skin, while 78  percent of the respondents from the Northern Region made similar statements. In the Brong Ahafo Region, 69 percent of respondents indicated the impossibility of a person of slave ancestry occupying a stool, as did 69 percent in the Asante Region, and 82 percent in the Eastern Region. This was also the case for 72 percent of respondents in the Western Region, 76 percent in the Central Region, 80 percent in the Greater Accra Region, and 71 percent in the Volta Region. The total number of respondents countrywide who stressed that a person of slave ancestry could not occupy a stool or skin was 75 percent while 35 percent of respondents indicated that a person of slave ancestry could occupy the stool. According to oral tradition, the exceptional circumstances that may permit a person of slave ancestry or a commoner to occupy a stool or skin is the absence of a suitable or genuine successor. The Winneba chieftaincy records state categorically, “If there is no genuine successor at all, a slave can succeed.”5 In a stool dispute at Penyi in the Volta Region, the stool family reported that “when the Asafohenega (military commander) died, the candidate eligible to the stool was a minor and therefore the division of Penyi authorized, according to native customary law, the present occupant to act as Asafohenega until the

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candidate came of age.”6 In a stool dispute heard at the Kumasi Circuit Court in the Hansen Kwame Attakora v. Akosua Hyebreh case, the defendant testified before the circuit judge as follows: The deceased was a servant to the stool but in the absence of a suitable male member he was appointed to succeed. He remained on the stool for nearly fifteen years. It is an Akan practice that a male slave or a male descendant of a slave woman can, by the consent of the Elders of the family be appointed to hold the office of a chief and the stool properties in trust for the right line.7

The exceptional circumstances are also explained in the Brong Ahafo chieftaincy records.8 On August 4, 1960, there was a petition from the lawyer, Patrick Dankwa of Accra, to the Brong Ahafo Regional Commissioner on the status of a client and his family. The facts of the case were that in 1952, the Bechemhene exchanged the “great oath” with the Yamfohene (ruler of Yamfo; normally the suffix -hene is translated as “ruler” or “king,” as in Asantehene, king of Asante) about his client and family to the effect that his client and family were subjects of the Bechem stool. The Yamfohene counter swore that his client and family were Yamfo stool slaves and that his predecessor paid for them in bananas. The petitioner wanted the regional commissioner to use his good offices to determine the status of his client and family because the Bechemhene had elected his client as the Adwumahene (ruler of Adwuma) of Tanoso. Unfortunately the records in the file did not indicate how the regional commissioner settled the matter.9 In the Brong Ahafo Local Court Division I held at Odumase on July 5, 1961 in the matter between Kwaku Duah and Odikro Kwaku Awuah, Kwaku Duah presented a long family history and stated that his great grandmother Nana Agyeiwaa bought a slave called Amma Fooduoto. Another relative Nana Akroko bought a male slave called Kwatanoa and gave Amma Fooduoto to this male slave in marriage. Their children were made to serve Kwaku Duah’s ancestors. The defendant and his relatives were servants of the Asonson stool. Six witnesses were called, all of whom testified for Kwaku Duah, and explained that the defendant was not entitled to occupy the stool, because Kwaku Duah’s relatives were “ancient people.” In his evidence on September 13, 1961, the defendant, Odikro Kwaku Awuah presented the long history of his family and traced his genealogy. Judgment was granted on October 12, 1961 in favor of the plaintiff Kwaku Duah, and he was also awarded 50 pounds sterling as damages.10 In District Court Grade II, Abetifi, Kwahu, in the case of Nana Kwasi Afari, Nana Akumwaa Sapomaah, Yaw Ashong v. Kofi Nyame, held on October 4,

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1963, the plaintiffs together with the Adehyehene (nobles), Ohemaa (the Queen Mother), and Gyasehene(a high-ranking official in the chief ’s household) of Aduamoa claimed from the defendant 100 pounds sterling as damages for stating publicly that the plaintiffs were nonmembers of the royal family of Aduamoa and therefore ineligible for election to the Aduamoa stool. This statement implied that the plaintiffs were of slave ancestry. Judgment was given in favor of the plaintiffs and the defendant was charged 10 pounds sterling and one live sheep.11 In the Wenchi Local Court held at Nchiraa on July 15, 1966, Kwabena Tippah of Moo-Mansie claimed 240 cedis as damages from Kwaku Mensah for telling him that he was a stranger of Moo-Mansie while he Kwabena was a real son to the queen mother of the Moo-Mansie stool. In his judgment on August 17, 1966, the judge stated that the definition of “stranger” had three meanings. First, it could mean a person who was new to a place. Second, a person who did not reside in a particular place, or third “if used in any other sense, depending upon the circumstances under which it was so used, then it could mean a ‘slave’.”12 From the court proceedings, it is clear that the judge’s third definition of the word “stranger” was what worried Kwabena Tippah and caused him to send Kwaku Mensah to court. Kwaku Mensah’s remarks implied that he was of slave ancestry and therefore ineligible to the Moo-Mansie stool. Judgment was given in favor of Kwabena Tippah, and he was awarded 144 cedis in damages. On July 17, 1991, the Pioneer Newspaper reported on its front page that a judicial committee of the Ashanti Regional House of Chiefs had on the previous day nullified the nomination, election, and the installation of Nana Akuamoah Boatin as the Asante Mamponghene (the ruler of Mampong). The committee based its judgment on the question of eligibility. The Asante Mamponghene’s claim that he belonged to the Baabiriw royal house was doubted by the committee.13 The Asante Mamponghene not satisfied with the decision on his eligibility, appealed to the National House of Chiefs. Meanwhile he assumed that pending the hearing of his appeal, he could continue with his normal role and duties as chief for which he had been properly enstooled by the “king makers” of the traditional state. This incensed the citizens opposed to his eligibility. While the appeal was pending, the palace was attacked and set on fire. Part of it as well as the chief ’s car and personal effects were burned. Twenty-eight people were subsequently charged for their involvement in this violent attack. The Mirror Newspaper of March 27, 1993 reported that the Ashanti Regional Tribunal had fined and given them various terms of imprisonment. On July 28, 1992, the Chieftaincy Tribunal of the National House of Chiefs that heard the appeal gave a twenty-page judgment against the Asante

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Mamponghene. In their evidence, both the appellants and the respondents traced their genealogies. On page fifteen of the judgment, one of the respondents stated that the seventh appellant was a descendant of a slave girl called Niana, who was purchased at the Salaga market in the 1800s. All the appellants denied this and produced evidence to establish that the seventh appellant was a royal of the Baabiriw family.14 The Weekly Spectator Newspaper of August 15, 1992 reported that a judicial panel of the National House of Chiefs sitting in Kumasi and chaired by Nana Ewuah Duku, Sekondi Omanhene (traditional ruler), had dismissed the appeal of Mr. Cartey, former director of the Management Development and Productivity Institute, Accra, because “he is not a royal of the Mampong stool and, therefore, cannot ascend it.”15 In the 2004–2005 academic year, I supervised a number of long essays (research papers) for final year students in the Department of History, University of Ghana, Legon. Two of the long essays had linkages to indigenous slavery. I cite them because they confirm my research findings and affirm that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the legacy of slavery is real. They were entitled “The Silver Stool Dispute in Asante Mampong (1987–1995). A Historical Survey” and “The History of Beposo, Asante Akim.”16 It was clear to me from these long essays that the issue of indigenous slavery continues to be relevant in contemporary Ghana. Throughout the long essay on “The Silver Stool Dispute of Asante Mampong,” the student referred to the destooled chief as a donko (the Akan word for “slave”). I cancelled the word donko and replaced it with “of servile origin.” During discussions with the student, he was very unhappy with what I had done and he said to me, “Madam that is the word all the people I interviewed used with reference to the destooled chief.” I could also tell from his account that his information was mainly based on interviews with those of that section of the royal family opposed to the chief ’s nomination, and who invariably refer to themselves as being “true, pure, real royals.” I happen to be related to this destooled chief through my mother’s grandfather’s line, that is, from my maternal greatgrandfather’s line. I knew about the dispute through oral tradition because I had also gone to Asante Mampong during some funerals when the case was pending and I asked a few questions from some of my relatives. I remember very clearly when, during a funeral at Asante Mampong, I asked my late uncle Dwomo, the fourth sibling after my mother, who also lived in the Mamponghene’s palace, and was very close to the Mamponghene, “what was happening?” He said to me, “Ye se oye donko” (they are saying he is a ‘slave’). I decided to do some more research

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and I was able to glean more information from the reports of the Regional and National Houses of Chiefs, court records, and newspapers. I advised the student to search for some written documents as well in order to get a more balanced view of the case. In the long essay on “The History of Beposo, Asante Akim,” the student wrote the following in his introduction: Since the creation of the Beposo Black Stool by Asantehene Nana Osei Tutu I in the early 17th Century, the town has suffered from serious constitutional crisis over the question of legitimacy between the Bretuo and Ekuona Royal Families. The reason is that the Ekuona maintain that by the provisions of the constitution establishing the Beposo chiefdom, it is only the members of the Ekuona Royal Lineage who must have the right of succession to the Stool. The Bretuo on their part maintain that the interpretation given by the Ekuona is wrong and that both Royal Families have by the nature of the constitutional framework equal right of succession to the Stool. In fact, these counter claims by both families have on various occasions become so explosive as to cause long litigations and disputes.17

According to Anorchie, the author of this long essay, the Beposo stool was first occupied by Nana Akwasi after Asantehene Osei Tutu I created the stool for him for his loyalty and performance of duty. Nana Akwasi had three wives who hailed from Juaso, Ofoase, and Dwease, all in the Asante Akim South District in the Ashanti Region. “The first wife was a royal from the Juaso Oyoko family. The second wife, Aba Kafu was a maid servant at the Ofoasehene’s palace. She and her children were therefore not members of the Ofoase Royal Bretuo Family by birth but by incorporation. It is the descendants of Aba Kafu who would after the death of Nana Akwasi contest and continue to contest equal rights of succession to the Beposo Stool with the descendants of Ataa Panin, Nana Akwasi’s third wife from the Dwease Royal Ekuona Family.”18

Anorchie laments: The Ekuona and the Bretuo have now turned into two opposing political groups, each striving to see to the down fall of the other. A series of litigations and petty squabbles have been the order of the day as supporters of the two lineages have now resorted to cold war tactics with their opponents in order to settle old scores. Political meetings are a scene of insinuations and castigations. This situation has seriously undermined the authority of the chief. Many are those who either refuse or are reluctant to respond to the chief ’s call.

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People with experience who should be helping the chief in his executive functions have refused to offer any assistance for fear of being branded as belonging to either side. The judiciary has suffered many reverses on several occasions. Many people have often refused to attend the Chief ’s Arbitration Court to answer charges preferred against them just to register their resentment at the chief ’s authority.19

Anorchie concludes by suggesting that the Ekuona and Bretuo royal families should as a matter of necessity, institute between them a rotational system of succession to the stool, so that in the event of any of the stools being (that of the chief and the queen mother) declared vacant, the next incumbent royal lineage to offer a successor would no more be a problem. Such an arrangement would certainly pave the way for the people to have peace, so that they can concentrate their efforts on harnessing all human and material resources for the effective development of the traditional state.20 Whenever I read the newspapers and I find there is a chieftaincy dispute based on eligibility, I read through it carefully and inevitably find that there is a link with the issue of indigenous slavery. A colleague, who also dabbles as a lawyer, explained to me that as long as Ghana recognizes customary law as part of the constitutional and legal framework, the link between chieftaincy and indigenous slavery will continue to be affirmed.21 From the numerous examples given from various regions in Ghana on the legacy of slavery with respect to traditional political office, it is clear that the legacy rears its head when some members of the family aspire for traditional office.

Land Tenure The legacy of indigenous slavery runs through land tenure cases. The crux of the matter is on the right of ownership to the land in question. Traditionally this right is based on the Customary Law of Ownership and Succession in Matrilineal and Patrilineal Families. There are traditional stool lands and traditional family lands. There is also government land, much of which was acquired during the colonial period by the British government and that was passed on to successive governments in Ghana. During land tenure disputes a person’s slave ancestry comes up and it often becomes a disability, especially where the traditional courts are concerned because they administer customary law.

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Research I conducted in all ten administrative regions of Ghana in the PRAAD in all the ten regional capitals as well as in some of the palaces of chiefs who had well-kept archives, especially in Manhyia Palace, Kumasi and the Okyenhene’s palace in Kyebi, show that the main question that is often asked whenever there is a land tenure dispute is, “How did you come by this land? Was it by occupation, conquest, sale or gift?” And so, one’s history will inevitably determine one’s right to the land in contention. In the Brong Ahafo, Asante, and the Eastern Regions, I discovered huge volumes of land tenure cases each of which will form a monograph or a whole book. In the Volta, Greater Accra, Central and Western Regions, there were also large volumes of court records related to slavery and land tenure. I found it striking though that during my research at the Tamale archives I did not find any cases of land tenure disputes so far as the Upper West, Upper East, and Northern Regions are concerned. According to oral interviews I conducted, this is because the system of land tenure in these regions where land is under the custody of the “tendana” (the earth priest) prevents such occurrences. When I asked however if a person of slave ancestry could hold the office of a tendana, the answer was a quick “no.” The following are samples of the numerous cases I went through. In the Asante Region, for example, in the matter between Akosua Addai and Kojo Peprah, Akosua claimed three cocoa farms situated at Donkotoa Kwansu from Kojo. According to the evidence of Akosua, her brother, Kwabena Manu, died and left three cocoa farms. A relative called Akwasi Adu possessed the farms on the grounds that Akosua and her brother were slaves. The Asantehene’s court that sat in judgment of this case gave judgment in favor of Kojo Peprah because, in their opinion, Akosua had “no traditional right to claim the farms.”22 In the case of Akroponghene Kwabena Sarfo (plaintiff ) v. Kwasi Buor and Yaa Sahene (defendants), the Akroponghene required competent explanation from the defendants as to why they had been willfully and unlawfully enjoying the proceeds of the late Anyan Kum’s cocoa farms, while they had no relationship with the deceased. In his evidence, the Akroponghene established that during the Gyaman War (around 1820), his ancestors brought Adwoa Siaw, the defendants’ ancestress to Akropong as a slave. The defendants in their evidence denied the plaintiff ’s claim and traced their genealogical tree. Members of the Asantehene’s Divisional Court B who heard this case concluded in their judgment that they were convinced of the evidence of the plaintiff and that the defendants had

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not been able to dislodge the evidence of the plaintiff. They stated that the genealogical tree given by the defendants was not supported at all by any known inhabitant of the villages in which the deceased lived. Judgment was given in favor of the plaintiff and he was asked to take possession of the cocoa farm.23 In the case of Kojo Ansah and Yaw Mensah v. Opanin Kojo Addae, the plaintiffs claimed ownership of three cocoa farms from the defendant. They claimed that they had cultivated the farms with their own money and labor with the assistance of their late brother Yaw Amantuo. The defendants testified that the plaintiffs and their late brother were of slave ancestry. Members on the Asantehene’s court stated that the plaintiffs “could not produce any witnesses whose evidence was weighty and knotty.”24 Judgment was given in favor of the defendant and he was declared the sole owner of the disputed farms. I will take two classic examples from the numerous cases in the Brong Ahafo Region. In the case Nana Kwame Abayie, Nkomihene (plaintiff ) v. Nana Kwasi Sakyi, Bassahene (defendant), the plaintiff claimed that the land of Kwadwokurom had been his stool land from time immemorial. During cross examination of the defendant by the plaintiff, the plaintiff made the defendant aware of his slave ancestry. Judgment was given in favor of the plaintiff, because in the court’s opinion, the defendant was not able to prove and defend himself as to how he managed to have ownership of Kwadwokurom village and lands.25 In the matter between Afua Dede (plaintiff ) and Akosua Buor (defendants) held at the Ahafo Native Court, the plaintiff claimed the recovery of one cocoa farm at Fahoyeden. According to the evidence of the plaintiff, she was brought from the Ivory Coast as a slave when she was a small girl by one Doba. When she came of age, Doba married her. The defendant’s family gave her a fullgrown bush to plow and plant cocoa. There were about ten cocoa trees. She planted 650 more trees. When her husband Doba died, she was able to trace her roots and go back to the Ivory Coast, where she stayed for some time. On her return, she discovered that the defendant had taken possession of the farm. The Brong Ahafo Native Court decided that since the land belonged to the defendant and her family, the defendant should own the land. The plaintiff therefore lost her case.26 The following examples are taken from the Eastern, Western, Central, and Greater Accra Regions. The same theme flows through these examples, a person’s slave ancestry is a disability as far as land tenure is concerned. In the Eastern Region, in the cases of Kwame Adomako v. Opanin Yaw Anim and others; Odikro Akosua Abuah v. Yaw Donkor; and Yaa Konyah v. Akosua Opomaah,

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those with slave ancestry lost their cases.27 In the Western and Central Region, a typical case is that of Kweku Ackaah v. Kwesi Ackaah.28 In the Volta Region there was the matter between Djotapa Wugo and others and Kota and Nyavor Zormelo and others.29 In the Greater Accra Region is the example of Mantse Boi Abbey v. J. O. Martey.30 I have picked two cases out of the numerous ones from the common law courts on the same issue that is the link between land tenure and slave ancestry. In 1959, in the case Gyimah v. Kumah, Gyimah claimed ten farms at Kwahu from Kumah on the grounds that Kumah’s parents were slaves from Northern Ghana. The local court at Kwahu, which first heard the case, gave judgment in favor of Gyimah on the grounds that Kumah’s parents were slaves. Unhappy about the judgment, Kumah appealed to the Accra High Court. The high court condemned the local court for basing their judgment upon “the custom relating to slavery.”31 The evidence of both Gyimah and Kumah convinced the high court that Kumah’s parents worked on the farms in dispute as servants. He could not therefore claim the farms as his personal property. The appeal was dismissed.32 I find it interesting to observe that both the local court using the customary law based on the linkages to indigenous slavery and the high court that condemned any decision based on indigenous slavery arrived at the same conclusion. While the local court referred to Kumah’s parents as “slaves,” the high court referred to them as “servants.” In the case of Asseh v. Anto held at the Supreme Court in 1961, the Supreme Court dismissed an appeal from Asseh claiming eleven cocoa farms at Odoben because “the plaintiffs/respondents’ claim on the land based on slavery cannot be sustained.”33

Issues of Inheritance With respect to issues of inheritance that are related to slavery, the traditional courts continue to maintain the traditional/customary view that a person of slave ancestry cannot inherit property. The common law/regular courts on the other hand contend that slavery has been abolished and therefore slave descendants should not suffer any disabilities. The traditional courts that follow a matrilineal form of succession uphold lawyer Sarbah’s account on matrilineal succession in Ghana published in 1904, in which Sarbah relates that the line of succession is as follows:

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Mother; Brothers according to seniority; Nephews by seniority; Sisters; Sister’s Daughters. Failing these: Mother’s Brothers by seniority or election; Mother’s Sisters; Mother’s Sister’s Children. Failing these and their stock, the domestics in whose veins runs any of the heritable blood by seniority. Next, the head domestic.34

Sarbah also explains: There are four kinds of successors- Real, Proper, Ordinary and Extraordinary. The real successor of a person is his Mother. The Proper successors are the uterine brothers and sisters of the deceased. Ordinary successors are persons descended from the maternal grandmother. Extraordinary successors are issues by house domestics with a male person of heritable blood (“odehye”), a domestic or a member of a clan or tribe.35

Sarbah states explicitly: Where there are freeborn in the house and slaves, the Country law is that slaves cannot inherit as long as there are any of the blood surviving. They may inherit by Will, or, where the blood is under age, one may be selected from the slaves to succeed. Those of the blood would be those coming out of the womb of the Head. All who issue from a woman are all of the blood. The Emancipation (of slaves) is useless unless you take the benefit of it. The grandchild of an Emancipated slave would still be a slave, if he does not sever the connection.36

In patrilineal societies in Ghana, slaves also suffer disability because their genealogy is traced through the paternal line of their ancestor. Since succession is through the blood, once a slave or his descendant has slave ancestry it is regarded traditionally as a different or another line of succession. A few examples follow. In the Akyem Abuakwa Traditional Court, in the matter of Yaw Amoa v. Kwadwo Seniagya, the defendant boasted that he had inherited somebody’s farm but the plaintiff had no property because he was of slave ancestry, and that when he dies his property would revert to his master’s family. The traditional court gave judgment in favor of the defendant and asked the plaintiff to pay three pounds sterling as compensation to the defendant.37 In the same Akyem Abuakwa Traditional Court, Yaw Safo and five others brought Afua Apentema to court “for having deprived them and their household the right of succession.”38 Afua made it clear during the court proceedings that her ancestor Amaniwa Bonchere bought the plaintiff ’s ancestor called Abena. The court gave judgment in favor of the defendant and fined the plaintiffs. This

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is because in the traditional sense the plaintiffs had no right of succession to property in view of their slave ancestry. In the same traditional court, in the matter of Yaa Otwaah v. Kofi Baah, judgment was given in favor of the defendant Kofi Baah in a succession dispute over the property of the late Kofi Buor. Yaa, the plaintiff, wanted the defendant to explain why she was being prevented from succeeding her late uncle Kofi Buor’s estate when she was the next successor. Kofi Baah narrated a long family history to prove the deceased’s slave ancestry.39 I now cite three examples from the Kumasi Division Court. In the case Abena Buor v. Kwame Gyankyi over a succession dispute on the estate of the late Kwame Bimpeh, Kwame Gyankyi, the defendant, explained to the court that the plaintiff ’s father was a slave from “Eweland.” Judgment was given in favor of the defendant and the plaintiff was fined three pounds sterling and nineteen shillings.40 In the matter Kwasi Abebrese v. Kwaku Anane of Kumasi, the issue was the true successor to the property of the deceased Kwaku Amaabre. The fact that Amaabre’s ancestor came to the family as a slave was not disputed. Judgment was given in favor of the plaintiff.41 In the matter Nana Osei Akwasi v. Kofi Fofie, the plaintiff wanted an explanation from the defendant for claiming the property at Akyease. During the proceedings, it was made very clear that the plaintiff ’s ancestor was a slave. Judgment was given in favor of the defendant.42 An examination of the Brong Ahafo court records reflects the same pattern. The traditional courts maintain that slave ancestry is a disability so far as inheritance to property is concerned. A classic example is the case Yaa Nkrumah v. John Acquah held at the Magistrate’s Court, Sunyani. When the issue of slavery came up the court gave judgment in favor of the defendant.43 Next, I examine some of the judgments of the common law courts with respect to inheritance cases connected with slave ancestry. In the High Court of Kumasi on May 1, 1962, before Justice Djabanor, in the matter Fordwuor and others v. Nimo and others, the dispute was over the right of inheritance to the property of the late Joseph Nyame. According to the facts of the case, when Nyame died, the defendants took over his property on the grounds that Nyame became an adopted member of their family. The plaintiffs on the other hand indicated that Nyame was and remained a slave, and that having died without leaving any known relatives alive, they, the children, were entitled to succeed him. In his judgment, Justice Djabanor contended that the defendants and their witnesses were “loath” to regard the late Nyame as a slave. There was no doubt from the evidence that Nyame was originally not a member of the defendant’s family. He hailed from the north and had tribal marks on both cheeks. When he came to

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Abesua, he became attached to the family of the late Kojo Fordjuor. Attached in the purely social sense not in the sense of any relationship. He did not opt to join the family of the defendants. Justice Djabanor concluded (since the late Nyame died without leaving any known relatives except his own children, the plaintiffs), “I think it is equitable and in accordance with good sense and natural justice that in the particular circumstances of the case, the plaintiffs should succeed to their father’s property. . . . The defendants are to give them possession forthwith.”44

Social Affairs In traditional contexts of social interaction, when family members have to meet because of a funeral, a marriage, a festive occasion, or celebrations of various sorts, certain situations or circumstances that crop up may cause one’s lineage origin to be disclosed, especially if one is believed to have slave ancestry, regardless of whether or not one is aware of it. Both oral and documentary sources state, for example, that those who become haughty or too presumptuous and who have slave ancestry are likely to be reminded of it. There is no hard and fast rule in Ghana about how the story of slavery has to be passed on from generation to generation. Some families make it their duty to let all its members know those of slave ancestry, others do not but wait for opportune social moments to disclose it. In all the court records I examined throughout the country there were huge volumes of social affairs whose reference point had to do with slave ancestry. These cases can form the subject matter of a whole book, I am therefore picking a few examples I find interesting. In the Cape Coast court records, for example, Kweku Asare, Krontihene (a subchief) of the Simpah Division complained to the Wassa-Fiasihene (ruler of Wassa-Fiasi) that one Aminama Nuu had said to him, “Slaves like you boast too much.” Aminama Nuu was able to prove that Kweku Asare was a slave descendant and Kweku Asare was fined three pounds sterling.45 In the Sekondi court records, Yaa Damaah complained to the elders of the Tandoh stool that one Wagyani had insulted her because she asked her rudely, “Can a slave like you strike royal Kofi Gyimah’s grandson? I say you are a slave and if you call me, I will tell you how you became a slave.”46 The elders were impressed by the manner in which Wagyani was able to trace Yaa’s lineage. He proved that Yaa’s grandmother called Kunta was bought from the north and made a domestic servant of the Tandoh stool. Hence Yaa went beyond her

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bounds in hitting Kofi Gyimah’s grandson. Yaa was fined one pound sterling and one pot of rum.47 At Kyebi, Okyeame Kwame Asiedu, annoyed by the insubordination of Afua Kwankyewaa and Kwame Atakora, said to them, “Slaves who were brought here by my grandfather Anafi Kwadwo now give me no respect. A freeborn person who sleeps in a thatched roof is worth more than a slave who sleeps in that room.”48 Kwame Atakora reminded Okyeame Asiedu that “due to the passing of abolition laws by the English we are equal.”49 The Akyem Abuakwa Native Court agreed with Kwane Atakora and fined Okyeame Asiedu for making those insulting remarks. Okyeame Nyankamago of Kyebi reminded Yaw Okata when he was said to be exhibiting arrogant tendencies that he was “a native of Samarama. If a slave keeps long in a house, he becomes a member of the house.”50 The Akyem Abuakwa Native Court found out that Yaw was indeed of slave ancestry and he was asked to slaughter two sheep. In the Brong Ahafo Region, Kwadwo Mensah appealed to the Wenchi Native Court for arbitration in a case in which his son held out a calabash and asked for a drink when Kwasi Krah and his wife were having a drink in the house. This led Kwasi Krah to burst out angrily and say to Kwadwo Mensah’s son, “Your grandfather was a slave and you have the impudence to join Elders when they are drinking.”51 The native court considered Kwasi Krah’s outburst as offensive language and Kwadwo was awarded twenty pounds damages. In Accra, at the Ga Mantse Tribunal, Adwoa was aggrieved because Allotei had said to her, “What have you, a slave too, got to say when I am talking in the house?”52 Allotei was fined twelve shillings for “using those words of reproach.”53 At the Adangbe Shai local court, Amatei Commey complained that Kwaku Yao, after allowing his daughter to ease herself behind his house, replied when questioned, “If you know where you came from, you won’t do what you are doing.”54

Conclusion From research conducted on primary sources and documents covering the length and breadth of Ghana, the legacy of slavery appears more readily in traditional matters because that is where the oral tradition of who a person is, is continuously affirmed. It is not how high one has risen on the educational ladder, how rich a person is, or how famous one has become, but one’s place, role, and function in the family in which one is born. The family is the basic

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social and political unit and it is supposed to be the place of haven for everyone. One cannot identify a group of people in Ghana who are the main victims of this legacy by ethnicity, class, region, age, or gender because the issues that often come up are rampant among all the ethnic groups in the country and generate from the family. The evidence is therefore clear from chieftaincy reports, oral traditions, court records, and archival material from all the ten administrative regions of Ghana that the historical fact of indigenous slavery cannot simply be written off as an event, business, and institution of the past. Many laws have been passed since 1807 to abolish slavery and the slave trade. Ghana’s constitutions provide further legal backing to the abolition of slavery, and yet its ripples remain with us in traditional political institutions, land tenure, issues of inheritance, and in social affairs.

Notes 1 Public Records Archives and Administration Department (henceforth referred to as PRAAD), Koforidua, ECRG 14/1/31. 2 PRAAD, Sunyani, SY/16. 3 PRAAD, Sunyani, RG 1/1/122. 4 PRAAD, Cape Coast, Adm 23/1/683. 5 PRAAD, Cape Coast, Adm 23/1/583. 6 PRAAD, Ho, KE/C/00. 7 PRAAD, Kumasi, SCT 24/8. 8 PRAAD, Sunyani, RG 1/1/122. 9 PRAAD, Sunyani, RG 1/1/101. 10 PRAAD, Sunyani, SY 16. 11 PRAAD, Koforidua, Item 70. 12 PRAAD, Sunyani, WDC 1/44. 13 The Pioneer Newspaper, No. 11086, dated July 17, 1992. 14 Copy of Judgment of the Chieftaincy Tribunal of the National House of Chiefs dated July 26, 1992. 15 The Weekly Spectator Newspaper dated August 15, 1992. 16 Oppong, Christian, 2005. “The Silver Stool Dispute in Asante Mampong (19871995). A Historical Survey,” B.A. diss., University of Ghana; Anorchie, George, 2005. “The History of Beposo, Asante Akim,” B.A. diss., University of Ghana. 17 Anorchie, “Beposo,” 19. 18 Ibid., 24. 19 Ibid., 31. 20 Ibid.

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21 Interview with a colleague who is also a lawyer on January 3, 2014 at Lower Hill Drive, University of Ghana, Legon. 22 Manhyia Palace Archives, Kumasi, Asantehene’s Civil Record Book, Volume 4. 23 Manhyia Palace Archives, Kumasi, Asantehene’s Civil record Book, Volume 39. 24 Manhyia Palace Archives, Kumasi, Civil Record Book 71. 25 PRAAD, Sunyani, ADC1/15. 26 PRAAD, Sunyani, RC 1/19/15. 27 PRAAD, Koforidua, District Court Grade II, Item 67; Okyehene Palace Archives, Kyebi, AASA1.1/161; AASA 1.1/160. 28 PRAAD, Sekondi, ACC NO. 3838/71. 29 PRAAD, Ho, KE/C 69. 30 PRAAD, Accra, Adm. 29/6/41. 31 Ghana Law Reports 1959, 196–202. 32 Ghana Law Reports 1959, 196–202. 33 Ghana Law Reports 1961, 103–08. 34 Sarbah, John Mensah, 1904. Fanti Customary Law, 100–02. London. 35 Sarbah, Fanti Customary Law, 100–02. 36 Ibid., 122. 37 Okyehene Palace Archives, Kyebi, AASA 1.1/76. 38 Okyehene Palace Archives, Kyebi, AASA 1.1/76. 39 Okyehene Palace Archives, Kyebi, AASA 1.1/76. 40 PRADD, Kumasi, SCT 24/56. 41 PRAAD, Kumasi, SCT 24/18. 42 Manhyia Palace Archives, Kumasi, Civil Record Book, Volume 50. 43 PRAAD, Sunyani, SY/18. 44 Ghana Law Reports 1962 part 1, 305–11. 45 PRADD, Cape Coast, ACC NO. 38/18/71. 46 PRAAD, Sekondi, 3809/71. 47 PRAAD, Sekondi, 3809/71. 48 Okyehene Palace Archives, Kyebi, AASA/1.1/65. 49 Okyehene Palace Archives, Kyebi, AASA/1.1/65. 50 Okyehene Palace Archives, Kyebi, AASA/1.1/65. 51 PRAAD, Sunyani, WDC 1/144. 52 PRAAD, Accra, ACC NO. 253. 53 PRAAD, Accra, ACC NO. 253. 54 PRAAD, Accra, ACC NO. 107.

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Charged Memories: The Slave Trade in Contemporary Political Discourse Bayo Holsey

In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the slave trade in Ghana and other parts of West Africa. Historians have explored the origins of slaves, the means of their procurement, and the political milieu in which human beings became commodities for overseas markets. While once historians of slavery mainly focused on points of disembarkation, today, as this volume demonstrates, they increasingly examine the natal societies of Atlantic slaves and their points of embarkation along the West African coast including in the Gold Coast. The academic interest in the African side of the story of slavery is paralleled by a more widespread fascination. The development of diaspora tourism industries has brought thousands of international tourists each year to slave sites in West Africa, including Cape Coast and Elmina castles in Ghana as well as Gorée Island in Senegal and the Slave Route in Benin. West African leaders have supported efforts to conserve the slave sites in their nations and, in many cases, have positioned themselves as authorities on the history of the slave trade. Their efforts have led to a great deal of international attention and have attracted the attention of many Western leaders who have visited these sites and, like their West African counterparts, have also reflected upon the history of the slave trade in speeches. As a result, a new discourse about the slave trade has emerged, one authored by politicians. Indeed, more and more, political leaders have become key players in the commemoration of the slave trade, using it to further specific political ends. Ghana, furthermore, has become a key stage for, and object of, their discussions. In this chapter, I discuss recent examples of the intersection of the history of the slave trade and international politics in the context of a political performative tradition that began in earnest in the 1990s. I begin with a brief discussion of the development of West African slave sites. I then examine visits by US presidents to slave sites, followed by a discussion of statements by African leaders on the slave trade. These sections are followed by an exploration of the specific role

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that Ghana has played in this performative tradition. Here, I discuss former Ghanaian president John Kufuor’s statements about the slave trade as well as US president Barack Obama’s trip to Cape Coast Castle. Through this analysis, I argue that while Western leaders have worked to defuse the radical potential of the history of the slave trade as a critique of Western power, several African leaders have chosen to use this history to critique their own nations’ pasts. In doing so, they perform a well-worn narrative tradition about African corruption in order to demonstrate their acceptance of neoliberal logics.

The Development of African Slave Sites The first West African slave site to receive major international attention was Gorée Island in Senegal. The island houses a building known today as La Maison des Esclaves, or House of Slaves. This building, which was reportedly built by the Dutch in the late eighteenth century, was once the residence of a prominent African trader. Some of the storerooms of the house are said to have once held slaves prior to their transport to the Americas, though the number of slaves that were ever kept in the rooms has become a matter of historical debate.1 The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) named the House of Slaves a World Heritage Site in 1978 and since that time, it has become a popular destination for tourists, particularly those from the African diaspora, who wish to see the site where slaves embarked on the Middle Passage.2 In 1994 UNESCO launched its Slave Route Project. The project, which aimed to increase awareness of the history of the slave trade and to examine its effects, has highlighted the significance of various West African slave sites. The official launch took place in Ouidah, a major slave port in the Atlantic trade. Though lacking in physical structures related to the slave trade, the city has marked its slave past through the erection in 1995 of the Gate of No Return, a monument that symbolically marks the point where Africans embarked on ships for the Middle Passage. Since then, it has also established the Slave Route, a series of monuments and displays placed along a path from the central market to the beach, a path imagined to have been taken by slaves that leads up to the Gate of No Return. In addition, in 2004, the city installed the Gate of Return monument and the Door of No Return museum.3 Ghana is known for two popular slave sites, Cape Coast and Elmina castles. Cape Coast Castle, which evolved from a fort built by the Swedes in the 1650s, became the British headquarters for the slave trade in the eighteenth century.

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Figure 3 U.S. President Barack Obama and family visit Cape Coast Castle, July 2009. Credit: REUTERS / Alamy Stock Photo.

Figure 4 Plaque inside Cape Coast Castle commemorating U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit. Credit: Photograph by Rebecca Shumway, 2009.

Elmina castle was originally built by the Portuguese in 1482 and later became the Dutch headquarters for the slave trade. Both sites contain dungeons that were used to imprison slaves prior to their embarkation onto slave ships. In 1979, UNESCO named Cape Coast and Elmina castles world heritage sites. Adecade later, local government officials began to explore the possibilities for the development of the castles. With the aid of an international grant, the government transformed the castles into major international tourist sites. Ghana’s two slave

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castles have since become popular destinations for members of the lay public interested in exploring the history of the slave trade in West Africa. Today, thousands travel to Ghana each year to see the dungeons and reflect on the history of the slave trade. The Ministry for Tourism also began sponsoring Panafest, a pan-African arts festival that takes place every other year. In 1998, former president Jerry Rawlings inaugurated the celebration of Emancipation Day as an annual event.4 Rawlings and other African leaders have been vocal spokespersons on the slave trade. As I discuss further below, the launches of the aforementioned commemorative events were opportunities for them to talk about the significance of this history to their nations. In addition, many African Americans who have visited the aforementioned slave sites have written powerful accounts of their experiences. One of the earliest accounts was published by the highly acclaimed writer Richard Wright in his 1954 book, Black Power. In it, he visualizes a black woman in a slave dungeon being “led toward those narrow, dank steps that guided her to the tunnel that directed her feet to the waiting ship that would bear her across the heaving, mist-shrouded Atlantic.”5 Decades later in 1991, poet Nikki Giovanni wrote about Gorée, “It is all but impossible to be a Black American and not know Senegal. So many of us made our way to the New World through Gori [sic] Island. Through a fort and a hole in the ground where even yet one hears the moaning of captives. What made those people survive, to replicate themselves—to live?”6 These experiences in the slave dungeons shape their approach toward history, one that was anti-racist and anti-colonial in nature. To be sure, black leaders and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic were the first ones to develop a slave-dungeon narrative tradition, and it is one that continues to flourish.7 More recently, however, Western leaders have begun to develop a similar narrative tradition to serve various national objectives. In the next section, I discuss this tradition among American leaders.

The Slave-Trade Speech as an American Political Tradition In 1997, Hillary Clinton embarked on a six-nation goodwill tour of Africa. Her itinerary, the most extensive African itinerary ever completed by a US first lady, included South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Eritrea, and Senegal. The mainstream American press eagerly reported that in Senegal, her first stop was Gorée Island. In her autobiography, she recounts the experience as follows: Chelsea and I stopped first in Senegal, ancestral home of millions of Americans who had been sold into slavery through Gorée Island off the coast of Dakar, the

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Senegalese capital. At the small fort where slaves were held, leg irons and chains were still attached to the walls of musty cells, stark reminders of the human capacity for evil. This was where innocent people ripped from home and family and reduced to chattel, were herded through the Door of No Return at the back of the fort, dropped onto the beach and loaded onto boats to be rowed out to the anchored slave ships. I shut my eyes and breathed in the humid, stale air, imagining my wild despair if I or my daughter had been kidnapped and sold into slavery.8

Her trip was a key event in that it marked one of the first moments in which the White House engaged in the slave-dungeon narrative tradition. The uses of this tradition, however, had yet to be seen. After her moving experience at Gorée, Hillary Clinton reportedly convinced the president to include the island on the itinerary for his upcoming trip to the continent to take place the following year.9 This visit was highly anticipated because around the same time, Tony Hall, an Ohio Democrat in the House of Representatives had introduced a bill calling for Congress to formally apologize for the slave trade. Though the bill was tabled, it sparked a heated debate in Washington. As a result, Bill Clinton became embroiled in questions about the legacy of slavery like no president before him. Advisors had urged Clinton not to apologize, fearing that such a move would pave the way for claims for reparations.10 The trip also took place within the context of a shifting relationship between the United States and Africa. Throughout the Cold War, US interest in Africa revolved primarily around containing the Soviet threat. This period included several instances in which Washington backed racist or authoritarian regimes because they were viewed to be partners against the Soviets. At the same time, the United States allocated less aid to Africa than any other world region.11 By the late 1990s, Washington was beginning to focus on opening up avenues for trade on the African continent. Clinton crafted a foreign policy for Africa based on the idea of America’s right to a leadership role in the world, an idea with a long history, but one that was strengthened by the outcome of the Cold War.12 The content of American leadership consisted of, in large part, opening African markets to private investment. This was a “trade not aid” approach to foreign policy,13 clearly within the bounds of neoliberal economics. In particular, the Clinton administration proposed the Partnership for Economic Growth and Opportunity on Africa Act in 1997 to promote private American investment in Africa. In this context, America’s record during the Cold War became relevant to discussions of future partnerships with Africa.

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Clinton addressed this record during a speech in Uganda noting that “the United States has not always done the right thing by Africa.” In addition to discussing the Cold War however, he took many by surprise when he added, “And of course, going back to the time before we were even a nation, EuropeanAmericans received the fruits of the slave trade. And we were wrong in that, as well.”14 Clinton’s toying with expressions of regret filled newspapers back in the United States with headlines like, “Clinton’s Contrition,”15 and many observers criticized Clinton’s near-apology for the slave trade. By the time Clinton reached Gorée, however, he had moved completely away from the idea of an apology. In a speech delivered at this site, he began, “From Goree and other places, Africa’s sons and daughters were taken through the door of no return, never to see their friends and families again. Those who survived the murderous middle passage emerged from a dark hold to find themselves, yes, American. But it would be a long, long time before their descendants enjoyed the full meaning of that word.” He then continued stating, “We cannot push time backward through the door of no return. We have lived our history,” and he stated, “America’s struggle to overcome slavery and its legacy forms one of the most difficult chapters of that history. Yet, it is also one of the most heroic, a triumph of courage, persistence, and dignity.” 16 In this way, he stressed an ultimate victory for America emerging out of the slave trade. He rejected the idea of the slave trade’s ongoing legacy in American relations with Africa but pledged “to build a new partnership based on friendship and respect.”17 Clinton sought to pivot away from the typical slave-dungeon narrative, which highlighted black suffering, toward a broader slave-trade narrative that stresses an ultimate redemption and could serve as a backdrop for his conversation about America’s post-Cold War positive relationship with Africa. In 2003, President George W. Bush completed a trip to Africa that also included a visit to Gorée. While Clinton reluctantly addressed the slave trade, Bush seemed to relish the opportunity to position slavery as a precursor to the freedom now enjoyed in the nation. In fact, the history of slavery provided a useful talking point for Bush as he could track a movement from unfreedom to freedom in the United States, a movement that, he could then argue, other nations need to follow. Bush began the speech by addressing the slave house in which he stood explicitly. He stated, At this place, liberty and life were stolen and sold. Human beings were delivered and sorted, and weighed, and branded with the marks of commercial enterprises,

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and loaded as cargo on a voyage without return. One of the largest migrations of history was also one of the greatest crimes of history.18

His use of the passive voice is telling. He does not name the perpetrators of the crimes that he enumerates. He does, however, name the slave trade one of the greatest crimes of history. This statement, which provided the perfect soundbite for the media, signaled his intention to provide a full indictment of the slave trade. After a brief description of the Middle Passage, Bush described the fate of enslaved people in the Americas, again using the passive voice: “Those who lived to see land again were displayed, examined, and sold at auctions across nations in the Western Hemisphere.” After this, however, he began the most important part of his speech, namely, his discussion of the corrupted American soul. He stated, For 250 years the captives endured an assault on their culture and their dignity. The spirit of Africans in America did not break. Yet the spirit of their captors was corrupted. Small men took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters. Years of unpunished brutality and bullying and rape produced a dullness and hardness of conscience. Christian men and women became blind to the clearest commands of their faith and added hypocrisy to injustice. A republic founded on equality for all became a prison for millions. And yet in the words of the African proverb, "no fist is big enough to hide the sky." All the generations of oppression under the laws of man could not crush the hope of freedom and defeat the purposes of God.19

In this paragraph, Bush argued that slave owners, who were “Christian men and women,” failed in their Christian duty, adopting a “dullness and hardness of conscience.” Even in his indictment of slave owners, Bush managed a passive voice; their spirit “was corrupted” and they “became blind.” Bush then argues that such a state of affairs could not continue forever. According to him, African Americans, who had themselves become Christian, were inspired by their faith to fight for freedom. He provides quotations by Olaudah Equiano and Phyllis Wheatley in which they invoke God in their calls for freedom. Bush names other African Americans, “Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth, educators named Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, and ministers of the Gospel named Leon Sullivan and Martin Luther King, Jr.,” and then adds white Americans, such as John Quincy Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln to the list of freedom fighters. He argued: These men and women, black and white, burned with a zeal for freedom, and they left behind a different and better nation. Their moral vision caused Americans to

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examine our hearts, to correct our Constitution, and to teach our children the dignity and equality of every person of every race. By a plan known only to Providence, the stolen sons and daughters of Africa helped to awaken the conscience of America. The very people traded into slavery helped to set America free.20

In this way, Bush marked emancipation as a moment in which, not only did enslaved people gain freedom, but also, and more importantly for him, the entire nation was delivered from its sin. At this moment, he stressed America’s ultimate redemption. Bush devoted three sentences to the continuing struggles with American society, but he comes back to the idea of America’s salvation stating, “However long the journey, our destination is set: liberty and justice for all.”21 Through this speech, Bush transformed the history of the slave trade from an example of Western cruelty and immorality to evidence of America’s greatness. Like Clinton, his narrative allowed him to turn away from the past and toward a future partnership with Africa and to argue that America is the rightful leader of the free world. America is now a nation of justice and freedom, and it therefore is a good choice for an economic partner. It is one that will “ensure that the nations of Africa are full partners in the trade and prosperity of the world,” “stand together for peace,” “wage an unrelenting campaign of justice” against terrorists, answer hunger “with human compassion and the tools of human technology,” and join with Africans “in turning the tide against AIDS.” In this way, his discussion of the slave trade served only to “undermine and eclipse present wrongs.”22 Indeed, in the hands of American political leaders, the slavetrade narrative came to support rather than to challenge Western power.

The Slave-Trade Speech as an African Political Tradition At the same time that American presidents began to take on the history of the slave trade, several African leaders were creating a different discourse about the slave trade that focused on Western responsibility and highlighted the negative effects of the trade on the African continent. In 1992, The Organization of African Unity created a committee to pursue reparations for the slave trade that included many of these figures.23 In addition to their voices, Benin’s president Nicéphore Soglo made several bold remarks about the slave trade. In a 1993 speech, he argued that Africa had been “impoverished, emptied of its substance” by the slave trade and that the lands that received them, “now opulent, resist dividing with them the fruits of prosperity.”24 In this way, he critiqued Western

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nations not only for the slave trade but also for their continuing unfair treatment of the African continent. The following year, however, Soglo provided a very different take on the slave trade. In 1994, at the launch of the Slave Route Project in Ouidah, he remarked, “Our complicities in the slave trade are well established, our senseless divisions, our collective mistakes, slavery as an endogenous institution . . . one understands nothing about the underdevelopment and the extreme destitution of sub-Saharan Africa by being silent about these historical plagues.”25 Soglo enumerated the negative effects of the slave trade on the African continent. He also discussed African responsibility, however. In a similar piece also written for the launch, he stressed that recalling the history of the slave trade should not lead to hatred but rather should be done “with a profound sense of the unity of the human race.” He continued, Nor is there anything to be gained by concealing our own responsibilities in the disasters which have plagued and continue to plague us. Our collective complicity in the slave trade is well established, and our absurd divisions, our erring ways, and slavery as an endogenous institution have all been thoroughly explored by historians and anthropologists.”26

In this statement, Soglo recognizes African participation in the slave trade. This history is the foundation for his discussion of contemporary African ills. In arguing for the importance of not concealing this history, he stated that “nor can we ignore the cases of government mismanagement and even the predatory conduct of certain leaders, and that absurd will for power, that blind pursuit of power for power’s sake, which inflicts so much suffering upon our peoples, is a reality that today stares us in the face.”27 He next discussed the recent histories in Rwanda, Liberia, and Somalia, and noted, Such tragedies are, alas, also part of our history, and would preclude our continuing indefinitely to lay upon others blame for our misfortunes, even if we are tempted to do so. The fact nevertheless remains, stubborn and overwhelming, that we understand nothing about the underdevelopment or the extreme destitution of sub-Saharan Africa if we turn a blind eye to the historical scourges it has suffered over four centuries.28

Here, Soglo argues for attention to the long durée of African history. He makes note of four centuries of suffering, but suffering for which Africans themselves are responsible. African participation in the slave trade, in other words, illuminates more recent crimes.

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Soglo concluded by suggesting that the exploration of this history and these connections might change global relationships by leading to “new prospects for South-South and South-North cooperation.”29 Here, Soglo reveals his sense of the possible dividend of discussion of African slave traders, namely new economic partnerships with the West. Indeed, this emergent political discourse about African slave traders would become a framing narrative for discussions about contemporary relationships with the West for some African leaders. Mathieu Kérékou, who had ruled Benin prior to Soglo’s election, was voted back into office in 1996. In addition to calling for national reconciliation, he also argued that Africans and people of African descent in the diaspora should reconcile through a reckoning with the history of the slave trade. In 1999, he launched the Reconciliation and Development Project with this aim. Yoweri Museveni, president of Uganda, became another African leaderturned-spokesperson on slavery. Upon visiting the Ouidah Museum of History in Benin in 1993, he made special note of African complicity in the slave trade, arguing that African rulers gained wealth through their involvement in the trade.30 He elaborated on this point in a 1994 interview. When asked about “ethnic conflict” by Bill Berkeley, a reporter for the Atlantic Monthly, Museveni replied, “What Europeans and Americans call ethnicity in this context is actually backwardness—social and economic backwardness.” He argued that the attitudes of African peasants are parochial. These comments set the stage for his infamous remark quoted by Berkeley: “I have never blamed the whites for colonizing Africa; I have never blamed these whites for taking slaves. If you are stupid, you should be taken a slave.”31 Not only are political opportunists undermining the nation then, so too are their peasant supporters who are, according to Museveni, barely deserving of freedom. Given his belief that such stupidity persists, Museveni offers an economic solution, one that Berkeley calls “a virtual textbook adaptation of the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment program.”32 For this, he received a great deal of support from the White House. In this way, a discussion of African unfreedoms became a segue into talk of economic reform. Museveni would rehearse this argument when asked his opinion as to whether or not Bill Clinton should apologize for the trade two days prior to Clinton’s remarks in Uganda. He responded to this question by stating the following, “African chiefs were the ones waging war on each other and capturing their own people and selling them. If anyone should apologize it should be African chiefs. We still have those traitors here even today.”33

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The slave trade appears to be a history for the postcolonial neoliberal moment. Neoliberal economic policies are built on the idea that the failures of developing nations have internal causes, that these nations are in fact poor performers. This discourse arose at the end of the Cold War with the sharp economic decline of many African nations. In this context, Western nations and lenders began to blame African nations themselves for their failing economies. They blamed African fiscal irresponsibility and prescribed austerity measures in the form of structural adjustment programs designed to reform these nations and bring them in line with the global economy. Within this economic framework, Western nations are absolved of any responsibility for African poverty.34 According to Paul Zeleza, political sociologists have helped to construct a narrative in which greed and corruption have become part of the social fabric of the postcolonial African state, which in turn, provides broader social sanction for neoliberal economic policies. He explains, This “new” Africanist political sociology plays a discursive space clearing function for the resurgent “free-market” capitalism. It is not coincidental that it assumed hegemony in the 1980s, Africa’s “lost decade,” when one country after another succumbed to the dictates of the international financial institutions to undertake ‘free-market’ economic reforms. The narrative of African state failure absolved the international economic system and the international financial institutions of responsibility for generating the structural conditions and context behind Africa’s economic crisis and for devising many of the policies that the African states were now solely being blamed for.35

What is more, this neoliberal interpretation of African culpability was not only applied to postcolonial states; it also was grafted onto the precolonial past. As one scholar has argued, “While the rapacity of global capitalism may be at the origin of the tragedy, Africans’ failure to control their own predatory greed and their own cruelty also led to slavery and subjugation.”36 The popularity of narratives like this one has allowed, as I discuss below, leaders like Ghana’s president Kufuor to rehearse them.

Ghana and the Politics of Memory In March 2007, President Kufuor traveled to England. While there, he gave a speech at Chatham House in London in which he told the audience, “If you study

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the slave trade, you will find that it was incidental to the history of those times. Yes, among the trading partners some were worse than others. But I assure you if you come to Africa, if you come to Ghana, you will see that there were some very local participants in the trade.” He went on to note that not only are European nations guilty; he argued that “some local indigenous groups were also guilty.”37 What might have been simply a statement of fact quickly became politicized. Prime Minister Tony Blair was at that very moment embroiled in a debate over whether or not he should apologize for the slave trade to mark the bicentennial of British abolition. Indeed, it was actually during a press conference that featured Kufuor and Blair side by side that a reporter asked Blair if he would apologize and Blair did so.38 Though he apologized, like other Western leaders, Blair sought to quickly pivot away from the slave trade and the possibility of calls for reparations toward the neoliberal future. What is notable here is that Kufuor helped him to do so. Upon his return to Ghana, Kufuor gave a speech at an event held by the British Council in Ghana to celebrate the bicentennial of abolition in which he argued, according to one reporter, that the “payment of reparations, as was being suggested by others, would be difficult and complex, given the fact that Africans actively participated in the slave trade and, therefore, were partly responsible for the inhuman practice.”39 As I have discussed elsewhere, Kufuor’s invocation of African slave trading and critique of calls for European reparations are significant because he sought to shift blame away from Europeans and, in doing so, to dismiss the claim that Europeans are the historical enemies of African nations.40 He no doubt hoped that his remarks would signal a noncombative stance toward Britain that might increase its goodwill toward Ghana. Indeed, his Chatham House remarks took place within the context of conversations with Britain’s prime minister regarding Ghana’s economic development that ultimately led Tony Blair to pledge £138  million to Ghana. I argue that Kufuor used a “neoliberal calculation”41 in his construction of history in the hopes of gaining a better position for his nation within the global economy. This calculation was that by highlighting African participation in the slave trade and minimizing European culpability, he could curry favor with European nations and thereby garner economic benefits.42 A narrative about Africans taking responsibility for past and present crimes is indeed central to the neoliberal project. This fact became quite clear during Barack Obama’s trip to Ghana. I conclude, therefore, with a brief analysis of this visit.

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Obama in Ghana Slavery was, from the beginning, a specter for the Obama campaign and presidency. Obama’s race and family background forced him to deal with the issues of slavery and freedom long before he made his requisite trip to a slave dungeon as president. In his speech entitled, “A More Perfect Union,” but referred to commonly as his “race speech,” Obama mentioned the American “nation’s original sin of slavery.”43 Under his presidency in 2008, the US House of Representatives passed a bill resolving that it “apologizes to African Americans on behalf of the people of the United States, for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery and Jim Crow” and the following June, the resolution passed the Senate.44 Obama’s take on the slave trade from a site in which slaves were imprisoned was therefore highly anticipated. Obama’s only foray outside of Accra during his visit to Ghana was to Cape Coast Castle. This visit was also one of the few events during the trip in which the entire First Family appeared together. President and Mrs. Obama along with their daughters, Sasha and Malia, and Mrs. Obama’s mother, who lived with the family in the White House, toured the castle together. Obama positioned the visit as more of a family affair than a political moment, as his speech at the castle reflected the fact that slave trade had little role in his foreign policy narrative. Unlike Bush, he did not feel compelled to position the United States as the moral leader of the world, though he maintained a similar commitment to ensuring that it take a leading role in trade in Africa. For these reasons, his remarks at the castle were brief and subdued. Throughout the short speech, Obama placed the slave trade within a larger context of all forms of oppression in the past and present. He began by stating, “It is reminiscent of the trip I took to Buchenwald because it reminds us of the capacity of human beings to commit great evil.” He then spoke of the importance of the experience of visiting the castle for his daughters, for whom he hoped that “one of the things that was imparted to them during this trip is their sense of obligation to fight oppression and cruelty wherever it appears, and that any group of people who are degrading another group of people have to be fought against with whatever tools we have available to us.”45 His focus on oppression “wherever it appears” and on “any group of people” continue the work of rendering the slave trade a generic story of wrongdoing.

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Not until the very last section of his speech does Obama give more specific weight to his visit to the castle and to the history of the slave trade. He ended by stating, And I think, as Americans, and as African Americans, obviously there’s a special sense that on the one hand this place was a place of profound sadness; on the other hand, it is here where the journey of much of the African American experience began. And symbolically, to be able to come back with my family, with Michelle and our children, and see the portal through which the diaspora began, but also to be able to come back here in celebration with the people of Ghana of the extraordinary progress that we’ve made because of the courage of so many, black and white, to abolish slavery and ultimately win civil rights for all people, I think is a source of hope. It reminds us that as bad as history can be, it’s also possible to overcome.46

Here, Obama finally makes mention of the significance of this history for his family as African Americans, to see “the portal through which the diaspora began.” Obama immediately moves on from this special significance and from the somber mood that it inspires to a discussion of “celebration,” “extraordinary progress,” and “hope.” Obama would repeat some of these themes at a speech delivered at his departure ceremony. In it, he said, “I'll never forget the image of my two young daughters, the descendants of Africans and African Americans, walking through those doors of no return, but then walking back those doors of return. It was a remarkable reminder that while the future is unknowable, the winds always blow in the direction of human progress.”47 Here, Obama echoes Bush’s statement that “history moves in the direction of justice.” Despite his brief remarks on the slave trade, the president invoked the neoliberal narrative in a much more direct fashion. During his visit, Obama outlined a “tough love” approach to foreign policy in which African nations will receive US investments only if they can demonstrate good governance. Obama chose Ghana because the White House viewed it as a model of good governance on the African continent. Ghana completed several democratic elections without any major conflicts. Africa’s problems were nonetheless a repeated theme before and during his trip. In an interview with AllAfrica reporters prior to his trip, Obama was asked if problems on the continent represented the failure of US policy or the failure of governance. He responded, I would say that the international community has not always been as strategic as it should have been, but ultimately, I'm a big believer that Africans are

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responsible for Africa. I think part of what’s hampered advancement in Africa is that for many years we’ve made excuses about corruption or poor governance; that this was somehow the consequence of neo-colonialism, or the West has been oppressive, or racism. I’m not a believer in excuses. I’d say I’m probably as knowledgeable about African history as anybody who’s occupied my office. And I can give you chapter and verse on why the colonial maps that were drawn helped to spur on conflict, and the terms of trade that were uneven emerging out of colonialism. And yet the fact is we’re in 2009. The West and the United States has not been responsible for what’s happened to Zimbabwe’s economy over the last 15 or 20 years. It hasn’t been responsible for some of the disastrous policies that we've seen elsewhere in Africa. I think that it’s very important for African leadership to take responsibility and be held accountable.48

Here then, Obama dismantled the argument of US responsibility for African problems. While he only mentions colonialism and not the slave trade, his assertion that “the fact is we’re in 2009” makes clear that, to his mind, the past has little bearing on the Africa of today. Obama repeated this theme during remarks delivered to the Ghanaian Parliament, his major speaking engagement in Ghana. In this speech, he began with a clear statement: “We must start from the simple premise that Africa’s future is up to Africans.” He then placed himself within the context of the narrative of an African past, stating, “I have the blood of Africa within me, and my family’s own story encompasses both the tragedies and triumphs of the larger African story.”49 He discussed his grandfather’s life in Kenya and, in particular, his experience under colonialism. Colonialism comes up in this context as a shared history of his family and the people of Ghana. While in the interview discussed above, he frames his knowledge of colonialism in more academic terms by stating that he can “give chapter and verse” of this history, here, he transforms this history into his personal family narrative. Obama’s family history of colonialism works to tie him to the principally recognized experience of racial oppression in Africa. It is certainly an experience that would resonate in Ghana. Obama explains, My grandfather was a cook for the British in Kenya, and though he was a respected elder in his village, his employers called him “boy” for much of his life. He was on the periphery of Kenya’s liberation struggles, but he was still imprisoned briefly during repressive times. In his life, colonialism wasn’t simply the creation of unnatural borders or unfair terms of trade—it was something experienced personally, day after day, year after year.50

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This narrative could lend itself well to a more radical protest narrative; however, in Obama’s hands, the contemporary relevance of this history was immediately dismissed. He continued, It is easy to point fingers, and to pin the blame for these problems on others. Yes, a colonial map that made little sense bred conflict, and the West has often approached Africa as a patron, rather than a partner. But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants. In my father’s life, it was partly tribalism and patronage in an independent Kenya that for a long stretch derailed his career, and we know that this kind of corruption is a daily fact of life for far too many.51

In this way, Obama constructed a narrative about African immorality and the need for reform that recalled the broader neoliberal logic discussed above. Like many before him, he used history to critique African states and, ultimately, to demand compliance with Western conditions for trade. While historians are tasked with debating in nuanced ways the participation of Africans and Europeans in the slave trade, political leaders have no such mandate. To the extent that they have chosen to address the topic of the slave trade, their comments must be understood then within the context of their political aims. As this chapter has demonstrated, recent American presidents, along with a handful of African leaders, have used the history of the slave trade to strengthen the image of the United States as a moral nation and/or critique the African past. In doing so, they demonstrate their commitment to a neoliberal project in which Western nations are positioned as rightful leaders of morally compromised African states. While other African and African diasporic leaders and intellectuals have used the history of the slave trade to critique Western power and call for reparations, this discourse takes a very different path. In doing so, it demonstrates the ways in which slave sites have become stages for the performance of dominant neoliberal political narratives.

Notes 1 Austen, Ralph, 2001. “The Slave Trade as History and Memory: Confrontations of Slaving Voyage Documents and Communal Traditions.” The William and Mary Quarterly 58(1) (January): 229–44; Araujo, Ana Lucia, 2010. Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press.

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2 See Ebron, Paulla, 1999. “Tourists as Pilgrims: Commercial Fashioning of Transatlantic Politics.” American Ethnologist 26(4) (November), 910–32 for a discussion of diaspora tourism to Gorée Island. 3 Araujo, Public Memory of Slavery. 4 Holsey, Bayo, 2008. Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 5 Wright, Richard, 1954. Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, New York: Harper and Brothers. Quoted in Bruner, E. M., 1996. “Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora.” American Anthropologist, New Series 98(2) (June): 290–304, 292. 6 Quoted in Tillet, Salamisha, 2009. “In the Shadow of the Castle: (Trans) Nationalism, African American Tourism, and Gorée Island.” Research in African Literatures 40(4) (Winter). See this piece for an extended discussion of diasporic discourses about Gorée. 7 See especially Hartman, Saidiya, 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Phillips, Caryl, 2000. The Atlantic Sound. New York: Alfred Knopf. 8 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 2003. Living History, 401. New York: Simon & Schuster. 9 French, Howard, 1998. “Goree Island Journal; The Evil that Was Done Senegal: A Guided Tour.” The New York Times. March 6. 10 The presence of several African Americans leaders who accompanied him on the trip suggested however he would discuss the slave trade in some fashion. These individuals included Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater; Reverend Jesse Jackson, the President’s Special Envoy for the Promotion of Democracy in Africa; Bob Nash, Assistant to the President; Susan Rice, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs; Bob Johnson, President of Black Entertainment Television; and several members of congress including Donald Payne, William Jefferson, Charles Rangel, Maxine Waters. Washington Post, March 25, 1998. 11 Grubbs, Larry, 2009. Secular Missionaries: Americans and African Development in the 1960s, 182. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. 12 See Edwards, Jason A., and Joseph M. Valenzano III, 2007. “Bill Clinton’s ‘New Partnership’ Anecdote: Towards a Post-Cold War Foreign Policy Rhetoric.” Journal of Language and Politics 6(3): 303–25. 13 Alden, Chris, 2000. “From Neglect to ‘Virtual Engagement’: The United States and Its New Paradigm for Africa.” African Affairs 99: 355–71. 14 Clinton, William J., 1998. “Remarks at the Kisowera School in Mukuno, Uganda” Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 34(13)( March 30). 15 Apple Jr., R. W., 1998. “Clinton’s Contrition.” The New York Times April 1. 16 Clinton, William J., 1998. “Remarks at Goree Island, Senegal.” Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 34(14) (April 6). 17 Ibid.

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18 Bush, George W., 2003. “Remarks at Goree Island, Senegal.” Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 39(28) (July 14). 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ralph, Michael, 2007. “‘Crimes of History’: Senegalese Soccer and the Forensics of Slavery.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture & Society July to September 9(3): 213. This piece provides a fuller discussion of Bush’s speech and its reception by Senegalese citizens. 23 See Howard-Hassman, Rhoda E., 2008. Reparations to Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 24 Quoted in Araujo, Public Memory of Slavery, 73. 25 Ibid., 77. 26 Soglo, Nicéphore, “Forward” in Diène, Doudou. 2001. From Chains to Bonds: The Slave Trade Revisited. Oxford: Berghahn, xiv. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., xv. 30 Araujo, Public Memory of Slavery, 76–77. 31 Berkeley, Bill, 1994. “An African Success Story.” The Atlantic 274(3) (September): 22. 32 Ibid., 26. 33 Strobel, Warren P., 1998. “Clinton Nears Slavery Apology; Museveni Says Africans at Fault.” The Washington Times, March 25. 34 Ferguson, James, 2006. Global shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe, 1997. Manufacturing African Studies and Crises. Dakar: Codesria. 35 Zeleza, Manufacturing African Studies and Crises, 127. 36 Mbembe, Achille, 2002. “African Modes of Self-Writing.” Public Culture 14(1): 257. 37 See http://www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page5705 38 www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page11247.asp 39 Daily Graphic March 27, 2007. 40 Holsey, Bayo, 2011. “Owning Up to the Past?: African Slave Traders and the Hazards of Discourse.” Transition 105: 74–87. 41 Ong, Aihwa, 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 42 Ghana also staged a reconciliation with descendants of slaves in the African diaspora through the launch of the Joseph Project during the same year. This project similarly aimed to encourage economic relationships. See Holsey, Bayo, 2010. “Rituel et Mémoire au Ghana: Les Usage Politiques de la Diaspora.” Critique Internationale 47(April–June): 19–36.

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43 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/obama-race-speech-read-th_n_92077. html 44 The House of Representatives and Senate bills, numbered HRES.194.EH and SCON.26.HDS, are available at the Library of Congress’s Thomas webpage: http://thomas.loc.gov/ 45 Obama, Barack H., 2009. “Remarks Following a Tour of Cape Coast Castle in Cape Coast, Ghana” Compilation of Presidential Documents, Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration, July 11. 46 Ibid. 47 Obama, “Remarks Prior to Departure from Accra, Ghana.” Compilation Presidentia Documents, Office of the Federal Register, National Archive and Records Administration, July 11. 48 Obama, Barack H., 2009. “Interview with AllAfrica.com.” Compilation of Presidential Documents, Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration, July 2. 49 Obama, “Remarks to the Ghanaian Parliament in Accra, Ghana.” Compilation Presidentia Documents, Office of the Federal Register, National Archive and Records Administration, July 11. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid.

Afterword Ray A. Kea

A recent review article of Sortir de la grande suit: essai sur l’Afrique decolonisée by Achille Mbembe describes the text as a postcolonial rereading and reconceptualization of the colonization–decolonization binary, which seeks to restore political meaning to the independence of the postcolony and to redefine Africa’s relationship to the world. The task entails writing Africa into the world in non-Hegelian terms and writing the world from African historicity and perspectives. In this regard Africa becomes “a legitimate, living, and expressive place of dwelling in a globalized capitalist world.”1 Proceeding from different methodological and conceptual premises, the chapters in the present volume carry Mbembe’s postcolonial initiative in another direction. They recover forgotten, excluded, or marginalized aspects of Gold Coast/Ghanaian history by writing Africa into the world from a revisionist (decolonized) Gold Coast/Ghanaian historiography and writing the world from the same historiographical standpoint. The aim is to investigate the ambiguous legacies of the Ghanaian present from the vantage point of the Gold Coast/Ghanaian past, on the one hand, and to relate the Ghanaian past and present to world history, on the other.2 The historiographical approach of my discussion places the case studies of the chapters in a larger conceptual framework and with reference to large-scale processes within which the daily experiences of people in their concrete life situations are subsumed (cf. Donkoh; Getz; Holsey; Jenkins; Perbi; Rucker; Runkel; Shumway). Ranging chronologically from the fifteenth century to the present and embracing multiple spatial scales, the chapters pursue their purpose by dramatizing the intersection of particular fundamental themes pertaining to Gold Coast/Ghanaian history and the Gold Coast diaspora (in the Americas and Europe) across definable time spans—precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial. The themes include slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, anti-slavery activism and emancipation in the nineteenth century, and the contingent contradictions and antinomies that inhere in the legacy of enslavement and slavery in present-day Ghana. The volume’s interpretation and treatment of slavery is complex, as the

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chapters wrestle with issues and questions concerning what is general and what is specific to Gold Coast slavery. In the different case studies slavery is profiled as a polyvalent phenomenon with multiple significations: historical, institutional, diasporic, and political (abolition legislation), and as praxis, as a set of interactive relationships, and as legacy. In these different modalities, slavery becomes a definable collective and individual subject of history. In a programmatic statement, the editors, Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz, perceive slavery as “an historical phenomenon and as a root cause of problems facing contemporary Ghana” and their aim is to “open up and facilitate new conversations within Ghana and beyond, in scholarly and nonscholarly circles.” The historical legacy of slavery is affirmed as a source of social dissonance. Emphasizing a global relevance to the volume’s themes, the editors maintain that “the history and legacy of slavery in Ghana and elsewhere should be viewed as a shared inheritance among all inhabitants of the modern world” (Getz and Shumway). The implication is that knowledge of this history and critical engagement with its legacy can contribute to conversations, discussions, and debates in academic and non-academic venues around the world. Historiographically speaking, the statement locates the dynamics of enslavement of the Gold Coast past and the discordant, contentious, and ambivalent social memory of enslavement in the Ghanaian present in the movements of world history. The time span is from the eighteenth-century Gold Coast “grand emporium” and its ports of globalization to the contemporary Ghana nationstate and its world heritage sites of “slave forts” and their doors of no return (Donkoh; Holsey; Ntewusu; Perbi; Shumway).3 Based on my reading of the chapters, I would like to advance the presupposition that relations between gendered slave-subalterns and gendered slaveholders comprised a primary class division in Gold Coast societal formations in the transatlantic slave trade era (especially Getz; Jenkins; Runkel; Shumway) in which different hierarchies of labor and status, appearing in hegemonic definitions of proprietary claims to the social surplus as different forms of capital (material, symbolic, social, etc.), were normative. This normalcy, undergoing substantive structural reworking in colonial and postcolonial contexts, is experienced in the present moment as a specific social memory and a national heritage. The emergence of new cultural landscapes was bound to the collective dynamics of state actors, and/or dominant groups and communities (Donkoh; Holsey; Ntewusu; Perbi). As social spaces of urban organization, the grand emporium and its ports, as one collective infrastructural register, and the slave forts, as another kind of institutional register, were not neutral sites but comprised political and social

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constructs in whose architecture and morphologies and in the discursive fields in which they were talked about represented local, regional, and international political practices at work (cf. Donkoh; Holsey).4 Integral to the history of ports and forts is the history of the Gold Coast diaspora in the circum-Caribbean world, a site of industrialization and regimes of incarceration (settler colonies and their slave plantations) (Donkoh; Rucker), and in the European world where the roles of free and unfree Gold Coasters ranged from menial laborers to Hofmohren (“court Moors”) and university scholars (Donkoh).5 These histories can be written in global/world historical terms, for example, the ancient global Afro-Asian Oikumenic configuration (ca. 500 BCE onward) and the modern Euro-Atlantic world system (fifteenth century CE onward), and with reference to local and regional events (court durée) and the moyenne durée in the spatial and structural contexts of local, regional, and precapitalist systems of material, cultural, and symbolic production.6 The volume’s themes can be interpreted in other ways. Three discursivetheoretical-disciplinary fields hold a particularly prominent, if sometimes contentious, intellectual status in academic circles in Global North metropoles. They are world-systems theory and analysis, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism (postmodernism). Postcolonialism and poststructuralism are two French theoretical projects that problematize the master narratives and models of development of subjects and societies of the Global South, and which privilege a Global North understanding of the world. Dependency theory, it is said, comes from Latin America but world-systems analysis had its origins in Africa” (Terence Hopkins). For “in Africa it was easier to overcome many illusions; from there we could see the centers of the world better” (Giovanni Arrighi).7 Africa provided the “raw material” (experiences) that was to be refined (theorized) in the academies of the Global North. Notwithstanding its African roots, world-systems studies characteristically ignore pre-twentiethcentury Africa, not to mention the themes and topics examined in the present volume. Can Africanist historiography reclaim and reappropriate world-systems theory and analysis for its own purposes? For example, I would venture that a world-systems sociography of “ritual technologies and memory in the Gold Coast diaspora” (Rucker) or of “marriage and slavery and affective readings of courtroom testimony” (Getz) is a feasible enterprise in the sense that it can make connections between collective and individual historical agents, knowledge, public and private spheres, and abstract structures of domination and subordination at different levels of aggregation. Equally viable is a worldsystems-oriented biography of an individual like Kofi Theophilus Opoku or like

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Francis P. Fearon.8 In this case world-systems analysis would serve to explore structural and processual history in its experiential or subjective dimension across different levels of time and space. The salient point is that world-systems theory, based on African experiences, should be reformulated in order to examine the kinds of themes highlighted in this volume. From an African/ Ghanaian perspective could it “open up and facilitate new conversations [about slavery and its legacy] within Ghana and beyond, in scholarly and non-scholarly circles”? With regard to poststructuralism and postcolonialism, a recent work by Dr. Pal Ahluwalia argues that both “schools” of theoretical thought have African colonial roots. Specifically, he connects them to the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury French colonial project in Africa, especially Algeria. The two schools silence or suppress the worldliness of their colonial identity by not acknowledging French colonial Africa as the colonized site that made the projects possible.9 The presumption is that without the colonial African experience—a necessary condition—the two schools would not have emerged and developed in the way that they did. Can poststructuralism be appropriated as a methodological and conceptual strategy for an analysis of “memory, heritage, and the legacy of slavery” (Donkoh) or for a conceptual understanding of “anti-slavery on the Gold Coast before 1874” (Shumway)? What about postcolonial readings of “slave relics in traditional political leadership in Burugu” (Ntewusu) or a postcolonial and poststructural analysis of “the legacy of indigenous slavery in Ghana” (Perbi)? Can these theoretical formulations perform the work of decolonizing and advancing Africanist/Ghanaian historiographical culture by providing methodological insights and conceptual vocabularies? World-systems theory and post colonialism and post structuralism are appropriate for an understanding of British colonialism in the Gold Coast (and Asante). But there are other theoretical approaches. The articulation of the Gold Coast’s noncapitalist systems and an expanding imperial British capitalism marked formative moments in the remaking and/or ruination of institutions, organizations, and socialcultural practices in nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury Gold Coast societies (Fante, Accra, Akuapem, Nzema, etc). The noncapitalist milieu of the Gold Coast (and Greater Asante) was indispensable for British capital accumulation. For Rosa Luxemburg, who seriously studied several different non-Western societies including the Lunda Empire of Central Africa, land, raw materials, or spheres of capitalist investment do not exist: the globe is populated, invigorated, and cultivated by the most diverse societies,

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which are made into “land,” “spheres of capital investment,” and “sales markets” by brute force. Her central thesis is that capitalism constantly requires “noncapitalist strata and countries” in order to expand. She elaborates: “Capital cannot accumulate without the aid of non-capitalist organizations, nor, on the other hand, can it tolerate their continued existence side by side with itself. . . . The decisive fact is that the surplus value cannot be realized by sale either to workers or to capitalists, but only if it is sold to such social organizations whose own mode of production is not capitalistic.” Therefore, imperialism is not a mere political policy on the part of the British government, but rather a social and economic necessity for capitalist reproduction, a reproduction that did not require noncapitalist relations of production.10 British colonialism, sustained by capitalism’s structural logic, made the Gold Coast a “land,” a “sphere of capital investment,” and a space of “sales markets,” and “raw materials.” The colonized Gold Coast is positioned as a periphery (in the world-systems sense of the term) in the world economy. Christian evangelizing and proselytizing and the implementation of a new judicial-legal order affected social and gender relations—in marriage, domesticity, and female status (Getz; Jenkins). The nexus between continuity and discontinuity in the reconfiguration of power is exemplified in the institutions of marriage and slavery (Getz; Jenkins; Shumway; Runkel). Present-day capital investment in Ghana’s raw material and energy resources, as well as world heritage sites, is a legacy of British colonial rule. A more complicated legacy involves capital investment in “slave forts” as world heritage and tourist sites and a political discourse that “iconicizes” the forts, on one side, and a collective and social practice (or organized behaviors) that deprecates and devalorizes slave ancestry, on the other (Donkoh; Holsey; Perbi).11 In the transformative colonizing moment, political, cultural, and social issues concerning slavery and abolition, on the one hand, and the self-conscious ambivalence, inconsistency, uncertainty, and agency of the community of educated elite can be interpreted in terms of structural subordination (Runkel). In this context a world-systems structural biography of members of the Gold Coast elite community, facing mounting tensions between cosmopolitanism and British colonial racism and between the abstract concerns of intellectuals and the complex demands of local political action, would illuminate attitudes and outlooks and their agency at a time of momentous change (Runkel; Shumway). At the level of regional political accumulation (geopolitics), conflicts between the Greater Asante realm and the Fante/Gold Coast/British (1807–1896) can

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be interpreted in part as a manifestation of the contentious interaction of a globalizing Euro-Atlantic world system (industrial capitalism) and a global Afro-Asian world system (tributary–mercantile). At the level of the everyday, the (necessary) project of British industrial capitalism had an ambiguous, rupturing, and contradictory impact (an “internal cost”) on popular experiences and the material and cultural realities of daily existence—family life, marriage relations, female social status, identity, social networks, property regimes, and so on (Getz; Runkel; Shumway).12 In a 2012 conference paper, historian Cathérine Coquery-Vidrovitch describes in an overview the historical centrality of Africa in successive historical globalizations. Her interpretive study is pertinent to the themes of this volume. She writes Africa into the world history as an essential and active component: Africa was necessary to world development and it was a major condition for the making of capitalism. Contrary to Hegelian-oriented sensibilities, Africans were actors and not passive victims, thus contesting world history’s stereotyped way of writing Africa off as irredeemably marginal, isolated, and backward.13 With reference to slavery she makes the point that the plantations of the Americas “were only possible thanks to African manpower.”14 Focusing on political economy, Coquery-Vidrovitch interprets African historicity from a critical non-Hegelian world perspective. Earlier writers have drawn attention to the centrality of African slavery and the transatlantic slave trade in world history and in the world economy. Historian Fernand Braudel, for example, commented that without African labor the European colonization of the Americas would have been impossible.15 According to Sidney Mintz and James Blaut, West Indian sugar plantations were collectively the site of the first industrial revolution and that the enslaved plantation laborers were transformed into the first (industrial) proletariat of the modern era.16 The argument has been made that Atlantic world history is collective in the sense that the masses or social collectives–specifically enslaved Africans and their descendants—are eminent and decisive in its variable history, a history anchored by the rural organization of settler colonies and plantation complexes in the Caribbean and the urban organization of world ports or portals of globalization in Western Africa and maritime Europe.17 Recounting the events and happenings of Gold Coast diaspora experience, Rucker recovers a vibrant intellectual and ideological life and leadership in which the proletarianization of labor involved domination, suffering, and struggle. The slaves’ mode of cognitive mapping an industrial and commodity-producing milieu through ritual technologies, oath-making, and mortuary symbolism—in

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short, a proletariat order of things—supported a radical insurrectionary politics. The slaves—“Coromantees” and “Aminas” appear as the object of (planter) knowledge and the subject of (his/her own) knowledge—were simultaneously, enslaved sovereign and observant activists (to rephrase Foucault). The semantic horizons of the enslaved “laborers’ discourses”, the hermeneutics of their cultural and symbolic imaginaries, and their cognitive insights into the structure of a planter-dominated world were the grammar of an intellectual and social agency whose genealogy is to be found in the conditions of knowledge and the geopolitics that functioned in the deep history (as moyenne durée and as longue durée) of the Gold Coast region. Coquery-Vidrovitch poses a query about Africa’s internal movements and processes as a way of addressing the continent’s world historical centrality: “It may be instructive to (positively) look at the processes by which Africa afforded so [much] wealth and [so many] products without which other continents could not develop.”18 This is a valid query. How was the production, distribution, and circulation of wealth and products—gold, food staples, enslaved bodies, cowries, luxury craft goods, and so on—structured and managed and what organizations, social relations, and processes were involved? From a world-systems perspective there were no “losers,” “winners,” or “victims” with regard to the transatlantic slave trade. There were interacting historical agents and social subjects in varied life situations (Donkoh; Getz; Jenkins; Runkel; Shumway). If Coquery-Vidrovitcvh’s thesis is adopted, can one argue that the historical “weight” of Africa’s centrality in world history is internalized in Ghanaian social memory as a negation and forgetting of slavery and a denigration of ancestry? In a journal article on West African daily life in the era of the transatlantic slave trade, historian Paul Lovejoy provides an overview that complements Coquery-Vidrovitch’s account of African centrality in world history and adds another dimension to an understanding of slavery and its legacy in Ghana and the diaspora by placing eighteenth-century Western Africa in the mainstream of history. He writes: “For the fortunate few in Africa . . . the slave trade led to military success, political power, and commercial gain that enabled a level of prosperity and influence strongly affecting the organization of society and the development of culture in Africa. The towns and cities of western Africa had their palaces and courts, public gardens, prayer grounds, market places, and commercial districts, as well as mosques, shrines, and, even in a few places, churches. At the center of commercial and political power the elite was often literate, at least by the 16th

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century in Muslim towns and by the 18th century at the ports along the Guinea coast and in the courts of the major states in the hinterland interior. Towns and cities were densely linked to the Muslim centers of North Africa and the Middle East, to the European-dominated Atlantic, or to both. . . . Despite the scourge of slavery, the cultural history of western Africa reveals a level of education and a complexity of social interaction that demonstrates that many places were in the mainstream of world history.”19

The political systems and political economy and symbolic organization that brought prosperity and courts, enabled the emergence of an anti-slavery ideology in Fanteland and the status and influence of a nineteenth-century community of educated elite in Accra, Cape Coast, and elsewhere (Jenkins; Runkel; Shumway). The chapters of Donkoh and Holsey contest and subvert the hegemony of world heritage discourse and destabilize iconic representations of world heritage sites as an idealized patrimony. Contesting world heritage hegemony has a genealogy that is traceable to the world Lovejoy describes. This world owed much to the Euro-Atlantic connection —celebrated in world heritage ideology—but it owes considerably more to “indigenous slavery” whose legacy is obscured and is not celebrated anywhere (Perbi). The grand emporium’s political, social, and cultural institutions and their conditions of operation generated different historical trajectories and different historical subjectivities, which stood in opposition to the “fortunate few” and their enduring legacy. A locally composed mid-nineteenth century Christian hymn captures an alienated sensibility that one might associate with a freed convert. “Nothing good is on this earth, therefore let us go: let us turn to heavenward: There then we shall know the Lord of peace: Here afflictions are at hand heaven is our Fatherland; So let us go!” At the beginning of the twentieth century an anonymous social ideology, whose origins are traceable to the early nineteenth century, circulated over a wide area of the Gold Coast Colony and expresses alienation in another way. “Those in authority shall become low; the rich man shall be poor; those who enjoy good and wholesome food shall be hungry, and those who need food and are in want of necessary food shall get enough or more than they need.” The authors of these texts were conscious of their social conditions. Can we conclude that they had experienced enslavement and that slavery was a root cause of problems in the nineteenth century as its legacy is in contemporary Ghana? With this in mind, the editors’ charge to “open up and facilitate new conversations within Ghana and beyond, in scholarly and non-scholarly circles” is a welcomed clarion call.

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Notes 1 Karera, Axelle, 2013. “Writing Africa into the World and Writing the World from Africa: Mbembe’s Politics of Dis-enclosure.” Critical Philosophy of Race 1(2): 228–41. Also Mbembe, Achille, 2015. “Africa in the New Century.” Cityscapes. Re-Thinking Urban Things 7, http://www.cityscapesdigital.net/2015/12/09/africanew-century/. For an archaeologist’s view of African in the world see Stahl, Ann B., 2015. “Circulations Through Worlds Apart: Georgian and Victorian England in an African Mirror.” In François G. Richard (ed.), Materializing Colonial Encounters. 71–94. New York: Springer. 2 Cf. the discussion on the politics of “endogenous and indigenous knowledges” in Africa and decoloniality in Sabelo, J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015, “Why Decoloniality in the 21st Century?,” The Thinker 48: 10–15. 3 For archaeologists’ view of Africa in the world see MacEachern, Scott, 2015. “African Models in Global Histories.” In Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Jeffrey Fleisher (eds.), Theory in Africa, Africa in Theory: Locating Meaning in Archaeology. 19–37. London: Routledge; Stahl, Ann B., 2014. “Africa in the World: (Re) Centering African History through Archaeology.” Journal of Anthropological Research 70: 5–33. 4 For the Gold Coast as a “grand emporium” see Kea, Ray A., 2012. A Cultural and Social History of Ghana from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century. The Gold Coast in the Age of Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 2 vols. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellon Press. 5 Mabe, Jacob Emmanuel, 2007. Wilhelm Anton Amo interkulturell gelesen. Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz. 6 The intention is to capture the historical dynamics of Gold Coast/Ghanaian and Gold Coast diaspora histories within macro- and micro-levels of analysis and over the long duration. At the level of an Afro-Asian world economy or world-system— as a multi-centric historical system—different possibilities have been proposed. Marshall Hodgson posits an Afro-Asian Oikumenic Configuration. Samir Amin postulates an Afro-Asian tributary–mercantile world-system and Enrique Dussel predicates an Asian-African-Mediterranean interregional system. The Gold Coast/Asante (and of course West Africa) would have been part of these global formations. The globalizing Euro-Atlantic mercantile-capitalist world engaged with the Gold Coast, forming with sub-continental West Africa, the western geography of the Afro-Asian-centered world economy, from the fifteenth century onwards. In the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a globalizing industrial capitalism destroyed the noncapitalist Afro-Asian world economy. For a general discussion of noncapitalist modes of production and exchange see Karatani, Kojin, 2014. The Structure of World History. From Modes of Production to Modes

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of Exchange. Translated by Michael K. Bouraghs. Durham and London: Duke University Press; Amin, Samir, 2013. Global History: A View from the South. Dakar: CODESRIA. Hopkins and Arrighi quoted in Derluguian, Georg, 2015. “Spaces, Trajectories, Maps: Towards a World-Systems Biography of Immanuel Wallerstein.” Journal of World-Systems Research 21(2): 454 (448–59). For an example of the kind of world-system biography I have in mind see McQuade, Brendan, 2015. “‘The Road from Mandalay to Wigan is a Long one and the Reasons for taking it aren’t Immediately Clear’: A World-System Biography of George Orwell.” Journal of World-Systems Research 21(2): 314–38. Ahluwalia claims that categories like “otherness,” “difference,” “deconstruction,” “hybridity,” and so on are tied to French post-coloniality. He maintains that the impact of colonial Africa in France is pervasive and its influence can be discerned in the works of diverse theorists—Foucault, Althusser, Cixous, Derrida, Sartre, Lyotard, Leiris, and Bourdieu among others. Ahluwalia, Pal, 2010. Out of Africa: Post-Structuralism’s Colonial Roots. New York: Routledge. In her analysis of the economic expansion of European imperialism, Rosa Luxemburg advanced the (controversial) argument that under-consumption in industrial capitalist countries meant that capitalists had to expand into noncapitalist areas, seeking markets, raw materials, and investment opportunities (particularly new sources of labor) outside of the capitalist economic sphere. “Non-capitalist organizations provide a fertile soil for capitalism, which feeds on the ruins of such organizations: Only the continuous and progressive disintegration of non-capitalist organizations makes accumulation of capital possible.” Van der Linden, Marcel, 2016. “Rosa Luxemburg’s Global Analysis.” Historical Materialism 24(1): 135–59; Hudis, Peter, 2010. “Accumulation, Imperialism, and Pre-Capitalist Formations. Luxemburg and Marx on the non-Western World.” Socialist Studies/Études socialistes 6(2): 75–91; Le Blanc, Paul, 2010. “Rosa Luxembourg and the Global Violence of Capitalism.” In ibid., 160–72. The complex legacy is operative in a global context in which the role of peripheries (the Global South) is to supply the centers (the Global North) with the means of developing without being able to develop themselves. Does this structural imbalance affect the ambiguities and selectivity of social memory concerning slavery and the designation of world heritage sites? For a discussion of Gold Coast cosmopolitanism in this context see BeizuelaGarcia, Esperanza, 2014. “Cosmopolitanism: Why Nineteenth Century Gold Coast Thinkers Matter in the Twenty-First Century.” Ghana Studies 17: 203–21. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Cathérine, 2012. “Rethinking Africa’s Transcontinental Continuities,” unpublished abstract of a paper presented at the international

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Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora conference “Rethinking Africa’s Transcontinental Continuities in Pre- and Protohistory,” African Studies Center, Leiden University, Leiden, 12–13 April 2012, http://www.shikanda.net/Rethinking_history_conference/rethinki.htm. Ibid. In 1847 Karl Marx relates that without North America there would be no modern industrial civilization and without slavery there would be no North America. Lawrence, Ken, 1977. “Karl Marx on American Slavery.” Theoretical Review 1(1): 1–16. For the social-historical trajectory of enslaved African labor in the USA see Wacquant, Loïc, 2002. “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration.” New Left Review 13: 41–60. Braudel, Fernand 1979, The Perspective of the World. Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, vol. 3. Translated by Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 997—98; Keita, Maghan, 2002. “Africa and the Construction of a Grand Narrative in World History.” In Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchtey (eds.), Across Cultural Borders. Historiography in Global Perspective. 285–308. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Blaut, James, 1993. The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: Guilford Press, 191-98, 201-06; Mintz, Sidney, 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books, chapter two. Unlike slaves on the Gold Coast who provided services and produced surpluses, chattel slaves on Caribbean sugar plantations produced surplus value (rent and profit coincide), that is, their labor adds value to capital. Weiss, Holger, ed. 2016. Ports of Globalization, Places of Creolization. Nordic Possession in the Atlantic World during the Era of the Slave Trade. Leiden and Boston: Brill; Yerxa, Donald A., ed. 2008. The History of Africa and the Atlantic World. Historians in Conversation. Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press; Santiago-Valles, Kelvin. 2005. “World-Historical Ties Among ‘Spontaneous’ Slave Rebellions in the Atlantic.” Review. Fernand Braudel Center XXVIII: 1, 51–83. See note 13. In addition to its energy and mineral resources, recent studies of illicit financial flows suggest that under conditions of the current neoliberal phase of globalization Africa (including Ghana), fully integrated into the global system, is a net creditor and net exporter of capital vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Sylla, Ndongo Samba, 2014. “From a Marginalized to an Emerging Africa? A Critical Analysis.” Review of African Political Economy 41: S1, S7–25. Lovejoy, Paul, 1997. “Daily Life in Western Africa during the Era of the ‘Slave Route’.” Diogenes 45: 3, 1–19. From my conceptual purview the Gold Coast and Greater Asante were sites of interaction between the Euro-Atlantic mercantile capitalist world-system and the Asian-African-Mediterranean interregional system.

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Index abirempon 33, 37 abusua 114, 167 abolition. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 British and western forms 62, 93, 110, 85, 156–7, 230 non-western forms 12, 63, 67, 85–6, 93–4, 144–6, 157, 162–3 of slave trade 3, 88, 90, 91 of slavery 3–8, 13, 89–90, 116, 156, 159–60, 202, 217, 242 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (of 1807) 7, 8, 38. See also abolition Aborigines Protection Society/Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society 160–2, 171 Accra. See also Christiansborg Castle archives 47 colonial 11, 114, 119, 123 n21, 134, 139, 160–3, 165–6 contemporary 51, 204, 205, 210–12, 216, 231 precolonial 50, 93, 156, 241, 245 Ada 50, 139 Adukrom 129–30 African American 3, 71, 90, 94, 186, 190–2, 197, 222, 225, 231–2 African diaspora 1–3, 9, 12, 18 n.26, 86, 87, 97, 186–95 African Studies Association 2 African Times 158 Aggrey, King Joseph 96–7 Akan culture 9, 32, 64, 75, 77, 88, 113, 114, 117, 134, 167, 205 language 6, 62, 63, 66, 67, 123 n21, 207 people 12, 111, 113 Akuapem 118, 129, 138, 140, 241 Akwamu 35, 191 Akyem Abuakwa 129, 133, 213, 216 alcohol 161, 184, 191

Anomabo 33, 88, 90, 192 Antigua 32, 62–6, 68, 72–4, 76 anti-slavery 11, 14, 85–98, 112, 128, 156, 238, 241, 245 laws 110, 118–20 movement in Britain 85, 147, 149 asafo 34, 77, 204 Asante colonial 147, 202, 241–2 invasion of Fanteland (1807– 1816) 86–8, 91–2 people 1, 37, 131, 184, 191 precolonial kingdom 7, 10–11, 33–7, 87, 91–3, 95–6, 116, 127, 130 Region 196, 204, 210 Sagrenti war of (1873–1874) 14, 96, 110, 116–17 slaves from 35–8, 93, 147, 158 Asante Mampong/Asante Mamponghene 206–7 Awoye 139–41 Babatu (slave raider) 48, 50, 52, 53 Bagao (slave raider) 46, 48, 52, 53 bayi/obayifo 66–70, 77. See also obeah Bannerman, Edmund 159, 160, 164–6, 168–70 Barbados 31, 68, 69, 72, 74 Basel Mission 75, 93, 118, 126, 127, 129, 130, 135, 137–48 Beposo 207–8 Bonsu, Asantehene Osei 35, 91–2 Brazil 31, 32, 70, 92, 190 Brew, James Hutton 158–60 Brew, Richard 90 Brew, Sam Kanto 90, 91, 93 Brew, Samuel Collins 93 Britain. See also Abolition of the Slave Trade Act abolitionism 11, 85, 94, 97, 129, 146, 169, 194 Africans travel to 88, 90, 92–4

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capitalism 242 colonial rule in Ghana 11, 56, 93, 96, 97 Company of Merchants 90 laws against slavery 11, 111–14, 130, 161 participation in slave trade 31, 33 relationship with Ghana 230 Brong Ahafo 203–5, 210, 211, 214, 216 Bu Naba 46, 47, 49, 52–8 Burugu 46–57, 241 Bush, President George W. 224–6, 231, 232 Caboceer, Cudjo (Birempong Kodwo) 33 Cape Coast (Oguaa) 75, 88, 93–7, 111, 158, 168, 204, 215, 245 Cape Coast Castle 12, 32, 33, 189, 194, 219–21, 231 colonial courts 117 slave trade from 32–3, 36, 220 capitalism 120, 229, 241–3 Casely Hayford, Joseph Ephraim 159, 170 chieftancy/chieftainship 5–6, 46, 52, 55, 148, 202, 203–6, 209 Christianity 37, 64, 70, 87, 89, 90, 92–4, 225, 245 in the Gold Coast Colony 128, 130–4, 139–43, 146, 149, 158, missions and missionaries 87, 91–5, 97, 118, 129–31, 142–4, 158, 242 Christiansborg Castle 32, 75, 167 Clinton, US President William (Bill) 223–4, 226 Clinton, Hillary 222, 223 Colonialism 110, 116, 118, 120, 137, 233, 241–2 and slavery 11, 167–8, 186, 193 “Coromantee” 62–80, 244 courts British Gold Coast Colony 8, 11, 13–14, 109–12, 116–20, 137, 156, 161–2, 240 Caribbean colonies 63, 65, 74, 78 Ghanaian 202–17 traditional 35, 58, 96, 129, 140, 146, 244–5 Cuba 32, 38, 70, 92, 188

Dagomba 36, 46, 47, 49, 56, 57 Denkyira 35, 117, 118 Denmark/Danish 31, 32, 37, 62, 65, 68, 80, 139, 196–7 Danish St. Croix 62, 63, 64 diaspora 5, 10, 13, 14, 29, 186–7, 189, 228, 232. See also African diaspora, Akan Gold Coast diaspora 62, 64–9, 76–7, 238, 240, 243 tourism 219, 220 domestic slavery 4, 5, 10, 47, 90, 92, 110, 168–9. See also slavery, slave holding donko. See slave Douglass, Frederick 85, 87, 225 Du Bois, W. E. B. 71–2, 76, 77, 225 Dutch. See Netherlands Dutch West Indies Company 33, 35, 75. See also Netherlands Elmina (Edina) 32, 33, 35, 197 Elmina Castle 32, 33, 189, 219, 220, 221 emancipation 3, 8–11, 109–15, 126, 129, 133–7, 144–8, 156–70, 226 Ewe 113, 139 family

5, 48, 89, 93, 95, 107–8, 110–17, 126, 142–6, 148–9, 165–8, 203–9, 211, 243. See also kinship, wife/wives Obama 231–3 slaves as members of 55, 107, 111, 126, 131, 135, 138–40, 145–6, 203, 213–17 slaves’ separation from 6, 11, 72, 140, 168, 193, 223 Fante 13, 33, 36–8, 85–98 Fante Confederacy 86, 94–7 Fearon, Francis P. 156–71, 241 Frafra 57 Freeman, Thomas Birch 94 Ga 63, 113 gender 9, 217, 239, 242. See also marriage, women, wives gold 31–3, 35, 37, 49, 55, 92, 93, 137, 184, 185, 244 Gonja 36, 46, 48, 49, 56, 57

Index Great Britain. See Britain Gwollu 49, 50, 53 Hector, Sam (Quaw) 62–6, 72 heritage 50, 181, 182–96, 221, 239, 242 definition 182–3 of the slave trade 12, 187–93, 195 of slavery 14, 187–93 tourism 1, 12, 242 Horton, James Africanus Beale 95–7, 168 Islam. See muslim Jamaica 31, 68, 71–4, 76, 78, 80, 96 Karikari, Asantehene Kofi 116 kinship 4, 12, 112, 135, 144. See also family, wife/wives Konkomba 46, 56, 57 Koranteng, Simeon 133 Kufuor, President John 14, 220, 229–30 Kukuruntumi 118 land

46, 53, 80, 143, 185, 192, 202, 209–12, 217, 241–2 Lovejoy, Paul 7, 244, 245 Mamfe 129–32, 145 Mamprugu (Mamprusi) 46–9, 51–8 markets 91, 145, 220, 244 international 29, 38, 92, 219, 223, 242 slave (in Ghana) 33–7, 49, 50–3, 98,128, 195–6, 207 Marley, Bob and Rita 190 maroon 78, 79 marriage 54, 55, 107–20, 131, 140, 161, 205, 215, 240, 242–3 memory 1, 9, 65, 132, 139, 145, 186–7, 197, 239–41, 244 as history or heritage 181, 183 Mensah, Abena 116–17 military/militarize 6, 54, 64, 66, 74, 77, 78, 87, 95, 184–5, 204. See also rebellion, war British 94, 96, 110 response to transatlantic slave trade 11, 29, 34–7, 91, 244 Moo-Mansie 206

263

Muséveni, Ugandan President Yowéri 228 Muslim 6, 127, 245 Nairobi Conference on “Slavery in Africa: Past, Heritage, Present” 2, 10 Nananom Mpow 11, 37 Nalerigu 51–4 Netherlands/Dutch 31–3, 35, 37, 58, 89, 185, 190, 197, 220–1. See also Dutch West Indies Company Dutch Guianas 32, 68, 78–9 New York City 80 newspapers 158–61, 163, 165–6, 168, 202, 206–9, 224 Nnokosuo (slave’s river) 195–6 nnɔnkofoɔ. See slave oath 63–7, 73–7, 205, 243 Obama, US President Barack 220, 230–4 Obama, Michelle 193 obeah 63, 66–74, 76–7. See also bayi Opo, Rosine 140–1 Opoku (King of Asante) 60 n16, Opoku, (Kofi) Theophilus 14, 118, 127–36, 142–3, 148, 240 oracle 64, 66, 68, 69, 73, 76. See also shrine pawn/pawning 5, 6, 8, 109–10, 112, 113, 120, 142–4 Penyi (Volta Region) 204–5 Perbi, Akosua Adoma 1, 5, 10, 12, 14, 34 Portugal/Portuguese 31–4, 185, 190, 221 postcolonial 56, 229, 238–41 Quaque, Philip

90–1

race 4, 87, 90, 93, 94–8, 184–6, 226, 231 racism/antiracism 9, 86, 133, 168–70, 188, 191, 193, 222–3, 233, 242 Rattray, R. S. 113 rebellion 57, 58, 62, 64–5, 67–8, 72–3, 77, 80, 96. See also military, war relics 46–8, 50–2, 54–5, 57, 241 Reindorf, Carl 75, 139 religion 48, 71, 76, 134, 184. See also Christianity, Muslim, ritual, shrine reparations 194, 223, 226, 230, 234

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resistance 13, 47, 50, 67, 77, 80, 94, 96. See also rebellion ritual 54, 57, 62–3, 65–77, 114, 117, 182, 195, 240, 243 St. Croix 32, 62, 63–6, 80 Saint-Domingue/Haiti 32, 70, 89 Samori (Samori Touré) 48, 50, 52–3 Sakana (Upper West Region) 50–1 Salaga 49, 50, 52, 53, 127–8, 134, 160, 195, 207 Sarbah, John Mensah 4, 159, 170, 212–13 Secundi (Coromantee rebel) 63–4, 74 Sekondi 207, 215 shrine 11, 36, 37, 51, 68, 69, 244. See also oracle Sierra Leone 79, 86, 88, 89–90, 93, 95–7, 166–9 slave/slavery/slaving donko (Akan word meaning slave) 6, 113, 133, 207 gender and marriage 54–5, 107–20, 239 inheritance 212–15 legacy of 10–13, 202–16, 239 Suriname 32, 68, 78–80 Tindana/tendana (earth priest) 53, 210 Tongnaab 11, 36 tourism 1, 12, 47, 190, 191, 195–7, 219–22, 242 transatlantic slave trade 7, 8, 10–14, 29–38, 49, 87–91, 136, 148, 181–97, 238–44. See also abolition and northern Ghana 12, 36, 46–58

UNESCO 182, 220, 221 Slave Trade Route Project 195, 220 violence 6, 11, 35–6, 65, 74–5, 128, 135–7, 146, 184, 206. See also military, rebellion, war war

6, 35–8, 46, 49, 53–5, 63–4, 69, 71–9, 228. See also military, rebellion Anglo-Asante 91, 96, 110, 116, 117 captives 6, 34, 35, 113 Gyaman 210 Sagrenti 14, 96, 110, 116, 117 Seven Years 89 Yaa Asantewaa 55 Wassa Fiase 117, 118 Wesleyan (Methodist) Missionary Society 90 West African Herald 158 Western Echo 159–60 Winneba 114, 204 witchcraft 66–8, 72, 131–2 wife/wives 8, 14, 52, 55, 65, 107–20, 127, 131–3, 140, 208. See also family, kinship women 11, 14, 54, 108–20, 131, 132, 138, 141, 145, 168, 189 midwives 68 world-systems theory 240–1 Yahaya, Prince 52–3, 55 Yamfo (Brong Ahafo Region) 205