Identity, Spirit and Freedom in the Atlantic World

The Gold Coast and the African Diaspora

Robert Hanserd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351591775
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire afro-américaine

This book applies oral, archival and other interdisciplinary evidence from West Africa and the Americas to analyses of new world Maroons, slaves and free blacks, examining a "Gold Coast" entrepot of Akan, Ga, Guan and other peoples in an Atlantic era of non-linear, mutable intersection of contested history and culture.

Combining extant evidence with newer interdisciplinary insights to reconsider under-recognized histories and actors, Identity, Spirit and Freedom in the Atlantic World explores West African cosmologies, regional statecraft and socio-cultural practice, and the way they contributed to Atlantic ideas of freedom, identity and spirituality. Archival researches of British, Dutch and Danish Atlantic thoroughfares bring to light histories of royals, priests and others remade as captive laborers, Maroons and free blacks. Looking at Akwamu's overtaking of Great Accra, Jamaica's Maroon Wars, the 1712 Rebellion in New York and many other examples, this book explores the evolution of identity and spirituality in the diaspora of the Gold Coast and the Atlantic world.

Identity, Spirit and Freedom in the Atlantic World will be of interest to scholars and students of African studies, the African diaspora, cultural studies and Atlantic and American history.

1 Introduction

Freedom is a relative term. Kyerepon-Guan oral traditions recalled Ɔkᴐmfo Anokye, the famed spirit priest, held off Akwamu Awarufram armies known as the “masters of firepower” intent on destruction of his village Awukugua and the capture and sale of the residents of Kyerepon Amannuonum to Europeans at the coast. What perceptions of freedom are expressible in this account? Ideations of liberty influenced the name Akua-pem, a mix of Akan, Guan, Ga and Adangbe and other groups in the eastern region referred to as the Gold Coast. These groups initiated the Concord at Abotakyi and participated in the Nyanoase War of 1729–1730 that reorganized the eastern Gold Coast interior under an Akyem stool in 1733. In the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, what was freedom to Grandy Nanny and her Windward Maroons, who deployed elements of Gold Coast identities and spiritualities for ambuscade and to aim bullets and flaming projectiles at English militias, free black and slave black-shots intent on their capture and enslavement? Kojo and his Leeward Maroons in the Cockpit Country fought British colonists for a treaty that secured their autonomy but obliged Maroons to capture fugitive slaves, their former allies. What was its value to Koromantee and “Mina” American-made Gold Coast and Akan identities, in the colony of New York in 1712 and 1741, where slaves and free blacks from varying West and Central African cultural centers along with whites enacted conspiracy and real resistance to slavery via Akan and other African forms of spirituality? How or to what extent did Gold Coast diasporas influence Maroons, free blacks and slaves and their struggles for liberty in North America and the Caribbean prior to and during the Afro-Atlantic age of Revolutions and Emancipation?

This book investigates freedom, spirituality and identity in West African Akan, Guan, Ga, Adangbe and other late seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century culture and history. Maroons, slaves and free blacks articulated elements of these West African beliefs and practices in Jamaica, New York and other Atlantic thoroughfares. Within chronological and cultural parameters of a Gold Coast diaspora, African lifeways converged with Enlightenment philosophies of freedom and religious view on liberty. This historicity shaped perceptions of personhood and ideations of liberty, cosmology and identity in Atlantic Worlds. Many researchers downplayed the African cultural transfer to the Americas in this process. This book uses West African culture and history as a lens to consider African and Afro-Atlantic perceptions on freedom, identity and spirituality. The manuscript includes oral, archival and other interdisciplinary evidence from West Africa and the Americas in its analysis of new world Maroons, slaves and free blacks. It highlights a “Gold Coast” entrepot of Akan, Ga, Guan and other peoples in an era of Atlantic cultural transfer. West African cosmologies, regional statecraft and socio-cultural practice were eviscerated and reinvented in Atlantic ideations of freedom, identity and spirituality.

The manuscript looks to myth and history for meanings of priests, cosmology and ancestry in Akan, Guan and Ga and Adangbe ontologies. Varyingly named by the aforementioned African peoples, priests propagated belief in coastal port towns and interior states, from sacred shrines and during public festivals and holy days. In some instances, they defined freedom by offering protection to runaway slaves through the power of their shrine or through consecration of oath. Thus, spirit power celebrated life, contested and complimented political authority but also sanctified war and captivity for local and trans-Atlantic human commodification. How did intersections of spirit practice amid trans-Atlantic exchange engender Maroon, slave and free-black reformations of Gold Coast beliefs in reactions to enslavement in American environs? Cultural re-inventiveness and non-African adaptations to American slavery and freedom pursuits were significant, as this book exhibits. However, identities and aspirations of many Maroons, slaves and free blacks replicated African and Afro-Atlantic adaptabilities. The book reflects on lives, myths and social practice and finishes by examining seeds of “double consciousness” in reflecting on West African cognitions in American contexts. The following paragraphs consider cognates of Atlantic history and freedom, identity and spirit as phenomena informed by African culture and history, experiences of slavery and Enlightenment ideations.

Atlantic history is a “deeply embedded part of early modern history peculiarly relevant for understanding the present” (see endnote 1). This definition manifested as geographically specific and, in some interpretations, highly politicized in its rejection of prior imperialist histories and endorsement of an “Atlantic highway” between the United States and Western Europe at the end of World War II according to Bailyn. Gilroy, too, built histories of an Atlantic into a paradigm of meaning for people of African descent. Gilroy’s Black Atlantic is “rhizomorphic and fractal,” manifest through “hidden expressions, both residual and emergent, that attempt to be global or outer-national in nature.” At best, emphasis on national instead of outer-national African identities elucidated expressions of black citizenship, anti-slavery and counter-hegemonic class struggle. At worst, it sustained an American historicism of ethnic absolutism, scientific reason and racial domination on the one hand and African-American essentialism, cultural insiderism and myopic ideas of racial authenticity on the other. The Black Atlantic was the end result of African cultural influences in the Atlantic world, a construct that seeded larger Atlantic transformations amongst Europeans, Native Americans and Africans. Discussions of an Afro-Atlantic presented here consider African precursors to a “Black Atlantic.” Are researchers of a Black Atlantic and its African foundations similarly political in counters to Eurocentric ethnic absolutism, scientific reason and racial domination? How do Black American heritages of Africa articulate West and Central African culture and history?

Myth and history help recover foundational perceptions of an Afro-Atlantic, at least conceptually. In 1324, Ibn Fadl al-Umari recorded a conversation between his informant Ibn Amir Hajjib and Mansu Musa, king of the Mali Empire. The gold trade that made his Bilal al Sudan state recognizable throughout western Europe, Africa and Asia was not the topic of notation. It was the voyage of the kings’ predecessor Mansa Muhammed to “attain the limits of the Circumambient (Atlantic) ocean” (see endnote 1). Filled with gold, water and provisions, the fleet of ships “disappeared” except for one vessel whose captain returned and informed the king. Mansa Musa attained “imperial power” from Mansa Muhammed who “departed with his companions on the Ocean; we never saw him again thereafter.” Ronald Davis’s narrative offers evidence on the historicity of this account which includes a criticism of more diffusionist and idealized researches of pre-Columbian African contact. Certainly, aboriginal Americans had their own viewpoints on Africans who arrived with Spanish conquistadors. The modern-day republic of Ghana idealized its affiliation to the ancient Sudanic kingdom of the same name, and historical evidences suggest ethnic and cultural interactions of the southern Akans with the Mande, Mossi and other groups. This is not an argument for historical and cultural correlation or continuity between the Sudanic and forest groups. However, a pre-colonial African cognition of an Atlantic Oceanic thoroughfare unknown and explorable seems relevant.

Henry Lewis Gates documented another node of African acuity of Atlantic terroir, exchange and adaptation to slavery and colonialism evoked through spirit, myth and belief. Using the poetry of Teofilo Radillo, he contextualizes the jigue, a trickster topos, as a canonical west African spiritual form converging with “European Hispanic culture,” a monkey reborn as a jigue. The monkey drowned in Africa chasing after the nganga “forever floating over the waves of water.” Gates’ interpreted nganga as KiKongo priest or priestess or an interpretive device. Extremely dark in color and of short stature, the “jigue was born in Oriente … from the waters … By the edge of the lagoon while the children bathe … A dark jigue is watching with a great length of hair … His teeth are pointed and his intentions are sharp. He glared at me with what … I could not tell, may have been eyes of live coals”.¹ This myth represented an Afro-Atlantic ontology “muzzled to the shores.” The inductee who sought belief and praxis emerged unbroken from traumatic Atlantic crossings, “survived, dreams intact but the dreams are muzzled to the shores.” The water functioned hermeneutically and the middle passage and monkey not unlike Anansi the spider who became “Aunt Nancy” transformed language, defined the figurative as opposed to literal and became an “all metaphor, all ambiguous oracle” to assuage meaning-relevant to but not contingent upon Atlantic slavery and colonialism.

W.E.B. Dubois and his scientific rationalism of the early twentieth century encapsulated Afro-Atlantic myth, spirit and identity in the “mission” of the black man relative to Hegelian denunciations of African history and culture and nascent civil rights of an American Nadir. In Souls of Black Folk (1903), Dubois wrote about the challenge of African-American identity: “In those somber forests of his strivings, his own soul before him, he saw himself, darkly as through a veil” (see endnote 1). In this place, the “Atlantic African” saw flits of Ethiopia and the Egyptian Sphinx as falling stars of a history that died before the “world rightly gauged their brightness.” He also sought to define himself within the context of double consciousness: “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” Enlightenment scholars promoted the idea of a self-sufficient human mind, individualism with natural rights that governments should not violate and the construction of a society of reform based on rational themes. Early on, Thomas Hobbes specified freedom as an exchange between “individual proprietors.” Their freedom consisted of their “capacity to dispose of their possessions and powers and receive an equivalent value in return.” A reciprocal relationship was established whereby “self-possessed individuals” autonomous from the will of others entered voluntarily into a relationship for ones’ own self-interest. To John Locke, liberty or freedom is the power to act on our volition, whatever it may be, without any external compulsion or restraint (see endnote 1).

Reason, according to Herder – either “instinct” or learned – form the basis for freedom. Slaves “strive after liberty” but their minds are “not yet ripened into reason” only driven by “necessity.”² Echoing scholarly viewpoints of the era, he pronounced all people “have the capacity of becoming negroes,” but the same cannot be said for reason and freedom. In an “Age of Revolutions and Emancipation,” anti-slavery advocates in contemporary academic circles debated whether or not people of African descent actually possessed the intellectual capacity for freedom. Thomas Jefferson struggled with this very question, arguing for the emigration black Americans to Africa because their “faculty is a powerful obstacle to emancipation.” Diderot confirmed this prevailing belief, writing in 1780 that to Africans “government is everywhere bizarre, despotic, and totally dependent on the passions and whims of the sovereign.” Herder stressed the Senegal river as a breakwater for the “negro” race and acknowledged Europe viewed nations of Africa as “too tyrannical” using the Jaga “a mixed predatory people” and their “artificial nation” to validate his claim. Further, climate “forcibly discriminates the negro race in Africa.” These Afro-phobic and partial philosophies for racial inferiority and Africa as an anathema to freedom reflected emerging biological, environmental and sociological sciences that supplanted antiquated legacies of the Hamitic curse and other religious-based classifications of idolatry and/or salvation that affiliated Africa and her diasporas to barbarism, enslavement and brutality (see endnote 2).

Slavery and realties that African merchants partnered with Europeans in transactions of human cargo represented an under-recognized historical reality. However, it is often interpreted as “Africans sold other Africans into slavery”, a problematic Euro-American rationalization of capture and enslavement.³ This justification downplayed Portuguese efforts to import captive labor from Bight of Benin region into the Gold Coast or a papal bull in late fifteenth century to reduce “persons to perpetual slavery.” African and European traders viewed themselves as economically focused, equitable and “noble traders.” It suggested Dutch, Danish and English “fair” dealing in human trade minimally affected local culture, socio-political systems and forms of servitude. Linkages of Africa to slavery downplayed European mid-seventeenth century weapons trade and increasingly stable American plantations that coincided with rising values of human commodities. It also negated regional exchanges of gold prior to weapons and humans that were instrumental in European and Atlantic economies. Associations of Africa and slavery silenced shrewd African merchants who maintained monopolies over production and distribution of this valuable mineral.

Konadu’s short survey on trans-Atlantic Africa sets parameters for discussions of silenced “African voices” amid human trading as opposed to abstract analyses of “ ‘slave prices’ and trade volume … non-human abstract data to speak and thus silence enslaved Africans once more” (see endnote 3). A technological research tool such as the trans-Atlantic database is the outcome of prior “silencing” statistical works. Slave or “freedom narratives,” local oral histories and interdisciplinary approaches provide viable insights into processes of African “rupture, displacement, and eventual estrangement from natal family, community and from a cultural homeland.” Thus, database evidence is most viable when used in concert with oral, archeological and archival resources if the goal is to further elucidate African and Afro-Atlantic historical viewpoints. This “eclectic approach” encourages an “overall survey of data available to other disciplines” but highlights selectivity in application. Historical study to arrive at “practical conclusions” and “contributions to discipline” is an important approach for understandings of African and Afro-Atlantic history and culture. Freedom odehye (Akan) translated literally to “freeman” or free person and fawohodie (Akan) or heyeli (Ga) as independence or liberty. In many ways, the liminal nature of freedom in Afro-Atlantic cognitions of liberty reflected Apters’ reading of Mudimbe’s Invention of Africa and “gnosis” – both sacred “esoteric” knowledge and epistemological ethnocentric “trope.”

Names and labels are elements of the identities reviewed throughout this text. “Slave Coast,” for instance, made slavery and territory synonymous since the sixteenth century. It classified culture and history of Gbe-speaking Fon and Hula as well as Ewe and other regional peoples culture and history. It also validated captivity and enslavement and aggressive civilizing missions of the latter nineteenth century. For the Akan, Guan, Ga, Adangbe, Ewe and other peoples of the Gold Coast, the moniker “Gold Coast” characterized the prized commodity traded there since the fifteenth century. Local merchants and their culture and history were often viewed by Europeans as an inhibitor to gold’s successful export. The Dutch used “Diefachtich volck,” meaning predatory and thievish people, to describe Akwamu sika den who monopolized regional gold trading but also illicitly sold away their own citizenry.

The sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Gold Coast reflected what Ray Kea described as an apogee of “urbanization” and “unprecedented expansion and differentiation of commodity … and market trade” but also “individuals” and “collective groups” who “needed knowledge, skills and self-awareness to live in it.” Of this process, Ivor Wilks notes

The fusion in the forest zone of different traditions into a distinct and fairly homogenous southern Akan culture … made it a particularly vigorous one, and many of its features were borrowed by the predominantly patrilineal Ewe, Ga, Adangbe, and Guan-speaking people.

(see endnote 3)

He understood “Gold Coast” as a colonial and trans-Atlantic designator preferring Ghana or “land of gold” to specify the region. The use of “Gold Coast” first asserted by outsiders is employed here as an indigenous identifier of local regional history and culture continuously redefined in terms of meaning and history.

Atlantic expressions such as Koromantee or Mina “imagined” and only partially specified culture and history of those who actually resided and traded in the area around Fort Kromanti. Similar issues arise for other regional African identities (Mina as a moniker for Portuguese and later Dutch Elmina Castle) perhaps more closely affiliated to trans-Atlantic exchange than local culture and history, at least in name. Eighteenth-century researcher Edward Long specified “Fantin, Akim, Ashantee … and… . others commonly called Koromantins originated from the Gold Coast.” He correlated Gold Coast imports and “Koromantin” identity to Jamaican and British Caribbean environs, despite the pro-slavery denunciations of African culture and history in his work. Database, archeological and recently collected oral evidence substantiated his assertion. Many but certainly not all captives who exited West Africa from “Gold Coast” coastal seaports originated from the region (an assumption substantiated in oral traditions, early European accounts, archeological and demographic evidence-the trans-Atlantic database). Thus, broader Afro-Atlantic Gold Coast identities had real meaning in growing urban colonies on the mainland such as New York and interior karst rock landscapes of Jamaica (see endnote 3).

How are the validity of Ghanaian history, early ambiguities-racialization in the historical record and interdisciplinary evidence related to this centering of “Africa?” The question of what is history and who is making it is an important one in the context of the Gold Coast and Atlantic world. The second chapter addresses these theoretical inquiries. Additionally, the chapter investigates oral traditions associated with the life of Kwame Agyei Frempong from his birth in Awukugua to fame as diviner, Ɔkᴐmfo Anokye. Anokye’s elusiveness in contemporary histories are juxtaposed with his ubiquity in later nineteenth-century remembrances amid increased European colonial insurgences. Awukugua (Guan) and Agona (Asante) Anokye oral traditions highlight local history, regional cosmologies and their connectivity to priests’ authority, evolving political culture and parameters of freedom and slavery. Three elements of priestly power, akwantu, odeyhe opontumi and akoma, reflect concepts of freedom, identity and spirituality considered in this work. Evidence includes author-collected oral and field research on the life of Ɔkᴐmfo Anokye, historiographical literature and archival study.

Chapter 3 investigates narratives that Anokye priest engendered magic to protect Awukugua, a legend that raised questions related to intersectionality of oracular evidence with other disciplinary analyses of pre-colonial West African history. The tradition downplayed varia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• List of maps
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Wayward, haughty with spotted skin and disheveled hair: the life and history of Ɔkᴐmfo Anokye, c.1635–1720
• 3 A blockade from bullets: 1658–1681
• 4 Asanteman Sika Dwa (1701) and the Akyem Abuakwa Ofori stool at Akuapem (1733)
• 5 Flaming projectiles: flash of spirit, Jamaica 1685–1739
• 6 “Tacky’s” rebels and the Second Maroon War: 1760 and 1795
• 7 The 1712 rebellion: “One Conspirator was Pregnant, Her Execution ‘Suspended’ Until the Child was born”
• 8 Doctor Harry and the Kromanti Fly Boys and a place to remember ancestors: 1741–1795
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index