Cargo Cult

… market women sporting imported Silesian cloth - indexing the value of a commodity that doubled as a money form - as well
as fetissos of keys
and Venetian trade beads evoking locked chests of gold and overseas wealth. The Spirit Of Capitalism In Cape Coast Castle - A. Apter
In a sense, the Europeans were themselves

commodified, “taken possession of” as esteemed
objects of transport while representing their
nationally chartered companies.
The Spirit Of Capitalism In Cape Coast Castle –
Andrew Apter Page | 1
Thomas Edward Bowdich wrote that “the white

cloths . . . they paint for mourning with a mixture of
blood and a red dye wood. The patterns are various,
and not inelegant.”
Stamping History: Stories of Social Change in
Ghana’s Adinkra Cloth - Allison Joan
Martino
of the slave coast –

white negroes n black christmas
cargo cult -
the manufacture
of modernism
on mourning the loss of ancestral cult and culture
compiled by
amma birago
Christaller also included the name atadehyefo as “people in
European dress,” which shows how clothing becomes part of
one’s identity Christaller 1881).
Stamping History: Stories of Social Change in Ghana’s
Adinkra Cloth - Allison Joan Martino
… The Akan used metal basins as abodes of deities or altars

to the Supreme Being. They also employed them in placer
gold mining. At Benin blood from beheadings was caught in a
big copper basin to be sprinkled on the royal tombs. At Fetu a
diviner read the future in a basin of water. Basins were used
there, and elsewhere in Kwaland, as percussion instruments.
What Africans Got for Their Slaves:
A Master List of European Trade Goods - Stanley Alpern
the forms of religious practice that developed into Vodou were "responses to the institution of slavery," and "to its peculiar brand of sensuous
domination." "… magical gods of Africa as everyday responses to the white master's arbitrary power." Vodou and History, Laurent
Dubois
… market women sporting imported Silesian cloth - indexing the value of a commodity that doubled as a money form - as well as fetissos of keys
"to the Akan ... death ... is not life's contradiction

or negation but ... a planting or fruition of it."
A Coffin for "The Loved One":
The Structure of Fante Death Rituals'
Page | 2
Anthropologists identified the social convergence of this
for the ordinary Asante citizen in the sense that the severance of
lineage ties may be comparable to passing a death sentence
over him or her (McCaskie 1995: 89).
… the sumptuous fare of the governor’s “Publick Table,” where the company’s chaplain and surgeon regularly
dined - one summary of expenses for a single month in 1750 included fifteen goats and fifty-two gallons of rum.
Whether Tabir was already a European god or was simply developing European tastes is impossible to say. Perhaps
he was both, a kind of ritual creole manifesting multiple forms of Afro-European intercourse.
History In The Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery And The Spirit
Of Capitalism In Cape Coast Castle, Ghana
Andrew Apter
Tabir’s annual sacrifice in Atkins’s text:

… To this Rock, the Fetish-Man sacrifices annually a Goat and some Rum, eating and drinking a little himself, and
throwing the rest into the Sea with odd Gestures and Invocations, he tells the Company, and they believe that he
receives a verbal answer from Tabra, what Seasons and Times will be propitious; and for this Knowledge every
Fisherman finds it worth his while to Dashee him with some Acknowledgment.
Andrew Apter
Tradition and innovation in Dutch ethnographic prints

of Africans c. 1590-1670
Elmer Kolfin
Their hayre is blacke & curled, and some also red. The stature of the men is of an indifferent bignes; and excepting
their blacknes are very like to the Portingalles [italics ek]. The apples of their eies are of diverse colours; blacke and
of the colour of the sea. Their lips are not thick as the Nubians and other Negroes are; and so likewise their
countenances are some fat, some leane, and some betweene both, as in our countreyes there are [italics ek], and not
as the Negroes of Nubia and Guinea, which are very deformed.
The business of the creole communities was trade, brokering the movement of goods through the
Atlantic world. Although island settlements such as Cape Verde, Principe, and Sao Tome
developed indigenous agricultural and sometimes plantation economies, the comings and goings
of African and European merchants dominated life even in the largest of the creole communities,
which served as both field headquarters for great European mercantile companies and collection
points for trade between the African interior and the Atlantic littoral. …
From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and
the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America -
Ira Berlin
Dubois

A Master List of European Trade Goods
Stanley B. Alpern
According to Muller, one way to tell "low-status" men and women at Fetu from "distinguished gentlemen" and
"important ladies" was by the beads they wore. Ordinary men had "poor-quality" beads round their necks; grandees
sported gold beads and aggrey beads (prized ornaments of West African origin) in their hair and beards, and on their Page | 3
necks, arms, hands and legs. Ordinary women might "hang just one large blue bead" in their hair and had strings of
"common" beads round their necks, arms and legs. Grandes dames, like their men, wore "precious stones and golden
ornaments" in their hair and adorned their necks with "all kinds of beads-blue, red, brown, white, yellow."' Barbot
found Gold Coasters remelting glass beads into desired shapes and sizes.'
[Fante farmers near Elmina, early experimenters with maize, named the
crop oborowi, “the European’s [foreigner’s] millet.”
Rum, Gin and Maize: Deities and Ritual Change
in the Gold Coast during the Atlantic Era (16th century to 1850)
… when the deity enters the shrine through possession, anyone associated with the shrine is prohibited from eating
kenkey or to bring maize dough into the shrine. At Akonedi the ritual food is mashed yam, either white (etofufu) or
mixed with palm oil (etokokoo or “red” mashed yam). Instructively, Akonedi does not travel, and its priestess cannot
travel across the sea.
Emmanuel Akyeampong and Samuel A. Ntewusu
… the sumptuous fare of the governor’s “Publick Table,”

where the company’s chaplain and surgeon regularly dined …

… There is also at Cabo Corso, a publick Fetish, the Guardian of them all; and that is the rock Tabra, a bluff
peninsular Prominence that juts out from the Bottom of the Clift the Castle stands on, making a sort of Cover for
Landing, but so unsafe, as frequently to expose the Boats and People to Danger, the Sea breaking over with great
force … To this Rock, the Fetish-Man sacrifices annually a Goat and some Rum, eating and drinking a little himself,
and throwing the rest into the Sea with odd Gestures and Invocations, he tells the Company, and they believe that he
Andrew Apter
the importance of linen garments for both sexes, and added that the
material was used to swaddle babies and wrap corpses, and as a
sacrifice to deities.

Stanley B. Alpern
Dubois
Randall Shaw advised a fellow British trader in 1582 that

"lynnen cloath ys on of the chefest" commodities at old Benin …
Twenty years later Dutchman Dierick Ruiters remarked that
the people of Benin generally wore "Holland Linen"
over their own "nicely made" cotton clothes. …
Youths of 18 or 20, said Marees, with their first earnings from fishing, bought a "fathom" which they wrapped Page | 4
round their bodies and between their legs, their male parts, as they begin to acquire a sense of decency" same with
twice as much linen, letting it hang down below the also wore a mantle like the women. Wilhelm Johann Miiller, a
German who served the Danes on the Gold Coast in the 1660s, confirmed the importance of linen garments for both
sexes, and added that the material was used to swaddle babies and wrap corpses, and as a sacrifice to deities.
... Africa had well-developed industries producing every single item on the list" of European trade
goods. So why did Africans import things they already made? "Largely" for motives of "prestige,
fancy, changing taste, and a desire for variety."

Stanley B. Alpern
According to Muller, one way to tell "low-status" men and women at Fetu from "distinguished gentlemen" and
"important ladies" was by the beads they wore. Ordinary men had "poor-quality" beads round their necks; grandees
sported gold beads and aggrey beads (prized ornaments of West African origin) in their hair and beards, and on their
necks, arms, hands and legs. Ordinary women might "hang just one large blue bead" in their hair and had strings of
"common" beads round their necks, arms and legs. Grandes dames, like their men, wore "precious stones and golden
ornaments" in their hair and adorned their necks with "all kinds of beads-blue, red, brown, white, yellow."'
Barbot found Gold Coasters remelting glass beads into desired shapes and sizes.' A specialized, now-forgotten
vocabulary of bead types developed; a single Dutch cargo list of 1646 contained 14 varieties.' The Dutch brought
gitjes, olivetten (olive-shaped), quispelgrein, the French carnavacques, contecarbe, contrebrode, loquis, macatons,
vdrot, the Portuguese granadas, the English barleycorn, bird's eye, guinea-guinea. Barbot employed the term tubular
Venetian beads of sundry colors and sizes.'

Akyeampong, Emmanuel, and Samuel A. Ntewusu As previously noted, there is a ritual calendar for the yam
festival, which usually takes place around July. …
Commensality among the living informed communion between the living and the spiritual world (ancestors and
deities). Hence food and drink were offered ritually to the dead and to deities.
… how the advent of Atlantic trade, the introduction of new world crops such as maize and European liquor, and the
expansion and consolidation of states on the Gold Coast impacted the landscape of ritual. Political centralization and
social hierarchy drew on an elaborated range of consumer goods in the marking of difference. The powerful coveted
European liquors, and offered these prestige goods to their ancestors and deities. Even new food crops from the
Americas could not escape these local hierarchies: maize became an important crop, sometimes fed to the gods;
while cassava remained marginal, among the Akan associated with the poor and slaves.

Stanley B. Alpern
Dubois
Linens: often described only as fine or coarse, broad or narrow, white or blue, checked or striped, painted or printed,
they came from many cities in Holland, Germany, France, England, and Ireland. Randall Shaw advised a fellow
British trader in 1582 that "lynnen cloath ys on of the chefest" commodities at old Benin … Twenty years later
Dutchman Dierick Ruiters remarked that the people of Benin generally wore "Holland Linen" over their own "nicely
made" cotton clothes. … Linen around their bodies, letting it hang from below their Breasts or Navel down to their
knees." When they went to market they added another linen wrapper up to two "fathoms" long which hung to their Page | 5
feet, "like a Frock," and still another length of cloth, sometimes of striped linen, "over their shoulders and under
their arms like a little Mantle."
Vodou and History

Laurent Dubois
Rather than seeing the lwa primarily as African imports, in the tradition of Melville Herskovits,
she suggests that the forms of religious practice that developed into Vodou were "responses to the
institution of slavery," and "to its peculiar brand of sensuous domination." "A historical streak in
these spirits," she continues, "entirely this side of metaphysics, reconstitutes the shadowy and
powerful magical gods of Africa as everyday responses to the white master's arbitrary power."
Vodou, then, is in a sense an archive of slavery itself, of the tortured human relationships it
produced.
Nakedness and Other Peoples:

Rethinking the Italian Renaissance Nude
Jill Burke
Florentines had a key role as investors in Portuguese expeditions to the Atlantic coast of Africa. There had long been
a Florentine presence in Lisbon – the Bardi family were given a license to trade there as early as 1338 – and by
1500, Florentines were the most important and numerous group of foreign merchants in the Portuguese capital,
dealing in goods such as sugar, leather, dyes and silks as well as Guinean slaves.
When Alvise Cadamosto travelled to the south of the Senegal river, he was amazed at the change in the peoples that
he saw. As opposed to the ‘brownish, small, lean, ill-nourished’ men in the ‘sterile and arid’ country to the north,
these people were ‘very black, tall and big, their bodies well formed; and the whole country green, full of trees and
fertile’.
Indigenous spirituality is seen as a vital aspect of

Indigenous knowledges and yet, too often, it is left unpacked
in terms of engagement with the Western academy.
Indigenous Spirituality and Methodology for the Classroom
Eric Ritskes
What is meant by Indigenous spirituality? …. This is in direct opposition to a Western conceptualization of

spirituality which not only posits the individual as the sole "locus for selectivity and determination of belief ' (York,
2001, p. 366) but which emphasizes an individualized spirituality that fits into a commodified, Western liberal
frame- work.
For Indigenous peoples, community involves not only the people in the immediate location but relationships with
the environment/whole earth, relationships with the ancestors who have gone before, and relationships with those
who are to come: "community means the living, the unborn, the dead, and nature as a whole".
Dubois

Eric Ritskes
In a sense, the Europeans were themselves commodified, “taken possession of”

as esteemed objects of transport while representing their nationally chartered Page | 6
companies.
Andrew Apter
… when the deity enters the shrine through possession, anyone associated with the shrine is prohibited from eating
kenkey or to bring maize dough into the shrine. At Akonedi the ritual food is mashed yam, either white (etofufu) or
mixed with palm oil (etokokoo or “red” mashed yam). Instructively, Akonedi does not travel, and its priestess cannot
travel across the sea.

The Negroes of Accara celebrate three feasts annually: one on the occasion of the earth’s fertility, which comes in
about the end of July. The dates are never fixed exactly. This is called the ‘yams custom’, and before it is celebrated
they are not permitted to eat of the new yams or of the year’s harvest.
At the “yams custom” maize makes its appearance alongside a crop indigenous to West Africa and associated with
autochthonous deities. Among the Ga on the coast, maize appeared early as a ritual food in contrast to the yam
festivals of interior peoples. Ga society received many refugees in the pre-colonial period. Many of these refugees
were Akan peoples fleeing war, and they brought their yam-eating war deities.

The Accanists [Akans], who are real traders, used to trade in all these areas and they alone controlled all trade,
traveling with large numbers of slaves to carry their goods through all these places. But as a result of the wars which
the blacks so often start for trifling reasons, this trade is suddenly stopped… the passages are closed … and
especially since musket and gunpowder have been introduced, things have become much worse, the natives having
become more and more warlike.
With this came the stool as a symbol of political office, which the Ga regarded as a “war medicine or fetish.”
…. McCann argues that the introduction of maize at this crucial phase of Akan history increased the availability of
food and “in turn, released labor to extend the frontiers of forest settlement and support the development of politics
and statecraft.”
Why were European liquors like gin, rum, and schnapps incorporated into ritual
on the Gold Coast and not others?
the transformation of the ritual landscape in the Gold Coast

through the use of foods and liquors introduced through the Atlantic trade from
the 16th century through 1850,
Dubois
Golden-colored rum and blood sacrifices came to be

associated with war deities.
… detect influences of the Atlantic even in geographically dispersed areas that
underscore the momentous impact of Atlantic processes, such as the
incorporation of Atlantic foods or firearms?
Page | 7
Vodou and History

Laurent Dubois
Rather than seeing the lwa primarily as African imports, in the tradition of
Melville Herskovits, she suggests that the forms of religious practice that
developed into Vodou were "responses to the institution of slavery," and "to its
peculiar brand of sensuous domination." "A historical streak in these spirits,"
she continues, "entirely this side of metaphysics, reconstitutes the shadowy and
powerful magical gods of Africa as everyday responses to the white master's
arbitrary power." Vodou, then, is in a sense an archive of slavery itself, of the
tortured human relationships it produced.

According to another of the new fables - Philip D. Curtin - the most common European firearms, cheap liquor,
tawdry trinkets, view, was a dumping ground for European dominated from start to finish by practical range of
commodities was so broad that came to resemble what one specialist has 1 December 1645, the Dutch inventoried
Castle on the Gold Coast. By the end commodities were de rigueur on the same merchandise were stored by Dutch
traders.
Soon after the Portuguese reached Kwaland in the 1470s, they were selling garments and cloth made in North
Africa, Flemish and French fabrics, and their own woollens and linens to the inhabitants. By 1505, however, they
had added Indian textiles to their commercial inventories, and such cloth would a staple of European trade with
West Africa until well into the nineteenth century. Indian fabrics were popular in Africa for their cheapness,
durability, attractive patterns, and bright colors that resisted repeated washings tropical sunshine.

Stanley B. Alpern
British trader in 1582 that "lynnen cloath ys on of the chefest" commodities at old Benin …
Youths of 18 or 20, said Marees, with their first earnings from fishing, bought a "fathom" which they wrapped
round their bodies and between their legs, their male parts, as they begin to acquire a sense of decency" same with
twice as much linen, letting it hang down below the also wore a mantle like the women. Wilhelm Johann Miiller, a
Dubois
German who served the Danes on the Gold Coast in the 1660s, confirmed the importance of linen garments for both
sexes, and added that the material was used to swaddle babies and wrap corpses, and as a sacrifice to deities.
... Africa had well-developed industries producing every single item on

the list" of European trade goods. So why did Africans import things Page | 8
they already made? "Largely" for motives of "prestige, fancy, changing
taste, and a desire for variety."

Stanley B. Alpern

the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America
Ira Berlin
Although jaded observers condemned the culture of the enclaves as nothing more than "whoring, drinking,
gambling, swearing, fighting, and shouting," Atlantic creoles attended church (usually Catholic), married according
to the sacraments, raised children conversant with European norms, and drew a livelihood from their knowledge of
the Atlantic commercial economy.
… Of necessity, Atlantic creoles spoke a variety of African and European languages, weighted strongly toward
Portuguese. From the seeming babble emerged a pidgin that enabled Atlantic creoles to communicate widely. In
time, their pidgin evolved into creole, borrowing its vocabulary from all parties and creating a grammar unique unto
itself. Derisively called "fala de Guine" or 'fala de negros"-"Guinea speech" or "Negro Speech"-by the Portuguese
and "black Portuguese" by others, this creole language became the lingua franca of the Atlantic.
Village populations swelled into the thousands. In 1669, about the time the English were ousting the Dutch from the
village of New Amsterdam, population 1,500, a visitor to Elmina noted that it contained some 8,000 residents.
During most of the eighteenth century, Elmina's population was between 12,000 and 16,000, larger than Charleston,
South Carolina-mainland North America's greatest slave port at the time of the American Revolution.
Ira Berlin
In 1555, Cape Coast counted only twenty houses; by 1680, it had 500 or more. Axim, with 500 inhabitants in i63i,
expanded to between 2,000 and 3,000 by 165o. Small but growing numbers of Europeans augmented the African
fishermen, craftsmen, village-based peasants, and laborers who made up the population of these villages. Although
mortality and transiency rates in these enclaves were extraordinarily high, even by the standards of early modern
ports, permanent European settlements developed from a mobile body of the corporate employees (from governors
to surgeons to clerks), merchants and factors, stateless sailors, skilled craftsmen, occasional missionaries, and sundry
transcontinental drifters.
Ira Berlin
Established in 1482 by the Portuguese and captured by the Dutch in i637, Elmina was one of the earliest factories
and an exemplar for those that followed. A meeting place for African and European commercial ambitions, Elmina-
the Castle Sao Jorge da Mina and the town that surrounded it-became headquarters for Portuguese and later Dutch
mercantile activities on the Gold Coast and, with a population of 15,000 to 20,000 in i682, the largest of some two
Dubois
dozen European outposts in the region. The peoples of the enclaves-both long-term residents and wayfarers-soon
joined together genetically as well as geographically. European men took African women as wives and mistresses,
and, before long, the offspring of these unions helped people the enclave. Elmina sprouted a substantial cadre of
Euro-Africans (most of them Luso-Africans)-men and women of African birth but shared African and European
parentage, whose combination of swarthy skin, European dress and deportment, knowledge of local customs, and
multilingualism gave them inside understanding of both African and European ways while denying them full
acceptance in either culture. By the eighteenth century, they numbered several hundred in Elmina. Farther south Page | 9
along the coast of Central Africa, they may have been even more numerous.
Ira Berlin
More simply, the study of transnationalism is the study of ways in which a select migrant group influences the
specific area they migrated to, as well as the ways in which the existing inhabitants and culture influenced the
migrants and their homelands. Through such a process, the migrant group tends to enter a state of limbo, where they
no longer fully belong to their culture of origin - as they grow to adopt new cultural practices that are not mirrored at
home - nor are they fully accepted into whichever culture they entered. Thus, … Voodoo are prime examples of
transnational relationships at work.
More Than a Misunderstood Religion: Rediscovering Vodou
as a Tool of Survival and a Vehicle for Independence in Colonial Haiti
Eliza M. Kamerling-Brown
Rum: the notoriety of the triangular trade that sent New England rum to Africa,
slaves to the British West Indies and molasses to New have given Americans in
particular an exaggerated impression of Africans’ consumption of alcohol. … In
1756, the Newport, R.I. brigantine Marigold carried 9,900 gallons of rum to
Africa. Rhode Island rum exports to Africa are said to have reached 831,588
gallons in 1806.
What Africans Got For Their Slaves:
A Master List Of European Trade
Goods
Pompous Trappings - These were the status symbols, the privileges of rank and wealth. propped up the egos of
African kings, chiefs, grandees, and rich helping to set them apart from the common folk. … Pompous trappings
were generally not trade goods but presents to facilitate trade. … expensive fabrics, wines-luxuries considered the
prerogative …
What Africans Got For Their Slaves:
A Master List Of European Trade Goods
Stanley B. Alpern
His observations of local dress, commerce, and “fetisso” (“fetish worship”)

describe hybrid forms of social distinction, transactional forms of surplus
extraction, and ritual forms of economic “stimulus” that came to be identified
with Cape Coast’s “superior” market and the associated (if yet unnamed)
promontory of Tabir Rock - a half-century before the original “castle” was first
built by the Swedes in 1653.
Dubois

Andrew Apter
What is clear is that by the 1660s, Europeans traveled from Cape Coast to Fetu for what was ostensibly a harvest
festival along the very toll roads and commercial pathways that generated surplus for the kingdom through
extraction and exchange. In a sense, the Europeans were themselves commodified, “taken possession of” as
esteemed objects of transport while representing their nationally chartered companies. That Page | 10
their first point of arrival was the Fetu market itself, where they were greeted by market women shouting “Aquaba,
aquaba!” (“Welcome, welcome!”), highlights the conversion of economic into political capital, as the whites then
“proceed[ed] to the houses of the king and his closest counsellor,” where they professed friendship and loyalty to
their African hosts in return for their hospitality.
The King of Asante “owned” all war deities in his realm and their
custodians reported to the king. These war deities reportedly demanded
sacrifices of blood (human and animal) and delighted in rum with a
golden color.

Pito is a nutritious African beer brewed from sorghum or millet, and it

is unclear whether “maize” in this passage is a reference to a maize-like
cereal (sorghum) or reflects an actual coastal use of maize in the
brewing of beer, which the Ga of the Accra region do and call ŋmãda.
This would then indicate an early incorporation of maize from the
Americas into local brewing.

… McCann suggests the contributory role that maize could have played in this early Atlantic era among the forest
Akan, whose ecology was protein-rich but deprived of a reliable source of carbohydrates aside from yams that could
feed an expanding population. Labor intensive and longer maturing yams did not compare favorably with the high
yielding, two harvests a season, maize in terms of feeding expanding forest populations. McCann argues that the
introduction of maize at this crucial phase of Akan history increased the availability of food and “in turn, released
labor to extend the frontiers of forest settlement and support the development of politics and statecraft.”
The King of Asante “owned” all war deities in his realm and their custodians reported to the king. These war deities
reportedly demanded sacrifices of blood (human and animal) and delighted in rum with a golden color. Obaapanin
(the female head of an Asante abusua or matrilineage) Afua Pokuaa of Amoaman emphasized that gods liked the
golden color of “Bucaneer Rum,’ a color she described as kokoo (red). Afua Pokuaa’s family serves as custodians
for the Asante war deity Abotirimu, and the preference of abosombrafo (war deities) for golden rum was associated
with their penchant for blood.
… an antipathy between this pristine deity and the forces or influences unleashed by the
Atlantic trade in contradistinction to the war deities that thrived within the context of
Atlantic slaving. Shrines on hilltop settlements on the Akuapem range, such as Kyenku at
Obosomase, provided refuge for runaway slaves, even coming into conflict with Danish
slave owners who pursued their slaves to the shrine in an area they considered their
sphere of influence.
Dubois

Tradition and innovation in Dutch ethnographic prints Page | 11

Elmer Kolfin
Nana Tabir shrine in Cape Coast, an agent of the Atlantic slave trade, its
complicity revealed in the discourse of Tabir’s “whiteness” -- a deity that spoke
English and showed a weakness for red wine and margarine.

Andrew Apter
His observations of local dress, commerce, and “fetisso” (“fetish worship”) describe hybrid forms of social
distinction, transactional forms of surplus extraction, and ritual forms of economic “stimulus” that came to be
identified with Cape Coast’s “superior” market and the associated (if yet unnamed) promontory of Tabir Rock - a
half-century before the original “castle” was first built by the Swedes In 1653.
esteemed objects of transport while representing their nationally chartered companies.
That their first point of arrival was the Fetu market itself, where they were greeted by market women shouting
“Aquaba, aquaba!” (“Welcome, welcome!”), highlights the conversion of economic into political capital, as the
whites then “proceed[ed] to the houses of the king and his closest counsellor,” where they professed friendship and
loyalty to their African hosts in return for their hospitality. Over the course of the next five days, the dominant
organizations and constituencies of the kingdom performed their specific dances and ceremonies, with much
“shooting, drumming, . . . whooping and shouting” and “inhuman drinking,” beginning with “[t]he king and his
closest counsellor . . . on Monday, the day [dey] on Tuesday, the brafu or military commander on Wednesday, and
the Fetu caboceers and the Accanists living at Cabo Corso on Thursday.”

Ira Berlin
The Atlantic creole's unique experience reveals some of the processes by which race was constructed and
reconstructed in early America. Black life in mainland North America originated not in Africa or America but in the
netherworld between the continents. Along the periphery of the Atlantic-first in Africa, then in Europe, and finally
in the Americas- African-American society was a product of the momentous meeting of Africans and Europeans and
of their equally fateful encounter with the peoples of the Americas. Although the countenances of these new people
Dubois
of the Atlantic-Atlantic creoles-might bear the features of Africa, Europe, or the Americas in whole or in part, their
beginnings, strictly speaking, were in none of those places. Instead, by their experiences and sometimes by their
persons, they had become part of the three worlds that came together along the Atlantic littoral. Familiar with the
commerce of the Atlantic, fluent in its new languages, and intimate with its trade and cultures, they were
cosmopolitan in the fullest sense.
Page | 12
when the deity enters the shrine through possession, anyone associated with the
shrine is prohibited from eating kenkey or to bring maize dough into the shrine.
At Akonedi the ritual food is mashed yam, either white (etofufu) or mixed with
palm oil (etokokoo or “red” mashed yam). Instructively, Akonedi does not
travel, and its priestess cannot travel across the sea.

The Yam Eating Festival (Kajoji) Of The Balai Nawuris Of Northern Ghana
War deities who became more prominent in the era of the Atlantic slave trade showed a preference for golden-
colored rum brought from the Americas, just as they were also associated with blood sacrifices. We examined the
tensions that emerged between war deities and nature/agricultural deities, and how for some local deities such as
Akonedi of the Larteh Guan symbols from the Atlantic world became tabooed.
J.E.K. Kuma’s research into the history and cultures of northern Guans provides very useful insights into crops and
their uses in everyday life and festivities. He notes a number of similarities between southern and northern cultural
practices in Ghana based on the performance of everyday ritual. In particular he indicates that as far as harvest
festivals are concerned there seem to be profound similarity in their celebration among Guans in Ghana. Besides
Kuma, Goody’s study of the cultivation of crops and the consumption of food among the LoDargaba and Gonja
offers useful insights into the role of food in festivals in Northern Ghana.
As previously noted, there is a ritual calendar for the yam festival, which usually takes place around July. …


Dubois
Elmer Kolfin
Page | 13
The business of the creole communities was trade, brokering the movement of goods
through the Atlantic world. Although island settlements such as Cape Verde, Principe,
and Sao Tome developed indigenous agricultural and sometimes plantation economies,
the comings and goings of African and European merchants dominated life even in the
largest of the creole communities, which served as both field headquarters for great
European mercantile companies and collection points for trade between the African
interior and the Atlantic littoral. …
the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America -
Ira Berlin
Although jaded observers condemned the culture of the enclaves as nothing more than
"whoring, drinking, gambling, swearing, fighting, and shouting," Atlantic creoles
attended church (usually Catholic), married according to the sacraments, raised children
conversant with European norms, and drew a livelihood from their knowledge of the
Atlantic commercial economy.
… Creoles' ability to find a place for themselves in the interstices of African and European trade grew rapidly during
periods of intense competition among the Portuguese, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, French, and English and an equally
diverse set of African nationals. At the same time and by the same token, the Atlantic creoles' liminality, particularly
their lack of identity with any one group, posed numerous dangers.
Village populations swelled into the thousands. In i669, about the time the English were ousting the Dutch from the
South Carolina-mainland North America's greatest slave port at the time of the American Revolution.

Ira Berlin
Dubois
the Atlantic commercial economy. In short, they created societies of their own, of but not always in the societies of
the Africans who dominated the interior trade and the Europeans who controlled the Atlantic trade. Operating under
European protection, always at African sufferance, the enclaves developed governments with a politics as diverse
and complicated as the peoples who populated them and a credit system that drew on the commercial centers of both
Europe and Africa.
Page | 14
The Earliest German Sources For West African History (1504-1509)

Adam
Jones
In particular, much gold appears and occurs in that place: from it the Portuguese king has his gold coins struck and
minted. But the natives of these islands cannot work the gold or treat it. These people do not yet use any money at
all among themselves: instead, they use only strange, wondrous things, such as mirrors, brass rings, long, small blue
crystals &c. and many similar things that are strange to them and are brought thither to them. They exchange one
ware for another, giving what they have and what grows in their country, piece for piece, depending on how much
they love and value the same things.

Elmer Kolfin
The business of the creole communities was trade, brokering the movement of goods
through the Atlantic world. Although island settlements such as Cape Verde, Principe,
and Sao Tome developed indigenous agricultural and sometimes plantation economies,
the comings and goings of African and European merchants dominated life even in the
largest of the creole communities, which served as both field headquarters for great
European mercantile companies and collection points for trade between the African
interior and the Atlantic littoral. …
Ira Berlin
Brooks, Landlords and Strangers. Brooks, in his study of the Grain Coast and its interior, estimates "hundreds of
Portuguese and Cabo Verdean traders were admitted to western African communities by the close of the fifteenth
century." Probably the same could be said for other portions of the African coast at that time. By the middle of the
i6th century, Atlantic creoles were more numerous. In I567, when the English adventurer John Hawkins launched a
raid on an African settlement on the Cacheu River, he was repulsed by a force that included "about a hundred"
lanfados;
Brooks, Landlords and Strangers. By the 19th century, the Afro-Europeans had become to a "remarkable extent
soundly and politically integrated" and "occupied their own 'quarter' of the town" of Elmina People of mixed
ancestry and tawny complexion composed but a small fraction of the population of the coastal factories, yet few
observers failed to note their existence-which suggests something of the disproportionate significance of their
presence. Africans and Europeans alike sneered at the creoles' mixed lineage (or lack of lineage) and condemned
them as knaves, charlatans, and shameless self-promoters.
Dubois
New religious forms emerged and then disappeared in much the same manner, as Europeans and Africans brought to
the enclaves not only their commercial and political aspirations but all the trappings of their cultures as well. …
Catholicism, in various syncretic forms, infiltrated the posts along the Angolan coast and spread northward. Islam
filtered in from the north. Whatever the sources of the new religions, most converts saw little cause to surrender
their own deities.
Page | 15
Ira Berlin
their lack of identity with any one group, posed numerous dangers. While their middling position made them
valuable to African and European traders, it also made them vulnerable: they could be ostracized, scapegoated, and
on occasion enslaved. Maintaining their independence amid the shifting alliances between and among Europeans
and Africans was always difficult. …. The characteristics that distinguished Atlantic creoles-their linguistic
dexterity, cultural plasticity, and social agility-were precisely those qualities that the great planters of the New
World disdained and feared.
Village populations swelled into the thousands. In 1669, about the time the English were ousting the Dutch from the
South Carolina-mainland North America's greatest slave port at the time of the American Revolution. The business
of the creole communities was trade, brokering the movement of goods through the Atlantic world. Although island
settlements such as Cape Verde, Principe, and Sao Tome developed indigenous agricultural and sometimes
plantation economies, the comings and goings of African and European merchants dominated life even in the largest
of the creole communities, which served as both field headquarters for great European mercantile companies and
collection points for trade between the African interior and the Atlantic littoral. …
Ira Berlin

Andrew Apter
His observations of local dress, commerce, and “fetisso” (“fetish worship”) describe
hybrid forms of social distinction, transactional forms of surplus extraction, and ritual
forms of economic “stimulus” that came to be identified with Cape Coast’s “superior”
market and the associated (if yet unnamed) promontory of Tabir Rock - a half-century
before the original “castle” was first built by the Swedes in 1653.

in the Gold Coast during the Atlantic Era (16th Century to 1850)
… an antipathy between this pristine deity and the forces or influences unleashed by the Atlantic trade in
contradistinction to the war deities that thrived within the context of Atlantic slaving. Shrines on hilltop settlements
on the Akuapem range, such as Kyenku at Obosomase, provided refuge for runaway slaves, even coming into
conflict with Danish slave owners who pursued their slaves to the shrine in an area they considered their sphere of
influence.
Dubois
Here the prestigious ritual food was yam with water and pito from sorghum as the most important ritual drinks. The
prominent role of the hunters’ association and their deity Siga in rounding off the yam festival, including the
dramatic place of guns even in the cooking of the ritual food, may underscore the key role of the association in the
defense of the community during insecure times and the utility of firearms introduced through the Atlantic trade.
Maize, in the form of burnt cobs enters the rituals of the yam festival, another intriguing Atlantic connection. Thus, Page | 16
Balai Nawuri, while distant from the Atlantic seaboard, with rituals that seemed to close it off from this world, was
not isolated from the transformative processes of the Atlantic. Rosalind Shaw has demonstrated how ritual memory
can be revealing of the traumatic era of the Atlantic slave trade. Juxtaposing rituals of war deities along the coast
with those of Guan nature deities in the Akuapem hills and among the northern Nawuri, we see different levels of
engagement with the Atlantic trade based on distance from the coast. Atlantic slaving entwined with the rise and fall
of states in the Gold Coast, and these developments promoted the rise of war deities in insecure times and
threatened the primacy of nature deities. These developments are reflected in the new ritual importance of maize and
Stamping History: Stories of Social Change in Ghana’s

Adinkra Cloth - Allison Joan Martino
Johannes Gottleib Christaller included the following Twi expressions: He first said that hye fura conveys “to put on,
to wear (of clothes fitting to the body or parts of the body)” (Christaller 1881: 202). … to put on, or to wear
clothes (cf. fura tama)” (Christaller 1881: 468), which he identified as “to wear a negro dress” (Christaller 1881:
471). He contrasted this expression to wearing “European dress,” atadee (Christaller 1881: 468). Christaller also
included the name atadehyefo as “people in European dress,” which shows how clothing becomes part of one’s
identity Christaller 1881).
‘Guinea Cloth’: Production and Consumption of Cotton Textiles

in West Africa before and during the Atlantic Slave Trade
Colleen E. Kriger
‘Guinea cloth’ is a term conventionally used in reference to plain white, loom-patterned, or piece-dyed cotton
textiles that were important commodities in the “hidden half” of the Atlantic slave trade. Known also by various
names given to different types of these cloths – names such as brawles, capperees, chelloes, hussanees, and pautkas
– they were woven in India and shipped to Europe to be re-exported by slave traders to Africa’s Guinea Coast and to
the West Indies.3 Then, with the development of industrial production of cotton textiles in Europe, ‘Guinea cloths’
were made there in imitation of the Indian goods.
Dubois

Elmer Kolfin
Their hayre is blacke & curled, and some also red. The stature of the men is of an indifferent bignes; and excepting Page | 17
His observations of local dress, commerce, and “fetisso” (“fetish worship”) describe
hybrid forms of social distinction, transactional forms of surplus extraction, and ritual
forms of economic “stimulus” that came to be identified with Cape Coast’s “superior”
market and the associated (if yet unnamed) promontory of Tabir Rock - a half-century
before the original “castle” was first built by the Swedes in 1653.
Andrew Apter

… an antipathy between this pristine deity and the forces or influences unleashed by the Atlantic trade in
contradistinction to the war deities that thrived within the context of Atlantic slaving. Shrines on hilltop settlements
on the Akuapem range, such as Kyenku at Obosomase, provided refuge for runaway slaves, even coming into
conflict with Danish slave owners who pursued their slaves to the shrine in an area they considered their sphere of
influence.

I. Chukwukere on J. B. Danquah


Ira Berlin
Dubois
lanfados;
Page | 18
Ira Berlin
… Of necessity, Atlantic creoles spoke a variety of African and European languages, weighted strongly toward
Portuguese. From the seeming babble emerged a pidgin that enabled Atlantic creoles to communicate widely. In
time, their pidgin evolved into creole, borrowing its vocabulary from all parties and creating a grammar unique unto
itself. Derisively called "fala de Guine" or 'fala de negros"-"Guinea speech" or "Negro Speech"-by the Portuguese
and "black Portuguese" by others, this creole language became the lingua franca of the Atlantic.
the Atlantic commercial economy. In short, they created societies of their own, of but not always in the societies of
the Africans who dominated the interior trade and the Europeans who controlled the Atlantic trade. Operating under
European protection, always at African sufferance, the enclaves developed governments with a politics as diverse
and complicated as the peoples who populated them and a credit system that drew on the commercial centers of both
Europe and Africa.
distinction, forms of surplus extraction, and ritual forms of economic “stimulus” that came to be identified with
Cape Coast’s “superior” market and the associated (if yet unnamed) promontory of Tabir Rock - a half-century
before the original “castle” was first built by the Swedes In 1653.
History In The Dungeon: Atlantic transactional Slavery And The Spirit

Andrew Apter
loyalty to their African hosts in return for their hospitality. Over the course of the next five days, the dominant
organizations and constituencies of the kingdom performed their specific dances and ceremonies, with much
“shooting, drumming, . . . whooping and shouting” and “inhuman drinking,” beginning with “[t]he king and his
Dubois
closest counsellor . . . on Monday, the day [dey] on Tuesday, the brafu or military commander on Wednesday, and
the Fetu caboceers and the Accanists living at Cabo Corso on Thursday.”
History In The Dungeon: Atlantic transactional Slavery And The Spirit

Andrew Apter
Page | 19

Elmer Kolfin
New religious forms emerged and then disappeared in much the same manner, as Europeans and Africans brought to
the enclaves not only their commercial and political aspirations but all the trappings of their cultures as well. …
Catholicism, in various syncretic forms, infiltrated the posts along the Angolan coast and spread northward. Islam
filtered in from the north. Whatever the sources of the new religions, most converts saw little cause to surrender
their own deities.
Ira Berlin
New religious practices, polities, and theologies emerged from the mixing of Christianity, Islam, polytheism, and
animism. Similar syncretic formations influenced the agricultural practices, architectural forms, and sartorial styles
as well as the cuisine, music, art, and technology of the enclaves. Like the stone fortifications, these cultural
innovations announced the presence of something new to those arriving on the coast, whether they came by caravan
from the African interior or sailed by caravel from the Atlantic. Outside the European fortifications, settlements-the
town of Elmina as opposed to Castle Sao Jorge da Mina, for example-expanded to provision and refresh the
European-controlled castles and the caravels and carracks that frequented the coast. …
Residents included canoemen who ferried goods between ships and shore; longshoremen and warehousemen who
unloaded and stored merchandise; porters, messengers, guides, interpreters, factors, and brokers or make-laers (to
the Dutch) who facilitated trade; inn keepers who housed country traders; skilled workers of all sorts; and a host of
peddlers, hawkers, and petty traders. Others chopped wood, drew water, prepared food, or supplied sex to the lonely
men who visited these isolated places. African notables occasionally established residence, bringing with them the
trappings of wealth and power: wives, clients, pawns, slaves, and other dependents. In some places, small
manufactories grew up, like the salt pans, boatyards, and foundries on the outskirts of Elmina, to supply the town
and service the Atlantic trade.
Ira Berlin
Dubois
Ira Berlin
Page | 20
… Many former slaves mixed Africa and Europe culturally and sometimes physically. Knowledge and experience
far more than color set the Atlantic creoles apart from the Africans who brought slaves from the interior and the
Europeans who carried them across the Atlantic, on one hand, and the hap-less men and women on whose
commodification the slave trade rested, on the other. Maintaining a secure place in such a volatile social order was
not easy. The creoles' genius for intercultural negotiation was not simply a set of skills, a tactic for survival, or an
attribute that emerged as an "Africanism" in the New World. … The special needs of European traders placed
Atlantic creoles in a powerful bargaining position, which they learned to employ to their own advantage. The most
successful became principals and traded independently. They played one merchant against another, one captain
against another, and one mercantile bureaucrat against another, often abandoning them for yet a better deal with
some interloper, all in the hope of securing a rich prosperity for themselves and their families.
Ira Berlin
World disdained and feared. For their labor force they desired youth and strength, not experience and sagacity.
Indeed, too much knowledge might be subversive to the good order of the plantation. Simply put, men and women
who understood the operations of the Atlantic system were too dangerous to be trusted in the human tinderboxes
created by the sugar revolution.
Along the coast of Africa, Atlantic creoles often identified with the appendages of European or African power-be
they international mercantile corporations or local chieftains-in hopes of relieving the stigma of other-ness-be it
enslavement, bastard birth, paganism, or race. They employed this strategy repeatedly in mainland North America,
as they tried to hurdle the boundaries of social and cultural difference and establish a place for themselves. By
linking themselves to the most important edifices of the nascent European-American societies, Atlantic creoles
struggled to become part of a social order where exclusion or otherness-not subordination-posed the greatest
dangers. To be inferior within the sharply stratified world of the seventeenth-century Atlantic was understandable by
its very ubiquity; to be excluded posed unparalleled dangers.
From Creole to African:
Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society
in Mainland North America
Ira Berlin
Atlantic creoles first appeared at the trading feitorias or factories that European expansionists established along the
coast of Africa in the fifteenth century. Finding trade more lucrative than pillage, the Portuguese crown began
sending agents to oversee its interests in Africa. These official representatives were succeeded by private
entrepreneurs or lanfados, who established themselves with the aid of African potentates, sometimes in competition
with the crown's emissaries. European nations soon joined in the action, and coastal factories became sites of
commercial rendezvous for all manner of transatlantic traders.
Dubois
In 1555, Cape Coast counted only twenty houses; by 1680, it had 500 or more. Axim, with 500 inhabitants in i63i,
expanded to between 2,000 and 3,000 by 165o. Small but growing numbers of Europeans augmented the African
fishermen, craftsmen, village-based peasants, and laborers who made up the population of these villages. Although
mortality and transiency rates in these enclaves were extraordinarily high, even by the standards of early modern
ports, permanent European settlements developed from a mobile body of the corporate employees (from governors
to surgeons to clerks), merchants and factors, stateless sailors, skilled craftsmen, occasional missionaries, and sundry
transcontinental drifters. Page | 21
Established in 1482 by the Portuguese and captured by the Dutch in i637, Elmina was one of the earliest factories
and an exemplar for those that followed. A meeting place for African and European commercial ambitions, Elmina-
the Castle Sao Jorge da Mina and the town that surrounded it-became headquarters for Portuguese and later Dutch
mercantile activities on the Gold Coast and, with a population of 15,000 to 20,000 in i682, the largest of some two
dozen European outposts in the region. The peoples of the enclaves-both long-term residents and wayfarers-soon
joined together genetically as well as geographically. European men took African women as wives and mistresses,
and, before long, the offspring of these unions helped people the enclave. Elmina sprouted a substantial cadre of
Euro-Africans (most of them Luso-Africans) -men and women of African birth but shared African and European
parentage, whose combination of swarthy skin, European dress and deportment, knowledge of local customs, and
multilingualism gave them inside understanding of both African and European ways while denying them full
acceptance in either culture. By the eighteenth century, they numbered several hundred in Elmina. Farther south
along the coast of Central Africa, they may have been even more numerous.
Ira Berlin
Atlantic creoles originated in the historic meeting of Europeans and Africans on the west coast of Africa. Many
served as intermediaries, employing their linguistic skills and their familiarity with the Atlantic's diverse commercial
practices, cultural conventions, and diplomatic etiquette to mediate between African merchants and European sea
captains. In so doing, some Atlantic creoles identified with their ancestral homeland (or a portion of it) - be it
African, European, or American-and served as its representatives in negotiations with others. Other Atlantic creoles
had been won over by the power and largesse of one party or another, so that Africans entered the employ of
European trading companies and Europeans traded with African potentates. Yet others played fast and loose with
their diverse heritage, employing whichever identity paid best.
Whatever strategy they adopted, Atlantic creoles began the process of integrating the icons and ideologies of the
Atlantic world into a new way of life. The emergence of Atlantic creoles was but a tiny outcropping in the massive
social upheaval that accompanied the joining of the peoples of the two hemispheres. But it represented the small
beginnings that initiated this monumental transformation, as the new people of the Atlantic made their presence felt.
... Traveling in more dignified style, Atlantic creoles were also sent to distant lands with commissions to master the
ways of newly discovered "others" and to learn the secrets of their wealth and knowledge. A few entered as honored
guests, took their places in royal courts as esteemed councilors, and married into the best families.
The Earliest German Sources For West African History (1504-1509)
Adam
Jones
In particular, much gold appears and occurs in that place: from it the Portuguese king has his gold coins struck and
minted. But the natives of these islands cannot work the gold or treat it.26 These people do not yet use any money at
all among themselves: instead, they use only strange, wondrous things, such as mirrors, brass rings, long, small blue
crystals &c. and many similar things that are strange to them and are brought thither to them.27 They exchange one
ware for another, giving what they have and what grows in their country, piece for piece, depending on how much
they love and value the same things.
… the sumptuous fare of the governor’s “Publick Table,” where the

company’s chaplain and surgeon regularly dined - one summary of
Dubois
expenses for a single month in 1750 included fifteen goats and fifty-
two gallons of rum. Whether Tabir was already a European god or was
simply developing European tastes is impossible to say.

Andrew Apter Page | 22
Whether Tabir was already a European god or was simply developing European
tastes is impossible to say. Perhaps he was both, a kind of ritual creole manifesting multiple
forms of Afro-European intercourse.
Few images resonate more clearly with Gold Coast chieftaincy than the ruler carried in a hammock or palanquin,
beneath an embellished state umbrella, flanked by an entourage of drummers, warriors, and asafo company members
dancing with distinctive flags to representative rhythms. (See Figures 4 and 5.) Whether European participation first
established this practice or fed into local chiefly precedents is difficult to say, although the genre that evolved over
the centuries is surely a “creole” mix.

Andrew Apter
loyalty to their African hosts in return for their hospitality.
… market women sporting imported Silesian cloth—indexing the value of a commodity that doubled as a money
form—as well as fetissos of keys and Venetian trade beads evoking locked chests of gold and overseas wealth. And
Muller portrays protocols of local royalism that mirrored the prerogatives of European agents, suggesting how their
entourages to the inland capital were subsequently reproduced by Fetu’s kings and chiefs. Tabir’s imputed whiteness
is also mimetic, channeling the power of Europeans through their embodied dispositions, consumptibles, and
colorations. ….

Andrew Apter
… Tabir’s shrine in the castle dungeon channeled not only the prima materia of Atlantic slavery, but those symbolic
forms of investiture, delegation, and commodification— the “political idolatry”—that shaped merchant capitalism.
Ultimately, the Royal African Company’s insignia and heraldry, inscribed on black bodies, gold coins, and the most
coveted gifts to Cape Coast chiefs, and further reproduced on asafo company flags and shrines, extended the occult
powers of the king’s “touch” into transactional spheres of corporate branding and “acquisition.”
… the annual celebration of Fetu Afahye itself, which became so extensive and elaborate that it was dubbed “Black
Christmas” by the English Residents of Cape Coast Castle. Local chiefs maintain that the “central feature” of this
ritual consolidation involved sacrifices and libations at the four principal shrines … written record is Tabir’s
enduring connection with Cape Coast Castle and the rise of the British Atlantic economy.
Tabir’s fluid identification with Europeans, slipping between white and mulatto features, further registers his central
significance as a ritual figure of mediation and exchange, channeling both sides of Afro-European “intercourse” and
Dubois
the new social categories to which it gave rise. But if “Tabora” remains the fetishized locus of Cape Coast
entanglements in Davenant’s text, how were they shaped by actual ritual practices?
Taken together, these passages illustrate not only the “fetishized” terrain of Cape Coast Castle, but also significant
African agency in negotiating the terms of European settlement and trade. ….
Like Tabir, the preferred sacrifice was a bullock, and ritual offerings on its shrine included “blue baft and red turkey
twill,” which alluded to “the long friendly and honourable association of Oyeni with the flag of England.” Page | 23
Tabir’s ritual dominion as a god of the sea - protecting fishermen and generating wealth by providing bountiful
catches for inland markets - became increasingly entangled with European trade and firepower. Ambivalently
positioned both within and without the castle on its rock, Tabir connected the Atlantic economy to Cape Coast’s
annual Fetu Afahye festival - that formalized Afro-European relations through those reciprocal pathways of
ceremonial exchange that Tabir came to manage and consolidate.
Andrew Apter



Eric Ritskes
Indigenous spirituality is seen as a vital aspect of Indigenous knowledges and yet, too often, it is left unpacked in
terms of engagement with the Western academy.

frame- work.

Eric Ritskes
who are to come: "community means the living, the unborn, the dead, and nature as a whole".
Vodou and History

Laurent Dubois
Dubois
Rather than seeing the lwa primarily as African imports, in the tradition of Melville Herskovits,
she suggests that the forms of religious practice that developed into Vodou were "responses to the
institution of slavery," and "to its peculiar brand of sensuous domination." "A historical streak in
these spirits," she continues, "entirely this side of metaphysics, reconstitutes the shadowy and
powerful magical gods of Africa as everyday responses to the white master's arbitrary power."
Vodou, then, is in a sense an archive of slavery itself, of the tortured human relationships it
produced. Page | 24

in the Gold Coast during the Atlantic Era (16th Century to 1850)
Akyeampong, Emmanuel, and Samuel A. Ntewusu.
Why were European liquors like gin, rum, and schnapps incorporated
into ritual on the Gold Coast and not others?

through the use of foods and liquors introduced through the Atlantic
trade from the 16th
century through 1850,

… detect influences of the Atlantic even in geographically dispersed
areas that underscore the momentous impact of Atlantic processes, such
as the incorporation of Atlantic foods or firearms?
… the incorporation of rum and gin as powerful spiritual drinks in precolonial Gold Coast, particularly in the
context of state formation and warfare, and the growing importance of maize, side by side with the indigenous yam,
as the food of gods.

These are communities in which deities showed a preference for yam as a ritual food, and for ritual drinks made
from local cereals – millet and sorghum. Atlantic trade brought in European spirituous liquor, and ritual references
to rum, brandy, schnapps and gin become common. The intensification of state formation among the Akan from the
1600s with the importation of European firearms encouraged the militarization of Gold Coast societies and the
mobility of war deities across cultural and linguistic groups. Golden-colored rum and blood sacrifices came to be
Pito is a nutritious African beer brewed from sorghum or millet, and it is unclear whether “maize” in this passage is
a reference to a maize-like cereal (sorghum) or reflects an actual coastal use of maize in the brewing of beer, which
the Ga of the Accra region do and call ŋmãda. This would then indicate an early incorporation of maize from the
Americas into local brewing.
feed an expanding population. … and “in turn, released labor to extend the frontiers of forest settlement and support
the development of politics and statecraft.”
Dubois
Akyeampong, Emmanuel, and Samuel A. Ntewusu
In a sense, the Europeans were themselves commodified, “taken Page | 25

possession of” as esteemed objects of transport while representing their
nationally chartered companies.

Andrew Apter

Andrew Apter
… market women sporting imported Silesian cloth—indexing the value of a commodity that doubled as a money
form—as well as fetissos of keys and Venetian trade beads evoking locked chests of gold and overseas wealth. And
colorations. ….
forms of investiture, delegation, and commodification— the “political idolatry”—that shaped merchant capitalism.
powers of the king’s “touch” into transactional spheres of corporate branding and “acquisition.”1
Dubois
entanglements in Davenant’s text, how were they shaped by actual ritual practices? Page | 26
Andrew Apter
twill,” which alluded to “the long friendly and honourable association of Oyeni with the flag of England.”
Tabir’s ritual dominion as a god of the sea - protecting fishermen and generating wealth by providing bountiful
catches for inland markets - became increasingly entangled with European trade and firepower. Ambivalently
positioned both within and without the castle on its rock, Tabir connected the Atlantic economy to Cape Coast’s
annual Fetu Afahye festival - that formalized Afro-European relations through those reciprocal pathways of
ceremonial exchange that Tabir came to manage and consolidate.

Andrew Apter

… study of state ideology in precolonial Asante. But the Akan states mentioned had deep connections to the Atlantic
trade, and their worlds were transformed by this encounter. The resulting tensions, perhaps, may be gleaned in the
training of priestesses at the shrine of the autochthonous Guan deity, Akonedi, at Larteh in Akuapem. Maize is
tabooed to Akonedi, and on Tuesdays and Fridays, when the deity enters the shrine through possession, anyone
associated with the shrine is prohibited from eating kenkey or to bring maize dough into the shrine. At Akonedi the
ritual food is mashed yam, either white (etofufu) or mixed with palm oil (etokokoo or “red” mashed yam).
Instructively, Akonedi does not travel, and its priestess cannot travel across the sea.
Dubois

These considerations of prestige were extended into the spirit realm, and colorless gin and schnapps came to serve
alongside water as ritual fluids for deities averse to rum and human blood. By contrast war deities among Nawuris
preferred sorghum beer (pito). This may reflect the distance of Nawuri settlements from the coast and the Page | 27
incomplete penetration of Atlantic trade goods or a ritual preference for sorghum beer.

Andrew Apter

force … To this Rock, the Fetish-Man sacrifices annually a Goat and some Rum, eating and drinking a little himself,
and throwing the rest into the Sea with odd Gestures and Invocations, he tells the Company, and they believe that he
… the writings of European residents and travelers, whose sustained fascination with local “fetishes” generated a
documentary record several centuries. …
half-century before the original “castle” was first built by the Swedes in 1653.

Andrew Apter

Elmer Kolfin
Dubois

Why were European liquors like gin, rum, and schnapps

incorporated into ritual on the Gold Coast and not others? Page | 28
through the use of foods and liquors introduced through the
Atlantic trade from the 16th

… detect influences of the Atlantic even in geographically dispersed areas
that underscore the momentous impact of Atlantic processes, such as
the incorporation of Atlantic foods or firearms?
… the incorporation of rum and gin as powerful spiritual drinks in precolonial Gold Coast, particularly in the
context of state formation and warfare, and the growing importance of maize, side by side with the indigenous yam,
as the food of gods. Through food and drink, we analyze changing notions of spiritual efficacy, the ascendancy of
war deities, and interrogate how shifts in socio-political contexts aligned with those in the spiritual realm. Why were
European liquors like gin, rum, and schnapps incorporated into ritual on the Gold Coast and not others?
the transformation of the ritual landscape in the Gold Coast through the use of foods and liquors introduced through
the Atlantic trade from the 16th century through 1850, when the Danes withdrew from the Gold Coast. What ritual
foods and drinks were offered to Gold Coast deities and how did these change during the Atlantic era? What can we
learn from these transformations about the African material and symbolic experience of the Atlantic world and the
impact on the cognitive realm? What insights can we glean about political change on the Gold Coast through the
interpenetration of state formation, slave trade and liquor trade?
These are communities in which deities showed a preference for yam as a ritual food, and for ritual drinks made
from local cereals – millet and sorghum. Atlantic trade brought in European spirituous liquor, and ritual references
to rum, brandy, schnapps and gin become common. The intensification of state formation among the Akan from the
1600s with the importation of European firearms encouraged the militarization of Gold Coast societies and the
mobility of war deities across cultural and linguistic groups. Golden-colored rum and blood sacrifices came to be

Juhé-Beaulaton, 1990, p.177-98, notes how by the late 17th century maize had displaced sorghum and millet along
the West African coast. [See comment (1)]. [If maize had displaced sorghum and millet in brewing by the Ga by the
early 17th century, the resulting drink seemed to have retained the name of the brew based on sorghum (pito) in
these early transitional years. [Fante farmers near Elmina, early experimenters with maize, named the crop oborowi,
“the European’s [foreigner’s] millet.”
The Dutchman Pieter de Marees’ account of his trips to the coast of Guinea including the Gold Coast in the late
sixteenth century (published in 1602) is a rich source that was subsequently heavily plagiarized by other European
writers in the 17th and 18th centuries: Dapper (1668), Villault (1668), Müller (1673), and Barbot (1732). He
provides an intriguing account of the social drinking of palm wine on the Gold Coast that speaks to commensality
Dubois
among men, affective gender relations, and the utility of alcoholic drinks in the spiritual realm. He notes that on the
whole water is the main drink, though “in some places they brew a drink composed of water and a little maize,
which, when fermented resembles Beer. They drink this often and called it Poitou”. Pito is a nutritious African beer
brewed from sorghum or millet, and it is unclear whether “maize” in this passage is a reference to a maize-like
cereal (sorghum) or reflects an actual coastal use of maize in the brewing of beer, which the Ga of the Accra region
do and call ŋmãda. This would then indicate an early incorporation of maize from the Americas into local brewing.
Page | 29
On the provenance of maize in the Gold Coast, de Marees notes that it was brought from the West Indies or the
Americas to Sao Tome, an uninhabited island in West Africa discovered by the Portuguese around 1470. The crown
took over formal control of the island in 1522 and by the mid-16th century the Portuguese had transformed Sao
Tome into Africa’s leading exporter of sugar. Portuguese residents from Sao Tome subsequently brought maize to
their settlements on the Gold Coast and cultivated it there for their needs. De Marees was emphatic that “before the
arrival of the Portuguese the inhabitants of these countries did not know it [maize].” On all accounts De Marees
could be considered as one of the most important sources documenting the introduction of maize in Africa.

… a trade item that had not been available from the north, European firearms, and this would transform the nature of
warfare and revolutionize Akan state formation from the 1600s. The repercussions were wide, promoting the
militarization of neighboring states and communities. The availability of captives altered the nature of Gold Coast-
European trade, and by the end of the 17th century the Gold Coast was exporting slaves, sometimes in exchange for
gold. European sources record the disruptive nature of Akan warfare and state formation on trade.
The Accanists [Akans], who are real traders, used to trade in all these areas and they alone controlled all trade,
traveling with large numbers of slaves to carry their goods through all these places. But as a result of the wars which
the blacks so often start for trifling reasons, this trade is suddenly stopped… the passages are closed … and
especially since musket and gunpowder have been introduced, things have become much worse, the natives having
become more and more warlike.
feed an expanding population. Labor intensive and longer maturing yams did not compare favorably with the high
yielding, two harvests a season, maize in terms of feeding expanding forest populations. McCann argues that the
introduction of maize at this crucial phase of Akan history increased the availability of food and “in turn, released
labor to extend the frontiers of forest settlement and support the development of politics and statecraft.”
Warfare and the Atlantic slave trade had enormous impact on ritual in the Gold Coast in both the material and
cognitive realms. Maize, especially roasted maize, became a logistic of war as it kept for several days. And the
Asante army used grains of corn to keep count of soldiers lost in war. Among the Ga in Accra and its environs,
maize had become the major crop by the end of the 17th century. The Frenchman Jean Barbot, in his visits to the
Gold Coast in 1678-9 and 1681-2, witnessed just outside of Danish Osu a sacrifice to a lagoon deity to request rain
for the maize crop. It is clear that this was the major crop and the object of great concern.
Dubois
Atlantic trade also introduced and expanded the availability of European liquor. We saw above that de Marees did
not cite European liquor as a major item of trade in the late 16th century. This had changed significantly by the late
17th century from the account of Barbot. At my first voyage to Cape Corso [Cape Coast], I had a pretty brisk trade
for slaves and gold; but at my return thither three years after, I found a significant alteration; the French brandy, Page | 30
whereof I had always a good quantity aboard, being much less demanded, by reason a great quantity of spirits and
rum had been brought on that coast by many English trading ships, then on the coast, which oblig’d [sic] all to sell
cheaply.
The expanded availability of European liquor impacted both the ritual and social uses of alcohol. American rum
represents a good illustration of the dynamics by which Atlantic commodities were incorporated into distinctively
Gold Coast socio-political agendas. Barbot notes the presence of rum on the Gold Coast in the late 17th century.
Brooks offers further commentary on the central place of rum and tobacco in American trade to West Africa in the
Atlantic era.
Tobacco and rum were the foundation of American legitimate commerce and the chief source of profits. These, plus
cotton cloth, guns, and powder were the staples of the West African trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
and the main stock in trade of European merchants from all countries. The quality and competitive price of
American tobacco and rum ensured their entry into West African markets, whether through official import channels
or smuggling.
Rum imported into the Gold Coast came in two types: colorless or
“white” and a brownish or golden color. Both found distinct uses in
ritual in the Gold Coast. Incessant warfare from the 17th century had
elevated war deities over nature deities.

These considerations of prestige were extended into the spirit realm, and colorless gin and schnapps came to serve
alongside water as ritual fluids for deities averse to rum and human blood. By contrast war deities among Nawuris
preferred sorghum beer (pito). This may reflect the distance of Nawuri settlements from the coast and the
incomplete penetration of Atlantic trade goods or a ritual preference for sorghum beer.
In an important article by Raymond Dumett that examined European liquor traffic to the Akan of the Gold Coast in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he argued that huge imports of European liquor were largely incorporated into
ritual uses, especially at funerals, negating missionary assumptions that these huge quantities translated into
widespread drunkenness.

Dubois
Monrad makes clear that maize, together with chickens and eggs, were important ritual foods for spiritual beings,
including deities. Such ritual offerings of food may be placed on public roads – junctions were charged sites in ritual
landscapes -- or at the shrine of the deity. Monrad describes three annual festivals of the Ga, one of which is clearly
a harvest festival at which new yams and maize are consumed.
The Negroes of Accara celebrate three feasts annually: one on the occasion of the earth’s fertility, which comes in Page | 31

Margaret Field, a colonial anthropologist later turned ethno-psychiatrist, wrote two major studies on Ga religion and
medicine, and the social organization of the Ga. In the first she conveniently provides a typology of Ga deities,
categorizing them into four groups distinguished by their dances and music. The aboriginal deities (Kple deities),
worshipped before the arrival of the Ga by Obutu speakers (a lost language), were agricultural deities, the major
ones associated with the lagoons along the Ga coastline. …
A third category comprised deities based in the Ga town of Labadi, whose songs are in Ga. These were primarily
war deities, products of the Atlantic era of warfare, but who today have absorbed many of the agricultural rites of
the older gods. Their main festival is Homowo. Finally are deities that are yam-eating deities acquired from the
Fanti, Akwamu and Akuapem. Field describes these as “all war gods … purchased by the Ga in comparatively
recent times to assist in war.”
Instructively, the aboriginal deities associated with the lagoons, such as Sakumo
of Tema, are associated with water or corn wine and not with strong European
liquor. In the gbatsu (shrine room) of Sakumo can be found only pots of holy
water.

Field described homowo, celebrated in July or August, as the “very pivot of tribal life”; it united the living with the
dead. At homowo kpekpei (from cooked maize dough) was the food given to ancestors, something they had eaten in
their lifetime, as distinct from fotolii, expected by Kple or aboriginal deities. Importantly, both fotolii and kpekpei
were made from maize, making it a food of nature deities, ancestors and the living. Fotolii, made of coarse corn
dough, was lumpy. It was mixed with palm oil and placed in containers in shrines and road junctions. Kpekpei was
sieved, making it closer to the consistency of gari (grated, roasted cassava) or couscous. Also kneaded with red palm
oil, it was accompanied with palm nut soup cooked with fish and vegetables. Its smooth consistency allowed it to be
sprinkled in homes around the town for ancestors, and shared with the living for which it remained a special food.
Maize thus entered the ritual landscape of the Ga quite early both as a food and ritual drink (corn wine). Strikingly,
the yam-eating gods of the Ga are the borrowed gods from inland Akan speaking peoples. Here maize, introduced
from the Americas, has assumed an anteriority based on its association with nature/agricultural deities such as
lagoons, while the indigenous West African crop yam is linked to Akan war deities and more recent healing
medicines and their activating supernatural forces or deities (Ga: dzemawon). Maize has become a symbol of
fertility among the Ga, and in ceremonies like popo, performed for first-time pregnant women, maize was literally
Dubois
rubbed on the abdomen of the pregnant woman. Mediums (Ga: wo’yei, pl; wo’yo, sing.) of deities and other
supernatural beings, usually female and often married to medicine men, were reported during the colonial period to
regularly hold an annual yam feast (yéléyeli) to thank their deities.

in the Gold Coast during the Atlantic Era (16th century to 1850) Page | 32
Yam and Ritual in the Gold Coast Interior

The association of yam with odwira festivals among interior Akan states has given odwira the strong coloration of a
harvest festival. Odwira was celebrated by the Akwamu, Akuapem, Akyem, and Asante. At this festival the political
authorities and religious leaders ate new yams, marking an important transition in the agricultural calendar.
Nineteenth century European visitors such as Bowdich and Ramseyer in Asante, who witnessed this festival,
however, noted its significant political agenda, and McCaskie has centered odwira in his study of state ideology in
precolonial Asante. But the Akan states mentioned had deep connections to the Atlantic trade, and their worlds were
transformed by this encounter. The resulting tensions, perhaps, may be gleaned in the training of priestesses at the
shrine of the autochthonous Guan deity, Akonedi, at Larteh in Akuapem. Maize is tabooed to Akonedi, and
on Tuesdays and Fridays, when the deity enters the shrine through possession, anyone associated with the shrine is
prohibited from eating kenkey or to bring maize dough into the shrine. At Akonedi the ritual food is mashed yam,
either white (etofufu) or mixed with palm oil (etokokoo or “red” mashed yam). Instructively, Akonedi does not
This, perhaps, exhibits an antipathy between this pristine deity and the forces or influences unleashed by the Atlantic
trade in contradistinction to the war deities that thrived within the context of Atlantic slaving. Shrines on hilltop
settlements on the Akuapem range, such as Kyenku at Obosomase, provided refuge for runaway slaves, even
coming into conflict with Danish slave owners who pursued their slaves to the shrine in an area they considered their
sphere of influence.


Andrew Apter
Whether Tabir was already a European god or was simply developing European tastes is impossible to say. Perhaps
he was both, a kind of ritual creole manifesting multiple forms of Afro-European intercourse.

force . . . To this Rock, the Fetish-Man sacrifices annually a Goat and some Rum, eating and drinking a little
himself, and throwing the rest into the Sea with odd Gestures and Invocations he tells the Company, and they
believe that he receives a verbal answer from Tabra, what Seasons and Times will be propitious; and for this
Knowledge every Fisherman finds it worth his while to Dashee him with some Acknowledgment.
Dubois
Private interlopers entered the fray, adding a further dimension of instability on the Gold Coast, since they
circumvented company rules - undercutting monopoly prices, kidnapping (“panyarring”) African traders, and
thereby undermining the credit and trust that the Royal African Company had established with local merchants.
… the growing number of castle “gromettoes” who would continue to shape Cape Coast creole society. Variously
described as “castle slaves” or “factory slaves,” as distinct from the “chained batches of sale slaves” whom they
oversaw in the castle dungeons, the gromettoes occupied an interstitial space between bondage and freedom, Page | 33
entering the ranks of junior officers. As William St. Clair, Rebecca Shumway, Simon Newman, and Randy Sparks
have meticulously demonstrated, these mediators, who were internally differentiated by color as mulattoes, came to
occupy higher positions, a process linked to European unions - frequently polygynous - with so-called local
“wenches.” Additional castle slaves were offered by chiefs to English officers as gifts and pawns to cement local
alliances. It is important to emphasize that the rise of this caste of castle slaves was no mere outgrowth of Afro-
European commercial relations, but was central to their promotion and protection, providing cheap labor, essential
services, and access to prominent families and chiefs - indeed, generating the illustrious creole families of the
nineteenth-century cosmopolitan elite.

Andrew Apter
Finally, Davenant’s identification of the “rock called Tabora” locates Tabir at the epicenter of these Afro-Atlantic
transformations where merchant capital, market forces, and hinterland captives converged. The god’s early
association with Europeans and their firepower may well represent that thunderous cacophony which today’s
devotees say signals his anger, echoing over the ages the crashing waves and deafening cannon facing the sea.
To deepen our interpretation of Tabir’s history within the coastal developments of the Atlantic economy, we turn to
the writings of European residents and travelers, whose sustained fascination with local “fetishes” generated a
documentary record several centuries. …
half-century before the original “castle” was first built by the Swedes in 1653.

Andrew Apter
twill,” which alluded to “the long friendly and honourable association of Oyeni with the flag of England.”
…Tabir can now be identified as an emerging “spirit” of the Afro-European encounter, rising to historic visibility
and prominence with the founding and development of Cape Coast Castle. From this “point” forward in both space
and time, Tabir’s ritual dominion as a god of the sea - protecting fishermen and generating wealth by providing
bountiful catches for inland markets - became increasingly entangled with European trade and firepower.
Ambivalently positioned both within and without the castle on its rock, Tabir connected the Atlantic economy to
Dubois
Cape Coast’s annual Fetu Afahye festival - that formalized Afro-European relations through those reciprocal
pathways of ceremonial exchange that Tabir came to manage and consolidate.
Whether Tabir was already a European god or was simply developing European Page | 34

Andrew Apter
The officiates were dressed in black cloth with water vines (nyenyena) draped over their shoulders.27 They
propitiated Tabir with red wine poured into gourds and onto two … large rocks supported by the altar: …. Adorned
with coins, bills, and wine bottles, together with bowls, shells, skins, and a pair of gongs, the altar faced
commemorative wreaths and plaques from international visitors hanging nearby
on a wall. As the wine continued to flow, and shots of gin were passed among the officiates and invitees, the
priestesses sang and danced for their deity. This restricted ceremony was ritual preparation for the next phase of Fetu
Afahye - Tabir’s noontime procession with a white sacrificial bull through Cape Coast’s streets and thoroughfares.
They also registered a lasting impact on local codes of social distinction, as key markers of European value and
sovereignty were incorporated into the architectural styles and status symbols of the new mercantile elites. In this
respect, Tabir became a point of ritual articulation—not only between land and sea, coast and hinterland, Africans
and Europeans, and developing coastal polities, but also between the converging orders of structural differentiation
resulting from Cape Coast’s incorporation into the growing Atlantic economy. Hence thesis one: Tabir was no mere
mirror of this change; he occupied a key position in a growing ritual network, which established Afro-European
trading alliances through “fetish contracts” that controlled the sphere of circulation in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
Was Tabir a ritual representation of the white governor of Cape Coast Castle or
the mulatto overseers of slaves there when the fortress became the West African
headquarters of the Royal African Company? And what about the slaves who
were held in the dungeons and sent overseas? Did Tabir manifest the spirits of
the slaves, or in some sense placate their spiritsouls?

Andrew Apter
If Tabir served as a god of Atlantic mediation, connecting European trade, firepower, and symbolic capital to an
emerging merchant polity on the coast, he did so at the apex of a ritual system that developed into Fetu Afahye, an
amalgamation of communal festivals linking the ocean, the lagoon, the market, and the palace to northern hinterland
sources of slaves - a festival that was anchored in Cape Coast Castle and brought the Omanhen to reside in Oguaa.
Nor was such mediation strictly one-sided. Afro-European relations may have been historically asymmetrical, but as
we have seen, local leaders, caboceers, traders, and “fetish priests” exercised considerable agency in storming the
castle, negotiating prices, demanding gifts, exploiting rivalries, and incorporating European factors into their ritual
fields of command.
Dubois
At Fetu the . . . great festival (as they call it) is held annually at the beginning of September . . . The heathen festival
takes place as follows. They invite not only many Blacks from neighbouring places and countries, but also the
Danes, Dutch and other Whites trading in the Fetu country. Many people might easily think the Christians could not
attend this heathen festival without offending against their consciences. They excuse themselves by saying that this
is difficult to avoid, because the Christian servants in these heathen countries are pledged to seek what is best for
their principals, and, in view of this, must take good care not to antagonize the natives. The commandant of the
Whites never attends this festival in person, but the chief factor and other servants of the company are ordered to do Page | 35
so.
European participation in the “Customs” ceremonies of many coastal polities engaged in Atlantic trade is well
documented in other travel narratives, but what stands out in this seventeenth-century account is the recognition of
native bargaining power through the idiom of ritual itself. Europeans were compelled to attend the “heathen”
holiday against their better Christian judgment because it was basically good for business, and if the company
“commandants” remained exempt, it was only because they were represented by their chief factors and company
servants. Of additional interest is the mode of conveyance that literally carried Europeans to Fetu: These people are
carried to Fetu in hammocks by slaves on Sunday after lunch, accompanied by many armed black soldiers, servants,
attendants, as well as male and female slaves, who must carry the guns and equipment. Each nation also carries the
flag of its king and overlord with it, as well as taking a drummer.

Andrew Apter
… market women sporting imported Silesian cloth - indexing the value of a commodity that doubled as a money
form - as well as fetissos of keys and Venetian trade beads evoking locked chests of gold and overseas wealth. And
colorations. ….
forms of investiture, delegation, and commodification - the “political idolatry” - that shaped merchant capitalism.
powers of the king’s “touch” into transactional spheres of corporate branding and “acquisition.”
Andrew Apter
Dubois

Stanley B. Alpern
A few pompous trappings rate more than importance in precolonial Kwaland as

symbols horsetails, hammocks, umbrellas, flags, and Horsetails … Page | 36
Pompous Trappings - These were the status symbols, the privileges of rank and wealth. propped up the egos of
African kings, chiefs, grandees, and rich helping to set them apart from the common folk. … Pompous trappings
were generally not trade goods but presents to facilitate trade. They were, in fact, a form of "dash," a noun West
African coast in the slave-trade era (and beyond) that was more synonymous with the baksheesh of the Muslim
world. The word derived from the Portuguese daFiio, meaning donation, or doafiio, came to embrace many things.
The roster of trappings would be long: from white satin robes, brocaded silk mantles, trimmed French musketeers'
hats, embroidered admirals' uniforms, flags, multicolored umbrellas, silver-headed canes, silver tobacco watches and
clocks, music boxes, hand organs, kaleidoscopes, silverware, glassware and china, and damask napkins, to velvet-
upholstered armchairs with gilt legs, satin-upholstered couches, beds draped taffeta, Turkish carpets, sedan chairs,
caparisoned horses, and stagecoaches.
In 1863 Richard Burton brought Glele of Dahomey a "forty-foot circular silk Damask Tent with Pole complete" and
a coat of mail with gauntlets. the late eighteenth century British carpenters and joiners put up wooden houses for
African slave dealers at Old Calabar with materials from Liverpool. Pompous trappings were generally not trade
goods but presents to facilitate trade. They were, in fact, a form of "dash," a noun West African coast in the slave-
trade era (and beyond) that was more synonymous with the baksheesh of the Muslim world. The word derived from
the Portuguese daFiio, meaning donation, or doafiio, came to embrace many things.
Dash might performed, payment for permission to trade, surcharge on exports, a subsidy, a bribe obtain preferential
treatment, a payment might never be repaid), … Pompous trappings shade into high-quality trade good: for example,
expensive fabrics, wines-luxuries considered the prerogative hard to say where pure ostentation leaves
commentators have even seen utility in ostentation. to Old Calabar, maintains that "a display importance to the
African traders, as worthiness, not only to their own people, who would have virtually no other yardstick Northrup,
writing about southeastern Nigeria possessions like fine tableware and paintings major coastal traders in the eyes of
their otherwise inclined to adopt a condescending favourable impression made on European display."235 To me, the
evidence suggests adapted borrowings from Europe inspired European visitors, though they may well notables vis-a-
vis their own people structures .
A few pompous trappings rate more than importance in precolonial Kwaland as symbols horsetails, hammocks,
umbrellas, flags, and Horsetails: as early as 1504, the Casa were assembled for the African trade, bought Ryder says
they were "clearly destined Horsetails would be a European commodity than a century and a half. Randall Shaw
blacke" for the Benin trade in 1582, German visitor, Andreas Josua Ulsheimer, appearances, the oba "hangs over his
head horse-tail, in such a way that anyone who Gold Coast, Marees said, "[t]hey use stuffed when they are sitting
around doing nothing, bodies" - which suggests that tails were only. In the 1660s warriors at Fetu decorated helmets
with imported horsetails, some blue. Bosman also saw Gold Coast swords ornamented with "a bunch of Horse
Hair."

Basins: … basins were European trade goods from start of the Atlantic slave trade. The oldest literary reference to
European in Kwaland tells of copper basins (plus copper mortars, brass candlesticks, brass bracelets--read manillas--
old clothes, and used linens) being bartered the Gold Coast in the 1470s. … Many millions of brass, copper, pewter,
and tin basins must subsequently have been transported to the region because they appear so frequently in the
records of all slaving nations through all the centuries. Made in Germany, Holland, Flanders, Wallonia, France, and
England, they were often distinguished by weight, being commonly 1,2, 3, or 4 lbs.
Dubois
...[T]hey use the small Neptunes to store Oil with which they rub themselves; the big Neptunes to immure in Tombs
on the graves of the dead, and also to carry something or other in. … Such Brass Basins, which the Ships bring there
in large quantities, have become so common in the Country that people often sell brass-ware as cheaply . . . as it is
bought in Amsterdam .
… The Akan used metal basins as abodes of deities or altars to the Supreme Being. They also employed them in
placer gold mining. At Benin blood from beheadings was caught in a big copper basin to be sprinkled on the royal
tombs. At Fetu a diviner read the future in a basin of water. Basins were used there, and elsewhere in Kwaland, as Page | 37
percussion instruments.

Two seventeenth-century vocabularies of the Fante language

contain the word for sail. Muller recorded it in 1673 as Abidda,
Barbot in 1679 as avedda". In Portuguese the sail is a vela.
The connection is clear: a phonetician could
explain the shift from 1 to d.
Canvas was an early Portuguese trade good, and an English commodity by 1582, but we do not know what it was
used for. An Old Calabar chief named Grandy King George asked an English merchant in writing in 1773
specifically for "canvess to make sails for my canows." Such references are rare, but what Europeans more
importantly brought was the idea of sails. This innovation can be credited to the generally taciturn Portuguese on
circumstantial evidence. Marees saw canoes with single masts and square rush-mat sails on the Gold Coast in 1601
and has left us a drawing of one transporting jugs of palm wine.
By that time the coastal Africans had been seeing (mostly) Portuguese sailing ships for 130 years. The idea of
harnessing the sea wind with the traditional rush or raffia sleeping mat would likely have occurred before too long to
local canoemen.
Two seventeenth-century vocabularies of the Fante language contain the word for sail. Muller recorded it in 1673 as
Abidda, Barbot in 1679 as avedda". In Portuguese the sail is a vela. The connection is clear: a phonetician could
explain the shift from 1 to d.
… In the 1780s Gold Coasters were still employing mat sails.

Stanley B. Alpern
At Benin in Ruiters' says ‘" A little white Stick" symbolized the oba's authority. These observations references to
European silver- or gold-headed that such canes, affected by European residents, credence" in the area.265 There is
no doubt, had become an important item of European "When [grandees] go out for a walk," recounted carry in their
hand a long stick, coloured with silver. This stick is generally given Christians trading here. On it the names
engraved. This stick is used as a token of truthfulness, message." Phillips observed in 1694 that the RAC could make
to "the kings and Coast.
Youths of 18 or 20, said Marees, with their first earnings from fishing, bought a "fathom" which they wrapped round
their bodies and between their legs, their male parts, as they begin to acquire a sense of decency" same with twice as
much linen, letting it hang down below the also wore a mantle like the women.

Dubois
Perpetuanas: a durable (if not perpetual) serge (wool plus worsted),

usually blue, red, or green, sometimes yellow, brown, violet, or purple,
made in Holland, Flanders, and England. Exceptionally popular.
In 27 years of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
England's Royal African Company (RAC) sent more than
170,000 pieces, or perhaps 3,000,000 yards, Page | 38
of perpetuana to Africa.
By 1620 European sheets had been incorporated into Gold

Coast manners. wedding ceremonies, reported Samuel Brun,
the groom sometimes wore sheet over his shoulders. The bride
took it off him and covered her nakedness.
One English ship took 21,125 sheets to Cormantin Gold Coast in 1659. In 1687 a man was bought at Cape Coast on
the Coast for 26 sheets.45 In 24 years between 1673 and 1704 (some missing incomplete) the RAC shipped 507,809
sheets to Africa; without doubt millions of sheets were delivered to Kwaland during the slave-trade.

Stanley B. Alpern
Randall Shaw advised a fellow British trader in 1582 that "lynnen cloath ys on of the chefest" commodities at old
Benin ... Twenty years later Dutchman Dierick Ruiters remarked that the people of Benin generally wore "Holland
Linen" over their own "nicely made" cotton clothes. At the same time another Dutch trader, Pieter de Marees, wrote
that linen had become the standard clothing material on the Gold Coast.
Calicos: a white, blue or printed cotton cloth, made

into skirts. Indian calico was "the single most
important textile product sold to Africa" in the
eighteenth century.
Kerchiefs: The French contributed Mouchoirs de Pondich.ry from their Indian Colony; Cholet handkerchiefs, white
with red stripes, made of cotton or cotton-cum-silk at a town name near Nantes (with at least some of the cotton
cloth imported from and silk handkerchiefs from Nimes. European linen handkerchiefs traded.
Hats: fancy hats with gold braid, Spanish lace, white plumes, and such were a favorite gift for African V.I.P.s, but
common European hats of all kinds were an important trade good. Olfert Dapper mentioned black hats with flat
crowns and broad brims. Early eighteenth-century English slavers favored felt and beaver hats. Liverpool shipped
28,896 "Felt and Carolina" hats to Africa in 1770. Some hats were secondhand. Caps: generally less common than
hats-though Liverpool shipped 37,380 in 1770-but more often described. Caps came in wool, worsted, muslin, linen,
silk, velvet, and taffeta; they were red, white, green, blue, or striped. Some were Scotch bonnets, some priests' caps,
others Monmouth caps, a flat, round type worn by English soldiers and sailors. Again, some were hand-me-downs.
Other items of clothing, new and used, included shirts, jackets, cloaks, gowns, scarves, ties, belts, gloves, stockings,
slippers, and shoes.43 For African weavers and seamstresses there was a line of notions: thread and yarn, tapes,
ribbons and laces, fringe, braid and embroidery silk, buttons and patches
Dubois
According to another of the new fables - Philip D. Curtin -

the most common European firearms, cheap liquor, tawdry trinkets,
view, was a dumping ground for European dominated from start to finish
by practical range of commodities was so broad that came to resemble
what one specialist has called floating supermarkets. Page | 39
On 1 December 1645, the Dutch inventoried Elmina Castle on the Gold Coast.
By the end of the century about 150 commodities were de rigueur on the same
were de rigueur on the same coast and by 1728, 218 types of merchandise
were stored by Dutch traders.

Stanley B. Alpern
British trader in 1582 that "lynnen cloath ys on of the chefest" commodities at old Benin …Youths of 18 or 20,
said Marees, with their first earnings from fishing, bought a "fathom" which they wrapped round their bodies and
between their legs, their male parts, as they begin to acquire a sense of decency" same with twice as much linen,
letting it hang down below the also wore a mantle like the women. Wilhelm Johann Miiller, a German who served
the Danes on the Gold Coast in the 1660s, confirmed the importance of linen garments for both sexes, and added
that the material was used to swaddle babies and wrap corpses, and as a sacrifice to deities.
... Africa had well-developed industries producing every single item on

the list" of European trade goods. So why did Africans import things
they already made? "Largely" for motives of "prestige, fancy, changing
taste, and a desire for variety."

Stanley B. Alpern
… an idea of the variety of the European material input, the perceived needs of African consumers, the ways in
which European imports were used, how Kwaland became enmeshed in the world economy, and the things
exchanged for the ancestors of New World blacks.
… that "Europe offered nothing to Africa that Africa did not already produce ... Africa had well-developed
industries producing every single item on the list" of European trade goods. So why did Africans import things they
already made? "Largely" for motives of "prestige, fancy, changing taste, and a desire for variety." A related notion is
that Africans were so economically self- sufficient, "European products could not penetrate the African market until
the History in Africa second half of the nineteenth century.
According to another of the new fables - Philip D. Curtin - the most common European firearms, cheap liquor,
tawdry trinkets, view, was a dumping ground for European dominated from start to finish by practical range of
commodities was so broad that came to resemble what one specialist has 1 December 1645, the Dutch inventoried
Castle on the Gold Coast. By the end commodities were de rigueur on the same merchandise were stored by Dutch
traders.
Soon after the Portuguese reached Kwaland in the 1470s, they were selling garments and cloth made in North
Africa, Flemish and French fabrics, and their own woollens and linens to the inhabitants. By 1505, however, they
had added Indian textiles to their commercial inventories, and such cloth would a staple of European trade with
West Africa until well into the nineteenth century. Indian fabrics were popular in Africa for their cheapness,
durability, attractive patterns, and bright colors that resisted repeated washings tropical sunshine.
Dubois

A Master List of European Trade
Goods
Stanley B. Alpern
Page | 40
The resulting tensions, perhaps, may be gleaned in the training of priestesses at the shrine of the autochthonous
Guan deity, Akonedi, at Larteh in Akuapem. Maize is tabooed to Akonedi, and
on Tuesdays and Fridays, when the deity enters the shrine through possession, anyone associated with the shrine is
prohibited from eating kenkey or to bring maize dough into the shrine. At Akonedi the ritual food is mashed yam,
either white (etofufu) or mixed with palm oil (etokokoo or “red” mashed yam). Instructively, Akonedi does not
Interpretation Of Evidence On The Introduction Of Maize Into West Africa

Marvin P. Miracle
the hypothesis of pre-Columbian maize in Africa

Willett's arguments do not establish that the Portuguese introduced maize into West Africa, although he states (p. 1
i) that they introduced along the coast. Not only has it not yet been positively established that brought the first maize
to West Africa, but it has not so far been established of the varieties now found were introduced by them (although it
seems they would have had an economic motive for introducing higher-yielding from other continents whenever
they encountered them).
… These are the types which were probably available in Brazil at discovery of the New World; thus if flour types of
maize were introduced Africa in the first few decades after the discovery of Brazil, the presumably responsible. But
it has not yet been established when flour introduced to Africa.
Interpretation Of Evidence On The Introduction Of Maize Into West Africa

Marvin P. Miracle
the hypothesis of pre-Columbian maize in Africa

Willett's arguments do not establish that the Portuguese introduced maize into West Africa, although he states (p. 1
i) that they introduced along the coast. Not only has it not yet been positively established that brought the first maize
to West Africa, but it has not so far been established of the varieties now found were introduced by them (although it
seems they would have had an economic motive for introducing higher-yielding from other continents whenever
they encountered them).
… These are the types which were probably available in Brazil at discovery of the New World; thus if flour types of
maize were introduced Africa in the first few decades after the discovery of Brazil, the presumably responsible. But
it has not yet been established when flour introduced to Africa.

in the Gold Coast during the Atlantic Era
(16th Century to 1850)
Akyeampong, Emmanuel and Samuel A. Ntewusu
Dubois
Why were European liquors like gin, rum, and schnapps incorporated into ritual on the Gold Coast and not others?

through the use of foods and liquors introduced through the Atlantic trade from the 16th
Golden-colored rum and blood sacrifices came to be Page | 41

… detect influences of the Atlantic even in geographically dispersed areas that underscore the momentous impact of
Atlantic processes, such as the incorporation of Atlantic foods or firearms?

Ira Berlin
lanfados;
Ira Berlin
Indigenous spirituality is seen as a vital aspect of Indigenous

knowledges and yet, too often, it is left unpacked in terms of
engagement with the Western academy.

Eric Ritskes
frame- work.
who are to come: "community means the living, the unborn, the dead, and nature as a whole"
Eric Ritskes
Dubois

Elmer Kolfin Page | 42

Ira Berlin
World disdained and feared.
Between 1730 and 1750, African imports to New England increased substantially, and “at the latter date,
numbered as slaves...about 3,500.” Before that time, blacks were not su􀁽ciently numerous to have
introduced and sustained a parade, at least not one impressive in size. By 1780, in Connecticut, however,
they numbered 6,000, and the parade was enthusiastically supported in several towns, as it was in Rhode
Island towns, where they numbered 4,000 in 1780. Africans seasoned in the West Indies and those directly
from Africa constituted the bulk of the slaves brought into New England, that is, most of them were African
in sensibility and outlook. Advertisements indicate Gold Coast Negroes, considered “of highest quality,”
were most sought after, as “in South Carolina and the West Indies.”
Dubois

Ira Berlin
The Atlantic creole's unique experience reveals some of the processes by which race was constructed and Page | 43
Was Tabir a ritual representation of the white governor of Cape Coast Castle or the mulatto overseers of slaves there
when the fortress became the West African headquarters of the Royal African Company? And what about the slaves
who were held in the dungeons and sent overseas? Did Tabir manifest the spirits of the slaves, or in some sense
placate their spiritsouls?

Ira Berlin
Dubois
Page | 44

J.E.K. Kuma’s research into the history and cultures of northern Guans provides very useful insights into crops and
their uses in everyday life and festivities. He notes a number of similarities between southern and northern cultural
practices in Ghana based on the performance of everyday ritual. In particular he indicates that as far as harvest
festivals are concerned there seem to be profound similarity in their celebration among Guans in Ghana. Besides
Kuma, Goody’s study of the cultivation of crops and the consumption of food among the LoDargaba and Gonja
offers useful insights into the role of food in festivals in Northern Ghana.
As previously noted, there is a ritual calendar for the yam festival, which usually takes place around July. …

War deities who became more prominent in the era of the Atlantic slave trade showed a preference for golden-
colored rum brought from the Americas, just as they were also associated with blood sacrifices. We examined the
tensions that emerged between war deities and nature/agricultural deities, and how for some local deities such as
Akonedi of the Larteh Guan symbols from the Atlantic world became tabooed.
Dubois
We look at the northern Guan community of Balai Nawuri for clues of the impact of the Atlantic world on the deep
interior or whether their relative distance cushioned them from the disruptive developments of Atlantic trade.
Through the yam festival (Kajoji) of the Balai Nawuri, … how through ritual they framed and renewed their world.
Here the prestigious ritual food was yam with water and pito from sorghum as the most important ritual drinks. The
prominent role of the hunters’ association and their deity Siga in rounding off the yam festival, including the Page | 45
dramatic place of guns even in the cooking of the ritual food, may underscore the key role of the association in the
defense of the community during insecure times and the utility of firearms introduced through the Atlantic trade.
Maize, in the form of burnt cobs enters the rituals of the yam festival, another intriguing Atlantic connection. Thus,
Balai Nawuri, while distant from the Atlantic seaboard, with rituals that seemed to close it off from this world, was
not isolated from the transformative processes of the Atlantic. Rosalind Shaw has demonstrated how ritual memory
can be revealing of the traumatic era of the Atlantic slave trade. Juxtaposing rituals of war deities along the coast
with those of Guan nature deities in the Akuapem hills and among the northern Nawuri, we see different levels of
engagement with the Atlantic trade based on distance from the coast. Atlantic slaving entwined with the rise and fall
of states in the Gold Coast, and these developments promoted the rise of war deities in insecure times and
threatened the primacy of nature deities. These developments are reflected in the new ritual importance of maize and
European liquor along the coast compared to the ritual retention of yams and pito brewed from sorghum in the
interior. Both responses speak to the transformative impact of Atlantic trade in precolonial Gold Coast.

The Negroes of Accara celebrate three feasts annually: one on the occasion of the earth’s fertility, which comes in

Andrew Apter
Dubois

Page | 46
Vodou and History

Laurent Dubois
Rather than seeing the lwa primarily as African imports, in the tradition of Melville Herskovits, she suggests that the
forms of religious practice that developed into Vodou were "responses to the institution of slavery," and "to its
peculiar brand of sensuous domination." "A historical streak in these spirits," she continues, "entirely this side of
metaphysics, reconstitutes the shadowy and powerful magical gods of Africa as everyday responses to the white
master's arbitrary power." Vodou, then, is in a sense an archive of slavery itself, of the tortured human relationships
it produced.
Indigenous Spirituality
Eric Ritskes
Indigenous spirituality weaves its way inextricably through all aspects of life so
how can it be brought to a Western academy that seeks to fragment and
compart- mentalize knowledge as a method of control and containment? How
can a sense of community and connection be brought into a space that alienates
and distances people from their connections and their whole selves? … for
communities to be valued as partners in knowledge production, Indigenous
spirituality needs to be seen as active and embodied.
Indigenous spirituality is seen as a vital aspect of Indigenous knowledges and yet, too often, it is left unpacked in
terms of engagement with the Western academy. Both Indigenous knowledges and spirituality stem from lived
experiences of the individual and the community and yet little time has been spent on how these oppositional ways
of knowing can both resist and exist within the Western academy, a site of hegemonic power that seeks to posit itself
as the sole provider and authenticator of knowledge.
Eric Ritskes
What is meant by Indigenous spirituality? It is the recognition of the connectedness of all things, both animate and
inanimate, from past through the present and into the future. It is the realization of a common essence within us
that is constantly being shaped and re-shaped in response to the multitude of connections and relationships that
constantly affect us, a realization that we as humans are only one link in a grand chain of existence. It is this
understanding of ourselves as part of a greater schema that informs our desire to work for peace with one another, to
work for good relationships that do not seek to damage others and to live in balance and respect with others. This is
in direct opposition to a Western conceptualization of spirituality which not only posits the individual as the sole
"locus for selectivity and determination of belief ' (York, 2001, p. 366) but which emphasizes an individualized
spirituality that fits into a commodified, Western liberal frame- work.
Again, it needs to be re-emphasized that this emphasis on connections does not privilege the community over the
individual or vice versa but recognizes the inextricability of the two, the inter-depen- dence of the individual and the
Dubois
community. For Indigenous peoples, community involves not only the people in the immediate location but
relationships with the environment/whole earth, relationships with the ancestors who have gone before, and
relationships with those who are to come: "community means the living, the unborn, the dead, and nature as a
whole" (Wangoola, 2000, p. 271).
Spirituality weaves these three connections together and allows for a community that is broad and dynamic. Dei
(1993) explores how nature, the spirits, and the ancestors are connected through a spiritual understanding of the Page | 47
earth which is not only imbued with spirits but also acts as a bridge between the living and the dead. Mazama (2002)
states, "There can be no dichotomy between so-called natural and supernatural worlds" (p. 221). Each individual is
connected in different ways but they are still part of this greater "web" and have the rights and responsibilities that
are imbued by the community.
Eric Ritskes
… The emphasis placed on connections and lived experiences oppose

a Western worldview that values individualism and rational, scientific thinking.
What Are Ancestor Cults? The term “ancestor cult”

is used to define a wide array of beliefs and practices that
deal with one’s ancestors.
Is ancestor veneration the most universal

of all world religions?
A critique of modernist cosmological bias
Thomas Reuter
Ancestral founders, represented by their most direct living descendants, occupy what E.D. Lewis first referred to as
a position of “ritual precedence” over the more recently established branch houses or settlements of descendants or
newcomers, a position which involves a ritual duty of care. Certain individuals, houses, or settlements thus enjoy a
superior ceremonial rank on account of being socially closer to the ancestors and the origin of life than other
members of present-day society.
Ancestor Religion in these societies, therefore, is not so much a matter of “worshipping” ancestors, though there are
countless rituals to commemorate, invite and ‘feed’ the recently deceased persons as well as more distant, deified
ancestors in Austronesian societies. Rather, it is about valuing the (scientific) fact that our personal existence is not
at all independent but has arisen from, and remains utterly embedded within, a continuous and profoundly
interconnected flow of life. The special (“sacred”) feature of origins and of associated ancestors is that they have the
capacity to unite more “branch” people in the present (through the enactment of shared ritual) the further back they
are located in time and in the family tree. In short, their symbolic power lies in instilling a sense of social as well as
spiritual unity and sense of duration.
Is ancestor veneration the most universal of all world religions?
Thomas Reuter
The Phenomenon of Ancestor Cults with Missiological Implications

Richard Doss
As Jean-Marc Ela explains, “In many African societies, the cult of the dead is perhaps that aspect of culture to which
the African is most attached”. For Ela, what is essential to the African experience of the ancestors is that they
continue to be part of the family and community. … “of the spiritual presence of the ancestor”. Ela describes how in
one tribe in Cameroon the head of the family carries with him a jar—baba—that represents the presence of his
father or grandfather. This jar is used as the focal point of rituals that remember the ancestor, maintains the kinship
linage, and helps bring unity among the living.
Dubois
The Universality of Ancestor Worship

Steadman, Palmer and Tilley
An overly narrow definition of the term, worship, is also often used to claim that certain societies lack ancestor
worship. Many societies indeed do if the meaning of worship is restricted to elaborate ceremonies involving
ritualized sacrifices. ... several anthropologists have pointed out that worship may not be the most accurate term to
describe even those societies unquestionably assumed to have ancestor worship. For example, in a discussion of Page | 48
some of the classic ancestral cults of Africa, Abraham (1966:63) states that the rituals associated with ancestors "are
not rites of worship but methods of communication." If the essence of ancestor worship is the claim that there is
communication between ancestors and the living, then this behavior should be tested as a possible universal aspect
of religion.
"Although the worship of ancestors is not universal, a belief in the

immortality of the dead occurs in all cultures" (Lehmann and Myers
1993:283). That is, even if ancestor worship is not universal (which
may be true if ancestor worship is defined in its most restrictive sense)
all religions may have more in common than the mere assertion of the
immortality of the dead.
The Universality of Ancestor Worship
Steadman, Palmer and Tilley
Ancestor Religion in these societies, therefore, is not so much a matter of “worshipping” ancestors, though there are
countless rituals to commemorate, invite and ‘feed’ the recently deceased persons as well as more distant, deified
ancestors in Austronesian societies. Rather, it is about valuing the (scientific) fact that our personal existence is not
at all independent but has arisen from, and remains utterly embedded within, a continuous and profoundly
interconnected flow of life. The special (“sacred”) feature of origins and of associated ancestors is that they have the
capacity to unite more “branch” people in the present (through the enactment of shared ritual) the further
back they are located in time and in the family tree. In short, their symbolic power lies in instilling a sense of social
as well as spiritual unity and sense of duration.
Is ancestor veneration the most universal of all world religions?
Thomas Reuter


'Where are we going? Always home."

- Novalis
Dubois

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… market women sporting imported Silesian cloth - indexing the value of a commodity that doubled as a money form - as well

In a sense, the Europeans were themselves

Thomas Edward Bowdich wrote that “the white

of the slave coast –

… The Akan used metal basins as abodes of deities or altars

"to the Akan ... death ... is not life's contradiction

Tabir’s annual sacrifice in Atkins’s text:

Tradition and innovation in Dutch ethnographic prints

What Africans Got for Their Slaves:

… the sumptuous fare of the governor’s “Publick Table,”

Tabir’s annual sacrifice in Atkins’s text:

What Africans Got for Their Slaves:

Randall Shaw advised a fellow British trader in 1582 that

What Africans Got for Their Slaves:

Rum, Gin and Maize: Deities and Ritual Change

What Africans Got for Their Slaves:

Vodou and History

Nakedness and Other Peoples:

Indigenous spirituality is seen as a vital aspect of

What is meant by Indigenous spirituality? …. This is in direct opposition to a Western conceptualization of

Indigenous Spirituality and Methodology for the Classroom

In a sense, the Europeans were themselves commodified, “taken possession of”

Rum, Gin and Maize: Deities and Ritual Change

Rum, Gin and Maize: Deities and Ritual Change

the transformation of the ritual landscape in the Gold Coast

Golden-colored rum and blood sacrifices came to be

Vodou and History

What Africans Got for Their Slaves:

What Africans Got for Their Slaves:

... Africa had well-developed industries producing every single item on

What Africans Got for Their Slaves:

From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and

His observations of local dress, commerce, and “fetisso” (“fetish worship”)

History In The Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery And The Spirit

Of Capitalism In Cape Coast Castle, Ghana

Rum, Gin and Maize: Deities and Ritual Change

Pito is a nutritious African beer brewed from sorghum or millet, and it

Rum, Gin and Maize: Deities and Ritual Change

Rum, Gin and Maize: Deities and Ritual Change

Tradition and innovation in Dutch ethnographic prints Page | 11

History In The Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery And The Spirit

From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and

Rum, Gin and Maize: Deities and Ritual Change

Rum, Gin and Maize: Deities and Ritual Change

Tradition and innovation in Dutch ethnographic prints

From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and

The Earliest German Sources For West African History (1504-1509)

Tradition and innovation in Dutch ethnographic prints

History In The Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery And The Spirit

Rum, Gin and Maize: Deities and Ritual Change

Stamping History: Stories of Social Change in Ghana’s

‘Guinea Cloth’: Production and Consumption of Cotton Textiles

Tradition and innovation in Dutch ethnographic prints

Rum, Gin and Maize: Deities and Ritual Change

"to the Akan ... death ... is not life's contradiction

Anthropologists identified the social convergence of this

From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and

History In The Dungeon: Atlantic transactional Slavery And The Spirit

History In The Dungeon: Atlantic transactional Slavery And The Spirit

Tradition and innovation in Dutch ethnographic prints

… the sumptuous fare of the governor’s “Publick Table,” where the

History In The Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery And The Spirit

History In The Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery And The Spirit