Slave Coast Research Articles

Powerful Pots, Humbling Holes, and Regional Ritual Processes: Towards an Archaeology of Huedan Vodun, ca. 1650–1727

Situated along the “Slave Coast” of West Africa, the international coastal trading entrepôt of Ouidah is infamous as the point of embarkation for hundreds of thousands of people spirited into the Middle Passage. Accordingly, scholars have looked to it and the surrounding region as a font of culture and history for diasporic groups. In scholarly narratives, the larger Gbe-speaking region surrounding Ouidah is characterized as the homeland of Vodun, a religious tradition that influenced diasporic religions throughout the Atlantic world. This paper explores early Huedan Vodun at a local level and works to bolster, and at the same time problematize, the project of addressing Vodun at increasing geographic scales and temporal depths. It builds on longstanding research which recognizes that context is critical for interpreting possible ritual or religious significance of archaeological material.

Conversion to Christianity in African History before Colonial Modernity

This article examines different paradigms of conversions to Christianity in regions of Africa prior to the advent of colonial modernity. Religious change, in general, connected converts and various intermediaries to resources and power within specific settings. Even though African cultures were oral, conversions generated the production of texts which became important print media and were at least partly responsible for prompting conversions elsewhere in the world. The first case study explains how mission initiatives along the so-called West African slave coast almost always resulted in failure between 1450 and 1850, but how these failed efforts figure as important halfway options which reveal fundamental mechanisms of conversion. The dynamics of interaction were different in the African Kingdom of Kongo, where conversions became intimately entwined in the consolidation of political power and where, subsequent to the adoption of Christianity, new understandings of power evolved. Last but not least, in South Africa, again, another paradigm of conversion developed within the nexus of conflict and settler violence. Contested narratives of Christianity and conversion emerged as settlers tried to keep Christianity as a religious resource to be shared among whites only.

French Merchants and Missionaries on the Early Modern Slave Coast

r('~hristian missionaries launched expeditions to convert West Mricans starting with \~,-.1the first voyages of exploration. However, in the first few centuries of contact they were generally unsuccessful. Historians have covered these missionary efforts in an inconsistent fashion. Most concentrate on the 19th-century flood of Protestant and Catholic missionaries participating in the Rush for Africa:' thus overlooking the 16thand 17th-century efforts. Geographically, the coverage of Africa also is spotty, with historians concentrating on document-rich areas such as central Mozambique, the Cape Colony, and the Kingdom of Kongo, which had a state-sponsored version of Christianity in place by the early 16th century.l Thus, large sections of West Africa, especially the western portion of the Bight of Benin and the Slave Coast (primarily modern Togo and Benin), have not received the attention of historians, despite having a large number of easily available sources, particularly travel narratives. Historians have written a few works on the region. Some have critically examined Portuguese and Spanish missionaries during the first years of exploration; in particular, one work examines the efforts of Spanish Capuchins in the 1660s, but these works are often dated, the products of early 20th-century colonial mentalities in many cases. General surveys of Mrican Christianity cover missionaries in West Africa. Lamin Sanneh's 11i?stAftican Christianity is a quite good recent survey, and works produced by and for religious organizations address missionary efforts in some detail, for example Ralph Wiltgen's Gold Coast Mission History, 1471-1880. However, these general surveys

French Merchants and Missionaries on the Early Modern Slave Coast

French Merchants and Missionaries on the Early Modern Slave Coast

African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame , and: The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (review)

Reviewed by: African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame, and: The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech Furukawa Tetsushi Anne C. Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame. Boston: Beacon, 2005. 304 pp. $26.00 cloth/$16.00 paper. Shane White and Graham White. The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech. Boston: Beacon, 2005. 264 pp. $17.00. The Atlantic slave trade has been studied for many years. We have had seminal works from W. E. B. Du Bois's The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (1896) to Philip Curtain's The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), and these classics have been augmented by recent scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic. Anne C. Bailey's African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame has joined this long line of research lists as a pathbreaking attempt. There is a "deafening silence" on the issue of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade among African or African diasporic communities. Born and growing up in Jamaica, Bailey herself experienced this silence, and she tried to examine and break through it. "What is behind this silence?" she asks (10). The question brought her deep into an unknown aspect of studies on the slave trade. Unlike many previous works on the slave trade based on European and American records, Bailey's study focuses on the perspectives of the Africans or African societies from which slaves were taken. The book's main setting is the Anlo-Ewe community in the area of southeastern Ghana, once called the old Slave Coast. After years of research, including many interviews with chiefs and elders in Ghana, Bailey tries to untie entangled threads of history concerning slavery in the region. Not only European and American agencies but also African agencies are discussed in the system of the Atlantic slave trade. Domestic slavery in Africa, having existed long before its Atlantic counterpart, is also discussed in the book. Memory of domestic slavery and the history of the involvement of some Africans in the sale of others in the slave trade are shown as some reasons for the silence on slavery. Yet, through studying oral histories such as the incident at Atorkor, involving the kidnapping of famous local drummers and traders by Europeans and Americans in or around 1856, Bailey argues, "[T]o see Africans as partners implies equal terms and equal influence on the global and intercontinental processes of the trade. This was simply not the case. Africans had great influence on the processes of enslavement on the continent itself, but they had no direct influence on the engines behind the trade in the capital firms, the shipping and insurance companies of Europe and America, or on the plantation system in the Americas" (62). Not only was equal partnership between the two groups impossible, but Bailey also finds that even partial African involvement in the trade had devastated their society nevertheless. In some of her accounts, I see somewhat problematic issues such as the simple comparison between the author's oral collection of the Atlantic slave trade and survivors' voices of either the Holocaust or the Soviet Gulag. This needs a more [End Page 195] sensitive and careful argument with a sustained political, cultural, and psychological examination. Despite these drawbacks, the author successfully combines oral and written sources, and historical and literary approaches to unveil the aspect of silence of the Atlantic slave trade. Vivid voices and images of slavery or slave traffic in the region can surely be heard and seen. In this book Bailey goes beyond the simple writing of the past. In the final chapter she deals with the current issue of reparations. Recognizing roles of Africans as well as Europeans and Americans in the slave trade, Bailey remarks, "An apology from African nations and even specific groups whose involvement is on the record would go a long way toward establishing a high moral ground upon which to ask likewise for apologies from Europe and America as well...

Combating the Menace of Transnational Human Trafficking in Nigeria: A Challenge to Public Policy.

Savage neo-slave trade appears a befitting name for the current trafficking in persons which had dehumanized the homo-sapien. This is more savagery than its progeny, in which slaves were chained on their legs and necks and bound together in a convoy through Trans-Atlantic route to the white-man\'s country. The new slave trade the trans-National human trafficking, abuses the human element in its sacred part, the soul of womanhood. It is more devastating than the physical torture that was attendant to the trans-Atlantic route between 1445 and 1870. Paradoxically, the new phenomenon has its origin in Africa as with the first, with Nigeria, the old “slave coast”, again playing the arrow-head. This research explores the general characteristics of the illegal trade and identifies major predisposing factors as bad governance, with its ancillary by-products of unemployment, poverty and pervasive corruption in political and bureaucratic leadership. There is deception as well as ignorance on the part of the victims. The trade thrives in African cultural milieu which challenges public policy. Three African regional blocks, are found to be participants or facilitators in the trade, namely: Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) with Nigeria as a principal actor and a transit route; the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) and the North African Zones with Morocco as serving the “middle passage”. Combating policy in this study recommends a two-track policy model.International Journal of Policy and Development Studies Vol. 3 2007: pp. 1-15

Gbe and other West African sources of Suriname creole semantic structures

This paper reports on ongoing research on the role of various kinds of potential substrate languages in the development of the semantic structures of Ndyuka (Eastern Suriname Creole). A set of 100 senses of noun, verb, and other lexemes in Ndyuka were compared with senses of corresponding lexemes in three kinds of languages of the former Slave Coast and Gold Coast areas, and immediately adjoining hinterland: (a) Gbe languages; (b) other Kwa languages, specifically Akan and Ga; (c) non-Kwa Niger-Congo languages. The results of this process provide some evidence for the importance of the Gbe languages in the formation of the Suriname creoles, but also for the importance of other languages, and for the areal nature of some of the collocations studied, rendering specific identification of a single substrate source impossible and inappropriate. These results not only provide information about the role of Gbe and other languages in the formation of Ndyuka, but also give evidence for effects of substrate languages spoken by late arrivals some time after the “founders” of a given creole-speaking society. The conclusions are extrapolated beyond Suriname to creole genesis generally.

Towards a Reassessment of the Dating and the Geographical Origins of the Luso-African Ivories, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries

Fifty years ago, a group of 100 ivory carvings from West Africa was first identified by the English scholar William Fagg as constituting a coherent body of work. In making this important identification, Fagg proposed the descriptive label “Afro-Portuguese ivories.” Then, as now, the provenance and dating of these carved spoons, chalices (now recognized as salt cellars), horns, and small boxes posed a challenge to art historians. Fagg proposed three possible geographical origins: Sierra Leone, the Congo coast (Angola, ex-Zaïre), and the Yoruba-inhabited area of the old Slave Coast. Although Fagg was initially inclined on stylistic grounds to accept the Yoruba hypothesis, historical documents soon made it clear that the ivories—or at least many of them—were associated with Portuguese commerce in Sierra Leone. This trade developed in the final decades of the fifteenth century.Today approximately 150 works have been identified by scholars as belonging to the “corpus” of carved ivories from West Africa. Although the sobriquet “Afro-Portuguese” remains the most common appellation, these pieces should more appropriately be referred to as Luso-African ivories. The latter term more accurately reflects the objects' creation by West African sculptors who were working within Africa. The works, although hybrid in inspiration, are far more African than they are Portuguese. In addition, no documentary evidence exists to indicate that any of the ivories were carved by African artists living in Portugal. West African artists created the sculptures within the context of their own cultures.

Ethnicities of Enslaved Africans in the Diaspora: On the Meanings of “Mina” (Again)

The term “Mina,” when encountered as an ethnic designation of enslaved Africans in the Americas in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, has commonly been interpreted as referring to persons brought from the area of the “Gold Coast” (“Costa da Mina” in Portuguese usage), corresponding roughly to modern Ghana, who are further commonly presumed to have been mainly speakers of the Akan languages (Fante, Twi, etc.) dominant on that section of the coast and its immediate hinterland. In a recently published paper, however, Gwendolyn Hall has questioned this conventional interpretation, and suggested instead that most of those called “Mina” in the Americas were actually from the “Slave Coast” to the east (modern southeastern Ghana, Togo, and Bénin), and hence speakers of the languages nowadays generally termed “Gbe” (though formerly more commonly “Ewe”), including Ewe, Adja, and Fon. Given the numerical strength of the “Mina” presence in the Americas, as Hall rightly notes, this revision would substantially alter our understanding of ethnic formation in the Americas.In further discussion of these issues, this paper considers in greater detail than was possible in Hall's treatment: first, the application of the name “Mina” in European usage on the West African coast itself, and second, the range of meanings attached to it in the Americas. This separation of African and American data, it should be stressed, is adopted only for convenience of exposition, since it is very likely that ethnic terminology on the two sides of the Atlantic in fact evolved in a process of mutual interaction. In particular, the settlement of large numbers of returned exslaves from Brazil on the Slave Coast from the 1830s onwards very probably fed Brazilian usage back into west Africa, as I have argued earlier with respect to the use of the name “Nago” as a generic term for the Yoruba-speaking peoples.

The encyclopedia of African history and culture

Authoritative and Illuminating; This comprehensive set covers the entire expanse of African history as never before. It treats Africa - its geography, art, cultures, peoples, personalities, and even its wildlife - in three volumes, each devoted to a major period in the continent's development. Each volume's in-depth, heavily cross-referenced, and alphabetical entries draw students, researchers, and general readers into the histories of ancient cities, powerful kingdoms, and charismatic leaders, many of whom are little known. Filled with fascinating sidebars, unusual illustrations, and above all wonderful stories, these accessible, attractive, and very readable encyclopedias are authoriative information sources as well as enteratining and illuminating guides to the world's most diverse continent. Ancient Africa; This volume covers the earliest stages of Africa's history, from civilization's beginnings through the Metallic Age, the kingdoms of Egypt and Nubia, Africa's interaction with ancient Greece and Rome, and the rise of Kush and Aksum. African Kingdoms; The focus of tis volume is on the period from approximately 500 through 1500, encompassing the powerful kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai along with the wealthy city-states of the west and south. African Conquest and Colonization; Covering the period from approximately 1500 to 1850, this volume examines the Grain, Gold, and Slave Coasts; the rise of the slave trade; the partitioning of West Africa; and the traditional governments, religions, and arts of the regions.

The slave trade remembered on the former gold and slave coasts

The slave trade remembered on the former gold and slave coasts

West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast

T SHE section of the West African coast known to Europeans as the was, as the name implies, a major source for the transatlantic slave trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The two principal ports of embarkation for slaves in the region were Ouidah and Lagos.1 The history of Slave Coast ports such as Ouidah and Lagos cannot be understood or adequately represented in isolation, since they were involved in wider regional and transatlantic networks. Within Africa, the operation of the slave trade linked the coastal ports not only to the countries in the interior that supplied slaves to the coast but also to one another, especially through the coastal lagoon system, along which slaves were commonly moved from port to port prior to embarkation.2 Across the Atlantic, the commercial links established by the slave trade among ports in West Africa, America, and Europe are well known, but the trade also generated transatlantic social and cultural connections whose importance has been commonly underestimated. The scale and intensity of these bonds were such that the coastal communities of the Slave Coast, or at least their commercial and ruling elites, may be considered as participating in what can reasonably be termed an Atlantic community. The degree of involvement in this

Pawnship in Africa. Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective

Pawnship in Africa, Paul E. Lovejoy and Toyin Falola pawnship in the Niger Delta, E.J. Alagoa the resurgence of pawning in French West Africa during the Depression of the 1930s, Richard Roberts and Martin Klein indirect rule and the brief apogee of pawnship in Nimba, Liberia - 1918-1930, Martin Ford pawnship, economy, and the state in Abeokuta - 1920-1940, Judith Byfield pawning and enslavement for debt in the pre-colonial slave coast, Robin Law pawning in Ilorin, Ann O'Hear pawnship in colonial southwestern Nigeria, T. Falola pawnship in the Swahili hinterland, James Giblin and Fred Morton pawnship in Igbo society, Felix Ekechi pawning in the history of Benin, Uyilawa Usuanlele.

Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A history of the Anlo-Ewe

Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A history of the Anlo-Ewe

Sandra E. Greene. <italic>Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe</italic>. (Social History of Africa.) Portsmouth: Heinemann. 1996. Pp. xiii, 209. Cloth $60,00, paper $23.95

Sandra E. Greene. <italic>Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe</italic>. (Social History of Africa.) Portsmouth: Heinemann. 1996. Pp. xiii, 209. Cloth $60,00, paper $23.95

Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History o the Anlo-Ewe.

Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History o the Anlo-Ewe.

Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe. By Sandra E. Greene (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1996. xiii plus 209pp. $60/cloth $23.95/paperback)

Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe. By Sandra E. Greene (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1996. xiii plus 209pp. $60/cloth $23.95/paperback)

‘Of a nation which the others do not understand’: Bambara slaves and African ethnicity in colonial Louisiana, 1718–60

The French North American colony of Louisiana, parts of which were first settled in 1698, is an interesting and unique example of early eighteenthcentury life in a non-English North American colony, especially as it was lived by the several thousand African slaves imported in the 1720s. Comprising fewer than a dozen isolated settlements along the Gulf Coast and on the banks of the Mississippi River, Louisiana experienced a sharp increase in immigration of West Africans which only lasted thirteen years from 1718 yet had a profound affect on the social and economic development of the colony.2 By the end of the African slave trade to the colony in the early 1730s, Africans made up over half of the total population of the colony's largest settlement and capital, New Orleans.3 Between 1719 and 1731, the Louisiana colony was the final destination for just over 5,000 Africans. Captives arrived from various points along the West Africa coast including Cabinda, Whydah, Cape Lahou, Cape Apollonia, Bissau, Albreda, Goree and Saint Louis.4 Many were sold to plantations along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Natchez. Thorough and detailed examinations of contemporary events at and near these ports may eventually make it possible to offer more specific conclusions about the geographic origins and cultural backgrounds of Louisiana's African slaves than has been possible in other New World slave societies. As a result, Louisiana may provide for historians a rare opportunity to explore the complexities of African political and social structures in the New World as well as the African contribution to the social and economic development of a part of North America that is often neglected. As an example of an approach which stresses the value of wedding local histories in Africa and in the New World, this essay will focus upon Senegambia since that region accounted for roughly one-half of all the African captives brought to French Louisiana between 1719 and 1731.5The Atlantic slave trade brought together Africans of distinct and varied religious, social and linguistic backgrounds in the hostile and oppressive environment of New World slavery. Louisiana was no exception and the colony had an ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse African population. Numerous ethnic groups lived in areas that fed the transatlantic slave trade, and individuals from many of these ethnic groups were brought to Louisiana. Approximately 2,000 were shipped from ports along the West Africa coast from Portentic in northern Senegal to Cape Appolonia several hundred kilometres to the south. An additional 2,000 came via the port of Whydah on the Slave Coast, and approximately 300 more departed from Cabinda. We have only a small number of observations relating to the ethnicity of slaves in Louisiana in 1720-50. Despite the geographic diversity of Africans arriving in the colony, a disproportionate number of those to whom an ethnic label is attached were described as Bambara or belonging to the Bambara nation.6

Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe

Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe

Gender, ethnicity, and social change on the upper Slave Coast: a history of the Anlo-Ewe

Transformations gendered responses - ethnic outsiders in 18th- and 19th-century Anlo the road not taken ethnicity in colonial Anlo - the gender connection gender in colonial and post-colonial Anlo - the ethnic connection conclusion.