Fante of Ghana and Atlantic Slave Trade

[Tropicana]

I started this thread last night and I don't know what happened to it. I decided to start it again.

The Fante of Ghana (Akan people like the Ashanti) were among those who ended up in slavery in Jamaica so some Jamaicans are descended from them.

Jamaica and Africa (Part II)

GHANAIAN INFLUENCES

In the early years of the expansion of plantation slavery in Jamaica, the English slave trade was based at Cape Coast (Oguaa) in Ghana. This is why the Akan Southern Ghanaian influence - Asante, Fante, Akyem, Akwamu - in Jamaica is very strong. This Akan influence is particularly obvious in Maroon culture - names such as Kojo and Kofi - but is widespread throughout all Jamaica. The Jamaican family system cannot be understood unless you understand the Akan one. Like theirs, our family system stresses descent or 'generation' rather than marriage. It stresses the female side, just like all Akans do.


But in the present state of research, it is not possible to say with precision which ethnic groups predominated. It is very unlikely to have been Asantes. The Asante state controlled the 18th century slave trade from Ghana and usually did not sell their own people into slavery. Many of the people sold into slavery from Ghana were not from the South at all, especially if we are talking about the period after 1730.
new name for ackee


They came from the North of Ghana from the weaker groups such as the Kusaasi, Isala, Tallensi and Dagarti. Indeed, when I lived in Ghana I discovered that ackee was not known much by people from the coast or Asante. But when you went up to the North, the Dagartis knew and ate it - they call it chiha.
In the case of Nigeria, we know that it was from the East that Jamaicans came. This was in the latter part of the 18th century, especially as the English slave trade came to an end in 1807. This is also the period in which there was a huge inflow of persons from the Congo-Angola area.
This spike in the slave trade in the early 19th century was connected to the development of the coffee industry in Jamaica, following the collapse of coffee in Haiti after the revolution. This occurred mainly in the Dallas mountain overlooking UWI, in Upper Clarendon where my family is from and in the hills of northern Manchester - towards Coleyville and Wait-a Bit in Upper Trelawny.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20080113/focus/focus4.html

The Fante also colluded with Europeans in the slave trade.

New research from historical documents is uncovering information about them that was hidden for a long time. Melville Hersokvitts first documented cutural similarities between the Akan people and the Black people in the Caribbean.

Ghana has apologized to Black people in the West for its role in the slave trade.

This is about the book The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade by Ruth Shumway.

Several centuries ago, an Old World string of coastal fishing towns in West Africa began to encounter New World traders. The influx of commerce brought newfound wealth—and power —to local leaders. The outgo was gold, ivory, and human cargo. History Professor Rebecca Shumway is fascinated by this moment in human history—and the ghosts of Fanteland that still haunt far shores.In the cool of the West African morning, before the sun starts its daily broil from the sky, Eno Baisie Kurentsi holds court. As usual, the session is lengthy, animated, and sprinkled with great passions. The elders and town chiefs sit and argue before Kurentsi, who is about 80 years old. Later, he will retire to a bathing tub, drink rum until midafternoon, and smoke tobacco from a long pipe that rests on the ground.
Kurentsi is an Omanhene, a highly respected and charismatic political figure. During the course of his day, he hosts leaders from the green coastal area of Ghana over which he has wide influence. But he also engages leaders of Europe and considers himself an equal to the king of England. He speaks enough English to recite the alphabet. At least two of his sons study in Europe: one in Paris, another in London. He shrewdly conducts commerce. He even sways decisions about war—including the capture and sale of other African peoples as slaves.
A leader of Ghana's Fanteland in the 1750s, Kurentsi ruled amid the palm trees at the height of the transatlantic slave trade. It was a time when many of the Fante elite grew wealthy trading with Europeans. The cargo included some of the 1 million Africans who were sold from the Ghana coast and sent to the New World. Indeed, Fanteland was a place so vital and flourishing that one British governor, living in Ghana in 1753, wrote home to a coalition of English merchants, describing the region as a world "where the Negro[e]s are masters."

For roughly a century, from 1700 to 1807 (when Britain passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act), West African societies changed dramatically. The transatlantic selling of human captives and the gold and ivory trades brought sustained commercial relations with Europe and the Americas. Big ships with billowing white sails arrived regularly on the coast. They were full of Portuguese and Dutch and English traders sent to find goods that would build the wealth of foreign merchants. The Fante canoe men specialized in ferrying such goods and eventually human cargo to the European ships, which couldn't dock too close to the rocky shores.The enslaved were often traded by merchant Ghanaians with names like Fat Sam and Yellow Joe, men who used the slave trade to acquire wealth and influence. The forbidding white fort, from which slaves were shipped to the New World, still stands in the town of Anomabo. It was built in 1751 by the British to address the demand for slaves in Jamaica and Barbados.
The traffic for gold and human captives transformed Fanteland from a loosely connected set of fishing towns to a united Coastal Coalition that battled the neighboring Asante over control of the growing slave trade—and the wealth that flowed from it.
It's a poignant moment in human history, entwined with divided loyalties, newfound wealth, terrible tragedy, and transient bonds among very different peoples across several continents. In many ways, it's a historian's treasure trove, but it took Shumway time to find her way to it.

http://www.pitt.edu/research/ghosts-fanteland

[Tropicana]

Here is more:

The tobacco-smoking 80-year-old leader Eno Baisie Kurentsi is but one example of the rich, complex Fante culture. He lived in Anomabo, which, at the height of the slave trade, was a port city that became the center of Fante society, political power, and enterprise. About 14 miles east of Cape Coast, it was a city of contrasts.

In Kurentsi's time, Anomabo was tropical and cosmopolitan, full of merchants, African and European traders, and mixed-race people. It would be no surprise to spy an Anomabo leader, a figure much like a king, gliding through the streets under a large umbrella of satin and gold lace, gifts from the British. There were extremes of wealth and poverty.
In Fanteland, the oldest members of society held authority, as respect for elders is an enduring feature of West African social life. It was also a place of abirempong, or big men, African elites who held political power. The akomfuo, or priests, were here, too, supervising the ritual oaths, which in oral cultures are a form of legal agreement. Just like the political elite, the akomfuo also received material support—in some cases yards of blue cloth, gallons of rum—from the Europeans, who hoped the priests would help them curry favor from the gods and ancestors.
As a crossroads of global trade, which brought an astounding influx of wealth and interdependency, the region changed dramatically during the course of a century. The roots of that transformation were coiled around the slave trade, says Shumway. It was a most cruel form of violence, displacement, and killing that led to the suffering of large numbers of innocents. At the apex of the trade, the merchant need for captives was so great that it was no longer safe to travel alone through Fanteland—hunters, farmers, and women going to market "were ruthlessly captured and sold into foreign slavery."
The subsequent need in the region to protect people and land spurred the development of Asafo companies, which were military-like squads that provided a matrix of defense and kinship across neighboring Fante communities. Such fraternal bonds were celebrated through distinctive drum and flag corps that have survived into contemporary Fante culture.

http://www.pitt.edu/research/ghosts-fanteland

[Tropicana]

Here is information about the author:

In 1993, the undergraduate arrived at the University of Ghana, Legon, an airy campus of white buildings with red-tile roofs. During her one-year stay, she explored all things Asante. She visited Kumasi, the cultural capital, and found indigenous goods like Kente cloth, the colorful woven fabric once worn only by Ghanaian kings. She studied the golden stools, which represent the throne of Asante leadership, and she glimpsed a modern-day Asantehene, the chief of the Asante people.But Shumway also visited Cape Coast, a teeming city by the ocean, blotted with a huge white slave fort. Shumway toured the dungeons where the enslaved were housed— sometimes for months—before being loaded into ships that would carry them to the Americas. In the fort, one of the most emotional symbols is the "door of no return," the huge portal through which the enslaved were led to board the ships. During her visit to the fort, Shumway stood near the door as it was flung open. That moment, she recalls, was so overwhelming that she expected to see a slave ship in the distance, ready to load its cargo.
Instead, what she saw was a busy collection of people: fishermen, canoe men, schoolchildren. She wondered: Who are they? Is their history connected to the forts and castles that sit in their backyards?What she soon learned is that many of the people were Fante, descendants from the heritage and history lived by Eno Baisie Kurentsi.

http://www.pitt.edu/research/ghosts-fanteland

With her book The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Shumway set out to reinterpret her earlier scholarship, to put the Fante in the broader context of the African diaspora. She sought to access the voice of the Fante, to have their words and memories inform her interpretations, together with historical documents. She rode in canoes, walked through fields to shrines, and interviewed Fante regional leaders. Once, when she stopped for a cold cola at a Ghanaian roadside snack shop, a waitress introduced her to a local chief. All along the way, Shumway listened, hearing the Fante describe their own towns, their own shrines, their own stories.

By studying the ghosts of Fanteland, Shumway suggests it is possible to observe how the slave trade created new cultures in this part of West Africa in much the same way that the forced movement of millions of Africans gave birth to new cultures across the Americas. It also opens the door, she says, to comparing how inhabitants of the Ghanaian coast were able to preserve their autonomy when other communities farther east and west were absorbed into expanding empires such as Dahomey (now Benin) and Oyo (now Nigeria).

In documenting an era when it was either enslave or be enslaved, Shumway's own march across the archives and fields of Fanteland reveals the light and the dark sides of Africans' agency in the slave trade. Here, the elite Asante were among the most powerful and wealthiest in West Africa, but they were also the main slave traders in Ghana. In the 18th century, their brilliant Kente cloth was woven with threads of silk, cotton, and wool— textiles imported from abroad and often paid for in human lives.
The Pitt history professor hopes her work will encourage historians and others to begin to study how Fante culture is likely sprinkled across the African diaspora, perhaps showing up in Jamaica, Barbados, and the United States.