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Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade.
By Randy J. Sparks. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014.
321 pages. $29.95 (cloth).
Reviewed by Rebecca Shumway, Carnegie Mellon University
With Where the Negroes Are Masters, Randy J. Sparks continues to explore
the connections between West Africa and the British Atlantic world as he did
in his 2004 book, The Two Princes of Calabar.1 The focus of his new book
is the town of Anomabo (“Annamaboe”) in the modern Republic of Ghana,
which, like the better-known towns of Elmina and Cape Coast, was an active
international port during the era of the transatlantic slave trade. The book is
addressed to general readers rather than specialists and is mainly a synthesis
of published material, supplemented by the records and correspondence
of the English trading companies. The work seeks to tell the story of how
Anomabo became a central place in the Atlantic world and highlights the
commanding roles played by the town’s African merchant elites in their
commercial relationships with visiting English and American traders.
This study makes a valuable contribution to Atlantic history by drawing
attention to the much-neglected topics of African port towns and the
African elites who participated in the transatlantic slave trade and/or gleaned
political power from its prevalence in Atlantic Africa. As Sparks correctly
insists, the Fante-speaking region—of which Anomabo is a part—was a place
where black people and white people forged complex diplomatic and familial
relationships, as well as commercial ones, that shaped the overall patterns and
structures of the slave trade from the late seventeenth century to the early
nineteenth century. More enslaved Africans were sold and embarked from
Anomabo than from any other coastal market on what was then known as the
Gold Coast, including Cape Coast and Elmina. Several hundred thousand
captives sold at Anomabo faced the Middle Passage and, if they survived that,
a life of slavery in the Americas. Some of the main beneficiaries of this violent
and dehumanizing traffic were the political rulers of Anomabo, including the
paramount chief, John Corrantee (Eno Baisee Kurentsi), and his successor,
Amoony Coomah (Amonu Kuma). Sparks presents many revealing excerpts
from the accounts of English traders in which they express utter exasperation
in dealing with Fante men, who seem continually to outsmart them in both
trade and diplomacy.
The Fante elites’ sophistication in Atlantic trade and diplomacy, Sparks
shows, developed not only from decades of international trade on the Gold
Coast but also from their own experiences traveling to Europe and America.
1 Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic
Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).
William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 71, no. 3, July 2014
DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.71.3.0479
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The book begins with the story of William Ansah Sessarakoo, a young man
from Anomabo who traveled in the 1740s to London, where he became
known in fashionable circles as the Royal African. Like a small but influential
group of his Fante peers, Sessarakoo returned home to the Gold Coast after
visiting England and entered the slave-trading business. The emphasis on
Africans’ experiences traveling around the Atlantic world recalls the story of
two young men from Old Calabar (modern-day Nigeria) who made their
way to British America and England in the 1760s and 1770s, the subject of
Sparks’s last book.
Sparks’s most original scholarly contribution is his analysis of the practice
of pawning on the Gold Coast, much of which appeared in a 2013 article in
the William and Mary Quarterly.2 In West Africa during the era of the slave
trade, it was customary for African merchants to receive trade goods on credit
from slave ship captains and to provide a certain number of family members
or dependents as a form of human collateral. The “pawns” were returned to
the African merchant upon delivery of the slaves purchased. Sparks explains
that English slave ship captains were reluctant to set sail for the Americas
with pawns on board who were the friends or relatives of influential Fante
elites, even in cases when the pawns had not been redeemed by the African
merchant and therefore became the ship captain’s legal property. Instead,
the captains would exchange these local people for foreign slaves (duncos)
so as not to incur the displeasure of the delinquent Fante merchant, who
might prove a valuable trade partner on a future voyage. By highlighting
this practice, Sparks reveals the subtler aspects of African power within the
commercial exchanges that constituted the slave trade on the Gold Coast and
enriches scholarly understanding of the institution of pawning.
Much of the book is less helpful in illuminating the lived experience
of the African population of Anomabo, and as a whole it falls short of the
Africa-centered analysis suggested by the book’s subtitle, “An African Port
in the Era of the Slave Trade.” Sparks does not situate Anomabo within its
local African context nearly as well as he locates it within the British Atlantic
world. Because the book does not explain Anomabo’s place within the history
of the Fante people, readers are deprived of the opportunity to understand
the indigenous African foundations of the Anomabo merchant elite’s
political and commercial power. Rather than situate his study within the rich
historiography of Fante political and cultural history (including works by A.
Adu Boahen, Kwame Arhin, Kwame Y. Daaku, Ray A. Kea, David P. Henige,
and James R. Sanders, as well as my own), Sparks makes only superficial and
sometimes contradictory references to Anomabo’s position within the Fante
2 Randy J. Sparks, “Gold Coast Merchant Families, Pawning, and the EighteenthCentury British Slave Trade,” in “Centering Families in Atlantic Histories,” special issue,
William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 70, no. 2 (April 2013): 317–40.
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and Gold Coast political and cultural landscape. He variously describes
Anomabo’s political status as part of a “Fante . . . confederation,” “Fante
nation” (18), or “Fante confederacy” (241), or simply as “independent” (18).
There is no description of the nature of the greater Fante polity of which
Anomabo was one of many settlements, or how Fante society was changing
during this violent and tumultuous era.3
By focusing only on the Anomabo merchants’ interactions with English
and American traders, Sparks excludes the essential regional West African
3 The main book-length works on Fante history before the nineteenth century
are Margaret Priestley, West African Trade and Coast Society: A Family Study (London,
1969); Kwame Yeboa Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600–1720: A Study of
the African Reaction to European Trade (London, 1970); Ray A. Kea, Settlements, Trade
and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast (Baltimore, 1982); Rebecca Shumway,
The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester, N.Y., 2011); Kea, A Cultural and
Social History of Ghana from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century: The Gold Coast in
the Age of Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 2 vols. (Lewiston, N.Y., 2012). Several important
shorter works have shaped the historiography as well, most notably Kwame Arhin, “Diffuse Authority among the Coastal Fanti,” Ghana Notes and Queries 9 (1966): 66–70;
Arhin, “The Financing of the Ashanti Expansion (1700–1820),” Africa: Journal of the
International African Institute 37, no. 3 (July 1967): 283–91; David P. Henige, “Abrem
Stool: A Contribution to the History and Historiography of Southern Ghana,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 6, no. 1 (1973): 1–18; Henige, “The Problem
of Feedback in Oral Tradition: Four Examples from the Fante Coastlands,” Journal
of African History 14, no. 2 (1973): 223–35; A. Adu Boahen, “Fante Diplomacy in the
Eighteenth Century,” in Foreign Relations of African States: Proceedings of the Twentyfifth
Symposium of the Colston Research Society. . . . (London, 1974), 25–51; Henige, “John
Kabes of Komenda: An Early African Entrepreneur and State Builder,” Journal of African History 18, no. 1 (1977): 1–19; James Sanders, “The Expansion of the Fante and the
Emergence of Asante in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of African History 20, no. 3
(1979): 349–64; Arhin, “Rank and Class among the Asante and Fante in the Nineteenth
Century,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 53, no. 1 (1983): 2–22; Kea,
“City-State Culture on the Gold Coast: Fante City-States in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures: An Investigation,
ed. Mogens Herman Hansen (Copenhagen, 2000), 21: 519–30; Rebecca Shumway, “The
Fante Shrine of Nananom Mpow and the Atlantic Slave Trade in Southern Ghana,”
International Journal of African Historical Studies 44, no. 1 (2011): 27–44. See also Boahen, “Asante and Fante A.D. 1000–1800,” in A Thousand Years of West African History:
A Handbook for Teachers and Students, ed. J. F. Ade Ajayi and Ian Espie (Ibadan, Nigeria, 1965), 160–85; Kwame Y. Daaku, “John Konny: The Last Prussian Negro Prince,”
Tarikh: Modernisers in Africa 1, no. 4 (1967): 55–64; Daaku, “Trade and Trading Patterns of the Akan in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Development
of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa: Studies Presented and Discussed at the
Tenth International African Seminar at Fourah Bay College, Freetown, December 1969, ed.
Claude Meillassoux (London, 1971), 168–81; Daaku, “Aspects of Precolonial Akan Economy,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 5, no. 2 (1972): 235–47; Arhin,
“The Nature of Akan Government,” in Akan Worlds: Identity and Power in West Africa,
ed. Pierluigi Valsecchi and Fabio Viti (Paris, 1999), 69–80; Shumway, “Castle Slaves of
the Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast (Ghana),” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave
and Post-Slave Studies 35, no. 1 (January 2014): 84–98.
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commercial networks and politico-military alliances upon which the African
merchants’ elite status depended. He also entirely neglects the foundational
work of Akosua Adoma Perbi on the indigenous history of slavery and slave
trading within Ghana.4 While there is some truth to Sparks’s notion that “the
residents of Annamaboe were traders down to their fingertips” (3), they were
also warriors, diplomats, and practitioners of local belief systems, and these
aspects of their history played crucial roles in the rise of Anomabo as a hub
of Atlantic trade.
What is lacking in detail about the African context is more than made up
for by analysis of English/British and American traders’ activity at Anomabo.
An entire chapter is devoted to the Irishman Richard Brew, who lived and
traded for most of his life on the Gold Coast and was the subject of Margaret
Priestley’s book on the Gold Coast slave trade.5 Another chapter is devoted to
the Rhode Island–based slave trade, which effectively illustrates Anomabo’s
North American connections. But there are several other such transatlantic
connections—particularly with Barbados and Jamaica—that accounted
for more sustained and culturally relevant ties between the Fante and the
New World. The final chapter of the book, ominously entitled “Things Fall
Apart,” inaccurately attributes the decline of Anomabo in the nineteenth
century entirely to the actions of non-Africans: the death of Richard Brew,
the American Revolution, and the British Parliament’s abolition of the slave
trade. Those familiar with the history of the Gold Coast will know that the
single most disruptive event of that period from the Fante point of view was
Asante’s invasion and subjugation of the Fante area. Anomabo was the main
target of Asante’s invasion in 1806–7, which destroyed the town and placed
it under Asante imperial rule for the next twenty years. While it is true that
the trade in slaves from Anomabo declined following British abolition in
1807, nothing can compare to the disastrous effects of Asante’s conquest on
the commercial and political life of the town. In Sparks’s account, the Asante
invasion is briefly described but not given nearly the weight it deserves.
It is not easy to get general audiences to read about small places in Africa
that participated in the slave trade, but the African dimensions of Atlantic
exchanges are essential to scholarly understanding of Atlantic history. With
this book, Sparks will start many much-needed conversations about those
African dimensions. The inclusion of a bibliography would have been helpful
in this regard to provide readers an accessible introduction to the literature.
Towns such as Anomabo were indeed as important to the making of the
Atlantic world as port towns in Europe and the Americas, as Sparks insists,
4 Akosua Adoma Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to
the 19th Century (Legon-Accra, Ghana, 2004).
5 Priestley, West African Trade and Coast Society.
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and not only as points of embarkation for the enslaved. Sparks gives us a
valuable tool for broadening the scope of discussions about Atlantic history
to be more inclusive of Africa and Africans.