SANKOFA: SLAVES FROM THE GOLD COAST AND THE EVOLUTION OF BLACK CULTURE IN NORTH AMERICA

Historical Society of Ghana

SANKOFA: SLAVES FROM THE GOLD COAST AND THE EVOLUTION OF BLACK CULTURE INNORTH AMERICAAuthor(s): Frederick KnightSource: Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, New Series, No. 10 (2006-2007), pp.183-196Published by: Historical Society of GhanaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41406739 .

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Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana New Series , No, 10 (2006-2007), pp. 183-196.

SANKOFA: SLAVES FROM THE GOLD COAST AND THE EVOLUTION OF BLACK CULTURE IN NORTH AMERICA

By Frederick Knight Colorado State University

The impact of people from the Gold Coast on Caribbean slave societies has been well established. For example, they developed a reputation among colonial officials for being rebellious, which some slaves provided evidence of before landing in the Americas. For instance, on the ship Pindar Gaily, which embarked in 1707 from Cape Coast Castle for the island of Barbados, slaves hatched a rebellion that the crew ultimately suppressed.1 The rebellions continued in the Americas, such as in the Maroon communities of Jamaica, where people from the Gold Coast such as Cudjoe and Queen Nanny drew upon their political and military experience to help establish runaway slave communities in the island's mountains. They organized a major slave conspiracy on the island of Antigua in 1739.2 Gold Coast slaves shaped not only the political landscape of the Caribbean; they also transformed its material and spirituali life. For example, archaeological and documentaiy records indicate that they recreated healing practices in Caribbean.3 This paper will build on the substantial literature on the Caribbean by looking at the impact pf people from the Gold Coast on tyorth America. The lives of people from the Gold Coast in North America offer a window into a

"■ "W/ и , 1 David Ettis, et. al, "The Trans- Atlantic Slav« Trade: A Database on CD-ROM" (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1 999). Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, J 650- J 838 (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1990); John Thornton, "Coromantees: An African Cultural Group in Colonial North America and the Caribbean," Journal of Caribbean History 32 ( 1 998), 1 6 1 -78; David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua, with Implications for Colonial British Ameriça (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); "Tipde Book, 1764-66", Brown Family Papers, John Carter Brown Library, Box 643, folder 7. 3 Jerome Handler and Frederick W. Lange, Plantation Slavery in Barbados : An Archaeological and Historical Investigation (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978),



184 FREDERICK KNIGHT

number of important dynamics in colonial Anglo-American society - power and property, migration and the Atlantic slave trade, kinship relations, plebian resistance, labor and material production, and language and cultural change.

The Gold Coast, a term coined during the years of European commercial expansion onto the West African littoral because of the region's mineral, runs from the Tano to the Volta Rivers. Because of the spoils sought by Western traders, it became the site of a dense cluster of European trading posts, forts, and castles, which headquartered Brandenburgers, Danish, Dutch, English and French trading companies.4 By the eighteenth century, the idea of the Gold Coast was part of the parlance of not only British merchants but also of Anglo-American colonists, who often referred to it with the short- hand term "Coromantee." For example, the slaveholder Joseph Weatherley placed an advertisement in the Georgia Gazette in May 1768 offering a reward for his runaway slave, "A NEW NEGROE MAN named BOSON, of the Corromantee country; he is a tall fellow, very black, and rather slim, has scores or country marks on both his cheeks, speaks little or no English, but it's thought sufficient to tell his name."5 From the Gold Coast or "Coromantee," thousands of captives embarked on a nightmarish Atlantic Crossing aboard "floating prisons" to North America.6

The majority of the people from the Gold Coast who were enslaved in North America entered during the eighteenth century.7 During the course of the slave trade to North America, approximately 450,000 Africans disembarked on its shores, and of the people whose origins in specific regions in Africa are known, people from the Gold Coast constituted between ten and fifteen percent of the total African population in North America. It is important to note that the forced migration of slaves from Gold Coast ports to North America changed over time, and they had higher concentrations in some regions than

4 Albert Van Dantzig, Forts and Castles of Ghana (Accra, Ghana: Sedeo Publishing, 1980); Lathan A. Windley, ed., Runaway Slave Advertisements from the J 730s to 1790 , (Westport,

Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983), 4: 29-30. Stephanie Small wood, Saltwater Slavery : A Middle Passage from Africa to American

Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 101-52; for the terms floating prison, see Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 300. 7 The statistics for the slave trade to North America are primarily from David Eltis, et. al, "The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM" (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For other discussions of the slave trade to North America, see Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone : The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998)



SANKOFA 185

in others. The North American colony with the highest percentage of people from the Gold Coast as part of thç overall African population was the colony of Rhode Island, where they constituted three- quarters of the African population with known origins, In Maryland, they were 23 percent of the African population. In Florida, they constituted approximately 22 percent of thç African population. In New yprk, they were 16 percent of the African-born community. In the Carolinas and in Georgia, they were 14 percent of the African population. And of the British North American mainland colonies, Virginia had the lowest percentage of people from the Gold Coast, which was approximately 9 percent of the colony's African population.

The пцтЬег of peqple entering the North American mainland from the Gold Coast also varied from colony to colony and state to state. Apparently, the smallest number entered New York. Only 196 people forcibly embarked at Gold Coast ports for New York. However, this number is deceptive because the record? for over three-quarters of the slaves brought into New York do not indicate which region in Africa /they were from. Florida brought in 320 captives from the Gold Coast. Rhpde Island imported 1156, Maryland landed 1497, Georgia received 1606, Virginia imported 5401, and the Carolinas brought in the largest цитЬег of people from the Gold Coast, who numbered 18,337.

The s izp of the slave trade from the Gold Coast to North America $lso changed over time. For example, the imports into South Çarolina changed dramatically during the eighteenth century, During the first forty years of the century, a preponderance of slaves came into Sputh Carolina from either the Caribbean or western Centra^ Africä. Many in the African population in the early South

?lave population came from the $enegambia Region of West Africa, *yhiçh became important because of the experience they bought with rice cultivation, which became the colony's most important cash crop.8 During the 1740s, the slave population cfrang£$ because the slave trade to the colony essentially came to a hßlt. The tra^e picked up again between 1750 and 1775, so that by the 176Ps, a thousand to two thousand Africans were landed in the CQÌppy per year.9 This is the context in which slaves from the Gold Cp^st 1 tended in the Carolinas.

8 Judith Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001), Peter Wopd, Black Majority : Negroes in Colonial South Carolina front 1670 through the

Stono fyçbf Ilion (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1975 [orig. 1974]); Judith Carney, Black




Between 1700 and 1750, approximately 733 people were taken from the Gold Coast to the Carolinas. However, between 1750 and 1800, almost 12,000 people were taken aboard slave ships to the Carolinas, over sixteen times the number in the previous half century. So with the expansion of the slave trade from the Gold Coast, they continued to influence and interact with the larger African and American-born slave populations of the Carolinas. These numbers do not take into account the transshipment of slaves from the Gold Coast who first entered American slavery in the Caribbean before being transplanted to North America. Furthermore, the slave ships landing in North America from the Gold Coast did not normally specify the gender of their slaves, so it is difficult to determine the ratios between men and women. Also, men figured much more prominently than women in the historical records of the colonies and early United States, an imbalance that may be addressed through additional research. So the estimates provide more of a rough idea of where and how people from the Gold Coast and its interior landed in North America.

Numbers alone do not reveal the impact they had on the societies that they entered. Their most obvious impact was in terms of their labor. People from the Gold Coast brought a wide range of agricultural and artisan skills that shaped the agricultural landscape of North America. Before their enslavement in the Americas, many of them had acquired experience in producing New World crops such as tobacco and maize. By the early seventeenth century, tobacco entered the Gold Coast people, where women marketed locally-grown tobacco in Cape Coast during the years of the Atlantic slave trade. So it is likely that a number of slaves from the Gold Coast engaged in small-scale tobacco production before landing on Maryland and Virginia tobacco plantations. Slaves also brought knowledge growing multiple crops such as tobacco and cotton as garden crops and the root crops, maize, and millet in crop rotations as staple foods. Furthermore, the era of the slave trade to the Americas also coincided with the Asante project of forest clearing, work which British American colonial planters also depended upon their slaves to perform.10 As Jane Guyer and Samuel Belinga argue about

Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). Anthony S. Parent, Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1 660-1 740

(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 60-66; Lorena S. Walsh, From Calabar to Carter 's Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia), 6 1 -65; Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Americas (Chapel Hill: The University of North



SANKOFA 187

Equatorial Africans, people from the Gold Coast embodied "wealth in knowledge," which they carried to the North American mainland.11

South Carolina, with its large importations of slaves from the Gold Coast, received an infusion of this knowledge. The elderly slave Cudjoe developed a reputation in South Carolina's St. Stephen's parish as a canoeman.12 During the 1740s, slaves from the Gold Coast influenced the colony's development of indigo, and later in the century impacted the colony's cotton culture. In the midst of the American Revolution, Africans and their descendants in South Carolina and other colonies cultivated cotton and made cotton textiles for domestic consumption. For example, slaves used cotton spinning tools in South Carolina comparable to ones in used by women in the interior of the Gold Coast as well as in other parts of West Africa. The early development of cotton by Africans, particularly African women, in South Carolina planted the seeds for its later expansion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.13

The presence of workers from the Gold Coast continued into the following century, such as on the estate of the South Carolinian Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. He recorded that on the week of April 22, 1818, "Gossport & Quash from the Crescent & January & Bob from the old place are the Fishermen for the ensuing week." On the week of April 29, "Cuffie and Sambo from the Crescent and Adam & Ceasar from the Old Place begun fishing today." Given the knowledge that people from the Gold Coast had in fishing, it is reasonable to conclude that they drew upon their skills to ply the South Carolina waters. However, in other ways, their work practices faded. In particular, Quash and his crew caught 15 drum fish on April 28, a Tuesday, which of course along the Gold Coast was the day that fishermen took their Sabbath. On the Christian evangelist

Carolina Press, 1998), 1 10; Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on Guinea, Volume 2, P. E. H. Hair, Adam Jones, and Robin Law, eds. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1992), 547. 11 Jane I. Guyer and Samuel M. Eno Belinga, "Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa," Journal of African History 36 (1995), 93. 12 Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements , 3: 299; for a recent discussion of the impact of Africans on American economic development, see Kevin Dawson, "Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World," Journal of American History 92:4 (March 2006), 1327-55. Frederick Knight, "In an Ocean of Blue: African Indigo Workers in the Atlantic World to

1800," in Diasporic Africa: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 35- 36; Mark D. Groover, "Evidence for Folkways and Cultural Exchange in the 1 8th Century South Carolina Backcountry," Historical Archaeology , 28: 1 (1994), 52-54.



188 FREDERICK KÑIGHT

Pinckney's estate, slave fishermen from the Gold Coast would replace their Tuesday Sabbath by one that fell on Sundays.14

People from the Gold Coast shaped not only the North American world of work; they also influenced its linguistic landscape , and the colonial records indicate that communication barriers alienated them from their owners. This is clearly indicated in the advertisements for runaway slaves^ such as the one published by the slaveholder James Screven in the Savannah Georgia Gazette seeking {he return of "Quamener" who was described as a being of the "Guiney country" and "speaks little English.* John Graham of Georgia sought the capture of his slave Somerset of the "Cormantee Country" who alôo did not speak English fluently.15 Furthermore, the South Carolina Gullah dialect, words such as "adidi" for feasting and "afe" for year continued to be used well into the twentieth century.16

As indicated in the names recorded by Charles Coatesworth Pinckney, Gold Coast slaves in North America^ struggled to keep their names. While colonial planters tried to ridicule their slaves by giving their slaves Roman names such as Ceasar and Cato, the enslaved contested planters' efforts at ideological control.17 This was the case on the Lucas estate in colonial South Carolina. The Lucas estate was established around 1712 by a West Indian planter named John Lucas, and it was later managed by his daughter Eliza Lucas.18 While the estate records from this estate are fragmentary, they indicate a Gold Coast presence through a listing of slaves with Akan day-names. The 1745 Lucas's Garden Hill estate recorded labor force with 35 men, 16 women, 17 boys and 1 1 girls and among theni were adult male slaves named Quamina, Quashee, Quau, Cuffee, and Quaicu, a name that appeared twice.19 The Lucas estate records include boys named Quau and Quashee, and while they were possibly born in Africa, they were likely born in Carolina. There is

14 A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, volume I: Plantation and Frontier, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, ed. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1958), 205-06; de Marees, Description and Historical Account of thè Gold Coast , 12 1 ; for Pinckney' s attempts at converting slaves, see Sylvia Frey, Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 260 and 281; 15 Windley, Slave Runaway Advertisements, 4: 42 and 51.

... ̂Lorenzo Dow Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002 [orig. 19491), 45. 1 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 112. 18 Elise Pinckney, "Eliza Lucas Pinckney: Biographical Sketch/' in The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 1 739-1762 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1972), xvi- xviii. 19 "Col. Lucas's List of Negroes at Gaťdeft Hill frottl Murray, May 1745," ill Pinckftey Family Papers, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, South Carolina.



SANKOFA 189

other evidence that people born on the Gold Coast tried to keep their naming practices alive into the second generation, giving their children Akan day-names. In 1705, a woman slave named Abinabah landed in South Carolina with her son Cuffee, before she was removed back to Barbados in 1710 without her son, whose fate is unknown.20 The cultural tenacity of people from the Gold Coast is apparent in the naming of their mixed-race. For example, Cuffee described as a "tall, slim, yellow, fellow, about six feet high," was born in South Carolina. And Cudjo was a "mus tee," referring to his mixed-race heritage.21

Gold Coast slaves stood out not only because of their names but also through their "country marks." For instance, the South Carolina plaiiter John Strobhar described his slave Kwadwo as having "country marks down his cheeks."22 The Virginia slave George was, according to his owner, marked in the face as the Gold Coast slaves geherally are." Upon running away from his owner Henry Young in Wilmington, North Carolina, in August 1774, a slave riámed Kwamitia was identified as having "as Scar above his right Eye, his Teeth áre filed, and is marked with his Courttry Marks." As a sign of his desperation and intractability, Kwamina also "had on when he went away, a Collar about his Neck with two Prongs, marked G P, and an Iron on each Leg.*23

Identified by their potts of origin, names or country marks, Gold Coast slaves maneuvered through an underground world of rumor and vice and became pawns in property disputes between British colonial subjects. For example, in 1720, the North Carolina slaveholder John Pálmer and his wife Joanna were brought to court for allegedly Using their slave "Cush" or "Quashey" to kidnap a slave from another planter. Though the charges against the Palmers were eventually dropped, Quashey found himself implicated in the intrigue while the case went through the justice system. In the following century, a white North Carolinian went to court allegedly for playing "cards with a Negro Quomana, in a rookery box." In Virginia, the slave Quashey became the center of a legal dispute in the 1738 case of Giles vs. Mallicote. In this case, Thomas Mallicote bequeathed to his son John a slave named Quashey, who was to labor for Mallicote's wife until John came of age. He died too soon to take

V 20 Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 126-27 21 Windley, 3: 106 and 152. 22 Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 39; Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 3: 461 a Ibid., 1: 48 and 441.




control of Quashey, and the dispute made its way into the courts until a settlement was reached on the case.24

The deepest contradiction in slavery was not between British subjects Who fought over slaves, but between slaves and owners, and slaves ruptured the tense relation between them through running away. The colonial newspapers are replete with advertisements for fugitive slaves, particularly of men, who more readily fled than women.25 And men from the Gold Coast and their descendants seemed to confirm their reputation for rebelliousness. For example, Kwamina troubled his South Carolina owner John Fischer. Kwamina was born in the Americas, and according to Fischer was "well known in and about Charlestown by his impudent behaviour; he has told me to my face, 'he can go when he pleases, and I can do nothing to him, nor shall I ever get a copper for him." Other slaves deployed strategies of collective resistance to their enslavement, at times banding together with slaves from other ethnic groups or those who were "country" (or American) born. For instance, in 1774, Kwaku ran away from the Governor's plantations with Dorset, Cork, Oronoco, Esther, Minda, perhaps in search of another crew of runaways. One South Carolina planter placed an advertisement in the September 1747 edition of the South Carolina Gazette for his slaves, "Cudjo a sensible Coromantee Negro Fellow, about 45 Years old, stutters, and his wife Dinah, an Ebo wench that speaks very good English." And in November 1761, eight slaves, "one Calabar and seven Coromante negro men, named DICK, ARTHUR, SMART, CUDEJO, QUAMINO, STEPHEN, CUFFEE, AND HUGHKY" fled from their plantation in Prince-William's parish, South Carolina.26

They also read the larger political landscape to strike, particularly during the American Revolution. Such was the suggestion of Jane Grove of Beaufort, South Carolina, who complained that a number of her slaves had "absented themselves" and were "supposed to have followed the army into Georgia in 1779," and among the fugitives was one named Cudjoe. The urban South provided cover for fugitives, as might have been the case with Quash, an elderly slave who allegedly sought refuge in Savannah, Georgia.27 It was a good hideout, for the substantial urban slave and growing free black population, together

24 Helen Tunnicliff Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro (New York: Octagon Books, 1968 [repr. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1926-37 ]),I: 88; II: 9-10 and 28. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century

Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 536-37. 26 Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements , 3: 79, 207, and 577; 4: 58-59. 27 Ibid., 4: 83 and 148-49.



SANKOFA 191

accounting for approximately forty percent of the town's population, could provide some shelter, and the town also provided opportunities for fugitives to pass for free and work for wages.28 Furthermore, while the majority of slaves were confined to the countryside, some had regular access to the cities, finding markets for goods and labor. Kwaku, a slave on coastal South Carolina plantation in the mid- eighteenth century, found markets for meat in Charles Town, where he was "very well known." In 1748 Kwamina, a South Carolina woodworker, ran away supposedly to Charles Town, perhaps to pass for free and sell his labor, and in 1774, Kwaku ran away, most likely to Charlestown were his wife lived.29

Slaves weighed a number of considerations in their calculations to leave, and among them were bonds of kinship. This was the case into the second and third generations. This was apparently the case with Cuffee, who ran away in 1765 from his South Carolina owner Francis Roche, who believed that Cuffee ran away to Indian country, where his mother lived. The slave Quash, his owner feared, was "supposed to be lurking either on John's Island, or in St. Andrew's parish, near Ashley-ferry, where he hath some relations." And in November 1771, Cuffee ran away from his owner, perhaps to be united with his mother in Charles Town or his wife who lived on the estate of John Moore.30

Within the context of the flight of slaves from plantations and the fears created by slave resistance in the Caribbean and elsewhere, colonial elites implicated slaves in the New York Conspiracies of 1712 and 1741^ In those years, a series of fires broke out in New York City, raising fears that slaves had a hand in them. In both caseß, colonial officials rounded up slaves and free suspects, and in both cases, Gold Coast slaves were prominent in the line of suspects. In 1712, eight men and one woman with Akan day-names were accused of participating in the plot, and four of them were executed. In the 1741 alleged conspiracy, one man and one woman who were said to be "Caromantee" and eleven men and one woman with Akan day- names appeared in the trial records.31

As on the political landscape, people from the Gold Coast shaped the cultural landscape of New York and other northern colonies. Their biggest impact was on the formation the African Burial

28 Walter J. Fraser, Jr., Savannah in the Old South (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2003), p, 97, 144, and 157. Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements. 4; 63, 82-83 and 463. 30 Ibid., 3: 253, 267, and 669-70. Walter Rucker, The River Floweth On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in

Early America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 38 and 82.




Ground. Located in what is now lower Manhattan, the African Burial Ground was established in the early eighteenth century and over the course of that century, Africans and their descendants buried their dead in this massive gravesite. Since being rediscovered in 1991 when construction workers were digging a foundation for a United States government building, archaeologists have done extensive studies of the grounds, and they have suggested that the burial ground has symbolic markers that suggest a Gold Coast influence. In particular, they point to Burial no. 101, on which what appeared to be a heart-shaped symbol, which archaeologist Michael Blakey and his team of researchers from Howard University have concluded was the Akan-Adinkra Sankofa symbol.32

Paralleling the findings on the New York Burial Qround, an archaeological study by James Deetz of a small black community in New England has shown its links to the Gold Coast. As mentioned before, a high percentage of the African population brought into the colony of Rhode Island was from the Gold Coast, and it is reasonable to suggest that many of them were then sent to other New England colonies such as Massachusetts. The most prominent was Paul Cuffe, a free black from Massachusetts who became a prosperous sailor and whose father was from Africa, most likely the Gold Coast.33 Another in the Akan Diaspora of New England was a free black man named Quaminy, a pillar in the Parting Ways Community of the small Massachusetts town of Plymouth. Quamina owned a house in this small community of free blacks, which also included Cato Howe, Plato Turner, and Prince Goodwin. Quamina had a significant influence on the town, and still had property named after him forty-six years after he died. Besides the documentary evidence of Quamina's presence, the archaeological record reveals other influences on the community. In particular, the archaeologist James Deetz points to the clustering of the twelve-foot by twelve-fqot houses without chimneys owned by Quaminy and the other free blacks in the community. This architectural and settlement patterns differs from the Anglo-American pattern, which was a more dispersed settlement of houses with chimneys and measured sixteen-foot by sixteen-foot. The free blacks of Parting Ways also decorated their

32 Michael Blakey, "The Study of New York's African Burial Ground: Biocultural and Engaged," in African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americqs (Lanham, Mass.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001), 222*3 1 . 33 James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 38.



SANKOFA 193

ancestors' gravesites with broken glass and pottery in the burial, which qiňte possibly from a Gold Coast practice.34

Even though their numbers faded in the nineteenth century, people from the Gold Coast made their presence known. In eastern North Carolina, slaves embodied memories from Africa through cultural ceremony and spirit possession, using this moment of revelry to ideologically challenge the social order of slavery. Near Edenton in the northern and in Wilmington in the southern part of the state, slaves commemorated Christmas through the Jonkunnu ceremony, which Africans and the descendants celebrated not only in North Carolina but also on the Caribbean islands of Jamaica, St. Vincent, and the Bahamas.35 A number of eyewitnesses wrote about this ceremony, and one of the most elaborate accounts is by Harriet Jacobs, a former slave in North Carolina who describes it as follows:

Every child rises early on Christmas morning to see the Johnkannaus. Without them, Christmas would be shorn of its greatest attraction. They consist of companies of slaves from the plantations, generally of the lower class. Two athletic men, in calico wrappers, have a net thrown over them, covered with all manner of bright colored stripes. Cows' tails are fastened to their backs, and their heads are decorated with horns. A box, covered with sheepskin, is called the gumbo box. A dozen beat on this, while others strike triangles and jawbones, to which bands of dancers keep time. For a month previous they are composing songs, which are sung on this occasion. These companies, of a hundred each, turn out early in the morning, and are allowed to go round till twelve o'clock, begging for contributions. Not a door is left unvisited where there is the least chance of obtaining a penny or a glass of rum. They do not drink while they are out, but cariy the rum home in jugs, to have a carousal. These Christmas donations frequently amount to twenty or thirty dollars. It is seldom that any white man or child refuses to give them a trifle. If he does, they regale his ears with the following song: Poor massa, so dey say;/ Down in de heel, so dey say;/ Got no mony, so dey say;/ Not one shillin, so dey say;/ God a 'might bress you, so dey say."36

34 James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten : An Archaeology of Early American Life , expanded and revised edition (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 187-21 1; it is also quite possible that this is rooted in mortuary practices from other parts of Africa, such as Central Africa, Equatorial Africa, or Southeastern Nigeria. John Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in the Decorative Arts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1 990 [repr. Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978]), 139-44. Elizabeth Fenn, "'A Perfect Equality Seetoed to Reign': Slave Society and Jonkonnu",

North Carolina Historical Review 65 :2 (Abril 1 988), 1 27- 153. 6 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life oía Slave Girl, Written by Herself Jean Fagan Yellin, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 118-19.




Much of this ritual seems to bear more of a resemblance to practices of southeastern Nigeria; however, people from the Gold Coast also played a role in developing this ceremony. First, they were present on the Collins estate, which was one of the most important centers for organizing Jonkonnu. The Collins estate was set up around 1786 by Josiah Collins and his business partners Nathaniel Allen and Samuel Dickinson, who sent a ship directly to West Africa in order to buy slaves.37 While we are not quite sure where exactly the ship docked in Africa, evidence from the nineteenth century suggests that it brought some people from the Gold Coast. In particular, the 1829 slave lists from the plantation reveal the presence of a twenty-two year old slave "Cuff," the son of a woman named Sally, indicating a link with the Gold Coast.38 The second and more obvious link with the Gold Coast is the name John Canoe, which the early chronicler Edward Long suggests is a play on the name of John Conny, the Gold Coast trader that the ceremony originally commemorated,39 So with influences from both the Gold Coast and Nigeria, the Jonkojinu ceremony provided a setting within which people from different parts of Africa came to understand their common lot as slaves and bridged their cultural differences.40

In terms of cultural practice, Gold Coast slaves shaped not only the life of the slave quarters, such as in their naming practices, architectural designs, and the annual Jonkonnu ceremony, but also left a reservoir legacy from which whites would draw. In the colonial period, the Boston minister Cotton Mather learned how to inoculate people from a slave Onesimus, who was most likely from what is now Burkina Faso. Onesimus identified himself as being "Gururnantese," which suggests that he left Africa from Cormantin. After learning about the practice from Onesimus, Cotton Mather then interviewed other Africans in Boston who made similar claims about being inoculated against the disease. Mather convinced fçllow Bostonians to deploy the practice in the 1721 outbreak of the disease, before resistance mounted against using the African practice»41 Pepple brought to the Americas through Gold Coast ports influenced

37 Edenton Gazette , November 19, 1800; Dorothy Redford Spruill, Somerset Homecoming: Recovering a Lost Heritage (New York: Doubleday, 1988). "List of Women and their Children at Lake Phelps," Collins Papers, Slave Records-Lists

Families, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, North Carolina. J Elizabeth Fenn, "'A Perfect Equality Seemed to Reign': Slave Society and Jonkonnu," North Carolina Historical Review 55:2 (April 1988), 129. 40 Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Origins of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 54-73. Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1 77 $-82 (New York: Hill

and Wang, 2001), 31-33.



SANKOFA 195

mainstream American culture in other ways* This was particularly the case '*dth the great American writer Herman Melville. In his iioVella Benito Cereño, Mellville tells the story of Africans who hatched a slave rebellion on the ship Try al, and characterised the rebels aš Asante wairiörs and the moral authorities among the slaves as Asante elderô.42 In addition the novelist Mark Twain drew upon religious traditions of the descendants of people from the Gold Coast and other parts of Africa in developing his slave character Jim in the novel Huckleberry Fitink

Through their naming practices, architecture, resistance strategies, funerary traditions, and street festivals, slaves from the Gold coast and their descendants to maintain practices from the Old Country, yet over time they adopted the coin of British culture to negotiate the landscape of colonial slavery. For example, the Georgia slave Cuffey was said by his owner John Lamar to "speak good English/ And the owner of Kwamina and Kwaku, slaves in South Carolina, claimed that they spoke "English very well." Gold Coast slaves also adopted or were forced to take on new names, which was the case with the Georgia slaves feristol, Prince, Alleck, Sampson and Marian, all of whom were of the "Coromantee country." The South Carolina slave CaeSar was said to be a "Coromantee negro." Kwaku, "of thè Guinea Country," was also known as Darby, and Kwamina was also known as George.44 While African naming practices generally died out by the end of the eighteenth century, some were still known by African names well into the nineteenth century. On the Hermitage Plantation, a South Carolina rice estate, slaves named Quash and Cuffee appeared on the 1860 list of slaves and on the 1861 list of slaves on the Gowrie Plantation, a woman named Binah appeared.45 What was the nature of the relationship between the American and African-born? One way to answer this question is through the life of Charles Ball, who was born into slavery in Maryland. He was sold to a slave trader and separated from his wife and children. On Charles Ball's painful trek from Maryland to South Carolina, he conjuťed up the memory of his African grandfather. He recalled in his autobiography about a sleepless night, that "I passed in thinking of my wife and little children, whom I could not hope ever

42 Sterling Stuckey, Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History (New York; Oxford University Press, 1994), 153-70. Jennifer Ayn Hildebrand, Another Life They Don't Show': African Cultural Practices in

America," (Ph.D. bisseitation, 2003), 94- 1 33. Windley, Runaway SlaVe Advertisements, 3: 7, 200 278, and 441; 4: 32, 154, and 183. 45 A DocumèHtary History of American Industrial Society, volume I: Plantation and Frontier,

Ulťióh Bonnell Phillips, ed. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1958), 138-39.




to see again. I also thought of my grandfather, and of the long nights I had passed with him, listening to his narratives of the scenes through which he had passed in Africa.*46

In conclusion, the slave trade from the Gold Coast to North America had a number of long-range historical implications. The most obvious is the labor extracted of the enslaved, who exercised not only physical might but also contributed agricultural and other kinds of work related knowledge to the development of American plantations. 47 As W. E. B. Du Bois write, slaves "grew a fiber that clothed the masses of a ragged world." And part of the knowledge that went into cotton production was planted by people from West Africa, and quite possibly the interior of the Gold Coast. The strategies of resistance that slaves from the Gold Coast deployed, though they did not make the system of slavery totally collapse, imposed some limitations on the amount of labor that planters siphoned from them. Their political responses on plantations and elsewhere also shifted power, albeit temporarily, into the hands Of the slaves. And they also shaped the cultural practices of whites, who quite incorporated dimensions of Gold Coast culture. Though the abolition of the slave trade to the United States in 1808 essentially stopped the forced migration of Africans to the Americas, and the names of the enslaved changed, the legacy of people from the Gold Coast lived on the memories of people, both black and white, in the United States. The psychological and spiritual pain that people experienced through capture, through the Atlantic Crossing, and enslavement in the Americas is unimaginable. Yet we also know that even through the unimaginable, they demonstrated a resiliency that enabled them to help give birth to the New World.

46 Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains: Or the Life of An American Slave (New York: H. Dayton, 1858). 31. 47 W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a Fis tory of the Part Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (Millwood, New York: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1976; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1935), 4.



Documents

SANKOFA: SLAVES FROM THE GOLD COAST AND THE EVOLUTION OF BLACK CULTURE IN NORTH AMERICA