326 Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz, Eds. Stemming from Proposals For

326 Book Reviews

Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz, eds., Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, 264 pp., US$114.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-47-42566-36.

Stemming from proposals for the “Slavery in Africa: Past, Heritage, Present” conference (Nairobi, 2014) and panels at two African Studies Association meet- ings (Indianapolis, 2014 and San Diego, 2015), this volume tackles the subject of slavery and its legacies, with a focus on the Gold Coast/Ghana and its diaspora. This is a substantial undertaking, which the editors approach through the following questions: what were the various Ghanaian institutions and experiences of servitude and dependency, and in what ways did these intertwine with the Atlantic trading system? How did “Ghanaian understandings of the world survive or morph through the Atlantic slaving system and into the Americas” (p. 3)? How did people in and from the Gold Coast shape and influence changes such as the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and the progressive criminalization of slavery? What effects did these changes have upon institutions and experiences of slavery in Ghana, and what legacies did this leave? In the first chapter, Rebecca Shumway identifies some specificities of the Gold Coast in the Atlantic economy. Gold, rather than enslaved labor, was the key export for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Slaves were exported en masse from the Gold Coast into the Atlantic from the late seventeenth century to the first decade of the nineteenth, and “Britain was by far the most active nation” in this trade (p. 31). This marked “an important shift in the region’s commercial orientation, which had previously centered on markets in the northern part of Ghana” (p. 33), and had linked the forest to the savannah and sahel. In the second chapter, Samuel Aniegye Ntewesu explores this point in relation to northern Ghana. Here, he argues, people confronted new risks of capture and enslavement, first due to the canoe trade down the river Volta to the coast, and then through the incursions of Zabarima raiders from the sahel. In response they developed new strategies and institutions of protection. Two thousand, eight hundred and thirty-eight known slave ship voyages departed from Gold Coast ports during the period 1619 and 1840. Approximately 1.2 million enslaved people were forced on to these ships. 178,000 of them per- ished on the Middle Passage. Of those who survived the crossing, half disem- barked in the British Caribbean, giving rise to concentrations of Gold Coast or “Coromantee” slaves in Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua, as well as the Danish Virgin Islands. Walter Rucker (chapter 3) focuses on “ritual tools and technolo- gies” (p. 67) among these slaves. Offering a twist on a longstanding debate about the relative strength of “creolization” and African “survivals” in the Americas, Rucker concludes that, “At the very same time they [Coromantee slaves] were

(re)inventing themselves and becoming new peoples, their new identities and concepts of a post-slave state were framed by the ancestral realm” (p. 67). Chapters 4 (Rebecca Shumway) and 7 (Steffen Runkel) challenge Eurocen- tric interpretations of the progressive criminalization of slave trading and slavery. The engagement of Gold Coast elites with British anti-slavery has usually been interpreted in the light of their broader objections to formal coloniza- tion. Runkel’s chapter, on the other hand, outlines the campaigning work of Francis Fearon—an Accra-based African opponent of slavery—and explores Fearon’s radicalism and motivations in terms of his connection to the settle- ment of freedpeople in Sierra Leone. Chapters 5 (Trevor Getz) and 6 (Paul Jenkins) and 9 (Akosua Adoma Perbi) grapple with the vexed question of how indigenous institutions, practices and experiences of slavery were intertwined with the Atlantic trade in slaves, and how emancipation unfolded over time. Jenkins’ chapter compares two types of text written by African pastor Theophilus Opoku. Reporting on his trip to the notorious slave market at Salaga in 1877, Opoku described with great feeling the plight of newly enslaved women and children. By contrast, his reports on his own congregations in south-eastern Ghana were much more mundane, con- taining relatively infrequent references to individuals of slave status or descent, who were living within local Akyem and Akuapem households. For Jenkins, the differences in the texts suggest that slavery in Africa was essentially an assimila- tive institution, as argued in 1977 by Kopytoff and Miers. The British abolition and emancipation ordinances of 1874, then, provided a “nudge” in a process by which the status of slaves was quietly renegotiated and ameliorated within African households. This argument sits somewhat uneasily with that of the editors, whose intro- duction highlights falls in the prices of slaves post-1807 and the greater profits that could be derived from the use of their labor in export-oriented agricul- ture. Applying the broader argument of Paul Lovejoy, the editors suggest that during the early nineteenth century, slavery in the Gold Coast “bore a greater resemblance to American slavery than ever before” (p. 8). Getz examines cases brought to British courts by African women seeking to clarify their status as wives or slaves. This chapter is suggestive, firstly of the difficulties encountered by those women in renegotiating their status within households, and secondly of those women’s awareness of the possible impact of their own status on that of their children. Perbi’s chapter identifies the relevance of slave ances- try in numerous legal disputes over chiefly office, land tenure and inheritance, in post-independence Ghana. Chapters 8 (Wilhelmina Donkoh) and 10 (Bayo Holsey) return to the Atlantic slave trade, exploring the politics of memory and heritage.

Journal of Global Slavery 3 (2018) 313–328