The history of the commercial entrepôts on the Atlantic coast of West Africa in the pre-colonial period is far from being a neglected topic, but has attracted considerable academic research. The potential value of a biographical (or prosopographical) approach to the social history of such coastal communities has also long been recognized, the classic pioneering example being Margaret Priestley's study of the Brew family of Anomabu, on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), founded by the locally settled Irish slave-trader Richard Brew (died 1776). The case of the Brews, however, presents exceptionally favorable conditions for the reconstruction both of individual biography and of collective family history, in that the founder was literate and generated a considerable corpus of written records which survives to the present, while for subsequent generations of the family the early establishment of an institutionalized form of British proto-colonial administration on the Gold Coast also yielded relatively abundant documentation.

Elsewhere on the coast, and more particularly for individuals and families lower down the social scale, the amount of evidence available is likely to be much more limited and fragmentary. The present article represents a tentative attempt at a biography of a person of much lesser eminence than Richard Brew or his descendants, which may therefore be regarded as a venture into the field of subaltern history. To the extent that it also concerns someone who generated no documentation of his own, but whose life has to be reconstructed from incidental references in the records of the external agencies with whom he had dealings, it is also conceived as a methodological exploration of the possibility of extracting an African voice and perspective from European (and Eurocentric) sources.