West Africa was affected by European expansion and exploration decades before the European discovery of the Americas. In some ways, then, West Africa was already connected to the New World the moment Europeans discovered it. The relationship between the territory that is now the US and West Africa developed rapidly in the 1600s as West Africa and North America both became hubs of British trade. In its early phases, the connection between West Africa and what was to become the US centered around slavery and the growing number of enslaved Africans brought to North America in slave ships. The arrival of more than 400,000 African people between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries through the transatlantic and intra-American slave trades infused the early American republic with important African cultural elements. At the same time, the transatlantic slave trade shaped West Africa’s political, economic, and cultural history. The struggles of African and African-descended people to regain their freedom and pursue political and social gains shaped American legal, political, and social life.

The history of the coastal population of Ghana in the era of the slave trade cannot be explained solely by developments in trade and politics, although changes in these aspects of Gold Coast life certainly had a profound impact on people in the coastal area. The majority of people in Fanteland, the common folk, were not directly involved in the creation of the Coastal Coalition or the traffic in human captives, although they were affected by both. The experiences of not only the elites but also the common people from generation to generation created a sense of common culture and history among southern Ghana’s communities during the era of the slave trade. To better understand those experiences, it is necessary to look beyond coalition building and trade to the social and cultural institutions in which coastal people participated and within which they expressed their notions of shared identity.

This chapter considers the development of Fante culture during the eighteenth century and highlights cultural institutions that reinforced the unifying influences of political and economic conditions in eighteenth-century Fanteland. The people of southern Ghana wove a new cultural fabric in the era of the Coastal Coalition, combining their distinct traditions and creating new ones. These cultural changes occurred in religious practice, kinship systems, and artistic traditions, among others. Taken as a whole, they reveal the development of a common cultural foundation among the coastal peoples that did not exist prior to the eighteenth century.

The communities living on the coast of modern-day Ghana between the Pra River and Accra during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries were divided into distinct polities, each with its own linguistic features and under the political authority of a sovereign ruler (“king” in European parlance). The Borbor Fante was one of these groups, occupying the lands around the modern-day towns of Mankessim, Anomabo, and Kromantse. The Borbor Fante polity was situated between the polities of Asebu to the west and Agona to the east.

By 1807 southern Ghana was a very different place from the Gold Coast of 1700. The coastal population had achieved a degree of political and commercial unity that would have been unimaginable at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The coast towns were linked by a highly efficient network of communication that enabled them to orchestrate their responses to the constantly shifting circumstances of the Atlantic trade. Armed militia units were present in every coastal town, ready to execute the instructions of coalition leaders. People across the region spoke a common language and had a sense of their shared dependence on the shrine of Nananom Mpow. The number of captives sold on the coast was declining dramatically, falling to fewer than one thousand captives sold per year in the first decade of the nineteenth century, compared to more than ten thousand annually throughout much of the eighteenth century. Agents of England’s Company of Merchants Trading to Africa began to question their purpose on the coast in light of the British Abolition Act, which made the slave trade from Africa illegal. The era of the slave trade was abruptly drawing to an end, and a new era, in which Asante would become an even mightier military power in the hinterland, was dawning.

The formation of the Coastal Coalition in the era of the slave trade stands out from other cases of political transformation in Atlantic Africa for its success in political unification without centralization of power under a king. The new elites who formed the coalition crafted strategies to effectively manipulate European agents of the English and Dutch trading companies in ways that exploited Ghana’s unique fort-based trade system. The extent to which they successfully implemented those strategies was distinctive and remarkable in the history of Atlantic Africa. At the same time, the Coastal Coalition developed in other ways that reflected the experiences of coastal populations across Atlantic Africa, from Senegal to Angola. The violence associated with the slave trade necessitated changes in political organization among coastal societies all along the Atlantic seaboard of Africa and caused widespread militarization among them. Violence also encouraged the cultivation of war shrines, such as Nananom Mpow, throughout Atlantic Africa and created incentives for groups to renegotiate cultural identities and boundaries.

This chapter explores the principal consequences of the incorporation of Fanteland (the coast between the Pra River and Accra) into the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century. It should be stated from the outset that any trade in human captives, and indeed slavery itself, is reprehensible. It would be inappropriate and inaccurate to suggest that the transatlantic slave trade was a boon to any African population. Nevertheless, a variety of conditions that were created by the slave trade opened up opportunities for economic growth and state formation in southern Ghana, and these developments must be included in any serious analysis of southern Ghana’s history. This chapter seeks to explain how the coastal population made the transatlantic trade work to its advantage, bearing in mind that the effects of the trade were filtered and spread through a prism of regional and local conditions. The ports of Cape Coast, Elmina, Accra, and Anomabo were truly “Atlantic” ports, where local circumstances were unique but regional and transatlantic developments shaped everyday life.

The people known as the Fante of the Gold Coast had a distinct reputation in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. European traders knew them as a people well-practiced in Atlantic trade. On one hand, Fantes were sought after as workers in African ports and aboard slave ships because of their knowledge and experience in transatlantic commerce. On the other hand, these same African people were regarded by Europeans as notorious swindlers, able to use their knowledge of Atlantic commercial practices to deceive foreign traders. One British agent summarized this view, commenting that “the leopard may change his spots but no Fante Man can be otherwise than a villain.” Whether it was a quality that cast them in an attractive or sinister light, the people known as Fantes in the eighteenth century clearly demonstrated their mastery of international commerce in the era of the slave trade. The Atlantic creoles of the Ghana coast, schooled for generations in the international gold trade, conducted trade and diplomacy in particular ways that established and perpetuated this reputation for exploiting Atlantic trade.

During the eighteenth century, a new set of leaders took control of the coast. Alongside these political changes, the social organization of coastal societies transformed as well, due to new relationships of dependency forming among communities within the new political structure. These changes were not caused directly by the activities of European or American traders, who increasingly participated in slave trading on this coast, but rather were indirect consequences of the instability associated with the transatlantic slave trade. As John Mensah Sarbah suggests, people with power attracted people in need of protection during this period. The new government came about through a process of war and destruction that decentralized political power in the region while creating opportunities for new leaders to assume power. The wars are well documented in European accounts. But less documented are the networks of dependency and mutual obligation that formed within African societies during this era. The outcome of the political transformation was greater decentralization of political authority across the coastal region compared to the small “kingdoms” that had existed in the seventeenth century. Yet the region simultaneously became more politically unified through a process of coalition building among previously separate polities.

Wars plagued the coastal polities in the first decades of the 1700s much as they had in the closing decades of the 1600s, except on a larger scale. The kings of Eguafo, Fetu, Asebu, Acron, and Agona lost all their former power in these wars, and those polities ceased to exist as sovereign entities. The wars destroyed the political order of the seventeenth century, which had been centered on “kings” residing in the hinterland capitals of coastal polities. While the institution of kingship was dissolving, however, Borbor Fante warlords grew increasingly influential in trade, diplomacy, and military affairs in the region.

The wars of the early eighteenth century created opportunities for a new cadre of leaders to replace former “kings” as politico-military leaders in the region. The basis of power of the new elite had a distinct military dimension that distinguished leaders of the slave-trade era from their predecessors.