Belonging in Africa: Frederik Svane and Christian Protten on the Gold Coast in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The idea that the African Atlantic world was populated by Atlantic Creoles who crossed cultural divides with relative ease is appealing, and it lends itself well to studies of identity formation that highlight the talents and opportunities that emerged from processes of cultural blending. Yet an examination of how travelling Africans ascribed meaning to their spatial and emotional groundings underlines that creolization in the African Atlantic was less smooth than suggested by the figure of the Atlantic Creole. For Frederik Svane and Christian Protten, two Euro-African men born on the Gold Coast in the early eighteenth century, Creole conditions resulted in identity practices that ranged from the complete rejection of African culture to a celebration and redefinition of the significance of African origins in the Atlantic world.

Crossroads and Exchanges in the Scandinavian Atlantic and Atlantic West Africa: Framing Texts of Eighteenth-Century African Christians

“…Accra-Osu was the headquarters of Danish-Norwegian commercial transactions in Lower Guinea ports. 26 The functionality of Accra-Osu as a trading company headquarters and as a world port owed much to the elaboration of social and spatial divisions of labour in the eastern Gold Coast as a consequence of urbanizing and state-building processes over the longue durée. Accra-Osu functioned as a site of entangled spaces.…”

“…In Protten's case, Pietism was a language of self-realization and personal salvation, which did not countenance overt opposition to or protests against chattel slavery. 36 Born out of a plurality of negative circumstances selfhood and personal spiritual redemption were the markers of Protten's crossroad.…”