Global Encounters: Slavery and Slave Lifeways on Nineteenth Century Danish Plantations on the Gold Coast, Ghana

Abstract

The global processes unleashed due to the European maritime exploration and commercial activities as from 1500 AD onwards affected indigenous peoples and cultures of the Atlantic world. In West Africa, the European presence precipitated the Atlantic slave trade, which involved the exportation of millions of Africans into slavery. In the nineteenth century a so-called legitimate trade in colonial agricultural commodities replaced the Atlantic slave trade. As a result, the Danes established agricultural plantations on the Gold Coast and exported tropical crops for processing and consumption in Denmark and the West Indies. Enslaved Africans were used by the Danes to cultivate the plantations in the foothills of the Akuapem Mountains and along the estuary of the Volta River. This paper combines information from written sources, ethnography, oral information and archaeology to investigate the living conditions of the enslaved workers on the plantations. The archaeological data was recovered from the Frederiksgave plantation at Sesemi near Abokobi in the Akuapem Mountains of southeastern Gold Coast (Ghana).

Transnational artifacts: Grappling with fluid material origins and identities in archaeological interpretations of culture change

“…183-184) reports small quantities of European objects at Makala in central Ghana from contexts dating from the early eighteenth to early nineteenth century, perhaps acquired via elite trade networks. Excavation of the remains of a coastal plantation in Ghana indicates that by the nineteenth century the everyday lives of slaves in western Africa exhibited similar material patterns as found on American plantations in terms of the range of European goods present (Bredwa-Mensah, 2004;Ogundiran and Falola, 2007). It seems likely that, as in Japan, communities across western Africa were exposed to (and adopted) European material culture to different degrees at different times, and that slaves transported to the Americas in the sixteenth century in general had less direct experience with European goods than their counterparts from the nineteenth century.…”

Slaving and Slave Trading in Africa

“…Archaeological work connected to coastal fortifications has explored Danish plantations that cultivated agricultural products (coffee, indigo, cotton) in the Volta and Akuapem, for instance Bibease, Frederiksgave, and Brockman (Boachie-Ansah 2009;Bredwa-Mensah 1996, exploring the material repertoires associated with plantation slavery on the West African coast as an alternative to the transatlantic slave trade. Influenced by historical archaeology's conceptual and theoretical frameworks developed to understand plantation slavery in the Americas, these studies focus on landscapes, the lives of the enslaved, agriculture, foodways, and material possessions.…”