Spiritual Pawning: “Mad Slaves” and Mental Healing in Atlantic-Era West Africa

Abstract

When enslaved people became “mad,” they lost exchange value as labor capital on the Atlantic market, as neither African nor European merchants considered the mentally distressed to be valuable bondsmen. Historians of slavery in the Americas have drawn on accounts of “mad slaves” to understand how labor value was generated, and disrupted, through the transport and sale of captive Africans. But historians have yet to examine the relationship between psychological distress and enslavement in West Africa, where many of the captives in question originated. This article opens a research agenda on madness in Atlantic-era West Africa through a case study of the role of Ga shrines as spaces of mental healing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gold Coast, today’s coastal Ghana. Ga families confided their mentally distressed kin to shrine priests, who treated severe illnesses caused by ritual afflictions. When shrine priests healed these ailments, they engaged in spiritual pawning: converting mad persons, deemed unfit for sale due to mental incapacity, into potential subjects of enslavement. West African shrines were thus spaces of value conversion that reflected a broader monetary and ritual economy of capture, enslavement, and raiding that proliferated on the Gold Coast.