Forts Castles And Society In West Africa

This volume consists of multiple original comprehensive scholarship about and approaches to the history of the fortresses of Ghana and Benin. It suggests an alternative approach and view on them.

These essays reexamine European forts in West Africa as hubs where different peoples interacted, negotiated and transformed each other socially, politically, culturally, and economically. This collection brings together scholars of history, archaeology, cultural studies, and others to present a nuanced image of fortifications, showing that over time the functions and impacts of the buildings changed as the motives, missions, allegiances, and power dynamics in the region also changed. Focusing on the fortifications of Ghana, the authors discuss how these structures may be interpreted as connecting Ghanaian and West African histories to a multitude of global histories. They also enable greater understanding of the fortifications’ contemporary use as heritage sites, where the Afro-European experience is narrated through guided tours and museums.

An estimated 2.7 million Africans made an enforced crossing of the Atlantic on British slave ships between c.1680 and 1807--a journey that has become known as the 'Middle Passage'. This book focuses on the slave ship itself. The slave ship is the largest artefact of the Transatlantic slave trade, but because so few examples of wrecked slaving vessels have been located at sea, it is rarely studied by archaeologists. Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping,1680-1807 argues that there are other ways for archaeologists to materialize the slave ship. It employs a pioneering interdisciplinary methodology combining primary documentary sources, maritime and terrestrial archaeology, paintings, maritime and ethnographic museum collections, and many other sources to 'rebuild' British slaving vessels and to identify changes to them over time. The book then goes on to consider the reception of the slave ship and its trade goods in coastal West Africa, and details the range, and uses, of the many African resources (including ivory, gold, and live animals) entering Britain on returning slave ships. The third section of the book focuses on the Middle Passage experiences of both captives and crews and argues that greater attention needs to be paid to the coping mechanisms through which Africans survived, yet also challenged, their captive passage. Finally, Jane Webster asks why the African Middle Passage experience remains so elusive, even after decades of scholarship dedicated to uncovering it. She considers when, how, and why the crossing was remembered by 'saltwater' captives in the Caribbean and North America. The marriage of words and things attempted in this richly illustrated book is underpinned throughout by a theoretical perspective combining creolization and postcolonial theory, and by a central focus on the materiality of the slave ship and its regimes.

"Though the pyramids of Egypt, the obelisks of Ethiopia and the stone walls of Zimbabwe are some of the remarkable historical structures in Africa, none of them quite capture the intricate connections between African and global history as the slave castles of Modern Ghana do. More than forty-five castles, forts and dungeons dotted the two hundred and fifty mile coastline of the Gold Coast (Modern Ghana) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Grim and foreboding in their appearance, these castles and dungeons have become eternal coastal signposts of a disturbing past. They have long been remembered as the place where victims of the slave trade were imprisoned before their forced transportation to the New World. They personify the slave trade in all of its grim realities: estrangement, brutality and degradation. Here, in these "ships at permanent anchor," victims of the slave trade spent days and months in agony before their perilous and uncertain voyage to the New World. Ghana's slave forts and castles formed an integral part of the Middle Passage. Yet, they have received very scant scholarly attention. House of Slaves is a multi-layered historical study of the slave forts and castles of the Gold Coast that focuses on the people who worked in these slave castles. The book seeks to unravel the interplay between people and structures in the facilitation of the Atlantic Slave Trade on the West African coast. Life in the slave castles mirrored the conditions aboard slave ships on the Atlantic: starvation and disease. A better understanding of the West African dimension of the trans-Atlantic Slave trade; the creation of the early African diaspora in the Americas, the West Indies and Europe, and the "reconnections" between Africa and its global diaspora, since the 1990s, should begin from a textured analysis of the activity, memory and symbolism that these coastal ships at permanent anchor embody in African history and the history of the African Diaspora."" -- Back cover.