Paper short abstract:

This talk opens a research agenda on madness and enslavement in Atlantic-era West Africa through a case study of the role of Ga shrines as spaces of mental healing in the Gold Coast, today coastal Ghana, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Paper long 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 as 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. It does so by examining the role of

shrines—spread along the coast of what is today Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries—as spaces of mental healing. When shrine priests healed cases of mental

illness, they engaged in spiritual pawning: converting mad persons, deemed unfit for sale due to

mental incapacity, into potential subjects of enslavement. Shrines were thus spaces of value

conversion that reflected a broader monetary and ritual economy of capture, enslavement, and

raiding that proliferated in Atlantic-era West Africa.