Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the extractive history of enslaved Africans exported to the Americas through Fort Amsterdam, Ghana, in the 18th century. It is a history that engages the hidden relationship between ritual execution and the transmutation of enslaved captives into human commodities.

Paper long abstract:

The slave forts and castles that punctuate Ghana’s historic Gold Coast stand as monumental reminders of the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery, beginning with the construction of Elmina Castle by the Portuguese in 1482 and ending, at least officially, with Britain’s Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. Built as “factories” for bulking enslaved Africans for sale and transshipment to the Americas, they served as highly regulated sites of Afro-European exchange and interaction when the English, Dutch, Swedes, Danes and Brandenburgers entered the so-called African Trade.

In this paper, I focus on one critical link in this transatlantic value-chain where enslaved captives from Ghana’s hinterland were brought to Fort Amsterdam (formerly Fort Cormantin) and auctioned off to European traders en route to the Americas. Known as Otsir grove in the town of Abandze, it is easily missed on the Accra-Cape Coast highway where it is overshadowed by Forts Amsterdam and Anamabo, which rose to prominence in the mid-eighteenth century. Located within a subcommunity of a subcommunity, however, Otsir’s sacred grove congeals an extractive history of profound significance within its trees, throughout its grounds, and beneath the earth. It is a history that speaks to the autochthonous layers of an occupied territory, historically labile sovereign centers, the core ritual template of the eighteenth-century Fante state, and the fundamental relationship between the ritual execution of criminals and the transmutation of enslaved captives into human commodities.