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A Microcosm of Why Africans sold Slaves: Akan Consumption Patterns in the 1770s.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

George Metcalf
George Metcalf
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario
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Extract

The European goods which Africans consumed in the slave trade era tell us much about the African societies which imported them. However the study of the subject has involved much confusion through the application of fragmentary evidence from different societies in different stages of development towards the fashioning of broad hypotheses about the impact of the trade on West Africa as a whole. It is important therefore, when the evidence is available, to study each society and each group of African middlemen individually as well as within the wider context.

The papers (especially the barter records) of Richard Miles throw a good deal of light on one such microcosm: the Akan people of the Gold Coast in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Fante middlemen with whom Miles dealt required, for virtually every barter, an assortment of goods from five major categories: hardware, currencies, textiles, luxury items, arms and ammunition. Though all these categories were necessary for the trade, it is notable that textiles were far and away the dominant commodity desired by the Akan. Guns were in surprisingly low demand during this period which suggests that the Akan slave producers (principally the Asante) had no difficulty raising slaves through tribute in peacetime and were not forced to rely on wars and slave-raids.

Miles's documents also make it clear that generalizations drawn from the Gold Coast in this period cannot be extended automatically to other areas; Akan history tells us that neither can they be extended on the Gold Coast into a different era.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , November 1987 , pp. 377 - 394
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

1 For an overview of these historiographic trends, see Hopkins, A. G., Two Essays on Underdevelopment (Geneva, 1979).Google Scholar

2 Davies, K. G. pointed Out nearly thirty years ago that Africans were in no sense passive consumers and that their tastes dictated the nature of the trade: The Royal African Company (London, 1957), 235.Google Scholar But as recently as 1971, Claude Meillassoux wrote of the ‘shoddy trade goods and glass trinkets’ of the slave trade era in The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa (London, 1971), 50.Google Scholar

3 A good sample of the controversy in this area may be seen in Inikori's, J. E. introduction to Forced Migration (London, 1982), 55–7.Google Scholar

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69 For the remarkable survival of indigenous handicraft industries amongst the Akan, even in the face of European imports, see Dickson, Historical Geography, 25, 43–4, 92–5;Google ScholarReynolds, E., Trade and Economic Change on the Gold Coast 1807–1814 (London, 1974), 22–4.Google Scholar

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