NATALIE EVERTS
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780197265208
- eISBN:
- 9780191754180
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197265208.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, World Early Modern History
Euro-Africans along the Gold Coast figure as a somewhat obscure minority in contemporary European literature. Perhaps this can be attributed to the kinship system of the coastal Akan that dominated ...
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Euro-Africans along the Gold Coast figure as a somewhat obscure minority in contemporary European literature. Perhaps this can be attributed to the kinship system of the coastal Akan that dominated the structure of Gold Coast society and accounted for the integration of Euro-Africans into the local lineages. In Akan culture, children belonged to the abusua or matrilineal family of their mothers, either as free members or as slaves. A different recruiting mechanism was also in operation in the other fundamental institution of the southern Akan polities, the asafo companies. Elmina boys were recruited by their father's asafo, and as a rule, male Euro-Africans had to do without the patrilineal affiliation to these prestigious power associations. The dearth of these ties encouraged a certain minority of Euro-Africans to initiate their own ‘company’, which might be considered a kernel in the development towards a Euro-African identity.Less
Euro-Africans along the Gold Coast figure as a somewhat obscure minority in contemporary European literature. Perhaps this can be attributed to the kinship system of the coastal Akan that dominated the structure of Gold Coast society and accounted for the integration of Euro-Africans into the local lineages. In Akan culture, children belonged to the abusua or matrilineal family of their mothers, either as free members or as slaves. A different recruiting mechanism was also in operation in the other fundamental institution of the southern Akan polities, the asafo companies. Elmina boys were recruited by their father's asafo, and as a rule, male Euro-Africans had to do without the patrilineal affiliation to these prestigious power associations. The dearth of these ties encouraged a certain minority of Euro-Africans to initiate their own ‘company’, which might be considered a kernel in the development towards a Euro-African identity.
Cephas N. Omenyo
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195393408
- eISBN:
- 9780199894390
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195393408.003.0012
- Subject:
- Religion, World Religions
This chapter traces how Charismatic healing practices long prominent in African Independent Churches/African Instituted Churches and Pentecostal churches have become central in all the traditionally ...
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This chapter traces how Charismatic healing practices long prominent in African Independent Churches/African Instituted Churches and Pentecostal churches have become central in all the traditionally mainline/historic churches in Ghana, focusing on Akan ethnic churches: Roman Catholic Church in Ghana, Presbyterian Church of Ghana, and Methodist Church Ghana. Non-pentecostal Western missionaries established mainline churches in the early nineteenth century. To stem the exodus of members to AICs and Pentecostals, from the 1970s lay-led Charismatic renewal movements within mainline churches departed from missionary heritages influenced by an Enlightenment worldview developed in non-African cultures. For most Akan/African Christians, as for practitioners of African indigenous religions, religion must meet existential needs. The universe seems filled with benevolent and malevolent spirits; the Devil and demons cause sickness or render medicine impotent; and salvation includes healing and deliverance or liberation. When sick, Akans typically try hospitals, traditional healers, Muslim spiritualists, and churches until one finds healing.Less
This chapter traces how Charismatic healing practices long prominent in African Independent Churches/African Instituted Churches and Pentecostal churches have become central in all the traditionally mainline/historic churches in Ghana, focusing on Akan ethnic churches: Roman Catholic Church in Ghana, Presbyterian Church of Ghana, and Methodist Church Ghana. Non-pentecostal Western missionaries established mainline churches in the early nineteenth century. To stem the exodus of members to AICs and Pentecostals, from the 1970s lay-led Charismatic renewal movements within mainline churches departed from missionary heritages influenced by an Enlightenment worldview developed in non-African cultures. For most Akan/African Christians, as for practitioners of African indigenous religions, religion must meet existential needs. The universe seems filled with benevolent and malevolent spirits; the Devil and demons cause sickness or render medicine impotent; and salvation includes healing and deliverance or liberation. When sick, Akans typically try hospitals, traditional healers, Muslim spiritualists, and churches until one finds healing.
Kwame Gyekye
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195112252
- eISBN:
- 9780199853069
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195112252.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
The democratic characteristics of the conventional political activities and structures of Africa are discussed in this chapter through distinguishing opinionated thoughts, practices and values of the ...
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The democratic characteristics of the conventional political activities and structures of Africa are discussed in this chapter through distinguishing opinionated thoughts, practices and values of the Akan society of Ghana, together with other African communities. Features of the autonomous political state are described with respect to the pressing demands and threats of colonialism to traditional customs. Although at first, the political institutions recommended by colonial rulers appear to offer organizational soundness, constitutional failure — disability of acting according to what is established — still occurs. Such malfunction can be understood in several terms, including the inadequate ability and the lack of motivation of African people to run government establishments that are provided by conquerors. Since democracy can be perceived in varying definitions and intensities, manifestations of this concept are promoted, including coordination with the government and performance of obligations assumed in the context of cooperative living.Less
The democratic characteristics of the conventional political activities and structures of Africa are discussed in this chapter through distinguishing opinionated thoughts, practices and values of the Akan society of Ghana, together with other African communities. Features of the autonomous political state are described with respect to the pressing demands and threats of colonialism to traditional customs. Although at first, the political institutions recommended by colonial rulers appear to offer organizational soundness, constitutional failure — disability of acting according to what is established — still occurs. Such malfunction can be understood in several terms, including the inadequate ability and the lack of motivation of African people to run government establishments that are provided by conquerors. Since democracy can be perceived in varying definitions and intensities, manifestations of this concept are promoted, including coordination with the government and performance of obligations assumed in the context of cooperative living.
K. Anthony Appiah
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- February 2006
- ISBN:
- 9780195114409
- eISBN:
- 9780199785827
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/019511440X.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This essay explores the theories of the person within Western and Akan traditions. It identifies six obstacles to theory comparison. It argues that there may be no non-question begging way of ...
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This essay explores the theories of the person within Western and Akan traditions. It identifies six obstacles to theory comparison. It argues that there may be no non-question begging way of comparing theories since these theories themselves play key roles in understanding how each is to be used.Less
This essay explores the theories of the person within Western and Akan traditions. It identifies six obstacles to theory comparison. It argues that there may be no non-question begging way of comparing theories since these theories themselves play key roles in understanding how each is to be used.
Kwasi Wiredu
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- February 2006
- ISBN:
- 9780195114409
- eISBN:
- 9780199785827
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/019511440X.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This essay compares the conceptions of truth within Akan and Western languages. It explores Western conceptions of truth, focusing on the correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic theories of truth. ...
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This essay compares the conceptions of truth within Akan and Western languages. It explores Western conceptions of truth, focusing on the correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic theories of truth. It argues that the Akan language helps clarify thinking about how to know what can be characterized as truth. The unification of the three competing Western theories of truth is possible by an infusion of the Akan conception of truth.Less
This essay compares the conceptions of truth within Akan and Western languages. It explores Western conceptions of truth, focusing on the correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic theories of truth. It argues that the Akan language helps clarify thinking about how to know what can be characterized as truth. The unification of the three competing Western theories of truth is possible by an infusion of the Akan conception of truth.
Sterling Stuckey
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199931675
- eISBN:
- 9780199356027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199931675.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century, Cultural History
This chapter lays out the organizing principle of slave culture in North America and underscores the centrality of the ancestral past to the African in America. The most important African ritual in ...
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This chapter lays out the organizing principle of slave culture in North America and underscores the centrality of the ancestral past to the African in America. The most important African ritual in slavery, the Ring Shout, is revealed in some detail. With the ring a symbol of unity and counter-clockwise dance and rhythm consciousness as common starting points, different ethnic groups on plantations of the South began moving toward unity almost before being aware of it. Children were especially drawn to the ring, helping to transmit the Shout over generations. African practices and values are related to specific academic disciplines to make slave behavior comprehensible. Slave art in the form of tales, music and dance are in dispensable to the analysis that establishes far more similarities between slave culture in the North and south than previously thought.Less
This chapter lays out the organizing principle of slave culture in North America and underscores the centrality of the ancestral past to the African in America. The most important African ritual in slavery, the Ring Shout, is revealed in some detail. With the ring a symbol of unity and counter-clockwise dance and rhythm consciousness as common starting points, different ethnic groups on plantations of the South began moving toward unity almost before being aware of it. Children were especially drawn to the ring, helping to transmit the Shout over generations. African practices and values are related to specific academic disciplines to make slave behavior comprehensible. Slave art in the form of tales, music and dance are in dispensable to the analysis that establishes far more similarities between slave culture in the North and south than previously thought.
István Aranyosi
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199989607
- eISBN:
- 9780199346349
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199989607.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
After using the case of one of the African peoples’, the Akan’s conceptual scheme as an illustration of the point that the concept of mind is not absolute but relative to culture and historical ...
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After using the case of one of the African peoples’, the Akan’s conceptual scheme as an illustration of the point that the concept of mind is not absolute but relative to culture and historical context, the author puts forward the idea of a “folk neuroscience”, understood as a superficial but coherent way in which philosophers assume the nervous system to work. Philosophers’ favourite piece of folk neuroscience, the sentence “Pain = C fibers firing” amounts to a blunder, as C fibers are not part of the CNS, but of the PNS, yet, the identity theory is alternatively called “Central State Materialism”, based on the unsubstantiated claim that states like pain are confined to the CNS. Pain research is used as an illustration for the idea that the PNS plays an important conceptual role in understanding pain states. The chapter ends with an analysis of and attempt to weaken the zombie intuition.Less
After using the case of one of the African peoples’, the Akan’s conceptual scheme as an illustration of the point that the concept of mind is not absolute but relative to culture and historical context, the author puts forward the idea of a “folk neuroscience”, understood as a superficial but coherent way in which philosophers assume the nervous system to work. Philosophers’ favourite piece of folk neuroscience, the sentence “Pain = C fibers firing” amounts to a blunder, as C fibers are not part of the CNS, but of the PNS, yet, the identity theory is alternatively called “Central State Materialism”, based on the unsubstantiated claim that states like pain are confined to the CNS. Pain research is used as an illustration for the idea that the PNS plays an important conceptual role in understanding pain states. The chapter ends with an analysis of and attempt to weaken the zombie intuition.
Kwasi Konadu
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390643
- eISBN:
- 9780199775736
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Discontinued
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390643.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century
Since the Herskovits‐Frazier debate of the 1940s, African diasporic research in the Americas has been marked not only by an uninterrupted focus on West Africa but also by an equally incessant neglect ...
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Since the Herskovits‐Frazier debate of the 1940s, African diasporic research in the Americas has been marked not only by an uninterrupted focus on West Africa but also by an equally incessant neglect of the Akan. Accounting for 10 percent of the total number of African captives who embarked for the Americas, the Akan diaspora not only shaped and brought into sharp relief the diasporic themes of maroonage, resistance, and freedom but also complicated these themes in that the displaced Akan created their own social orders based on foundational cultural understandings. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Akan never constituted a majority among other Africans in the Americas, yet their leadership skills in warfare and political organization, medicinal knowledge of plant use and spiritual practice, and composite culture as archived in the musical traditions, language, and patterns of African diasporic life far surpassed what their actual numbers would suggest. The book argues that a composite culture calibrated between the Gold Coast (Ghana) littoral and the forest fringe made the contributions of the Akan diaspora possible. That argument calls attention to the historic formation of Akan culture in West Africa and its reach into the Americas, where the Akan experience in the former British, Danish, and Dutch colonies is explored. There, those early experiences foreground the contemporary movement of diasporic Africans and the Akan people between Ghana and North America. Indeed, the Akan experience provides for a better understanding of how the diasporic quilt came to be and is still becoming.Less
Since the Herskovits‐Frazier debate of the 1940s, African diasporic research in the Americas has been marked not only by an uninterrupted focus on West Africa but also by an equally incessant neglect of the Akan. Accounting for 10 percent of the total number of African captives who embarked for the Americas, the Akan diaspora not only shaped and brought into sharp relief the diasporic themes of maroonage, resistance, and freedom but also complicated these themes in that the displaced Akan created their own social orders based on foundational cultural understandings. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Akan never constituted a majority among other Africans in the Americas, yet their leadership skills in warfare and political organization, medicinal knowledge of plant use and spiritual practice, and composite culture as archived in the musical traditions, language, and patterns of African diasporic life far surpassed what their actual numbers would suggest. The book argues that a composite culture calibrated between the Gold Coast (Ghana) littoral and the forest fringe made the contributions of the Akan diaspora possible. That argument calls attention to the historic formation of Akan culture in West Africa and its reach into the Americas, where the Akan experience in the former British, Danish, and Dutch colonies is explored. There, those early experiences foreground the contemporary movement of diasporic Africans and the Akan people between Ghana and North America. Indeed, the Akan experience provides for a better understanding of how the diasporic quilt came to be and is still becoming.
Babacar M’Baye
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604732337
- eISBN:
- 9781604733525
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604732337.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
This chapter shows how Cugoano reflected similar trickster qualities as an Akan writer who resisted noninclusiveness in the West through wit and alteration of conventions. The strong survival of Akan ...
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This chapter shows how Cugoano reflected similar trickster qualities as an Akan writer who resisted noninclusiveness in the West through wit and alteration of conventions. The strong survival of Akan folklore in the New World is not surprising since the Akan were a large part of the African population in the Americas. Barskile points out that in the period between 1601 and 1700, “52.5% of Gold Coast Africans brought to the Americas disembarked in Barbados.” Furthermore, as Rucker shows in The River Flows On, “between 1601 and 1800, roughly 80 to 85 percent of all Gold Coast Africans involved in the slave trade were embarked on ships destined for British, Dutch, and Danish colonies.” These statistics demonstrate the strong presence of Gold Coast inhabitants in the New World slave population during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Less
This chapter shows how Cugoano reflected similar trickster qualities as an Akan writer who resisted noninclusiveness in the West through wit and alteration of conventions. The strong survival of Akan folklore in the New World is not surprising since the Akan were a large part of the African population in the Americas. Barskile points out that in the period between 1601 and 1700, “52.5% of Gold Coast Africans brought to the Americas disembarked in Barbados.” Furthermore, as Rucker shows in The River Flows On, “between 1601 and 1800, roughly 80 to 85 percent of all Gold Coast Africans involved in the slave trade were embarked on ships destined for British, Dutch, and Danish colonies.” These statistics demonstrate the strong presence of Gold Coast inhabitants in the New World slave population during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Kwasi Konadu
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390643
- eISBN:
- 9780199775736
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Discontinued
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390643.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century
This chapter explicates the lives of Akan persons and their roles in the development of a composite African culture shaped by diasporic experiences in the Dutch and Danish colonies of the Americas. ...
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This chapter explicates the lives of Akan persons and their roles in the development of a composite African culture shaped by diasporic experiences in the Dutch and Danish colonies of the Americas. It examines Akan culture and politics in the Danish Caribbean and pays specific attention to the colonial holdings of St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John. In doing so, the Akan emerge as Maroons delimited by an uneasy coexistence within the same neo‐European social order they fought against, insurrectionists who, in the St. John revolt, overthrew the plantocracy in 1733–1734, and as runaways, conspirators, skilled laborers, and individuals known as (A)mina, who were situated between levels of emancipation and brutal enslavement. These thematic identities for the Akan in Danish America were also true for those in the Dutch colonies, where Akan‐based maroonage and culture left indelible marks on its colonial and postcolonial societies. Thematically, the Akan were thus Maroons, runaways, collaborators, forgers of culture, and seekers of polities of their own making on the Gold Coast and in the Americas.Less
This chapter explicates the lives of Akan persons and their roles in the development of a composite African culture shaped by diasporic experiences in the Dutch and Danish colonies of the Americas. It examines Akan culture and politics in the Danish Caribbean and pays specific attention to the colonial holdings of St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John. In doing so, the Akan emerge as Maroons delimited by an uneasy coexistence within the same neo‐European social order they fought against, insurrectionists who, in the St. John revolt, overthrew the plantocracy in 1733–1734, and as runaways, conspirators, skilled laborers, and individuals known as (A)mina, who were situated between levels of emancipation and brutal enslavement. These thematic identities for the Akan in Danish America were also true for those in the Dutch colonies, where Akan‐based maroonage and culture left indelible marks on its colonial and postcolonial societies. Thematically, the Akan were thus Maroons, runaways, collaborators, forgers of culture, and seekers of polities of their own making on the Gold Coast and in the Americas.
Kwasi Konadu
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390643
- eISBN:
- 9780199775736
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Discontinued
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390643.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century
This chapter looks thematically at cultural and diasporic issues in the Akan experience in North America and at the uneven dialogue between diasporic Africans and Akan people from Ghana. The claims ...
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This chapter looks thematically at cultural and diasporic issues in the Akan experience in North America and at the uneven dialogue between diasporic Africans and Akan people from Ghana. The claims to which both diasporic Africans and Akan people make to culture and diaspora constitute the crux of that internal dialogue. Diasporic Africans such as Nana Yao Dinizulu and Nana Kwabena Brown have adopted and preserved elements of Akan spiritual practices since the 1960s, showing the endurance of an Akan spiritual culture and the role to which diasporic Africans may play in its furtherance. They have claimed a culture worth preserving and have rooted their cultural identity and praxis in it. Diasporic Africans have also problematized the “slave castles” of Ghana, whose dungeons have become contested sites at a crossroads in which diasporic Africans are adopting Akan cultural and spiritual practices and seeking an home, while Akan persons in Ghana are increasingly undergoing Christianization and are leaving for North America and parts of Europe. These phenomena associated with the Akan diaspora suggest that the study of a composite African diaspora must be one of ongoing movement in specific and shared dialogue among Africa‐based and African‐descended communities.Less
This chapter looks thematically at cultural and diasporic issues in the Akan experience in North America and at the uneven dialogue between diasporic Africans and Akan people from Ghana. The claims to which both diasporic Africans and Akan people make to culture and diaspora constitute the crux of that internal dialogue. Diasporic Africans such as Nana Yao Dinizulu and Nana Kwabena Brown have adopted and preserved elements of Akan spiritual practices since the 1960s, showing the endurance of an Akan spiritual culture and the role to which diasporic Africans may play in its furtherance. They have claimed a culture worth preserving and have rooted their cultural identity and praxis in it. Diasporic Africans have also problematized the “slave castles” of Ghana, whose dungeons have become contested sites at a crossroads in which diasporic Africans are adopting Akan cultural and spiritual practices and seeking an home, while Akan persons in Ghana are increasingly undergoing Christianization and are leaving for North America and parts of Europe. These phenomena associated with the Akan diaspora suggest that the study of a composite African diaspora must be one of ongoing movement in specific and shared dialogue among Africa‐based and African‐descended communities.
Paul Appiah Himin Asante
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199370993
- eISBN:
- 9780199374212
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199370993.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society, Religious Studies
This chapter examines African notions of individual and community to shed light from a different culture on the question of moral responsibility for the harms that markets cause to distant others. ...
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This chapter examines African notions of individual and community to shed light from a different culture on the question of moral responsibility for the harms that markets cause to distant others. The chapter focuses on the culture of the Akan people, a matrilineal tribe in Ghana. There it is believed that during conception, the woman (mother) transmits her blood (mogya), the man (father) transmits the spirit (sunsum or ntoro), and God gives the soul (okra). These three elements in the Akan anthropology and cosmology simultaneously constitute the “individual” person: the spiritual from God, the community from the woman, and individuality from the man. The individual is, thus, ontologically relational. The introduction of Western markets in Africa has created fundamental tensions in this cultural perspective, at the level of the nation, the local community, and the self-understanding of individual persons.Less
This chapter examines African notions of individual and community to shed light from a different culture on the question of moral responsibility for the harms that markets cause to distant others. The chapter focuses on the culture of the Akan people, a matrilineal tribe in Ghana. There it is believed that during conception, the woman (mother) transmits her blood (mogya), the man (father) transmits the spirit (sunsum or ntoro), and God gives the soul (okra). These three elements in the Akan anthropology and cosmology simultaneously constitute the “individual” person: the spiritual from God, the community from the woman, and individuality from the man. The individual is, thus, ontologically relational. The introduction of Western markets in Africa has created fundamental tensions in this cultural perspective, at the level of the nation, the local community, and the self-understanding of individual persons.
Finn Fuglestad
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190876104
- eISBN:
- 9780190943110
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190876104.003.0012
- Subject:
- History, African History
The chapter seeks to map what happened west of Allada/Dahomey, on the Western or “Little” (peripheral) Slave Coast. It was conditioned in part by occurrences on the Gold Coast – the center of the ...
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The chapter seeks to map what happened west of Allada/Dahomey, on the Western or “Little” (peripheral) Slave Coast. It was conditioned in part by occurrences on the Gold Coast – the center of the European presence in West Africa – among the Twi-speaking Akan. The central event is the conquest on the Eastern Gold Coast of the Ga-Adangbe of Accra by Akwamu in 1677–82. It sent waves of refugees into the Western Slave Coast. Many of these Ga-Adangbe refugees supported themselves as bandits and mercenaries, putting pressure on the local Ewe population. In the region of Aneho-Little Popo the refugees turned into conquerors and established the polity of Glidji which held uneasy relations with Grand Popo. The impact of all this remained fairly limited and the interest of the Europeans remained equally limited. An unresolved question is to what extent and how Akwamu dabbled in the affairs of the Western Slave Coast.Less
The chapter seeks to map what happened west of Allada/Dahomey, on the Western or “Little” (peripheral) Slave Coast. It was conditioned in part by occurrences on the Gold Coast – the center of the European presence in West Africa – among the Twi-speaking Akan. The central event is the conquest on the Eastern Gold Coast of the Ga-Adangbe of Accra by Akwamu in 1677–82. It sent waves of refugees into the Western Slave Coast. Many of these Ga-Adangbe refugees supported themselves as bandits and mercenaries, putting pressure on the local Ewe population. In the region of Aneho-Little Popo the refugees turned into conquerors and established the polity of Glidji which held uneasy relations with Grand Popo. The impact of all this remained fairly limited and the interest of the Europeans remained equally limited. An unresolved question is to what extent and how Akwamu dabbled in the affairs of the Western Slave Coast.
