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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.

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.

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.

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.

In this essay, Yvonne Daniel highlights the necessity of employing appropriate terminology when discussing African dance forms - terminology that distinguishes dance forms based on geographical, social, and stylistic histories. Daniel provides an analysis of Afro-Cuban dance categories while bridging to similar dance traditions found throughout the Caribbean and Afro-Latin America. Daniel offers a pluralistic typography of African and Diaspora dance forms and allows a more precise legacy representation. She concludes with a set of recommendations for the mentoring of African Dance performers, researchers, and Performing Arts communities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter is concerned about death, dying and the dead in Africa. It focuses on one region of the continent, encompassed by the present-day nation of Ghana, but the chapter seeks to contribute to an understanding of the history of death more broadly. It presents the book's chronological reach, extending over some four centuries, from around 1600 to the 1950s. Indeed, the use of Ghana as a case study was in part determined by a desire to think about changing perceptions, experiences and cultures of mortality in Africa over as long a period as possible. The chapter argues that the long history of encounter and creativity of continent's diverse state-builders, the Akan, and the British is fundamental to the project of writing about death across the divide between the precolonial and colonial eras of African history. Ultimately, the chapter unveils the author's interest and inspiration in writing the relationship between the living and the dead in West Africa.

This chapter begins to set out the landscape of Willem Bosman's cultural encounter as it unfolded on the Gold Coast from the late fifteenth century. It highlights a set of fundamental metaphysical questions that, in the broadest sense, framed understandings of life and death among the Akan and their neighbours: Where did mankind come from? How did death come into the world? Where do people go when they die? By beginning the story with Bosman, the intention is not to recapitulate older ideas of the coast of Guinea as a 'white man's grave'. Rather, the chapter suggests that the reality and representation of the African encounter with mortality became entangled with the encounter with European others.

The chapter highlights the rise of the Asante forest kingdom and what oral histories of that epochal event have to say about death, dying and the dead. It focuses on an aspect of Akan mortuary culture touched on in the previous chapters: the ways in which death was spoken about or, as was often the case, not spoken about. Asante tradition records that the kingdom was forged by the combined genius of two men: Osei Tutu, the omanhene of Kumasi and then the first Asantehene, and Komfo Anokye, the ritual specialist or 'priest' (okomfo) Anokye; these two were ably assisted by a third figure, the military commander Amankwatia. Theirs is a history that was familiar throughout Asante across the centuries, one endlessly recounted at firesides alongside the mythic cycles of odamankomasem and anansesem and the traditions of settlement of families, clans and stools. Yet it is a history that is characterized too by silences, contradictions and interpretive complexities.

This chapter looks at the material and conceptual roles of gold in matters of death and burial on the Gold Coast and in the Akan forest in the era of Atlantic commerce. It argues that death and the ends of life were intimately bound up with ideologies concerning gold, wealth, accumulation and increase. The chapter identifies one aspect of this role as crucial to an understanding of the changing contract between Asante state and society: inheritance and death duties. Another has been touched on only in passing: the interment — and the periodic disinterment — of gold in graves. Both, in essence, were about exchange: exchange between generations, and between the living and the dead. Finally, the chapter explores how the symbolic power of gold in Asante reached dizzying heights of complexity.

This chapter reviews the most visible material manifestation of funerary culture on the Gold Coast and in its forest hinterland before the twentieth century: commemorative terracotta sculptures of the dead. The chapter notes that the Akan and their neighbours were parsimonious when it came to artistic engagement with the dead. Unlike in many societies, from ancient Egypt to medieval Christian Europe and on to modern Mexico, death in Ghana has not left a powerful visual residue. Even within West Africa, the Akan region is notable for the absence of art that served to mediate with ancestors and the spirit world: in contrast to cultural zones to the west, north and east, it had, for example, no masking tradition. The chapter looks at the role of the terracottas within the wider Akan funerary complex. It focuses on the evocative sculptures, but the aim, in the spirit of Sir Thomas Browne's reflections on ancient British burial urns, is that they illuminate something of that broader history of death.

This chapter analyzes the entanglement of slavery and death on the Gold Coast. It focuses on the two eighteenth-century texts which reflect on life, death and anticipation of the afterlife in the Ga towns on the eastern reaches of the coast. The Ga (or Accra) had a long and intimate relationship with the Akan peoples to their north and west. The chapter outlines the succession of Akan overlords after the powerful kingdom in the mid-seventeenth century fell. Despite the situation, Ga merchants carved out a lucrative intermediary role and three prosperous towns grew up in association with the European forts in their midst: Kinka (or Dutch Accra), James Town (English Accra) and Osu (Danish Accra). The chapter explores how townsfolk earned their livelihood from trade, in particular the exchange of slaves for a range of imported commodities: cloth, liquor, metal goods, firearms, tobacco — all of which we have already seen come to feature in local funerary cultures. It investigates how slaves died, where and how were their corpses disposed of, and what were their prospects in the afterlife.