Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-x4r87 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T05:15:38.375Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Belonging in Africa: Frederik Svane and Christian Protten on the Gold Coast in the Eighteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2015

Gunvor Simonsen
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The idea that the African Atlantic world was populated by Atlantic Creoles who crossed cultural divides with relative ease is appealing, and it lends itself well to studies of identity formation that highlight the talents and opportunities that emerged from processes of cultural blending. Yet an examination of how travelling Africans ascribed meaning to their spatial and emotional groundings underlines that creolization in the African Atlantic was less smooth than suggested by the figure of the Atlantic Creole. For Frederik Svane and Christian Protten, two Euro-African men born on the Gold Coast in the early eighteenth century, Creole conditions resulted in identity practices that ranged from the complete rejection of African culture to a celebration and redefinition of the significance of African origins in the Atlantic world.

Keywords

Creolizationraceslavery
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , April 2015 , pp. 91 - 115
Copyright
© 2015 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Gunvor Simonsen is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Copenhagen. She would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers as well as her collegues Sniff Andersen Nexø and Ulrik Langen at Copenhagen University and Pernille Ipsen at University of Wisconsin-Madison for their comments to earlier drafts of the article.

References

Published Primary Sources

Burchard, Brentjes, ed. Antonius Gvilielmus Amo Afer aus Axim in Ghana. Student, Doktor der Philosophie, Magister Legens an der Universitäten Halle - Wittenberg Jena, 1727–1747: Dokumente, Autographe, Belege. Halle (Saale): Martin-Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 1968.Google Scholar
Capitein, Jacobus Elisa Joannes. The Agony of Asar. A Thesis on Slavery by the Former Slave, Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein, 1717–1747, edited, translated and with an introduction by Grant Parker. Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2001.Google Scholar
Carretta, Vincent and Reese, Ty M., eds. The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque: The First African Anglican Missionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Carstens, J. L.En Almindelig Beskrivelse om alle de Danske, Americanske eller West-Jndiske Ey-Lande. København: Dansk Vestindisk Forlag, 1981 [orig. 1730s–1740s].Google Scholar
, Justesen, Ole, ed. Danish Sources for the History of Ghana, 1657–1754, translated by James Manley. Fontes Historiae Africanae, Series Varia. Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005.Google Scholar
Haagensen, Reimert. Beskrivelse over Eylandet St. Croix i America i Vest-Indien. København, 1758.Google Scholar
Haagensen, Reimert. Description of the Island of St. Croix in America in the West Indies, translated by Arnold R. Highfield. St. Croix: The Virgin Islands Humanities Council, 1995.Google Scholar
Kong Christian den Femtis Danske Lov, edited by V. A. Secher. København, 1891.Google Scholar
Oldendorp, Christian Georg Andreas. Historie der caribischen Inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Crux und Sanct Jan. Kommentierte Edition des Originalmanskriptes, edited by Gudrun Meir, Stephan Palmié, Peter Stein and Horst Ulbricht. Dresden: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2000.Google Scholar
Protten, Christian. En nyttig grammaticalsk Indledelse til tvende hidindtil gandske ubekiendte Sprog, Fanteisk og Acraisk (paa Guldküsten udi Guinea), efter den danske Pronunciation og Udtale. København: 1764.Google Scholar
Protten, Christian. Introduction to the FANTE and ACCRA (GÃ) 1764 and J. E. J. Capitein’s 1744 FANTE Cathechism, edited and translated by H. M. J. Trutenau. London: Afro Press, 1971.Google Scholar

Published Secondary Sources

Appel, Charlotte and Fink-Jensen, Morten. Dansk skolehistorie, vol. 1, Da læreren holdt skole. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bagge, Povl, Frost, Jep Lauesen and Hjejle, Bernt, eds. Højesteret, 1661–1961, vol. 2. København: GEC Gads Forlag, 1961.Google Scholar
Bartels, F. L. “Jacobus Eliza Johannes Capitein, 1717–47.” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 4:1 (1959): 3–13.Google Scholar
Bartels, F. L.. “Philip Quaque, 1741–1816.”Transactions of the Gold Coast & Togo Historical Society 1:5 (1955): 153–177.Google Scholar
Beachy, Robert. “Manuscript Missions in the Age of Print: Moravian Community in the Atlantic World.” In Pious Pursuits, German Moravians in the Atlantic World, edited by Robert Beachy and Michele Gillespie, 33–49. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berlin, Ira. “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America.” William and Mary Quarterly 53:2 (1996): 251–288.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brantlinger, Patrick. Dark Vanishings. Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Bredsdorff, Thomas. Den brogede oplysning. Om følelsernes fornuft og fornuftens følelse i 1700-tallets nordiske litteratur. København: Gyldendal, 2003.Google Scholar
Brentjes, Burchard. Anton Wilhelm Amo. Der schwarze Philosoph in Halle. Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1976.Google Scholar
Brooks, George E.Eurafricans in Western Africa. Commerce, Social Status, Gender and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Brooks, George E.. Eurafricans in Western Africa. Commerce, Social Status, Gender and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Byrd, Alexander X.Captives and Voyagers. Black Migrants Across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.Google Scholar
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Debrunner, Hans W. “Friedrich Pedersen Svane, 1710–1789.” Evangelisches Missions-Magazin 101 (1957): 24–31.Google Scholar
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. “Creolization in Anthropological Theory and in Mauritius.” In Creolization. History, Ethnography, Theory, edited by Charles Stewart, 153–177. California: Left Coast Press, Inc., 2007.Google Scholar
Eriksholm, A. J. “En degn i Havrebjerg. Frideric Petri Svane Africanus.” Fra Holbæk Amt. Historiske aarbøger (1907): 32–49.Google Scholar
Feinberg, Harvey M.Africans and Europeans in West Africa, Elminans and Dutchmen on the Gold Coast during the Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldbæk, Ole and Justesen, Ole. Kolonierne i Asien og Afrika. København: Politikens Forlag, 1980.Google Scholar
Fogleman, Aaron Spencer. Jesus Is Female. Moravians and Radical Religion in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Force, Pierre. “The House on Bayou Road: Atlantic Creole Networks in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Journal of American History 100 (2013): 21–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gayibor, N. L. “Les rois de Glidji: Une chronologie revisee.” History in Africa 22 (1995): 197–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1973.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Glasson, Travis. Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Gould, Eliga H. “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery.” The American Historical Review 112:3 (2007): 764–786.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graden, Dale T. “Interpreters, Translators, and the Spoken Word in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade to Brazil and Cuba.” Ethnohistory 58:3 (2011): 393–419.Google Scholar
Green, Tobias. “Building Creole Identity in the African Atlantic: Boundaries of Race and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Cabo Verde.” History in Africa 36 (2009): 103–125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, Kim F.Things of Darkness. Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Hernæs, Per. “European Fort Communities on the Gold Coast in the Era of the Slave Trade.” In International Conference on Shipping, Factories and Colonization, edited by J. Everaert and J. Parmentier, 167–180. Brussel: Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences, 1996.Google Scholar
Hernæs, Per. “‘Fort Slaves’ at Christiansborg on the Gold Coast: Wage Labour in the Making.” In Slavery Across Time and Space. Studies in Slavery in Medieval Europe and Africa, edited by Per Hernæs and Tore Iversen, 197–229. Trondheim: NTNU, 2002.Google Scholar
Hernæs, Per. Slaves, Danes, and African Coast Society. Trondheim: University of Trondheim, Department of History, 1995.Google Scholar
Heywood, Linda M. and Thornton, John K.. Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Hondius, Dienke. “‘No Longer Strangers and Foreigners, but Fellow Citizens’: The Voice and Dream of Jacobus Eliza Capitein, African Theologist in the Netherlands (1717–47).” Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora 28:2–3 (2010): 131–153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ipsen, Pernille. “‘The Christened Mulatresses’: Euro-African Families in a Slave-Trading Town.” William and Mary Quarterly 70:2 (2013): 371–398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ipsen, Pernille. Koko’s Daughters. Danish Men Marrying Ga Women in an Atlantic Slave Trading Port in the Eighteenth Century. København: Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Københavns Universitet, 2008.Google Scholar
Johnson, Walter. “On Agency.” Journal of Social History 37:1 (2003): 113–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jordan, Winthrop D.White over Black: American Attitutes Toward the Negro 1550–1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.Google Scholar
Justesen, Ole. “Henrich Richter 1785–1849: Trader and Politician in the Danish Settlements on the Gold Coast.” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 7 (2003): 93–192.Google Scholar
Khan, Aisha. “Good to Think? Creolization, Optimism, and Agency.” Current Anthropology 48:5 (2007): 653–673.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Khan, Aisha. “Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Caribbean as Master Symbol.” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 3 (2001): 271–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kopytoff, Igor and Miers, Suzanne. “African ‘Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality.” In Slavery in Africa, edited by Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers, 3–81. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977.Google Scholar
Kpobi, David Nii Anum. Mission in Chains: The Life, Theology and Ministry of the Ex-Slave Jacobus E. J. Capitein (1717–1747) with a Translation of his Major Publications. Zoetermeer: Uitgeverij Boekencentrum, 1993.Google Scholar
Landers, Jane G.Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Landers, Jane G.. “Atlantic Creoles.” In Oxford Bibliographies, Atlantic History at www.oxfordbibliographies.com.Google Scholar
Law, Robin. The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Law, Robin. The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’ 1727–1892. Oxford: James Currey, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Law, Robin, Mann, Kristin. “West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast.” William and Mary Quarterly 56:2 (1999): 307–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindsay, Lisa A. and Sweet, John Wood, eds. Biography and the Black Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lovejoy, Paul E. “The African Diaspora: Revisionist Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture and Religion under Slavery.” Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation 2:1 (1997): 1–21.Google Scholar
Mamigonian, Beatriz G. and Racine, Karen, eds. The Human Tradition in the Black Atlantic, 1500–2000. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.Google Scholar
Mark, Peter. ‘Portuguese’ Style and Luso-African Identity, Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Mark, Peter, da Silva Horta, José. The Forgotten Diaspora. Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McNay, L. “Subject, Psyche and Agency: The Work of Judith Butler.” In Performativity & Belonging edited by Vikke Bell, 175–193. London: Sage Publications, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meillassoux, Claude. The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold. London: The Athlone Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Nedergaard, Paul. “Den sorte degn i Havrebjerg.” Kirke-Tidende 24 (1917): 372–379.Google Scholar
Nexø, Sniff Andersen. “Undesired Contacts. The Troubled Boundaries of Colonial Bodies in Greenland.” Ethnologia Scandinavica 42 (2012): 5–28.Google Scholar
Nørregaard, Georg. Vore Gamle Tropekolonier. Guldkysten: De Danske Etablissementer i Guinea. Denmark: Fremad, 1968.Google Scholar
Olsen, Poul Erik. “Danske Lov på de vestindiske øer.” In Danske og Norske Lov i 300 år, edited by Ditlev Tamm 289–321. København: Jurist- og Økonomforbundets Forlag, 1983.Google Scholar
Olsen, Poul Erik. “Disse vilde karle: Negre i Danmark indtil 1848.” In Fremmede i Danmark, edited by Bent Blüdnikow, 103–117. Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 1987.Google Scholar
Palmié, Stephan. “Creolization and Its Discontents.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006): 433–456.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parker, John. Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra. Oxford: James Curry, 2000.Google Scholar
Perbi, Akosua Adoma. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana from the 15th to the 19th Century. Legon, Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004.Google Scholar
Reese, Ty M. “‘Sheep in the Jaws of So Many Ravenous Wolves’: The Slave Trade and Anglican Missionary Activity at Cape Coast Castle, 1752–1816.” Journal of Religion in Africa 34:3 (2004): 348–372.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robertson, Claire. Sharing the Same Bowl? A Socioeconomic History of Women and Class in Accra, Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Sebald, Peter. “Christian Jacob Protten Africanus (1715–1769) —Erster Missionar Einer Deutchen Missionsgesellschaft in Schwarzafrika.” In Kolonien und Missionen. Referat des 3. Internationalen Kolonialgeschichtlichen Symposiums 1993 in Bremen, edited by W. Wagner, 107–121. Münster: Universität Bremen, 1993.Google Scholar
Sensbach, Jon F.Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sensbach, Jon F.. A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Shumway, Rebecca. “Castle Slaves of the Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast (Ghana).” Slavery & Abolition 35:1 (2014): 84–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shumway, Rebecca. The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sparks, Randy J.The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Sparks, Randy J.. Where the Negroes Are Masters. An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stead, Geoffrey. “Crossing the Atlantic: The Eighteenth-Century Moravian Experience.” Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society 30 (1998): 23–36.Google Scholar
Sweet, James H.Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Weiss, Holger. “The Danish Gold Coast as a Multinational and Entangled Space, c. 1700–1850.” In Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity, Small Time Agents in a Global Arena edited by M. Naum and J. M. Nordin, 243–260. New York: Springer, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waaben, Knud. “A. S. Ørsted og negerslaverne i København.” Juristen 46 (1964): 321–343.Google Scholar