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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Cultural interaction on the pre-colonial Gold Coast: modes of incorporating Euro-Africans in Elmina extended families
| Panel |
29. Extended families in time. Creating alliances and power networks in Western Africa societies and history
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| Paper ID | 410 |
| Author(s) |
Everts, Natalie Christina
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Within the situations of encounter between Africans and Europeans on the coast, in the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, numerous social customs developed to facilitate mutual relations between trade partners. A decisive factor for the intensity of these social patterns, that have been designated as moral community in the historiography, was the degree of permanence of the European presence in a certain community. In Elmina, where Dutch traders resided for almost 250 years, among the different customs to facilitate interaction between Europeans and Africans, were rulings concerning African marriage, which was the usual relationship between European men and local Akan women.
These marriage customs by and large fit into Akan customary law. The Akan basically followed a matrilineal system of kinship, so children born out of these relationships belonged to the abusua or matrilineal family of their mothers. The status of a mother determined that of her children. Within the exogamous abusua people were connected as relatives, or as subordinates or slaves. Children, girls especially, symbolised the continuity of a lineage, and elders preferred girls to be given in marriage to promising partners. In Elmina they could either choose an African who disposed of his own abusua or a European connected to the castle community.
The sources show that in at least some segments of the Elmina mbusua several generations of female lineage members married Europeans. In 1758, Governor J.P. Huydecoper for instance married Penni Raems, a Euro-African lady of a prominent family. He described her to be of mixed descent in the 3th generation. On the basis of three Dutch archival collections I intend to explore this Euro-African component within the Elmina mbusua further. By focusing on the micro level and analysing some individual cases, I attempt to demonstrate how children of mixed descent were differentiated within Elmina society. As the kinship system of the coastal Akan accounts for the integration of Euro-Africans into the indigenous families this serves to explain why they did not develop a separate Euro-African ethnic identity comparable to that of groups of mixed descent elsewhere along the Guinea Coast.
Like Bosman observed, Akan men could, by verbal will, present their wives and children with personal property, a practise contrary to the transfer of communal property via the maternal line. In like way partners and children of Europeans could inherit legacies of slaves, gold, commodities, or real estate. References seem to indicate that certain household elders supported wealthy Euro-African lineage members to use their inheritance, which they (the elders) also might have claimed as abusua property, to establish themselves as traders on behalf of the collective.
Backed by their kin a few of these traders eventually developed into fierce competitors for the European traders. Tensions between the two groups arose when after the Fourth Anglo Dutch War (1781-1784), Euro-African traders, due to the deteriorated Dutch economic position on the coast, seized opportunities to trade with the British and their Fante allies.
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