Black Atlantica - Cultivating Modernism

Whether by caravan, canoe, or dhow, trade brought West African goods and people into direct contact with
the far corners of the

Old World. ... West Africa in Global Trade and Empires, Shumway
From the very beginning, then, the contact zone

depended upon sexual relationships.
The Erotics of History: An Atlantic African
Donald L. Donham
Atlantic creoles originated in the historic meeting of

Europeans and Africans on the west coast of Africa. Page | 1
Origins of African-American Society
Ira Berlin
What, exactly, is the "black Atlantic"?

… a black Atlantic "counterculture of modernity" that evaded
the hegemony of the nation-form, but nationalist impulses
were never far from view;
The Black Atlantic Archive, Jonathan Elmer
black atlantica
cultivating modernism
compiled by
amma birago
Black life in mainland North America originated not in Africa or

America but in the netherworld between the continents. Along the
periphery of the Atlantic - first in Africa …
From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles
Ira Berlin
What’s more, the first globalization mirrors the shift away from
Medieval and into the early modern. … it broke a barrier that
physically and ideologically allowed the world to develop from an
isolated one to one that was truly global.
The First Globalization: Portugal and the Other" in the Fifteenth
and Sixteenth Centuries
- Peter Ellerkam
... the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis … to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective.
Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
Whether by caravan, canoe, or dhow, trade brought West African goods and people into direct contact with the far corners of the

Europeans and Africans on the west coast of Africa.
Origins of African-American Society
Ira Berlin
Page | 2
For Jobson, … As for 'Portuguese' themselves, their refusal to accept
the label Negro or Black would remain central to their sense of identity
for over two hundred years.
The Evolution of 'Portuguese' Identity:
Luso-Africans on the Upper Guinea Coast from the Sixteenth
to the Early Nineteenth Century
Peter Mark
When the Portuguese missions failed in Benin,

they turned to the Delta — Warri.
The Evolution of 'Portuguese' Identity
Peter Mark
De Barros records the visit of the Englishman, Wyndham, to

Benin in 1553, he came across a striking example of
Portuguese influence in that the king (Orhogbua) "could speak
the Portugall tongue, which he had learnt of a child."
Peter Mark
a "Jewish Era in the Sahara."

Charles G. M. B. de La Ronciere,

the hegemony of the nation-form, but nationalist impulses were
never far from view, …
The Black Atlantic Archive
Jonathan Elmer
From the very beginning, then, the contact zone

depended upon sexual relationships.
Donald L. Donham
EuroAfricans, or in the context of the Guinea-Bissau region,

Luso-Africans, represented a new and unprecedented
element in West Africa.
The Observance of All Souls' Day in the Guinea-Bissau Region:
George E. Brooks
The letter of the Portuguese king to the inhabitants of Geba

dated 1644 which calls for their move to Cacheu argued for them
to take ‘all their assets, families and residences’ to the said town of Cacheu,
where they would be able to ‘continue their trade and essentially
live and die with the holy sacraments,
while it will also improve the town’s defences’. Page | 3
The Port of Geba:
At The Crossroads Of Afro-Atlantic Trade And Culture
Philip J. Havik
Tradition and innovation in Dutch ethnographic prints

of Africans c. 1590-1670
Elmer Kolfin
Their hayre is blacke & curled, and some also red. The stature of the men is of
an indifferent bignes; and excepting their blacknes are very like to the
Portingalles [italics ek]. The apples of their eies are of diverse colours; blacke
and of the colour of the sea.
New religious forms emerged and then disappeared in much the same manner,
as Europeans and Africans brought to the enclaves not only their commercial
and political aspirations but all the trappings of their cultures as well. Priests and
ministers sent to tend European souls made African converts, some of whom
saw Christianity as both a way to ingratiate themselves with their trading
partners and a new truth.
From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins
of African-American Society in Mainland North America
Ira Berlin
… that sexual relations between Portuguese men and slave

women, or women from the lands where the Portuguese
settled, not only created a new nation of non-white Portuguese
but allowed the female partners of a frequently transient male
population of administrators, soldiers and sailors to acquire a
dominant role in colonial society and economy.
Creole Societies in the Portuguese Colonial Empire,
Ed. Philip J. Havik and Malyn Newitt

Peter Mark
Lanfado communities were permanently settled on the Petite Cote,
while in Sierra Leone and Rio Nunez much early commerce was in the hands of
lanfados who sailed there regularly from S. Domingos, north of present-day Bissau.
The offspring of these lanfados and African women were called
filhos de terra and were generally considered to be 'Portuguese'.
… a secure place in such a volatile social order was not easy.

The creoles' genius for intercultural negotiation was not simply
a set of skills, a tactic for survival, or an attribute that emerged
as an "Africanism" in the New World.

Ira Berlin
… Racial distinctions did not appear until the emergence
of a plantation society in the mid-16th century, when Page | 4
the preoccupation with skin color and hair texture
emerged along with racially exclusionary policies …
From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and
the Origins of African-American Society
in Mainland North America
Ira Berlin
Further south in the Gambia in 1661, English traders relied

on an African marabout who spoke Portuguese as their interpreter.
Peter Mark
When Castle Sao Jorge da Mina was founded, there were only
64 Europeans in the garrison. … In the eighteenth century the
number ranged from 171 to 377, averaging over 200 men.
These administrators, soldiers, and sailors
Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast, 1400-1900
Christopher R. DeCorse
Wilks Wangara
As opposed to Zurara, Cadamosto is beginning to learn about the local West-African trade routes and the people that
inhabited those lands. This is important because, in order for the Portuguese to insert themselves into the existing
regional economic system, they would need to familiarize themselves with the locals. It is also noteworthy that
Cadamosto mentions the women he sees because intermarriage with locals would become a primary source of
support after the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered the Pacific maritime system. Thus began
the interweaving narratives of economic development and necessary relationships with the “other.”

Peter Mark
During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Portugal established a trading
presence along the Upper Guinea Coast from Senegal to Sierra Leone. Emigrants from
Portugal known as lanfados' - some of them Jews seeking to escape religious persecution
- settled along the coast, where many of them married women from local communities.
By the early sixteenth century, Luso-Africans, or 'Portuguese' as they called themselves,
were established at trading centers from the Petite Cote in Senegal, south to Sierra Leone.
… Lanfado communities were permanently settled on the Petite Cote, while in Sierra Leone and Rio
Nunez much early commerce was in the hands of lanfados who sailed there regularly from S. Domingos,
north of present-day Bissau. The offspring of these lanfados and African women were called filhos de
terra and were generally considered to be 'Portuguese'.
Luso-Africans on the Upper Guinea Coast from the Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century
Peter Mark
Culture, Contact, Continuity, and Change on the Gold Coast, AD 1400-1900

Christopher R. Decorse
Dutch officers and merchants seem to have frequently maintained common-law wives. Mulattoes remained an
important segment of the population during the Dutch period. In Dutch they were called Hapoeiyers probably
because their skin colour was similar to the Tapuya Indians in Brazil. In 1700 the Director General and members of Page | 5
the Council decreed that Dutchmen fathering children out of wedlock would be required either to take their offspring
back to Holland, or to provide 'a proper sum for honest maintenance and Christian education'. It was also agreed that
a communal house would be built in Elmina 'into which all such children will be brought at the age of 5 or 6 years
and be separated from the natives, as well as from the Europeans, in order to be educated in the art of letters, the
foundation of economics, some crafts, as well as the making of plantations such as those of cotton and corn ...'.
Some descendants of Elmina women and Dutchmen were granted special status. This group was known as the
vrijburgers, which can be translated from Dutch as 'free citizens' or 'free people', and they were given the rights and
privileges afforded by Dutch law.
What’s more, the first globalization mirrors the shift away from Medieval and into the
early modern. Not only did it take advancements in nautical science, shipbuilding,
cartography, and linguistics, but it broke a barrier that physically and ideologically
allowed the world to develop from an isolated one to one that was truly global.
The First Globalization: Portugal, the Age of Exploration,
and Engaging the Other" in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
Peter Ellerkamp
Elmina sprouted a substantial cadre of Euro-Africans (most of them Luso-Africans) men and women of African
birth but shared African and European parentage, whose combination of swarthy skin, European dress and
deportment, knowledge of local customs, and multilingualism gave them inside understanding of both African and
European ways while denying them full acceptance in either culture. By the eighteenth century, they numbered
several hundred in Elmina. Farther south along the coast of Central Africa, they may have been even more
numerous.
Ira Berlin
Brooks, in his study of the Grain Coast and its interior, estimates "hundreds of Portuguese and Cabo Verdean traders
were admitted to western African communities by the close of the fifteenth century." Probably the same could be
said for other portions of the African coast at that time. By the middle of the 16th century, Atlantic creoles were
more numerous.
… the fifteenth century on the coast of Atlantic Africa. …By

Bosman’s time, Protestant Dutch traders lived in a natural
world evacuated of all spirits.
Donald L. Donham
West Africa in Global Trade and Empires

Rebecca Shumway
Whether by caravan, canoe, or dhow, trade brought West African
goods and people into direct contact with the far corners of the Old World
prior to the proliferation of the transatlantic slave trade.
West Africa's Discovery of the Atlantic

Robin Law
For West Africans, prior European ships, the Atlantic was more a barrier than a
link with the outside West Africans were of course familiar with waterborne
travel, making use of canoes (usually dug out from single trees), but this was Page | 6
mainly waterways - the major rivers, and the lagoons that in certain areas
(including Coast) run inside and parallel to the coast.
From Creole to African:

Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society
Ira Berlin
Atlantic creoles first appeared at the trading feitorias or factories that European
expansionists established along the coast of Africa in the fifteenth century.
Finding trade more lucrative than pillage, the Portuguese crown began sending
agents to oversee its interests in Africa.

Elmer Kolfin
Their hayre is blacke & curled, and some also red. The stature of the men is of an indifferent
bignes; and excepting their blacknes are very like to the Portingalles [italics ek]. The apples of
their eies are of diverse colours; blacke and of the colour of the sea. Their lips are not thick as the
Nubians and other Negroes are; and so likewise their countenances are some fat, some leane, and
some betweene both, as in our countreyes there are [italics ek], and not as the Negroes of Nubia
and Guinea, which are very deformed.
Further south in the Gambia in 1661, English traders

relied on an African marabout who spoke Portuguese
as their interpreter.

Peter Mark
Hair observes that many African ruling groups in Sierra
Leone, including both men and women, 'had been in extensive
contact with the Portuguese in childhood and had acquired
some European customs and a knowledge of the Portuguese
language'.
Although jaded observers condemned the culture of the enclaves as nothing more than "whoring, drinking,
gambling, swearing, fighting, and shouting," Atlantic creoles attended church (usually Catholic), married according
to the sacraments, raised children conversant with European norms, and drew a livelihood from their knowledge of
the Atlantic commercial economy.
Ira Berlin
Established in 1482 by the Portuguese and captured by the Dutch in 1637, Elmina was one of the earliest factories
and an exemplar for those that followed. A meeting place for African and European commercial ambitions, Elmina-
the Castle Sao Jorge da Mina and the town that surrounded it became headquarters for Portuguese and later Dutch
mercantile activities on the Gold Coast and, with a population of 15,000 to 20,000 in 1682, the largest of some two
dozen European outposts in the region. The peoples of the enclaves-both long-term residents and wayfarers-soon
joined together genetically as well as geographically. European men took African women as wives and mistresses,
and, before long, the offspring of these unions helped people the enclave. Page | 7
… the fifteenth century on the coast of Atlantic Africa. At that point,

quite different social worlds came into abrupt collision: on the European side,
a late feudal and developing capitalist system of exchange, soon with
Enlightenment reason; on the African side, the most baroquely elaborated
systems of trade on the continent, with a bewildering multitude of currencies.
Donald L. Donham
“Mixed” parentage raised legal, cultural and religious problems

and, of course, problems of perception and identity.
The populations which could be described neither as indigenous nor as being of pure European origin were much
more difficult to classify and hence more difficult to know and to control. “Mixed” parentage raised legal, cultural
and religious problems and, of course, problems of perception and identity. For the Portuguese at the beginning of
the era of expansion, the issue was further complicated by their ideological inheritance. In medieval Europe identity,
beyond the immediate identification of birthplace, residence and family, had depended on allegiance to a feudal lord,
a sovereign and the Catholic Church. These were concepts which could be used by the Portuguese to assimilate and
absorb anyone who would meet these criteria of acceptance.
In the case of the Jewish population itself, similar tropes defined their ambiguous position, some produced by the
Sephardi community itself, for being a Jew was held to be something inherited from a Jewish mother. If Jews
recognized the Jewishness of New Christians by reason of descent, it was not surprising that Old Christians
would do the same. The doubt cast on the loyalty and orthodoxy of New Christians attached itself also to converts
from other faiths and ultimately to those descended from parents or grandparents who had not been
Christian. It was this that erected the barriers to their full integration into early modern society, illustrated for
example by the reluctance to allow such people into the priesthood.
Further complications beset attempts to identify people of “mixed” parentage by family or lineage. In West Africa
the Portuguese met matrilineal peoples among whom children were considered to belong to the lineage of the
mother. Yet the Iberians, coming from a patrilineal and patriarchal society, were predisposed to recognize all the
children sired by a man as being part of his family.
The Black Portuguese

It was one of the major themes of Boxer’s seminal work Mary and Misogyny that sexual relations between
Portuguese men and slave women, or women from the lands where the Portuguese settled, not only created a
new nation of non-white Portuguese but allowed the female partners of a frequently transient male population of
administrators, soldiers and sailors to acquire a dominant role in colonial society and economy. This was
particularly the case in the colonial Iberian societies of Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia, which, in Philip
Havik’s phrase, “demonstrated the inexorable logic of the creolisation process.”
Creole Societies in the Portuguese Colonial Empire,
Ed. Philip J. Havik and Malyn Newitt
… Many former slaves mixed Africa and Europe culturally and sometimes physically.
Knowledge and experience far more than color set the Atlantic creoles apart from the
Africans who brought slaves from the interior and the Europeans who carried them across
the Atlantic, on one hand, and the hap-less men and women on whose commodification
the slave trade rested, on the other. Maintaining a secure place in such a volatile social
order was not easy. The creoles' genius for intercultural negotiation was not simply a set
of skills, a tactic for survival, or an attribute that emerged as an "Africanism" in the New Page | 8
World.
Ira Berlin
The First Globalization: Portugal, the Age of Exploration,

and Engaging the Other" in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
Peter Ellerkamp
… notion of native and foreigner becomes unclear because the most effective method of navigating alien spheres
was to integrate oneself into the local practices. Moreover, initial encounters and the ensuing development of
relations with the “other” shed light on the evolution of Medieval society into the early modern period by exhibiting
the slow change in the priorities of the Portuguese official and unofficial agenda. The methods by which the
Portuguese engaged with the “other” matured and were reshaped with the growth of the empire.
These casados — intermarriage and residence with the locals, produced a generation of Portuguese hybrids that
became a principal facet of empire in the east. Moreover, economics increasingly determined the nature of relations
with the “other.” … Their ability to cooperate and insert themselves into the local trade systems and expand them
into a complex, globalized network reflects the changing attitude of the times — an increased emphasis on profit and
less of a focus on religious ardor.

Luso-Africans on the Upper Guinea Coast from the Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century
Peter Mark
During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Portugal established a trading presence along the Upper Guinea
Coast from Senegal to Sierra Leone. Emigrants from Portugal known as lanfados' - some of them Jews seeking to
escape religious persecution - settled along the coast, where many of them married women from local communities.
By the early sixteenth century, Luso-Africans, or 'Portuguese' as they called themselves, were established at trading
centers from the Petite Cote in Senegal, south to Sierra Leone.
The earliest lanfados established themselves along the coast as commercial middlemen between African and
European traders and as coastal traders between Sierra Leone and Senegambia. Their position was formally
discouraged by the Portuguese Crown until the second decade of the sixteenth century, but they nevertheless played
an important role in trade with Portugal and the Cape Verde islands. Lanfado communities were permanently settled
on the Petite Cote, while in Sierra Leone and Rio Nunez much early commerce was in the hands of lanfados who
sailed there regularly from S. Domingos, north of present-day Bissau. The offspring of these lanfados and African
women were called filhos de terra and were generally considered to be 'Portuguese'.
Throughout the sixteenth century, the descendants of the Lanfados maintained close commercial ties with the Cape
Verde islands. Cape Verdeans were themselves the offspring of mixed Portuguese and West African marriages.
Sharing elements of a common culture and united by marriage and economic ties, mainland Luso-Africans and Cape
Verdeans represented a socially complex and geographically dispersed community. Cape Verdeans, like mainland
Luso-Africans, resolutely maintained that they were 'Portuguese', and both sub-groups employed the same
essentially cultural criteria of group identification.
The emergence of Atlantic creoles was but a tiny outcropping in the

massive social upheaval that accompanied the joining of the peoples of
the two hemispheres. But it represented the small beginnings that
initiated this monumental transformation, as the new people of the
Atlantic made their presence felt. ...
From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of
African-American Society in Mainland North America Page | 9
Ira Berlin
In Dutch they were called Hapoeiyers probably

because their skin colour was similar to the Tapuya
Indians in Brazil (de Marees 1602:26).
Culture, Contact, Continuity, and Change, Gold
Coast, Christopher R. Decorse
When Castle Sao Jorge da Mina was founded, there were only 64
Europeans in the garrison. … In the eighteenth century the number
ranged from 171 to 377, averaging over 200 men. These administrators,
soldiers, and sailors can be collectively called 'Dutch' … their actual
cultural background varied.

Ira Berlin
Atlantic creoles first appeared at the trading feitorias or factories that European
expansionists established along the coast of Africa in the fifteenth century. Finding trade
more lucrative than pillage, the Portuguese crown began sending agents to oversee its
interests in Africa.
… Africans and Europeans alike sneered at the creoles' mixed lineage

(or lack of lineage) and condemned them as knaves, charlatans,
and shameless self-promoters.
Ira Berlin
Crossing Empires:
Portuguese, Sephardic, and Dutch Business Networks in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1580-1674
Filipa Ribeiro da Silva
Numbers of free Africans, Eurafricans, and more rarely Europeans, usually called tangomaos by the Portuguese
authorities, were the connections between these two worlds. … In the Gold Coast, São Tomé, and Angola, the
employees responsible for the trade relied on middlemen who would bring the African merchandise and foodstuffs
from the remote areas in the interior to the coast. The various groups of commercial agents were connected with
each other. Together they formed commercial webs covering key points of the commercial circuits, and their
efficiency was crucial for the operation of the vast slave routes linking Europe, western Africa, and the Americas.
During the late eighteenth century the vrijburgers were Page | 10

recognized as a distinct quarter ... They had their own
burgermeester, or mayor, who signed agreements with the
Europeans.
Culture Contact, Continuity, and Change on the Gold
Coast, AD 1400-1900
Along the coast, Europeans died of yellow fever and malaria at frightening rates;
after a year on the coast, about half were dead. Those who survived did so largely
because they took African wives who fed and nursed them through illnesses.
From the very beginning, then, the contact zone depended upon sexual relationships.
Donald L. Donham

of a plantation society in the mid-16th century, when
Ira Berlin
Culture, Contact, Continuity, and Change, Gold Coast, AD 1400-1900

It was also agreed that a communal house would be built in Elmina
'into which all such children will be brought at the age of 5 or 6 years
and be separated from the natives, as well as from the Europeans, in order
to be educated in the art of letters, the foundation of economics, some crafts,
as well as the making of plantations such as those of cotton and corn ...'
Traveling in more dignified style, Atlantic creoles were also sent to

distant lands with commissions to master the ways of newly discovered
"others" and to learn the secrets of their wealth and knowledge. A few
entered as honored guests, took their places in royal courts as esteemed
councilors, and married into the best families.
From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and Origins of African-
American Society in Mainland North America
Ira Berlin
History In The Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery And The Spirit

Of Capitalism In Cape Coast Castle, Ghana
Andrew Apter
Was Tabir a ritual representation of the white governor of Cape Coast Castle or the mulatto overseers of slaves there
when the fortress became the West African headquarters of the Royal African Company? And what about the slaves
who were held in the dungeons and sent overseas? Did Tabir manifest the spirits of the slaves, or in some sense
placate their spiritsouls? Page | 11

Ira Berlin
Atlantic creoles originated in the historic meeting of Europeans and Africans on
the west coast of Africa. Many served as intermediaries, employing their
linguistic skills and their familiarity with the Atlantic's diverse commercial
practices, cultural conventions, and diplomatic etiquette to mediate between
African merchants and European sea captains.
For Jobson, … As for 'Portuguese' themselves, their refusal to accept the label Negro or Black would remain central
to their sense of identity for over two hundred years.
… de la Courbe, in 1685 … He described the Luso-Africans in the Gambia as 'certain Negroes and mulattoes who
call themselves Portuguese because they are descended from some Portuguese who formerly lived there'.
Peter Mark
There were formal marriages between Dutchmen and Elmina

women but these were sufficiently uncommon in the early
eighteenth century that the permission of the Dutch Director
General was sought. Dutch officers and merchants seem to
have frequently maintained common-law wives.
Culture, Contact, Continuity, and Change on the Gold
Coast, AD 1400-1900

never far from view; indeed, he began his study by exploring
the powerful hold of black nationalist thought in the career
of Martin R. Delaney. … black Atlantic writers set themselves
against the idea of nation, having little to gain from it.
Jonathan Elmer
Brooks, Landlords and Strangers. By the 19th century, the Afro-

Europeans had become to a "remarkable extent soundly and politically
integrated" and "occupied their own 'quarter' of the town" of Elmina
People of mixed ancestry and tawny complexion composed but a small
fraction of the population of the coastal factories, yet few observers
failed to note their existence-which suggests something of the Page | 12
disproportionate significance of their presence.
From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of
African-American Society in Mainland North America
Ira Berlin
By linking themselves to the most important edifices of the nascent European-American societies, Atlantic creoles
struggled to become part of a social order where exclusion or otherness-not subordination-posed the greatest
dangers. To be inferior within the sharply stratified world of the seventeenth-century Atlantic was understandable by
its very ubiquity; to be excluded posed unparalleled dangers.
Ira Berlin
African notables occasionally established residence, bringing

with them the trappings of wealth and power: wives, clients,
pawns, slaves, and other dependents.
Ira Berlin

Elmer Kolfin
Their hayre is blacke & curled, and some also red. The stature
of the men is of an indifferent bignes; and excepting their
blacknes are very like to the Portingalles [italics ek]. The
apples of their eies are of diverse colours; blacke and of the
colour of the sea.
During the late eighteenth century the vrijburgers were

recognized as a distinct quarter within the town …. They had
their own burgermeester, or mayor, who signed agreements
with the Europeans.
Culture Contact, Continuity, and Change on the Gold
Coast, Christopher R. Decorse
In Dutch they were called Hapoeiyers probably because their skin colour was similar to the
Tapuya Indians in Brazil. In 1700 the Director General and members of the Council decreed that
Dutchmen fathering children out of wedlock would be required either to take their offspring back
to Holland, or to provide 'a proper sum for honest maintenance and Christian education'.


Of Capitalism In Cape Coast Castle, Ghana Page | 13
Andrew Apter
Tabir’s annual sacrifice in Atkins’s text:

… There is also at Cabo Corso, a publick Fetish, the Guardian of them all; … To this Rock, the
Fetish-Man sacrifices annually a Goat and some Rum, eating and drinking a little himself, and
throwing the rest into the Sea with odd Gestures and Invocations, he tells the Company, and they
believe that he receives a verbal answer from Tabra, what Seasons and Times will be propitious;
and for this Knowledge every Fisherman finds it worth his while to Dashee him with some
Acknowledgment.

Ira Berlin
the Atlantic commercial economy. Village populations swelled into the thousands. … In 1555, Cape Coast counted
only twenty houses; by 1680, it had 500 or more.
The growth of European trade on the West African coast did not create
new commercial patterns as much as expand and redirect existing routes. …

Rebecca Shumway
Whether by caravan, canoe, or dhow, trade brought West African goods and
people into direct contact with the far corners of the Old World prior to the
proliferation of the transatlantic slave trade. Long-distance trade drew West
African elites across the Sahara Desert into the heartland of medieval Islam, to
the Renaissance Vatican, and to the best universities in early modern Europe.

Robin Law
For West Africans, prior European ships, the Atlantic was more a barrier than a link with the outside West Africans
were of course familiar with waterborne travel, making use of canoes (usually dug out from single trees), but this
was mainly waterways - the major rivers, and the lagoons that in certain areas (including Coast) run inside and
parallel to the coast.

Ira Berlin
Outside the European fortifications, settlements - the town of Elmina as opposed to Castle Sao Jorge da Mina, for
example - expanded to provision and refresh the European-controlled castles and the caravels and carracks that
frequented the coast. In time, they developed economies of their own, with multifarious systems of social Page | 14
stratification and occupational differentiation.
When Castle Sao Jorge da Mina was founded, there were only 64 Europeans in the garrison. … In the eighteenth
century the number ranged from 171 to 377, averaging over 200 men. These administrators, soldiers, and sailors can
be collectively called 'Dutch' but, as Harvey Feinberg has emphasized, their actual cultural background varied. In the
second half of the eighteenth century, the European staff was supplemented by Africans and mulattoes, possibly as a
means of cutting costs and replacing losses from illness.

live and die with the holy sacraments,
while it will also improve the town’s defences’.
The Port of Geba:
At the crossroads of Afro-Atlantic trade and culture
Philip J. Havik
There were formal marriages between Dutchmen and Elmina women but these were sufficiently uncommon in the
early eighteenth century that the permission of the Dutch Director General was sought. Dutch officers and merchants
seem to have frequently maintained common-law wives. Mulattoes remained an important segment of the
population during the Dutch period. In Dutch they were called Hapoeiyers probably because their skin colour was
similar to the Tapuya Indians in Brazil.
Some descendants of Elmina women and Dutch men were granted special status.
This group was known as the vrijburgers, which can be translated from Dutch as
"free citizens" or "free people," and they were given the rights and privileges
afforded by Dutch law.
Introduction to An Archaeology of Elmina:
Although the countenances of these new people of the Atlantic-Atlantic creoles-might bear the features of Africa,
Europe, or the Americas in whole or in part, their beginnings, strictly speaking, were in none of those places.
Instead, by their experiences and sometimes by their persons, they had become part of the three worlds that came
together along the Atlantic littoral.
Ira Berlin

of a plantation society in the mid-16th century, when
of African-American Society in Mainland North America Page | 15
Ira Berlin
Moreover, we conceive of the Atlantic community as transracial,

rather than specifically "black." … the role played by "Atlantic creoles,"
Africans who had acquired European languages and culture on the coast
of West Africa and who crossed the Atlantic as freemen (in the service of
European traders, for education, or as official emissaries of African rulers)
as well as slaves.
Constructing identity: architecture in the Gambia-Geba region
and the articulation of Luso-African ethnicity
Peter Mark

Ira Berlin
Atlantic creoles originated in the historic meeting of Europeans and Africans on the west
coast of Africa. Many served as intermediaries, employing their linguistic skills and their
familiarity with the Atlantic's diverse commercial practices, cultural conventions, and
diplomatic etiquette to mediate between African merchants and European sea captains.
For Jobson, the salient characteristic of the Luso-Africans was their skin color, which conflicted with his own
conception of what (European) Portuguese should look like. At the same time, his indulgent tone does not betray a
strongly negative reaction to their self-identification. As for 'Portuguese' themselves, their refusal to accept the label
Negro or Black would remain central to their sense of identity for over two hundred years. Revealing a more
judgmental, even disdainful attitude than Jobson, the Frenchman, de la Courbe, in 1685 expressed the conviction
that a people who were not white could not, a priori, be Portuguese. He described the Luso-Africans in the Gambia
as 'certain Negroes and mulattoes who call themselves Portuguese because they are descended from some
Portuguese who formerly lived there'.
Peter Mark

Jonathan Elmer
African notables occasionally established residence, bringing with them the trappings of wealth and power: wives,
clients, pawns, slaves, and other dependents. In some places, small manufactories grew up, like the salt pans,
boatyards, and foundries on the outskirts of Elmina, to supply the town and service the Atlantic trade. In addition,
many people lived outside the law; the rough nature and transient population of these crossroads of trade encouraged
roguery and brigandage.
From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins Page | 16
Ira Berlin
Hence thesis one: Tabir was no mere mirror of this change; he occupied
a key position in a growing ritual network, which established Afro-
European trading alliances through “fetish contracts” that controlled the
sphere of circulation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
History In The Dungeon
Andrew Apter
Was Tabir a ritual representation of the white governor of Cape Coast Castle or the mulatto overseers of slaves there
when the fortress became the West African headquarters of the Royal African Company? And what about the slaves
who were held in the dungeons and sent overseas? Did Tabir manifest the spirits of the slaves, or in some sense
placate their spiritsouls?
Atlantic Slavery And The Spirit
Andrew Apter
The creoles' genius for intercultural negotiation was not

simply a set of skills, a tactic for survival, or an attribute that
emerged as an "Africanism" in the New World.
Ira Berlin
Derisively called "fala de Guine" or 'fala de negros" "Guinea

speech" or "Negro Speech" - by the Portuguese and "black
Portuguese" by others, this creole language became the lingua
franca of the Atlantic.
Ira Berlin

Ira Berlin
In 1555, Cape Coast counted only twenty houses; by 1680, it had 500 or more. Axim, with 500 inhabitants in 1631,
expanded to between 2,000 and 3,000 by 1650. Small but growing numbers of Europeans augmented the African
fishermen, craftsmen, village-based peasants, and laborers who made up the population of these villages.
Village populations swelled into the thousands. In 1669, about the time the English were ousting the Dutch from the
village of New Amsterdam, population 1,500, a visitor to Elmina noted that it contained some 8,000 residents.
During most of the eighteenth century, Elmina's population was between 12,000 and 16,000, larger than Charleston,
South Carolina - mainland North America's greatest slave port at the time of the American Revolution. The business
of the creole communities was trade, brokering the movement of goods through the Atlantic world. Although island
settlements such as Cape Verde, Principe, and Sao Tome developed indigenous agricultural and sometimes
plantation economies, the comings and goings of African and European merchants dominated life even in the largest
of the creole communities, which served as both field headquarters for great European mercantile companies and
collection points for trade between the African interior and the Atlantic littoral. … Page | 17
Ira Berlin
Brooks, Landlords and Strangers. By the 19th century, the Afro-Europeans had become to a "remarkable extent
soundly and politically integrated" and "occupied their own 'quarter' of the town" of Elmina People of mixed
ancestry and tawny complexion composed but a small fraction of the population of the coastal factories, yet few
observers failed to note their existence-which suggests something of the disproportionate significance of their
presence. Africans and Europeans alike sneered at the creoles' mixed lineage (or lack of lineage) and condemned
them as knaves, charlatans, and shameless self-promoters.
Ira Berlin

Jonathan Elmer
… Mulattoes remained an important segment of the

population during the Dutch period. In Dutch they were called
Hapoeiyers probably because their skin colour was similar to
the Tapuya Indians in Brazil.
Culture, Contact, Continuity, and Change, Gold Coast,
AD 1400-1900 Christopher R. Decorse

Elmer Kolfin
Their hayre is blacke & curled, and some also red. The stature of the men is of an indifferent bignes; and excepting
their blacknes are very like to the Portingalles [italics ek]. The apples of their eies are of diverse colours; blacke and
of the colour of the sea. Their lips are not thick as the Nubians and other Negroes are; and so likewise their
countenances are some fat, some leane, and some betweene both, as in our countreyes there are [italics ek], and not
as the Negroes of Nubia and Guinea, which are very deformed.
Black life in mainland North America originated not in Africa

or America but in the netherworld between the continents.
Along the periphery of the Atlantic - first in Africa …
From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles
Ira Berlin
Page | 18
William Bosman had a poor opinion of them, saying that: 'I can only tell you
whatever is in its own Nature worst in the Europeans and Negroes is united in
them or, to be short, they are altogether Whores and Crooks of one and the same
kind' (Bosman 1705). Along with other Africans they were generally not
allowed to join religious orders and were not given West India Company
employment until the 1740s.
From Creole to African,
Ira Berlin
Culture, Contact, Continuity,

and Change on the Gold Coast, AD 1400-1900

Jonathan Elmer
One effect of reading these careful reconstructions of the discursive environments linking racial identity, commerce,
and feeling in the late eighteenth century is that it brings out strong continuities with our own age, in which it seems
that capitalism remains-for proponents and critics alike-ineluctably a matter of sentiment.
As William St. Clair, Rebecca Shumway, Simon Newman, and Randy

Sparks have meticulously demonstrated, these mediators, who were
internally differentiated by color as mulattoes, came to occupy higher
positions, a process linked to European unions - frequently polygynous
- with so-called local “wenches.”
History In The Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery And The Spirit Of
Capitalism In Cape Coast Castle, Ghana
Andrew Apter
Tabir’s annual sacrifice in Atkins’s text:

… There is also at Cabo Corso, a publick Fetish, the Guardian of them all; … To this Rock, the Fetish-Man
sacrifices annually a Goat and some Rum, eating and drinking a little himself, and throwing the rest into the Sea
with odd Gestures and Invocations, he tells the Company, and they believe that he receives a verbal answer from
Tabra, what Seasons and Times will be propitious; and for this Knowledge every Fisherman finds it worth his while
to Dashee him with some Acknowledgment.
Moreover, we conceive of the Atlantic community as transracial, rather than specifically "black." … the role played
by "Atlantic creoles," Africans who had acquired European languages and culture on the coast of West Africa and
who crossed the Atlantic as freemen (in the service of European traders, for education, or as official emissaries of
African rulers) as well as slaves.
and the articulation of Luso-African ethnicity* Page | 19
Peter Mark
… Many former slaves mixed Africa and Europe culturally and sometimes
physically. Knowledge and experience far more than color set the Atlantic
creoles apart from the Africans who brought slaves from the interior and the
Europeans who carried them across the Atlantic
Ira Berlin

Andrew Apter
What is clear is that by the 1660s, Europeans traveled from Cape Coast to Fetu for what was ostensibly a harvest
festival along the very toll roads and commercial pathways that generated surplus for the kingdom through
extraction and exchange. In a sense, the Europeans were themselves commodified, “taken possession of” as
esteemed objects of transport while representing their nationally chartered companies.
… market women sporting imported Silesian cloth - indexing the value of a commodity that doubled as a money
form - as well as fetissos of keys and Venetian trade beads evoking locked chests of gold and overseas wealth.
And Muller portrays protocols of local royalism that mirrored the prerogatives of European agents, suggesting how
their entourages to the inland capital were subsequently reproduced by Fetu’s kings and chiefs. Tabir’s imputed
whiteness is also mimetic, channeling the power of Europeans through their embodied dispositions, consumptibles,
and colorations. ….
Andrew Apter

Residents included canoemen who ferried goods between ships and shore; longshoremen and warehousemen who
unloaded and stored merchandise; porters, messengers, guides, interpreters, factors, and brokers or makelaers (to the
Dutch) who facilitated trade; inn keepers who housed country traders; skilled workers of all sorts; and a host of
peddlers, hawkers, and petty traders. Others chopped wood, drew water, prepared food, or supplied sex to the lonely
men who visited these isolated places. African notables occasionally established residence, bringing with them the
trappings of wealth and power: wives, clients, pawns, slaves, and other dependents. In some places, small
manufactories grew up, like the salt pans, boatyards, and foundries on the outskirts of Elmina, to supply the town
and service the Atlantic trade. In addition, many people lived outside the law; the rough nature and transient
population of these crossroads of trade encouraged roguery and brigandage.
Ira Berlin
… Of necessity, Atlantic creoles spoke a variety of African and European languages, weighted strongly toward
Portuguese. From the seeming babble emerged a pidgin that enabled Atlantic creoles to communicate widely. ….
Derisively called "fala de Guine" or 'fala de negros" "Guinea speech" or "Negro Speech"- by the Portuguese and
"black Portuguese" by others, this creole language became the lingua franca of the Atlantic.
Ira Berlin Page | 20
Intermarriage with established peoples allowed creoles to construct lineages that gained them full membership in
local elites, something that creoles eagerly embraced. The resultant political turmoil promoted state formation along
with new class relations and ideologies. New religious forms emerged and then disappeared in much the same
manner, as Europeans and Africans brought to the enclaves not only their commercial and political aspirations but
all the trappings of their cultures as well. Priests and ministers sent to tend European souls made African converts,
some of whom saw Christianity as both a way to ingratiate themselves with their trading partners and a new truth.
Missionaries sped the process of christianization and occasionally scored striking successes. … New religious
practices, polities, and theologies emerged from the mixing of Christianity, Islam, polytheism, and animism. Similar
syncretic formations influenced the agricultural practices, architectural forms, and sartorial styles as well as the
cuisine, music, art, and technology of the enclaves.
Ira Berlin
When Castle Sao Jorge da Mina was founded, there were only
64 Europeans in the garrison. … In the eighteenth century the
number ranged from 171 to 377, averaging over 200 men.
These administrators, soldiers, and sailors

Andrew Apter
Private interlopers entered the fray, adding a further dimension of instability on the Gold Coast,
since they circumvented company rules - undercutting monopoly prices, kidnapping
(“panyarring”) African traders, and thereby undermining the credit and trust that the Royal African
Company had established with local merchants.
… the growing number of castle “gromettoes” who would continue to shape Cape Coast creole society.
Variously described as “castle slaves” or “factory slaves,” as distinct from the “chained batches of sale
slaves” whom they oversaw in the castle dungeons, the gromettoes occupied an interstitial space between
bondage and freedom, entering the ranks of junior officers.
… on the early stages of the creation of African-American societies in mainland North America … the role
played by "Atlantic creoles," Africans who had acquired European languages and culture on the coast of
West Africa and who crossed the Atlantic as freemen (in the service of European traders, for education, or
as official emissaries of African rulers) as well as slaves.
Constructing identity: architecture in the Gambia-Geba
region and the articulation of Luso-African ethnicity
Peter Mark

Andrew Apter
As William St. Clair, Rebecca Shumway, Simon Newman, and Randy Sparks have meticulously demonstrated,
these mediators, who were internally differentiated by color as mulattoes, came to occupy higher positions, a process Page | 21
linked to European unions - frequently polygynous - with so-called local “wenches.” Additional castle slaves were
offered by chiefs to English officers as gifts and pawns to cement local alliances. It is important to emphasize that
the rise of this caste of castle slaves was no mere outgrowth of Afro-European commercial relations, but was central
to their promotion and protection, providing cheap labor, essential services, and access to prominent families and
chiefs - indeed, generating the illustrious creole families of the nineteenth-century cosmopolitan elite.
The mantra “There were no Ten Commandments south of the

equator” has been suggested to summarize the attitude of this
group of men who had, after all, fled a considerable distance
from European Christendom.
Christian Slavery, Colonialism, and Violence:
The Life and Writings of an African Ex-Slave, 1717–1747
David Kofi Amponsah
In Dutch they were called Hapoeiyers probably because their skin colour was similar to the
Tapuya Indians in Brazil. In 1700 the Director General and members of the Council decreed that
Dutchmen fathering children out of wedlock would be required either to take their offspring back
to Holland, or to provide 'a proper sum for honest maintenance and Christian education'.
Culture Contact, Continuity, and Change on the Gold Coast, AD 1400-1900

It was also agreed that a communal house would be built in Elmina 'into which
all such children will be brought at the age of 5 or 6 years and be separated from
the natives, as well as from the Europeans, in order to be educated in the art of
plantations such as those of cotton and corn ...'
Some descendants of Elmina women and Dutchmen were granted special status. This group was
known as the vrijburgers, which can be translated from Dutch as 'free citizens' or 'free people', and
they were given the rights and privileges afforded by Dutch law.
… Of necessity, Atlantic creoles spoke a variety of African and European languages, weighted strongly toward
Portuguese. From the seeming babble emerged a pidgin that enabled Atlantic creoles to communicate widely. In
time, their pidgin evolved into creole, borrowing its vocabulary from all parties and creating a grammar unique unto
itself.
Ira Berlin
fishermen, craftsmen, village-based peasants, and laborers who made up the population of these villages.
Tradition and innovation in Dutch ethnographic prints Page | 22

Elmer Kolfin
Their hayre is blacke & curled, and some also red. The stature of the men is of an
indifferent bignes; and excepting their blacknes are very like to the Portingalles [italics
ek]. The apples of their eies are of diverse colours; blacke and of the colour of the sea.
Their lips are not thick as the Nubians and other Negroes are; and so likewise their
countenances are some fat, some leane, and some betweene both, as in our countreyes
there are [italics ek], and not as the Negroes of Nubia and Guinea, which are very
deformed.
Established in 1482 by the Portuguese and captured by the Dutch in 1637, Elmina was one of the earliest factories
and an exemplar for those that followed. A meeting place for African and European commercial ambitions, Elmina-
the Castle Sao Jorge da Mina and the town that surrounded it became headquarters for Portuguese and later Dutch
mercantile activities on the Gold Coast and, with a population of 15,000 to 20,000 in 1682, the largest of some two
dozen European outposts in the region. The peoples of the enclaves-both long-term residents and wayfarers-soon
joined together genetically as well as geographically. European men took African women as wives and mistresses,
and, before long, the offspring of these unions helped people the enclave. Elmina sprouted a substantial cadre of
Euro-Africans (most of them Luso-Africans) men and women of African birth but shared African and European
parentage, whose combination of swarthy skin, European dress and deportment, knowledge of local customs, and
multilingualism gave them inside understanding of both African and European ways while denying them full
acceptance in either culture. By the eighteenth century, they numbered several hundred in Elmina. Farther south
along the coast of Central Africa, they may have been even more numerous.
Ira Berlin
… Many former slaves mixed Africa and Europe culturally and sometimes physically. Knowledge and experience
far more than color set the Atlantic creoles apart from the Africans who brought slaves from the interior and the
Europeans who carried them across the Atlantic, on one hand, and the hap-less men and women on whose
commodification the slave trade rested, on the other. Maintaining a secure place in such a volatile social order was
not easy. The creoles' genius for intercultural negotiation was not simply a set of skills, a tactic for survival, or an
attribute that emerged as an "Africanism" in the New World.
Ira Berlin
It was also difficult for the king to control the new population of mulattoes, the
offspring of Portuguese settlers and natives. Mulattoes often served as
middlemen in the trade, and some of them went completely native, "stripping off
their clothes, tattooing their bodies, speaking the local languages and joining the
fetishistic rites and celebrations".
The Portuguese-African Slave Trade: A Lesson in Colonialism
Emilia Viotti da Costa

live and die with the holy sacraments, Page | 23
while it will also improve the town’s defences’.
The Port of Geba:
At The Crossroads Of Afro-Atlantic Trade And Culture
Philip J. Havik
Some descendants of Elmina women and Dutch men were granted special status.
This group was known as the vrijburgers, which can be translated from Dutch as
"free citizens" or "free people," and they were given the rights and privileges
afforded by Dutch law.
Introduction to An Archaeology of Elmina:
'I can only tell you whatever is in its own Nature worst in the Europeans and
Negroes is united in them or, to be short, they are altogether Whores and Crooks
of one and the same kind' (Bosman 1705). Along with other Africans they were
generally not allowed to join religious orders and were not given West India
Company employment until the 1740s.
From Creole to African, Ira Berlin
attribute that emerged as an "Africanism" in the New World.
Ira Berlin
At Fetu the . . . great festival (as they call it) is held annually at the
beginning of September . . . The heathen festival takes place as follows.
They invite not only many Blacks from neighbouring places and
countries, but also the Danes, Dutch and other Whites trading in the
Fetu country.

Andrew Apter
European participation in the “Customs” ceremonies of many coastal polities engaged in Atlantic trade is well
documented in other travel narratives, but what stands out in this seventeenth-century account is the recognition of
native bargaining power through the idiom of ritual itself.
Of additional interest is the mode of conveyance that literally carried Europeans to Fetu: These people are carried to
Fetu in hammocks by slaves on Sunday after lunch, accompanied by many armed black soldiers, servants,
attendants, as well as male and female slaves, who must carry the guns and equipment. Each nation also carries the
flag of its king and overlord with it, as well as taking a drummer.
Few images resonate more clearly with Gold Coast chieftaincy than the ruler carried in a hammock or palanquin,
beneath an embellished state umbrella, flanked by an entourage of drummers, warriors, and asafo company members Page | 24
dancing with distinctive flags to representative rhythms. Whether European participation first established this
practice or fed into local chiefly precedents is difficult to say, although the genre that evolved over the centuries is
surely a “creole” mix.

Andrew Apter
What is clear is that by the 1660s, Europeans traveled from Cape Coast to Fetu for what was ostensibly a harvest
festival along the very toll roads and commercial pathways that generated surplus for the kingdom through
extraction and exchange. In a sense, the Europeans were themselves commodified, “taken possession of” as
esteemed objects of transport while representing their nationally chartered companies.
… market women sporting imported Silesian cloth—indexing the value of a commodity that doubled as a money
form—as well as fetissos of keys and Venetian trade beads evoking locked chests of gold and overseas wealth. And
Muller portrays protocols of local royalism that mirrored the prerogatives of European agents, suggesting how their
entourages to the inland capital were subsequently reproduced by Fetu’s kings and chiefs. Tabir’s imputed whiteness
is also mimetic, channeling the power of Europeans through their embodied dispositions, consumptibles, and
colorations. ….
Andrew Apter
In this respect, Tabir became a point of ritual articulation—not only between

land and sea, coast and hinterland, Africans and Europeans, and developing
coastal polities, but also between the converging orders of structural
differentiation resulting from Cape Coast’s incorporation into the growing
Atlantic economy.
History In The Dungeon:
Atlantic Slavery And The Spirit Of Capitalism
They also registered a lasting impact on local codes of social distinction, as key markers of European value and
sovereignty were incorporated into the architectural styles and status symbols of the new mercantile elites. In this
respect, Tabir became a point of ritual articulation—not only between land and sea, coast and hinterland, Africans
and Europeans, and developing coastal polities, but also between the converging orders of structural differentiation
resulting from Cape Coast’s incorporation into the growing Atlantic economy.
Hence thesis one: Tabir was no mere mirror of this change; he occupied a key position in a growing ritual network,
which established Afro-European trading alliances through “fetish contracts” that controlled the sphere of
circulation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
History In The Dungeon

Andrew Apter
Was Tabir a ritual representation of the white governor of Cape Coast

Castle or the mulatto overseers of slaves there when the fortress
became the West African headquarters of the Royal African Company?
And what about the slaves who were held in the dungeons and sent
overseas? Did Tabir manifest the spirits of the slaves, or in some sense
placate their spiritsouls?
Page | 25
History In The Dungeon:

Andrew Apter
If Tabir served as a god of Atlantic mediation, connecting European trade, firepower, and symbolic capital to an
emerging merchant polity on the coast, he did so at the apex of a ritual system that developed into Fetu Afahye, an
amalgamation of communal festivals linking the ocean, the lagoon, the market, and the palace to northern hinterland
sources of slaves - a festival that was anchored in Cape Coast Castle and brought the Omanhen to reside in Oguaa.
Nor was such mediation strictly one-sided. Afro-European relations may have been historically asymmetrical, but as
we have seen, local leaders, caboceers, traders, and “fetish priests” exercised considerable agency in storming the
castle, negotiating prices, demanding gifts, exploiting rivalries, and incorporating European factors into their ritual
fields of command.
There were formal marriages between Dutchmen and Elmina women but these were sufficiently uncommon in the
early eighteenth century that the permission of the Dutch Director General was sought. Dutch officers and merchants
seem to have frequently maintained common-law wives. Mulattoes remained an important segment of the
population during the Dutch period. In Dutch they were called Hapoeiyers probably because their skin colour was
similar to the Tapuya Indians in Brazil.
frequented the coast. In time, they developed economies of their own, with multifarious systems of social
stratification and occupational differentiation. Residents included canoemen who ferried goods between ships and
shore; longshoremen and warehousemen who unloaded and stored merchandise; porters, messengers, guides,
interpreters, factors, and brokers or makelaers (to the Dutch) who facilitated trade; inn keepers who housed country
traders; skilled workers of all sorts; and a host of peddlers, hawkers, and petty traders. Others chopped wood, drew
water, prepared food, or supplied sex to the lonely men who visited these isolated places. African notables
occasionally established residence, bringing with them the trappings of wealth and power: wives, clients, pawns,
slaves, and other dependents. In some places, small manufactories grew up, like the salt pans, boatyards, and
foundries on the outskirts of Elmina, to supply the town and service the Atlantic trade. In addition, many people
lived outside the law; the rough nature and transient population of these crossroads of trade encouraged roguery and
brigandage.
Ira Berlin

Europeans and Africans on the west coast of Africa. Many
served as intermediaries, employing their linguistic skills and
their familiarity with the Atlantic's diverse commercial
practices, cultural conventions, and diplomatic etiquette to
mediate between African merchants and European sea

captains.
Ira Berlin
Page | 26
Moreover, we conceive of the Atlantic community as transracial, rather than specifically "black." … the role played
by "Atlantic creoles," Africans who had acquired European languages and culture on the coast of West Africa and
who crossed the Atlantic as freemen (in the service of European traders, for education, or as official emissaries of
African rulers) as well as slaves. Berlin's analysis arguably exaggerates both the extent of cultural "creolization" in
West African coastal communities in early times and the numerical significance of such "creoles" among exported
slaves. Even though the argument may be empirically problematic for the seventeenth century, the conceptual
framework that Berlin develops, of a cosmopolitan culture linking seaports on all sides of the Atlantic littoral, can be
fruitfully applied to later periods.
and the articulation of Luso-African ethnicity*
Peter Mark
When Castle Sao Jorge da Mina was founded, there were only 64
Europeans in the garrison. … In the eighteenth century the number
ranged from 171 to 377, averaging over 200 men. These administrators,
soldiers, and sailors can be collectively called 'Dutch' but, as Harvey
Feinberg has emphasized, their actual cultural background varied.
… Paul Gilroy has propounded the idea of a "black Atlantic" identity, which also treats the Atlantic as "one single,
complex unit of analysis," but one in which blacks are "perceived as agents" equally with whites. He conceives the
Atlantic as "continually crisscrossed by the movements of black people-not only as commodities but engaged in
various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship."
Moreover, we conceive of the Atlantic community as transracial, rather than specifically "black." More directly
relevant to our own concerns is a recent article in this journal by Ira Berlin on the early stages of the creation of
African-American societies in mainland North America that stresses the role played by "Atlantic creoles," Africans
who had acquired European languages and culture on the coast of West Africa and who crossed the Atlantic as
freemen (in the service of European traders, for education, or as official emissaries of African rulers) as well as
slaves. Berlin's analysis arguably exaggerates both the extent of cultural "creolization" in West African coastal
communities in early times and the numerical significance of such "creoles" among exported slaves. Even though
the argument may be empirically problematic for the seventeenth century, the conceptual framework that Berlin
develops, of a cosmopolitan culture linking seaports on all sides of the Atlantic littoral, can be fruitfully applied to
later periods.
and the articulation of Luso-African ethnicity*
Peter Mark
When Castle Sao Jorge da Mina was founded, there were only 64 Europeans in
the garrison. … In the eighteenth century the number ranged from 171 to 377,
averaging over 200 men. These administrators, soldiers, and sailors can be
collectively called 'Dutch' but, as Harvey Feinberg has emphasized, their actual
cultural background varied.
the Atlantic commercial economy. In short, they created societies of their own, of but not always in the societies of
the Africans who dominated the interior trade and the Europeans who controlled the Atlantic trade. Operating under Page | 27
European protection, always at African sufferance, the enclaves developed governments with a politics as diverse
and complicated as the peoples who populated them and a credit system that drew on the commercial centers of both
Europe and Africa.
Ira Berlin
Atlantic creoles originated in the historic meeting of Europeans and Africans on the west coast of Africa. Many
served as intermediaries, employing their linguistic skills and their familiarity with the Atlantic's diverse commercial
practices, cultural conventions, and diplomatic etiquette to mediate between African merchants and European sea
captains. In so doing, some Atlantic creoles identified with their ancestral homeland (or a portion of it) be it African,
European, or American-and served as its representatives in negotiations with others. Other Atlantic creoles had been
won over by the power and largesse of one party or another, so that Africans entered the employ of European trading
companies and Europeans traded with African potentates. Yet others played fast and loose with their diverse
heritage, employing whichever identity paid best.
Whatever strategy they adopted, Atlantic creoles began the process of integrating the icons and ideologies of the
Atlantic world into a new way of life. The emergence of Atlantic creoles was but a tiny outcropping in the massive
social upheaval that accompanied the joining of the peoples of the two hemispheres. But it represented the small
beginnings that initiated this monumental transformation, as the new people of the Atlantic made their presence felt.
... Traveling in more dignified style, Atlantic creoles were also sent to distant lands with commissions to master the
ways of newly discovered "others" and to learn the secrets of their wealth and knowledge. A few entered as honored
guests, took their places in royal courts as esteemed councilors, and married into the best families.
Ira Berlin
Residents included canoemen who ferried goods between ships and shore; longshoremen and warehousemen who
unloaded and stored merchandise; porters, messengers, guides, interpreters, factors, and brokers or make-laers (to
the Dutch) who facilitated trade; inn keepers who housed country traders; skilled workers of all sorts; and a host of
peddlers, hawkers, and petty traders. Others chopped wood, drew water, prepared food, or supplied sex to the lonely
men who visited these isolated places. African notables occasionally established residence, bringing with them the
trappings of wealth and power: wives, clients, pawns, slaves, and other dependents. In some places, small
manufactories grew up, like the salt pans, boatyards, and foundries on the outskirts of Elmina, to supply the town
and service the Atlantic trade.

Ira Berlin
During most of the eighteenth century, Elmina's population was between 12,000 and 16,000, larger than Charleston, Page | 28
South Carolina-mainland North America's greatest slave port at the time of the American Revolution. The business
of the creole communities was trade, brokering the movement of goods through the Atlantic world. Although island
settlements such as Cape Verde, Principe, and Sao Tome developed indigenous agricultural and sometimes
plantation economies, the comings and goings of African and European merchants dominated life even in the largest
of the creole communities, which served as both field headquarters for great European mercantile companies and
collection points for trade between the African interior and the Atlantic littoral. …
Ira Berlin
attribute that emerged as an "Africanism" in the New World. … The special needs of European traders placed
Atlantic creoles in a powerful bargaining position, which they learned to employ to their own advantage. The most
successful became principals and traded independently. They played one merchant against another, one captain
against another, and one mercantile bureaucrat against another, often abandoning them for yet a better deal with
some interloper, all in the hope of securing a rich prosperity for themselves and their families.
Ira Berlin
… Creoles' ability to find a place for themselves in the interstices of African and European trade grew rapidly during
periods of intense competition among the Portuguese, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, French, and English and an equally
diverse set of African nationals. At the same time and by the same token, the Atlantic creoles' liminality, particularly
their lack of identity with any one group, posed numerous dangers. While their middling position made them
valuable to African and European traders, it also made them vulnerable: they could be ostracized, scapegoated, and
on occasion enslaved. Maintaining their independence amid the shifting alliances between and among Europeans
and Africans was always difficult. …. The characteristics that distinguished Atlantic creoles-their linguistic
dexterity, cultural plasticity, and social agility-were precisely those qualities that the great planters of the New
World disdained and feared. For their labor force they desired youth and strength, not experience and sagacity.
Indeed, too much knowledge might be subversive to the good order of the plantation. Simply put, men and women
who understood the operations of the Atlantic system were too dangerous to be trusted in the human tinderboxes
created by the sugar revolution.
Along the coast of Africa, Atlantic creoles often identified with the appendages of European or African power-be
they international mercantile corporations or local chieftains-in hopes of relieving the stigma of other-ness-be it
enslavement, bastard birth, paganism, or race. They employed this strategy repeatedly in mainland North America,
as they tried to hurdle the boundaries of social and cultural difference and establish a place for themselves. By
linking themselves to the most important edifices of the nascent European-American societies, Atlantic creoles
struggled to become part of a social order where exclusion or otherness-not subordination-posed the greatest
dangers. To be inferior within the sharply stratified world of the seventeenth-century Atlantic was understandable by
its very ubiquity; to be excluded posed unparalleled dangers.

Ira Berlin
expanded to between 2,000 and 3,000 by 165o. Small but growing numbers of Europeans augmented the African Page | 29
fishermen, craftsmen, village-based peasants, and laborers who made up the population of these villages. Although
mortality and transiency rates in these enclaves were extraordinarily high, even by the standards of early modern
ports, permanent European settlements developed from a mobile body of the corporate employees (from governors
to surgeons to clerks), merchants and factors, stateless sailors, skilled craftsmen, occasional missionaries, and sundry
transcontinental drifters.
Although the trading castles remained under the control of European metropoles, the towns around them often
developed independent political lives-separate from both African and European domination. Meanwhile, their
presence created political havoc, enabling new men and women of commerce to gain prominence and threatening
older, often hereditary elites. Intermarriage with established peoples allowed creoles to construct lineages that
gained them full membership in local elites, something that creoles eagerly embraced. The resultant political turmoil
promoted state formation along with new class relations and ideologies.
Ira Berlin

Ira Berlin
By the middle of the 16th century, Atlantic creoles were more numerous. In
1567, when the English adventurer John Hawkins launched a raid on an African
settlement on the Cacheu River, he was repulsed by a force that included "about
a hundred" lanfados;

… a black Atlantic "counterculture of modernity" that evaded the hegemony of
the nation-form, but nationalist impulses were never far from view; indeed, he
began his study by exploring the powerful hold of black nationalist thought in
the career of Martin R. Delaney. … black Atlantic writers set themselves against
the idea of nation, having little to gain from it.
Jonathan Elmer

During the late eighteenth century the vrijburgers were recognized as a distinct
quarter within the town which organized asafo company number seven,
'Akrompa'. They had their own burgermeester, or mayor, who signed
agreements with the Europeans.
… Mulattoes remained an important segment of the population during

the Dutch period. In Dutch they were called Hapoeiyers probably because
their skin colour was similar to the Tapuya Indians in Brazil.
Page | 30
Ira Berlin
Although the countenances of these new people of the Atlantic-Atlantic creoles-might bear the
features of Africa, Europe, or the Americas in whole or in part, their beginnings, strictly speaking,
were in none of those places. Instead, by their experiences and sometimes by their persons, they
had become part of the three worlds that came together along the Atlantic littoral. Familiar with
the commerce of the Atlantic, fluent in its new languages, and intimate with its trade and cultures,
they were cosmopolitan in the fullest sense.

A consistent feature at Elmina during the Portuguese and Dutch periods was the small number of European women.
As a consequence, relationships, if not formal marriages, between European men and Elmina women were common.
Though it is difficult to determine their numbers, mulattoes were already recognized as a distinct segment of the
population during the sixteenth century. Some early writers distinguished them by their dress, which was in some
respects influenced by European clothing. By 1637, the mulatto population was of such importance that special
approval was obtained for some of them to accompany the Portuguese garrison to Sao Tome after the Dutch
takeover.

During most of the eighteenth century, Elmina's population was between 12,000 and 16,000, larger than Charleston,
South Carolina-mainland North America's greatest slave port at the time of the American Revolution.
Ira Berlin
fishermen, craftsmen, village-based peasants, and laborers who made up the population of these villages. Although
mortality and transiency rates in these enclaves were extraordinarily high, even by the standards of early modern
ports, permanent European settlements developed from a mobile body of the corporate employees (from governors
to surgeons to clerks), merchants and factors, stateless sailors, skilled craftsmen, occasional missionaries, and sundry
transcontinental drifters.
… Mulattoes remained an important segment of the population during

the Dutch period. In Dutch they were called Hapoeiyers probably
because their skin colour was similar to the Tapuya Indians in Brazil.
Culture, Contact, Continuity, and Change on the Gold Coast, AD
1400-1900 Christopher R. Decorse

The growth of European trade on the West African coast did not create new commercial patterns as much as expand
and redirect existing routes. … The number of Europeans involved in the trade was, however, relatively small and
there were never more than a few hundred on the coast at one time. For the most part, these people were government Page | 31
officials, traders, and soldiers, not settlers interested in making a home. This is very different from the situation in
portions of southern and eastern Africa where there was significant European settlement and where cultural
transplantation was an integral part of the European presence.
The European component

While records of the African population are limited, more information is available on the European presence. When
Castle Sao Jorge da Mina was founded, there were only 64 Europeans in the garrison. Throughout the Portuguese
period the size of the garrison was never larger than this, and often much smaller. The number of personnel
increased under the Dutch, perhaps reflecting both the greater importance of Elmina as a trading centre and the
growth of competition on the coast.
Culture, Contact, Continuity, and Change on the Gold Coast,
AD 1400-1900 - Christopher R. Decorse

Ira Berlin
… Creoles' ability to find a place for themselves in the interstices of African and European trade grew rapidly during
periods of intense competition among the Portuguese, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, French, and English and an equally
diverse set of African nationals. At the same time and by the same token, the Atlantic creoles' liminality, particularly
their lack of identity with any one group, posed numerous dangers. While their middling position made them
valuable to African and European traders, it also made them vulnerable: they could be ostracized, scapegoated, and
on occasion enslaved. Maintaining their independence amid the shifting alliances between and among Europeans
and Africans was always difficult. …. The characteristics that distinguished Atlantic creoles-their linguistic
dexterity, cultural plasticity, and social agility-were precisely those qualities that the great planters of the New
World disdained and feared.

Ira Berlin
the Atlantic commercial economy. In short, they created societies of their own, of but not always in, the societies of
the Africans who dominated the interior trade and the Europeans who controlled the Atlantic trade. Operating under
European protection, always at African sufferance, the enclaves developed governments with a politics as diverse
and complicated as the peoples who populated them and a credit system that drew on the commercial centers of both
Europe and Africa. Although the trading castles remained under the control of European metropoles, the towns
around them often developed independent political lives-separate from both African and European domination.
Meanwhile, their presence created political havoc, enabling new men and women of commerce to gain prominence
and threatening older, often hereditary elites.
frequented the coast. In time, they developed economies of their own, with multifarious systems of social
stratification and occupational differentiation.
of African-American Society in Mainland North America Page | 32
Ira Berlin
… the fifteenth century on the coast of Atlantic Africa. At that point,

quite different social worlds came into abrupt collision: on the European side,
a late feudal and developing capitalist system of exchange, soon with Enlightenment reason;
on the African side, the most baroquely elaborated systems of trade on the continent,
with a bewildering multitude of currencies.
Donald L. Donham
Crossing Empires:
Portuguese, Sephardic, and Dutch Business Networks in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1580-1674
Filipa Ribeiro da Silva
Numbers of free Africans, Eurafricans, and more rarely Europeans, usually called tangomaos by the Portuguese
authorities, were the connections between these two worlds. … In the Gold Coast, São Tomé, and Angola, the
employees responsible for the trade relied on middlemen who would bring the African merchandise and foodstuffs
from the remote areas in the interior to the coast. The various groups of commercial agents were connected with
each other. Together they formed commercial webs covering key points of the commercial circuits, and their
efficiency was crucial for the operation of the vast slave routes linking Europe, western Africa, and the Americas.

Rebecca Shumway
Whether by caravan, canoe, or dhow, trade brought West African goods and people into direct contact with the far
corners of the Old World prior to the proliferation of the transatlantic slave trade. Long-distance trade drew West
African elites across the Sahara Desert into the heartland of medieval Islam, to the Renaissance Vatican, and to the
best universities in early modern Europe.

Robin Law
For West Africans, prior European ships, the Atlantic was more a barrier than a
link with the outside West Africans were of course familiar with waterborne
travel, making use of canoes (usually dug out from single trees), but this was
mainly waterways - the major rivers, and the lagoons that in certain areas
(including Coast) run inside and parallel to the coast

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Whether by caravan, canoe, or dhow, trade brought West African goods and people into direct contact with

the far corners of the

From the very beginning, then, the contact zone

Atlantic creoles originated in the historic meeting of

What, exactly, is the "black Atlantic"?

Black life in mainland North America originated not in Africa or

Atlantic creoles originated in the historic meeting of

When the Portuguese missions failed in Benin,

De Barros records the visit of the Englishman, Wyndham, to

a "Jewish Era in the Sahara."

What, exactly, is the "black Atlantic"?

From the very beginning, then, the contact zone

EuroAfricans, or in the context of the Guinea-Bissau region,

The letter of the Portuguese king to the inhabitants of Geba

Tradition and innovation in Dutch ethnographic prints

… that sexual relations between Portuguese men and slave

The Evolution of 'Portuguese' Identity

… a secure place in such a volatile social order was not easy.

From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins

Further south in the Gambia in 1661, English traders relied

The Evolution of 'Portuguese' Identity:

Culture, Contact, Continuity, and Change on the Gold Coast, AD 1400-1900

… the fifteenth century on the coast of Atlantic Africa. …By

West Africa in Global Trade and Empires

West Africa's Discovery of the Atlantic

From Creole to African:

Tradition and innovation in Dutch ethnographic prints

Further south in the Gambia in 1661, English traders

The Evolution of 'Portuguese' Identity

… the fifteenth century on the coast of Atlantic Africa. At that point,

“Mixed” parentage raised legal, cultural and religious problems

The Black Portuguese

The First Globalization: Portugal, the Age of Exploration,

The Evolution of 'Portuguese' Identity:

The emergence of Atlantic creoles was but a tiny outcropping in the

In Dutch they were called Hapoeiyers probably

From Creole to African:

… Africans and Europeans alike sneered at the creoles' mixed lineage

During the late eighteenth century the vrijburgers were Page | 10

… Racial distinctions did not appear until the emergence

Culture, Contact, Continuity, and Change, Gold Coast, AD 1400-1900

Traveling in more dignified style, Atlantic creoles were also sent to

History In The Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery And The Spirit

From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins

There were formal marriages between Dutchmen and Elmina

What, exactly, is the "black Atlantic"?

Brooks, Landlords and Strangers. By the 19th century, the Afro-

African notables occasionally established residence, bringing

Tradition and innovation in Dutch ethnographic prints

During the late eighteenth century the vrijburgers were

Culture, Contact, Continuity, and Change, Gold Coast, AD 1400-1900

History In The Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery And The Spirit

Tabir’s annual sacrifice in Atkins’s text:

From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins

West Africa in Global Trade and Empires

West Africa's Discovery of the Atlantic

From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins

The letter of the Portuguese king to the inhabitants of Geba

… Racial distinctions did not appear until the emergence

Moreover, we conceive of the Atlantic community as transracial,

From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins

What, exactly, is the "black Atlantic"?

The creoles' genius for intercultural negotiation was not