Fante people

Many inhabitants of the Gold Coast area are striving to consolidate their newly acquired territories and to settle into a secure and permanent environment wWhen the first Europeans arrive in the late fifteenth century.

Several African immigrant groups have yet to establish firm ascendancy over earlier occupants of their territories, and considerable displacement and secondary migrations are in progress.

Ivor Wilks, a leading historian of Ghana, has observed that Akan purchases of slaves from Portuguese traders operating from the Congo region augmented the labor needed for the state formation that is characteristic of this period.

Unlike the Akan groups of the interior, the major coastal groups, such as the Fante, Ewe, and Ga, are for the most part settled in their homelands.

The Portuguese are the first to arrive.

By 1471, under the patronage of Prince Henry the Navigator, they have reached the area that is to become known as the Gold Coast.

Europeans know the area as the source of gold that reaches Muslim North Africa by way of trade routes across the Sahara.

The initial Portuguese interest in trading for gold, ivory, and pepper increases so much that in 1482 the Portuguese build their first permanent trading post on the western coast of present-day Ghana.

This fortress, Elmina Castle, constructed to protect Portuguese trade from European competitors and hostile Africans, still stands.

The opening of European plantations in the New World during the 1500s, which suddenly expands the demand for slaves in the Americas, sees slaves soon overshadowing gold as the principal export of the Gold Coast area.

Indeed, the west coast of Africa becomes the principal source of slaves for the New World.

The seemingly insatiable market and the substantial profits to be gained from the slave trade attract adventurers from all over Europe.

Much of the conflict that arises among European groups on the coast and among competing African kingdoms is the result of rivalry for control of this trade.

The Portuguese position on the Gold Coast remains secure for almost a century.

During this time, Lisbon leases the right to establish trading posts to individuals or companies that seek to align themselves with the local chiefs and to exchange trade goods both for rights to conduct commerce and for slaves provided by the chiefs.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, adventurers—first Dutch, and later English, Danish, and Swedish—are granted licenses by their governments to trade overseas.

On the Gold Coast, these European competitors build fortified trading stations and challenge the Portuguese.

Sometimes they are also drawn into conflicts with local inhabitants as Europeans develop commercial alliances with local chiefs.

The principal early struggle is between the Dutch and the Portuguese.

With the loss of Elmina in 1642 to the Dutch, the Portuguese leave the Gold Coast permanently.

The next one hundred and fifty years will see kaleidoscopic change and uncertainty, marked by local conflicts and diplomatic maneuvers, during which various

European powers struggled to establish or to maintain a position of dominance in the profitable trade of the Gold Coast littoral.

Forts are built, abandoned, attacked, captured, sold, and exchanged, and many sites are selected at one time or another for fortified positions by contending European nations.

Osei Tutu (d. 1712 or 1717) becomes asantehene (king of Asante) at the end of the seventeenth century.

Under Osei Tutu's rule, the confederacy of Asante states is transformed into an empire with its capital at Kumasi.

Political and military consolidation ensue, resulting in firmly established centralized authority.

Osei Tutu is strongly influenced by the high priest, Anokye, who, tradition asserts, caused a stool of gold to descend from the sky to seal the union of Asante states.

Stools already functioned as traditional symbols of chieftainship, but the Golden Stool of Asante represents the united spirit of all the allied states and establishes dual allegiance that superimposes the confederacy over the individual component states.

The Golden Stool remains a respected national symbol of the traditional past and figures extensively in Asante ritual.

Osei Tutu permits newly conquered territories that join the confederation to retain their own customs and chiefs, who are given seats on the Asante state council.

Osei Tutu's gesture makes the process relatively easy and nondisruptive because most of the earlier conquests had subjugated other Akan peoples.

Within the Asante portions of the confederacy, each minor state continues to exercise internal self-rule, and its chief jealously guards the state's prerogatives against encroachment by the central authority.

A strong unity develops, however, as the various communities subordinate their individual interests to central authority in matters of national concern.

By the mid-eighteenth century, Asante is a highly organized state.

The wars of expansion that bring the northern states of Mamprusi, Dagomba, and Gonja under Asante influence are won during the reign of Asantehene Opoku Ware I (d. 1750), successor to Osei Tutu.

By the 1820s, successive rulers have extended Asante boundaries southward.

Although the northern expansions link Asante with trade networks across the desert and in Hausaland to the east, movements into the south bring the Asante into contact, sometimes antagonistic, with the coastal Fante, Ga-Adangbe, and Ewe peoples, as well as with the various European merchants whose fortresses dot the Gold Coast.

Some historians doubt that the abolitionist movement was inspired by the humanitarian impulse, because it took decades to end the trade in slaves.

According to historian Walter Rodney, for example, Europe abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade only because its profitability was undermined by the Industrial Revolution.

Rodney argues that mass unemployment caused by the new industrial machinery, the need for new raw materials, and European competition for markets for finished goods are the real factors that brought an end to the trade in human cargo and the beginning of competition for colonial territories in Africa.

Other scholars, however, disagree with Rodney, arguing that humanitarian concerns as well as social and economic factors were instrumental in ending the African slave trade.

The British, through conquest or purchase, have become masters of most of the forts along the Gold Coast by the early nineteenth century.

Two major factors lay the foundations of British rule and the eventual establishment of a colony on the Gold Coast: British reaction to the Ashanti wars and the resulting instability and disruption of trade, and Britain's increasing preoccupation with the suppression and elimination of the slave trade.

Ashanti, the most powerful state of the Akan interior during most of the nineteenth century, seeks to expand its rule and to promote and protect its trade.

The first Ashanti invasion of the coastal regions takes place in 1807; the Ashanti move south again in 1811 and in 1814.

These invasions, though not decisive, disrupt  trade in such products as gold, timber, and palm oil, and threaten the security of the European forts.

Local British, Dutch, and Danish authorities are all forced to come to terms with Ashanti, and in 1817 the African Company of Merchants signs a treaty of friendship that recognizes Ashanti claims to sovereignty over large areas of the coast and its peoples. 

The coastal people, primarily some of the Fante and the inhabitants of the new town of Accra, who are chiefly Ga, come to rely on British protection against Ashanti incursions, but the ability of the merchant companies to provide this security is limited.

The British Crown dissolves the company in 1821, giving authority over British forts on the Gold Coast to Governor Charles MacCarthy, governor of Sierra Leone.

The British forts and Sierra Leone will remain under common administration for the first half of the century.

MacCarthy's mandate is to impose peace and to end the slave trade.

He seeks to do this by encouraging the coastal peoples to oppose Kumasi rule and by closing the great roads to the coast.

Incidents and sporadic warfare continues, however.

MacCarthy is killed, and most of his force is wiped out in a battle with Ashanti forces in 1824.

An Ashanti invasion of the coast in 1826 is defeated, nonetheless, by British and local forces, including the Fante and the people of Accra.

When the British government allows control of the Gold Coast settlements to revert to the British African Company of Merchants in the late 1820s, relations with Ashanti are still problematic.

From the Ashanti point of view, the British have failed to control the activities of their local coastal allies.

Had this been done, Ashanti might not have found it necessary to attempt to impose peace on the coastal peoples.

MacCarthy's encouragement of coastal opposition to Ashanti and the subsequent 1824 British military attack further indicate to Ashanti authorities that the Europeans, especially the British, do not respect Ashanti.

The volume of the slave trade in West Africa grows rapidly from its inception around 1500 to its peak in the eighteenth century.

Philip Curtin, a leading authority on the African slave trade, estimates that roughly six point three million slaves were shipped from West Africa to North America and South America, about four and a half million of that number between 1701 and 1810.

Perhaps five thousand a year are shipped from the Gold Coast alone.

The demographic impact of the slave trade on West Africa is probably substantially greater than the number actually enslaved because a significant number of Africans perish during slaving raids or while in captivity awaiting transshipment.

All nations with an interest in West Africa participate in the slave trade.

Relations between the Europeans and the local populations are often strained, and distrust leads to frequent clashes.

Disease causes high losses among the Europeans engaged in the slave trade, but the profits realized from the trade continue to attract them.

Both the Dutch and the British form companies to advance their African ventures and to protect their coastal establishments.

The Dutch West India Company operates throughout most of the eighteenth century.

The British African Company of Merchants, founded in 1750, is the successor to several earlier organizations of this type.

These enterprises build and man new installations as the companies pursue their trading activities and defend their respective jurisdictions with varying degrees of government backing.

There are short-lived ventures by the Swedes and the Prussians.