prob need to archive this link,kek

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/where-the-negroes-are-mastersan-african-port-in-the-era-of-the-slave-trade-by-randy-j-sparks/2014/01/31/8c2877b8-829f-11e3-9dd4-e7278db80d86_story.html

Opinions

‘Where the Negroes are Masters:An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade’ by Randy J. Sparks

By Jonathan YardleyJanuary 31, 2014

Randy J. Sparks takes his title, and one of his book’s two epigraphs, from comments made by Thomas Melville, who was the principal British representative on the west coast — also known as the Gold Coast — of Africa from 1751 until his death in 1756. Referring to an unnamed worker, presumably white, Melville said, “He is a good workman and does very well to repair the forts, but is not fit to go where the Negroes are Masters.” What Melville meant was that in this part of Africa, what is now Ghana, the power of the native African hierarchy was so strong that only whites capable of negotiating with it were competent to be posted there.

The middle of the 18th century was the height of the slave trade, and a coastal settlement known as Annamaboe — now called Anomabu — was at its very epicenter. Few people outside Africa are likely to have heard of it today, but Sparks makes a persuasive case that in its day Annamaboe was “one of the hubs of Atlantic commerce, comparable in size to its Atlantic sister ports Charleston, South Carolina, and Newport, Rhode Island.” He says that its “capable and crafty merchants relied on the exportation of maize and slaves and the importation of European goods to build a wealthy, independent and powerful commercial center.”

It has long been known that some African tribal chieftains and their underlings collaborated with the slave traders, who were chiefly English, French, Dutch and North American, but the assumption has been that they did so for what might be called essentially negative reasons, such as punishing rival tribes or currying favor with whites. With his detailed account of the evolution and eventual dominance of Annamaboe, Sparks turns that assumption on its head. He leaves no doubt that, at least at certain locations on the Gold Coast, native Africans were not merely complicit in the trade, but were active, enthusiastic and decidedly voluntary participants. In particular through his portrait of John Corrantee, “a military commander, a skillful political leader, and a successful trader and diplomat,” Sparks leaves no doubt as to the validity of this argument.

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Corrantee, whose name “also appears as Currantee, Corrantrin, Corrantryn, Koranting, and Kurantsi in various European sources, and [whose] African name was Eno Baisee (Ano Bassi) Kurentsi,” was the “caboceer” of the Fante. A caboceer was an “official or chief who served as a political leader, magistrate, and military leader” of the Fante, a Gold Coast ethnic group that for some reason Sparks never fully characterizes but that has been prominent in Africa for centuries. Its chief rival during this period was the Asante people, now known as Ashanti, and many of the slaves shipped out from Annamaboe were Asante captured in warfare.

Corrantee was caboceer at Annamaboe from about 1740 until his death about a quarter-century later, and by any standard he led a remarkable life. Sparks is not exactly a comic writer — he is a professor of history at Tulane University — but his accounts of how Corrantee hornswoggled the allegedly superior white traders and sailors are singularly amusing. A Dutch official “compared Corrantee to Nanni . . . the spider who figures so prominently in trickster tales from the region,” and Sparks agrees, writing that “Corrantee the spider wove a large and complex web designed to ensnare his many rivals and opponents.” Later he writes:

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