Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade by Randy Sparks (review)

Best known for the Two Princes of Calabar (Cambridge, 2004), Randy Sparks brings us another beautifully written, compelling tale from the African Atlantic World. In his new book, Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade, Sparks gives us not just the biography of Annamaboe, an influential coastal slaving port along the Gold Coast, but also the life histories of its most notable merchants. Sparks explores the lives and labours of Fante and British merchants as their political and commercial networks, families, and fortunes crisscross the Atlantic Ocean and the cultural and racial boundaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He trains a spotlight on the African Atlantic, positioning Africa at the centre of the Atlantic World rather than as simply part of the wellworn story of European expansion and imperialism. Where the Negroes Are Masters should be essential reading in undergraduate courses on the histories of Early Africa, Slavery, and the Atlantic World in the age of revolutions.

Sparks explores the life course of Annamaboe and its growing position in the Atlantic World. From its humble beginnings, Annamaboe was a site of complex relationships between Africans and Europeans in the eighteenth century. These early contacts in early Annamaboe were marred by sporadic violence, miscommunication, and bad faith wheeling and dealing between Fante and the English. Yet Sparks also shows us how they found profoundly intimate reasons to live among and trade with one another. For all their missteps and the horrors of the human cargo they exchanged, Annamaboe could be a place of great prosperity, joy, and love.

By the mid-eighteenth century, as the sale of African slaves along the Gold Coast surged, so too did Annamaboe’s place in the Atlantic World. Here Sparks narrows the focus of the book on the biography of John Corrantee, the man who ruled Annamaboe and shaped the region’s economic and political influence on the wider world. Through skillful, often devious, diplomatic, military, and commercial manoeuvreing, Corrantee brought prosperity and strategic importance to the Fante of Annamaboe. As Sparks shows, Corrantee’s life was deeply entwined with his English counterparts — and for all their sparring, it is clear these men knew each other well, understood the cultural worlds from which they came, and worked tirelessly to outmanoeuvre one another.

Corrantee’s European doppelganger, according to Sparks, was Robert Brew: Irish merchant, Royal Africa Company employee, full time resident of Annamaboe, and Corrantee’s son-in-law. Brew and his African Atlantic family built an expansive network of businesses and political influence up and down the coast of West Africa. From Annamaboe to Whydah to Lagos, his ships traded in slaves, rum, tobacco, and other goods. Brew also served as a shrewd intermediary between the British, Fante, and the Asante — a powerful kingdom further into the Gold Coast interior. Brew exemplified the opportunities opened up by the slave trade but also its uncertainties and perils. He died a man deeply in debt — leaving the people of Annamaboe and his European trading partners little to inherit and a political vacuum to fill.

Where the Negroes Are Masters shifts from biography to the broader ebb and flow of the enslaved through Annamaboe and into the African Atlantic. By the mid to late eighteenth century, most of the slaves leaving Annamaboe had come via the frontier wars conducted by the Asante. Kidnapped peoples along the Asante frontier were brought southward through Fante territory and then sold at ports like Annamaboe and others. Sparks treats his audience to a fine summation of the enslavement, transport, sale of slaves along the Gold Coast, and then their resale in American ports like Charleston, offering students and scholars a clear picture of how the slave trade worked. Sparks draws his story to a close by studying the Africans who travelled the Atlantic World and then...