Materiality and Real Estate: Evolving Cultural Practices of Security on the Urban Gold Coast in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Historians of the African Atlantic world have increasingly emphasized cultural transformations and insecurity arising from the slave trade and Afro-European trade in urban settings. Whilst acknowledging the importance of these earlier studies, this research will argue that in participating in Atlantic commerce, nineteenth century Gold Coast merchant families transformed and deployed material culture – stone households, heirlooms and otherwise inalienable sacred objects into forms of collateral that could be used in real estate and other commercial transactions. In so doing, Gold Coast merchants expanded the cultural repertoire and commercial value of materiality in ways that gave meaning and form to the political and urban realities of the West African coast. In focusing on five prominent Gold Coast merchant families – the Brew, Bannerman, Hansen, Ankra and Richter establishments this paper will analyze the shifting discourses and cultural practices relating to security, power, vulnerability and materiality in the transition away from the slave trade and legitimate commerce to colonialism in the nineteenth century. By emphasizing evolving cultural understandings of security as evident in the investments in stone households/buildings, “trinkets”, heirlooms, family deities and ancestral veneration this study emphasizes how West African merchants materially expressed their vulnerability and declining power in an emerging British colonial economy by the second half of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, this study will make the point that West African merchants transformed their cultural understandings about the materiality of power, security and the sacred – rooted in their merchant households and transactional and cultural practices– into other forms of value to meet the exigencies of an Atlantic and emerging (proto) colonial economy and legal framework on the urban Gold Coast.