Introduction

This chapter investigates freedom, spirituality and identity in West African Akan, Guan, Ga, Adangbe and other late seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century culture and history. Maroons, slaves and free blacks articulated elements of these West African beliefs and practices in Jamaica, New York and other Atlantic thoroughfares. The manuscript looks to myth and history for meanings of priests, cosmology and ancestry in Akan, Guan and Ga and Adangbe ontologies. Varyingly named by the aforementioned African peoples, priests propagated belief in coastal port towns and interior states, from sacred shrines and during public festivals and holy days. Atlantic history is a “deeply embedded part of early modern history peculiarly relevant for understanding. This definition manifested as geographically specific and, in some interpretations, highly politicized in its rejection of prior imperialist histories and endorsement of an “Atlantic highway” between the United States and Western Europe at the end of World War II according to Bailyn.