ABSTRACT
A tremendous range of spiritualties converged at Gold Coast entrepôts, aboard ships and on American lands. African religious ideas intersected Christian ones amid Atlantic exchanges of African bodies. European traders on West African rented lands (verified by spiritual oath) chronicled African dogmata as antithetical to theirs-denounced by law, philosophy and morality. The Jamaican Code Noir of 1696, not unlike other Caribbean and mainland American late seventeenth- to nineteenth-century legislation, outlawed African spirit practice. Jamaican oral tradition also recounted spirituality and mythical and ambiguous identities reflective of African culture and history centers such as the Gold Coast. Consider, for example, oral accounts that Grandy Nanny, spiritual leader of the Windward Maroons, preserved spiritual knowledge during the middle passage while captive at Kormants. In March 1739, under a large silk-cotton tree in the Cockpit Country, Kojo and several Maroon captains including Accompong signed a treaty with the British representatives.
